Jamie Oliver - Biography
by Katherine Hall
James Trevor Oliver was born on 27th May 1975, to Trevor and Sally Oliver, the owners of The Cricketers pub and restaurant in Clavering, Essex. He grew up playing in the cornfields of the Essex countryside and working in the aforementioned pub, and was brought up to realise the value of hard work from an early age. Growing up, he’d busy himself in the bar, washing up, cooking, cleaning, bottling up and serving. By the time he’d reached his teens, he knew that he wanted to make his living from cooking. At 14, Jamie and The Cricketer's chef would spend their Sunday nights preparing meals for the pub’s clientele, and two years later, at the tender age of 16, he secured a place at Westminster Catering College.
Jamie spent his college years honing his craft and after graduating, headed off first to work in France and then for Antonio Carluccio, before taking up a position at London eatery the River Café. Getting a job as a chef in the famed restaurant (headed by acclaimed culinary duo Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers) was a turning point for Jamie. A confident boy, he made his mark in a TV documentary about the River Café and as a result, was offered his own BBC series, The Naked Chef. The show catapulted Jamie to fame and when he wrote the accompanying book of the same name, it remained at number one on the bestseller lists for weeks. He cultivated a cheeky chappie image, using phrases on his shows like ‘pukka’ and ‘lovely jubbly’ and remained at the vanguard of the late 90s ‘Cool Britannia’ telly with his ‘mockney’ accent, scooter and Brit Pop wardrobe. He played drums in his own band, Scarlet Division, and in 1999, was invited to 10 Downing Street to prepare a lunch for Tony Blair.
In 1998, Jamie became the face of UK supermarket Sainsburys, his now-famous face appearing on TV and radio adverts and on in-store promotional material, offering advice to customers on how to create healthy, well-balanced meals at a cheap price. This altruistic streak surfaced again in 2002, when he starred in a five-part documentary series, Jamie’s Kitchen, which followed his attempt to turn a group of disadvantaged youths into chefs, their reward at the end of the show being a job in Jamie's new charity restaurant Fifteen. The following year he followed up with Return to Jamie's Kitchen. The success of the London Fifteen lead to even more Fifteens - in Cornwall, Amsterdam and Melbourne.
He was awarded an M.B.E. in 2003 for his services to the British hospitality industry, and continued to tread the campaign route in 2005 by fronting Jamie’s School Dinners. A vocal protester against the unhealthy and processed food being served in UK school kitchens, Jamie pledged to take responsibility for the meals at a school in Greenwich, London for one year. He then ran a campaign to improve the standard of Britain’s school meals and presented a petition at Downing Street. As a result, the UK Government pledged to spend £280m (over three years) on school dinners.
In addition to making crusading TV shows, Jamie also found time to take a road trip to Italy in a VW van for Jamie’s Great Italian Escape, and also headed up to Rotherham, Yorkshire, to spread the healthy eating word in Jamie’s Ministry of Food. He also starred in the 2009 Great British Food Fight season on TV alongside fellow celebrity chefs Gordon Ramsay, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Heston Blumenthal, and has fronted an Atari game for Nintendo DS called What’s Cooking? With Jamie Oliver.