Start a family business, it has been said, and one day you’ll end up with neither. There is nothing like the pressures of commerce to set father against son or sister against brother. That wasn’t the message of Hidden Histories: Britain’s Oldest Family Businesses  (15 January), however. This was the cheery story of Richard Balson, a Bridport butcher, and his attempts to discover how long his family had been carrying on the same trade. It didn’t take long. He went to the Dorset county archives, where a kind lady immediately produced a rental agreement for a stall in the town’s “shambles”, or meat market. It showed that the business had started in 1535; impressive, but exactly what Richard already knew.This was somewhat anti-climactic, but ther