Gales

A Study in Brewing, Business and Family History

Barry Stapleton, James H. Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Edition: 1
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• Print ISBN:
  9781138713048
• Subtopic: World History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351776738
• Index: History

This title was first published in 2000:  This volume tells the fascinating story of the origins, development, growth and survival of a small country brewery in Hampshire. Employing and analyzing a wealth of original documentation, it examines the local environment both before establishment of the brewery and during the 150 years of its existence. While the performance of Gales Brewery is examined in the context of the British brewing industry as a whole, the thread of family involvement is woven throughout the volume. The contribution of contrasting individual entrepreneurs is examined in absorbing detail, from the half century of domination by George Alexander Gale to the subsequent century of contribution by the Bowyer family. Gales is exceptional in being one of the very few family breweries to survive the mania of mergers and takeovers in the brewing industry. This very readable book will be of considerable interest to business, economic, family and local historians.

CHAPTER ONE
The British brewing industry over two centuries: an outline

The 150 years since the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have seen major changes in all walks of British life - political, religious, demographic, economic and social. Transformations have occurred in agriculture, industry, finance, trade and transport, and continue at an increasingly accelerating rate. Thus, Britain's major industries both during and after the Industrial Revolution coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding and textiles are much less substantial sectors of the national economy of the late twentieth century.

Despite being subjected to significant change, the British brewing industry arguably has survived the last century and a half more successfully than most industries. Cynics might suggest that this is because it was a major source of income for the exchequers of successive governments. However, that would not explain the varied structure of the industry containing huge conglomerate multinational, national, regional and local breweries, and an explanation is necessary.

In the middle of the eighteenth century the industry consisted of some 50,000 brewing victuallers, essentially publicans who brewed their own ale for purely local consumption. During the next half century the first of the changes which were to affect the structure of the brewing industry was to result in this number being more than halved.¹ This followed from the development, in the second half of the eighteenth century, of a beer which had a longer life and became more mellow as a result of higher hop content. Bitter, dark and heavily hopped, porter was a beer that could be stored for months and improved in flavour in the process. This clearly had advantages for those who could afford to brew on a larger scale and thus store large quantities for future consumption. Those who benefited greatly were the London brewers such as Meux Reid, who opened up a gigantic container in 1799, Thrale (later Barclay Perkins), Truman and Whitbread, As London by 1750 contained more than one in ten of England's population, some three quarters of a million people,² there was a ready market for the larger-scale production that porter allowed and the four big brewers accounted for over 500,000 barrels between them before the end of the century.³ Because strong porter had to be kept maturing, in order to clear and improve the beer, for up to nine months before it could be distributed for consumption, it tied up considerable amounts of capital for long periods. Thus, the lengthy process of production discriminated in favour of larger and wealthier, rather than smaller, brewers. As a result, considerable numbers of publicans lost their brewing function.

Away from the metropolitan area, however, brewers still tended to make lighter ales and in the first half of the nineteenth century the consumption of a milder, though still quite bitter and strong, paler beer began to take precedence. This development of a milder pale brew, however, was not confined to the provinces, since in 1807 the newly built Albion Brewery at Mile End Road, Bethnal Green, was advertised in search of a tenant, as 'A New compact Ale and Pale Beer Brewery', indicating that any prospective tenant would expect to have facilities for brewing pale ale.⁴ This milder beer meant that the final brew could be distributed much earlier, thus brewers obtained quicker returns on invested capital.⁵ As a consequence, smaller provincial and metropolitan brewers were better able to compete in this growing market, a position enhanced by the abolition of excise duty of 10s a barrel by the Beer Act of 1830, since smaller brewers were affected more seriously by excise duties than larger ones because of the capital absorbed by duty payments. As the Act also allowed any ratepayer, on payment of 2 guineas to excise officials, to obtain a licence to establish a beerhouse, a substantial increase in retail outlets was created. By 1838 almost 46,000 beerhouses had been added to the 51,000 existing licensed premises in England.⁶ Generally established outside the tied house system of the large commercial brewers, the beerhouses were more likely to assist the growth of regional and provincial common brewers.

Even so, it was the development of the railway network which resulted in the real expansion of pale ale consumption in the 1840s and 1850s, with Burton upon Trent emerging as a major centre of production, its beer brewed with the local hard, gypsum flavoured water. Initially brewed for export to British settlements in India, the linking of Burton to Derby by rail in 1839 was to prove a turning-point in the demand for Burton pale ales in the home market. Bass, the prominent Burton brewer, increased output from 10,000 barrels in 1831 to 60,000 in 1847, 130,000 by 1853, 400,000 in 1863 and 900,000 in 1876. Not surprisingly, with Burton brewers growing on this scale, some of the leading London brewers established branches in Burton - Ind Coope (1858), Charrington (1871), Truman, Hanbury and Buxton (1873) and Mann, Crossman and Paulin (1875) - indicating that not only had they recognised that pale ale had replaced porter as Britain's major beer, but also that Burton had emerged as a substantial rival to London.⁷ Similarly, Dublin, especially with the growth of Guinness's brewery (by 1876 it produced nearly 800,000 barrels a year and became the largest producer in the brewing industry by the 1880s), was another important rival to London. Arthur Guinness Son and Co. dominated the Irish market as well as carrying on a secondary trade to England, especially in their stout. By 1900 they sold more than any other British beer producer and had assets of more than £6 million. Even so, Guinness were unique among nineteenth-century brewers, neither producing pale ales nor owning tied public houses in England. Most other London and provincial brewers had been acquiring houses throughout much of the century and especially in its last 15 years when some £188 million public share capital was raised by 353 companies and all large companies, with the exception of Guinness, participated in the purchase of houses.⁸

The largest of these pale ale breweries were located in Burton upon Trent. Led by Bass, whose output reached 1.5 million barrels in the 1880s, Allsopp, whose output peaked at 900,000 in 1876, and Worthington, they were joined by the major London breweries in the 1870s. Below these giants of the industry came those breweries producing between 100,000 and 600,000 barrels a year. In London these were Truman, Hanbury and Buxton, Watneys, Combes, Reids and Barclay Perkins, and in the provinces William Younger of Edinburgh, Ind Coope of Romford, Walker's of Warrington and Tetley of Leeds each producing some 300,000 to 400,000 barrels a year. The majority of breweries were smaller provincial firms with less than 100,000 barrels a year output. Greene of Bury St Edmunds, Samuel Smith of Tadcaster and Greenall Whitley of St Helens were the largest of this group, but the majority were smaller like Gales of Horndean in Hampshire with an output of about 10,000 barrels a year.⁹

However, the nineteenth-century growth of large-scale brewing and its associated tied house ownership, inevitably had its effect both on the numbers of licensed victuallers who brewed their own beer and on beerhouse keepers, especially after 1870. In the 60 years between 1841 and 1900 brewing licensed victuallers declined in number by nearly 90 per cent from 27,000 to less than 3,000. Beerhouse keepers fared similarly losing just over 90 per cent of their number from over 16,000 to only 1,582. However, commercial common brewers who numbered 2,258 in 1841 had fallen only to 2,175 in 1890, less than 4 per cent (see Table 1.1). Nevertheless, the 1890s saw increasing amalgamations and take-overs; thus by 1901 their numbers had declined to 1,520, a loss of almost one third (32 per cent). Small-scale commercial brewers producing up to 10,000 barrels a year still formed the majority of producers 911 (60 per cent). Even so, their total output was probably less than that of each of the ten largest British brewing companies.¹⁰

Much of the small-scale brewers output in the nineteenth century had traditionally been for the free trade, especially private customers, even

Table 1.1 Common brewers and brewing victuallers and beerhouse keepers, 1841-1900

Year	Common brewers	Licensed victuallers	Beerhouse keepers	Total
1841	2,455	27,125	16,376	45,986
1850	2,432	26,029	13,448	41,909
1860	2,431	24,704	12,283	39,418
1870	2,591	20,216	9,735	32,542
1880	2,595	12,417	6,157	21,169
1890	2,290	6,349	3,319	11,958
1900	1,836	2,887	1,582	6,305

Source: Gourvish and Wilson (1994), p. 68. Figures are for England, Scotland and Wales.

though the brewers steadily acquired tied houses.¹¹ But there is little doubt that from the 1880s there was an increased development of the tied trade as brewers had to purchase properties to protect their interests, not only from rival concerns locally but also from national predators. By 1886, 75 per cent of houses were owned by breweries. This resulted in local houses becoming scarcer and breweries having to look further afield for acquisitions, invariably at higher prices. Thus most companies had property values which represented over 40 per cent of their total capital.¹²

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The British brewing industry over two centuries: an outline
• 2 Horndean and the Gale family, 1700-1847
• 3 Sorrow and success: the era of George Alexander Gale, 1847-96
• 4 The early years of H. F. Bowyer to the First World War
• 5 The company in war and peace: 1914-39
• 6 Problems and progress: 1939-84
• 7 Towards 2000: the Company since 1984
• Appendix 1 Family trees: Gale and Bowyer
• Appendix 2 Company officers
• Appendix 3 George Gale and Co.: house list as at 20 April 1998
• Select bibliography
• Index