A QUARRYING firm celebrating half a century in business is marking the occasion with a raft of new investment.

MB Wilkes in Corfe Mullen, whose history begins with the current bosses’ grandfather, has ploughed money into new vehicles and equipment.

It has recently invested in a loading shovel and surveying equipment and taken on a fleet of nine contract hire lorries.

The company supplies sand, gravel, topsoil and decorative aggregates to national and local developers, councils, utility companies and sports grounds, as well as to the public.

It also offers a recycling facility for inert waste such as soil, concrete and brick rubble and a ‘muck away’ and grab-hire service for inert waste, along with haulage.

Commercial manager Dave Fletcher said: “Four years ago, we had one four-wheeled tipper truck and 11 staff. We’ve now got 13 tippers trucks and 30 staff.

“I’m very confident about the state of the business. We’re totally self-sustaining in what we do. We’re answerable to ourselves only, so we’ll handle most types of material, we can take away our spoil. We’ve got the ground to have the product in stock, we’ve got the trucks to deliver it and we stand alone in the business.”

The history of the company goes back to the 1950s, when Harold Wilkes – grandfather of the current operators – bought 350 acres of land, originally for timber production.

Quarrying began in 1958 under the HA Wilkes Company, and MB Wilkes Ltd was established in 1964 – initially using a Ford Zodiac as its site office.

Its operations expanded dramatically over the years and by the 1990s, bricks made by with MB Wilkes sand were being used at Tokyo Airport and Los Angeles’ bus station.

Harold Wilkes’s son Michael was with the company from the outset and it is now run by Michael’s sons David and Paul.

Dave Fletcher was appointed in 2010 with a brief to expand the range of products and services and develop new markets.

It increasingly began to take on environmental projects, including cleaning contaminated beach sand for the borough of Poole and supplying path gravel to the National Trust.

The business has enough aggregate reserves for a further 50-60 years and also plans to develop recycling markets to complement its existing recycled products. It has applied for planning permission for a solar farm and has a 25-year lease with Dorset county Council to develop a hard-core and asphalt recycling centre.

MB Wilkes holds a breakfast morning on Wednesday, October 29, from 9am to noon, open to business people and also to locals interested in finding out about the business.

Anyone interested in going needs to take along a voucher, still available on the company’s website mbwilkes.com