The brewing industry in England, 1700-1830 [Original ed.] 0751201502, 9780751201505

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THE

BREWING INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND 1700-18^0

939?

BY

PETER MATHIAS Fellow of Queens' College and Assistant Lecturer in History in the University of Cambridge

CAMBRIDGE AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1959

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PUBLISHED BY THE SYNDICS OF THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Bentley House, 200 Euston Road, London, N.W. 1 American Branch: 32 East 57th Street, New York 22, N.Y.

© CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

1959

Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge {Brooke Crutchley, University Printer)

CONTENTS page vin

List of Illustrations List of Tables

ix

Preface

xi xvii

Note: Beer, Ale and Brewing List of Abbreviations

xix

Introduction

xxi PART I

PRODUCTION AND TRADE -1

3

The Rise of Porter Brewing Beer brewing before porter, p. 3 The introduction of porter, p. 12 Changes in the structure of the industry in London, p. 21

II

Porter Brewing and the Brewery

28

Organising the staff, p. 28 Planning the brewery, p. 37 Yeast and isinglass, p. 48 Casks and vats, p. 53

>- HI

The Technical Innovations

63

Thermometer, hydrometer and attemperator, p. 63 Horses and steam-power, p. 78

IV

Distribution and the London Market

99

Technical management, p. 102 London prices, p. 109 The growth of tied trade, ^>.117

V

Distant Markets (i) British Isles

139

The country trade, p. 141 The Irish market,

151 V

206a;

Contents VI

page

Distant Markets (ii) Exports

171

p. 173 Other overseas markets, p. 193 Public contracts, p. 195 Naval brewhouses, p. 201

The Baltic and India,

Appendix to Chapter VI: The search for a concentrate

204

PART II

THE PROBLEMS OF ENTERPRISE AND FINANCE VII

Competition and Co-operation

213

p. 218 1795-1830, p. 228 1700-1795,

VIII Finance and the Entrepreneur (i) Entry into the trade,

252

p. 253

p. 258 Henry Thrale and John Perkins, p. 265 Whitbreads and finance, p. 277 Quaker finance, p. 287 London brewers before 1760,

IX Finance and the Entrepreneur (ii) New capital and partnerships, Control and continuity,

300

p. 300

p. 312

Brewers and other business activities, Activities other than business,

p. 322

p. 330

X The Excise System and the Brewing Industry The Excise establishment and its efficiency, Regulations and jurisdiction, The duties,

p. 350

p. 355

Excise allowances, Excise statistics,

p. 362

p. 369

VI

p. 340

339

Contents PART III

RAW MATERIALS -- XI

Barley and Malt

page 387

National and regional barley farming, Barley varieties, climate and soil, Malting,

p. 387

p. 401

p. 405

Changes in malting and malt,

p. 413

XII The Trade in Grain Imports and exports,

425

p. 425

East Anglia and the trade in barley and malt, The coasting trade,

p. 433

The traffic by river to London, The Lea,

XIII

p. 437

p. 442

The Brewer and the Markets The search for quality,

Malting and brewing,

448

p. 448

The malt-factors and the brewers,

XIV

p. 428

p. 455

p. 465

The Hop Industry

475

Hop-planting and varieties, Picking,

p. 475

p. 491 496

XV The Hop-Markets Hop-marketing,

p. 496

The brewer and the hop-market,

p. 523

Statistical Appendix

537

Bibliography

559

A. Sources,

p. 559

B. Unpublished thesis,

p. 561

C. Official publications (printed contemporary sources),

p. 561

p. 562 E. Published works—written after 1850, p. 569 D. Published works—written before 1850,

575

Index vii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PLATES 1

The Griffin Brewery, Clerkenwell

facing page 24

From a contemporary engraving in the possession of Watney Mann Ltd., Stag Brewery, Pimlico

2

Plan of the Anchor Brewery, Southwark (1792-1800), by George Gwilt

25

In the possession of Courage and Barclay, Anchor Brewery, Southwark

3

The interior of a small brewhouse in 1748

40

From the Universal Magazine (1747-8)

4

The interior of a large brewhouse in 1764

41

From T. H. Croker, Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1764-6)

5

Sir Benjamin Truman

264

From the portrait by Gainsborough in the possession of Truman Hanbury Buxton, Black Eagle Brewery, Spitalfields, London

6

John Perkins

265

From the portrait by Raeburn in the possession of Major C. A. C. Perkins

7

Samuel Whitbread I

308

Samuel Whitbread II From the portraits by Sir William Beechey and Gainsborough in the possession of Major Simon Whitbread at Southill Park, Bedfordshire

8

Two country breweries: Simpson’s of Baldock and Cobb’s of Margate

322

Photographs by Eric de Mare, reproduced by permission of the Editor of the Architectural Review

MAPS 1

Distribution of malt production paying duty (by excise collections) 1801-2 page 539

2

Distribution of strong beer taxed for sale (by excise collections)

1754-5

540

---

y
London, supposedly on the increasing influx of gentry from the counties who brought better palates and bigger purses to city inns. Common Brewers increased their numbers in provincial towns. From Burton, Nottingham and Derby improvement to navigation on the Trent increased the 1 J. U. Nef, Rise of the British Coal Industry (1932), vol. 1, pp. 192-3, 213-14. 2 Excise (TLB) (1696-1700), ff. 281-2; Excise Statistics (1662-1805), ff. 17, 20.

6

Beer Brewing before Porter trickle of highly prized ale reaching London. Malt-mills were beginning i to be made of cast-iron, and the use of coke was spreading for drying malt on the kiln. For hind-sighted historians, these signs may be inter¬ preted as the stirrings of advance down the first gentle incline, on whose steeper slopes the pace of innovation was to increase, and expansion gather momentum, in the ensuing decades. In microcosm, it was similar to larger developments in the economy as a whole, although the inception of rapid change in brewing within the urban market of London pre-dated the years ascribed to the industrial revolution of the Midlands and Lancashire. In so far as business wealth became reflected in social position, this generation of the most important London brewers at the end of the seven¬ teenth century shows a heightened status. Byde, whose ale Pepys thought it worth travelling out to Mile End to drink, was an Alderman of the City.1 George Meggott, Charles Cox, John Friend, John Lade, John Parsons and Felix Feast eventually became knights. A brewer’s daughter married a peer. Several brewers were already Members of Parliament—in particular Southwrark, a borough which had brewing as its major industry, was for long thus represented.2 There can be no more revealing evidence than this of the importance of the brewing industry in the locality—a pre¬ eminence dating directly back to the settlement of German and Dutch beer brewers. Where indirect evidence must be relied on, parliamentary , representation becomes as good a guide as any to social position and1 economic strength. With such a consolidation of strength—and continuity of site—it is perhaps not coincidental that the first ledger known to have survived in a brewery covers the years 1692-1701 for the business of Edmund Halsey. From its pages a little direct evidence may be gleaned about the trade, even though it is only a running cash book, roughly kept, which does not show valuations of fixed capital or the number of barrels brewed. With¬ drawals from the trade for 1695 (apart from salaries) do show that profits were almost certainly as much as £800 in a season when heavy sums had been spent for repairs and extensions.3 In the brewing season, May 1692-3, receipts from customers in the metropolis were over £7300. The brewery paid £2280 in excise duty and received £81 from 1 Pepys, Diary (Wheatley ed., 1926), vol. VII, pp. 66, 75, 112, 145. 2 For a fuller description see chapter ix. 3 Without balance sheets, of course, it is impossible to say if capital was being diminished by withdrawals from the trade. See below, pp. 141, 259.

7

The Rise of Porter Brewing the sale of grains—facts which imply a production of about 10,000 barrels. Some beer, stronger than that for London, was sent far afield to many scattered overseas markets, but the bulk of the year’s produc¬ tion was destined for the local market—the ale-houses and private homes in the locality. The book was balanced, or signed, weekly up to 1696 (without distinction of business or personal expenditure) by the owner James Child; and Halsey, before he became a partner following marriage with his master’s daughter, drew £1 per week wages, a salary of £60 p.a. as brewer, and the expenses of his horse at the livery stables. There seem to have been returns enough from profits to allow regular lending and to pay for most expansion.

In 1696, for example, Halsey

invested £1000 from trade in the Funds and granted small personal loans. Conversely, in a year of major expansion, 1699-1700, there was invested in the firm on surplus account, £200 from Halsey, £300 from Malyn (perhaps a partner, certainly an associate in trade) and £1200 from another person, E. Williams, who was outside the family circle. Halsey had bought one brewhouse-inn, a short distance away, presumably in order to sell his own beer over the counter, as it was kept in repair by the firm. At home, some indication of the value of the fixed assets is given by the bills of repair and extension for this year, 1699-1700: £254 for carpentry, £408 to a coppersmith and £3540 to ‘J. Clarke, brewer’ (without further speci¬ fication). Such scattered entries as these indicate what the ‘Rest’ valua¬ tions (which are known to have been drawn up) would tell in detail—that here was a large establishment, one of the bigger breweries in London, with valuable premises and large utensils; its mills and pumps worked by horses or a single horse (there is payment for a blind animal which would only have been worked in a mill) and its management already accustomed to dealing in large sums. The organisation behind production also appears to have been the skeleton of a developed eighteenth-century pattern.

One person was

evidently in executive control as manager, Halsey for James Child, Halsey’s young nephew Ralph Thrale after Child’s death, John Perkins under Thrale

as the owner became elderly or more committed in other walks

of life. Under him were the two clerks (in 1729, Lewin Laundy and Samuel Wise, who had been with Halsey for many years) looking after the account¬ ing, and ‘collecting’ the cash from publicans, while the manager, with the owner and perhaps a ‘workman brewer’ under him, did the actual brewing, attended the markets and saw important customers. Scraps of surviving evidence make it clear that the Anchor Brewery

8

Beer Brewing before Porter was in no way exceptional. In an inventory of coal stocks on Thames-side taken in 1703, Halsey and Malyn appear possessing 200 ‘chauldrons’, while Joseph Nicolson, another brewer in Spitalfields, had 400 chauldrons. Both quantities were far above the average in the return.1 When the Excise looked into the practice of the larger brewers placing fixed pipes between their storage and brewing vessels (to equate the level of beer or wort in all of them without having to ‘ strike over ’ with buckets) they listed fiftyeight brewers with 133 fixed pipes at their establishments.2 Those with the greatest number, implying (from what is known about the eminence of some of them) that these are among the largest concerns, were William Greene of Pimlico (‘Esquire’); William Hucks (Robert Hucks his son was leading the trade in 1743); Felix Feast, who was to be called the ‘greatest brewer in England’ a few years later; John Cholmeley, an impor¬ tant naval contract-brewer; and Thomas Hager.

Sir John Parsons,

whose brewery was well known, had only two pipes listed; and Noah Overing,3 who could brew 180 barrels a week for the navy, had only one— which means that all fifty-eight brewers listed by the Excise were probably important. None of the Southwark brewers appeared in the list, which robs it of value, nor did it include others who were evidently of weight in the trade: ‘Priscilla Coburne, a widow, a Common Brewer of great trade at Bow... ’ ;4 William Canning of Horseferry, Westminster, who paid £4145 duty in five years;5 Mr Chillingworth, who had a manager to run his business and was wealthy enough to employ two important counsel in his excise case;6 the Phoenix Brewhouse (part-owned by Sir John Friend) valued at £11,700 in 1698 when he was indicted for treason.7 With brewing so widespread, of almost universal incidence in England, such individual instances may be multiplied wherever local records survive. In London, which is the main concern of this book, perhaps the clearest instance of the pressures which even this degree of differentiation in size and economic efficiency might produce, came in detailed proposals by Anthony Burnaby, of the Middle Temple, in 1696 for the prevention of fraud.8

He accused rival ‘engrossing’ great brewers, whom he saw as

a group clearly distinguished from the ‘lesser brewers’, of having as many as ‘fourteen horses, six or seven drays and servants proportionate’, 1 Out of thirty-seven returns recording 3500 chauldrons, four brewers held 800 chauldrons. Hist. MSS. H. of Lords MSS. (1703), P- 238. 2 Excise (TLB), 1341, 9 March 1696-7. 3 See p. 198. 4 C.T.B. xx, 354. 6 Excise (TLB), 1341, 13 December 1695. 6 Excise (TLB), 1341, 7 February 1695. 7 C.T.B. Outletters {General), xvi, 19, 136, 167. 8 Excise (TLB), 1341, ff. 312-20; A. Burnaby, Essay on Excising Malt (1696).

9

The Rise of Porter Brewing and he asked: ‘How else can they afford to sell their drinke is. if not 2s. pr. barrell cheaper... and stronger than the lesser Brewers can afford to do were it not by the bigness of the Trade.’ Being on the side of the oppressed, he made the further assumption that only the opportunities for fraud (which, he assumed, similarly increased with the scale of brewing) enabled them to achieve such an end, so that vigilance by the authorities would bring justice for the humble. ‘By the underselling of the great Brewers the Revenue is not only in some measure prejudiced thereby but the little Brewers almost ruined’, he wrote. ‘The prevention of frauds I hope cannot be deny’d will put a mighty equality upon the Trade.... ’ Ignoring the more important economic advantages of large-scale produc¬ tion in brewing, he nevertheless acknowledged their result. It was a tithe of that which became possible in the new world of porter brewing. This being so, one should not see the changes of the eighteenth century springing simply from the innovation and success of porter. Just as, in the economy as a whole, the Industrial Revolution did not leap fully armed from the middle decades of the century when the classic innovations occurred and the pace of change quickened, but rather rested upon the gathering strength of a nation increasing its numbers, enjoying new sources of wealth from foreign trade, free from civil violence, and looking with shrewder secular eyes for profit, so innovation in the brewing industry after 1720 came partly in response to the situation which had developed up to 1720, and at every turn it looked back to what had gone before. For the group of brewers hoisting themselves head and shoulders above their fellows, looking round at the teeming streets of London—an everaugmenting, turbulent market always recruiting enough from the country¬ side to keep almost a tenth of the nation within its boundaries—the appearance of the product, stable and efficient enough to enable them to exploit it, was no coincidence. In the preparatory years of this new age of industrial brewing, the dependence of the new world upon the old needs to be emphasised. Glimpses of the golden harvest awaiting the new generation of brewers growing up in the pre-porter days, with the standards and expectations of the pre-porter brewing industry, gave incentives to develop the new product once it existed. Existing concerns were already sufficiently large to be accumulating profits at a pace fast enough to provide for the needs of expansion without complete reliance on capital ‘inexperienced’ in the trade, which had to come in entirely from beyond the industry. Most of the porter ‘capital houses’ and the ‘new men’ of industrial brewing learnt 10

Beer Brewing before Porter their trade, nourished their ambitions and founded their businesses in breweries already significant in seventeenth-century London: Benjamin Truman in a concern brewing before 1700; Ralph Thrale in the Anchor Brewery of which the owners can be traced before 1650; Henry Goodwyn following Dickinson and Sir J. H. Cotton who followed Sir John and Humphrey Parsons at the Red Lion Brewery, and several others. The greatest of that ‘ heroic generation ’, Samuel Whitbread, is perhaps atypical; but even he took over an existing small brewery in Old Street in 1742 to accumulate eight years’ profits before building his new large porter brewery in Chiswell Street. If ‘ revolution ’ inanindustry[means a fundamental change in its structure —a complete shift in its centre of economic gravity—which breaks open the horizons of entrepreneurs by its effect on the scale of production and alters qualitatively all their assumptions and problems, not least their relations to the market—then it is to the decades immediately after 1720 that we must turn to discover such a metamorphosis in the London brewing industry, and to analyse its consequences. There were two central features in the history of the brewing industry in eighteenth-century England: one, the great stability of product and organisation in many areas of the country; the other, great changes coming to both in the towns, of which the most remarkable was the rise of porter brewing in London followed by some of the larger provincial towns. Apart from the intrinsic importance which this product had in providing one-tenth of the nation with its staple malt liquor, the changes in the structure of the industry arising on its production heralded the path of progress, not only for the brewing industry in general, but in certain important ways for industry as a whole. The survival of so many names of those families establishing porter breweries in London in the eighteenth century—and the fact that almost all the firms they founded still function on their eighteenth-century sites—is witness to the industrial reorganisa¬ tion we shall consider, which crystallised the present structure of produc¬ tion. It is representative of a process through which successive industries have passed at different times, involving massive production from single units employing great fixed capitals, mass-distribution to wider markets and growing towns, with new problems of financing, pricing, stabilising production and facing fluctuations in demand as the gathering rhythm of an industrial economy damped the importance of variations in the harvest. The following sections will attempt to analyse the rise of the porter 11

The Rise of Porter Brewing breweries and the commercial consequences of it. The intrinsic nature of porter, its brewing and the innovation are first discussed; then the organisation of the staff and the deliberate planning of the breweries which produced it on such an increasing scale. Other features of produc¬ tion and equipment follow, and finally the main technical innovations: the vats, the introduction of thermometer and saccharometer to manipulate the brewing processes exactly and the further advance in mechanisation brought by steam. These developments in production lie at the back of other commercial and financial changes discussed in other parts of the book.

If space does not always permit the explicit discussion of each

change in terms of other relevant changes, some of which, again, it would be tedious to recapitulate, one hopes that this section on production will be recalled, to enlighten the chapters on raw materials, finance, distribu¬ tion and competition. THE INTRODUCTION OF PORTER

Only the porter breweries rose to massive production in the eighteenth century, establishing the modern structure of the brewing industry in London, while the ale brewers remained on a scale of production not greatly different from that at which the larger brewers were working at the end of the seventeenth century. Each brewed less than 20,000 barrels annually throughout the vital years when this change in structure was occurring in porter brewing, during which time porter became the staple drink in the metropolitan area. In 1800, Kirkman, the leading ale brewer, produced

27,300 barrels,

Sandford 21,600, Combrune

18,200 and

Charrington 15,900 barrels.1! By 1830, when public taste was beginning to swing away from ported, Goding, then the first ale brewer, did not brew more than 30,000 barrels, while the most important porter brewers were producing 200,000-300,000 barrels annually.2 It will never be possible to establish the cause of these trends scienti¬ fically: there are too many variables and so many unknowns.

Porter

triumphed in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century proved to be the century of ale, with the porter brewers forced to respond to the trend themselves either later or sooner.

Undoubtedly, the rise and

hegemony of porter and the subsequent expansion of ale brewing are both) in response to swings in public taste, but this in turn, of course, is noti 1 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Bullock and Broadley Collection of cuttings, held at Whitbreads, Chiswell Street. See also J. Richardson, Philosophical Principles of the Science of Brewing (3rd ed. 1805), pp. xxvii-xxxiv. 2 Ibid, and Barclay Records: Brewery Statistics (MSS.). 12

The Introduction of Porter ; uninfluenced by price differentials and variations in the strength of the beers. Porter, being first put out at 23s. per barrel to the publican and sold at 3d. per pot retail, undercut both ‘twopenny’ ale at 4d. a quart, and other pale ales on the market. This price leadership continued after the general rise of 1761, caused by an increase of 35. per barrel in the duty (which affected all strong malt liquors alike), when porter had become the staple product in the London marketing area, whose price was the base from which all other beer prices were calculated.1 From changes in the price of porter, too, came the initiative conditioning change in the price of other beers, which kept in step at their appropriate margins. Such leadership was not maintained after 1830, with the relative advance of ale. But price, in turn, being—theoretically—always quite relative to strength (i.e. from the addition of water) was conditioned by the economies of large-scale production, and by changes in quality induced technologically and chemically through differences in the volume of beer brewed in any one set of utensils and stored in bulk in any one vat. Both public taste and these opportunities of lowering prices rest in part upon technical foundations; the salesman, the accountant, even the production engineer were dependent in the end upon the master-brewer. We may claim, there¬ fore, that the unique expansion of porter breweries in the eighteenth century, with the commercial consequences following therefrom, almost certainly had a technical foundation. Porter, in brief, seems to have been the first beer technically suited for mass-production at contemporary standards of control, unlike ale which needed ‘attemperated fermentation’ for stability in large-scale brewing. The appearance of the new beer should be seen, therefore, as an event of the first importance, or as an invention exactly equivalent in its own industry to coke-smelted iron, mule-spun muslin in textiles or ‘ pressed-ware ’ in pottery.

It deserves some dis¬

cussion. The facts known about its introduction are few and, being in the main derived from a single source, uncritical.2 Similarly, what evidence 1 See pp. 109-15. 2 The unanalytical, antiquarian character of most literature upon the history of brewing has also been responsible for the remarkable degree of plagiarism present in all accounts of the introduction of porter brewing. Springing from the anonymous contribution to the Gentleman’s Magazine, xxx (1760), 527-9, identical descriptions (differing only in the mistaken date of 1730 vice 1722, propagated by some followers of the Monthly Magazine (xm, pt. i) after 1802) repeat themselves many times in topographical and technical literature. The sequence runs through: Picture of London (1805), pp. 39-40; F. A. Accum, Art of Brewing (1821), p. 6; H. Thomas, Ancient Remains... (1830), vol. II, pp. 154-7; D. Hughson, History and Description of London (n.d.), vol. in, pp. 293-4; Yeats, Technical History of Commerce (1871), Manufactures, p. 235; A. Rees, Cyclopaedia (1819), vol. xxxvm (Porter). After 1850 it is repeated by most writers on brewing without significant additions. 13

The Rise of Porter Brewing exists is descriptive rather than analytical or scientific, which was to be expected from an age where technical innovations were usually guarded secrets and where the chemistry of brewing remained unknown. Even the accurate measurement of strength and temperature in manufacture developed only in subsequent generations, as a consequence of a rational search to cut costs and improve efficiency, itself largely resulting from successful, large-scale production. The new beer was first brewed, it appears, in the autumn of 1722 by Ralph Harwood, a partner in the Bell Brewhouse at Shoreditch. The ‘Blue Last’ in Shoreditch still claims the first delivery.1 Being intended to combine the virtues of the mixtures of beers then drawn from various casks by publicans, it became known as ‘entire butt’ or ‘intire’ before being dubbed porter from the favour it supposedly found with these heavy manual workers. A visitor to London remarked on the innovation in 1726.2 Even the old question of terminology—with changing products hiding under a traditional name—remains perplexing, not least with porter.This was for sometime merely a colloquial term. In the 1760’s it becomes common in print—it is described in the early editions of the London and Country Brewer in 1738—but is still not commonly used by the porter brewers themselves in business records, so that terminology is no sure guide for judging innovation. While Whitbread was certainly a porter brewer, only the word ‘mild beer’ appeared in his books until a ‘New Porter Tun Room’ was valued in 1760.3 The valuation of beer stocks in Thrale’s brewery in 1748 included, besides the only important item of ‘mild beer’ (the staple porter), stale beer, cloudy beer, eager beer (both these last being deteriorated stock waiting to be ‘cured’ in the autumn), good amber, stale, amber, brown ale, brown small and pale small.4 Truman similarly, although not brewing brown ale, had amber and stout (brown, pale and ‘elder’) in his 1741 Rest Book although again mild beer was the only important item. Amber and pale brews (never significant in quantity from the 1740’s) dropped out generally in the course of the next decades, when porter alone, of standard and ‘export’ strengths, remained; that is, mild beer, stale beer, brown stout and pale stout.5 Stocks of ‘stout’ are, in every case studied, much smaller than the rest, significant 1 J. Bickerdyke [C. H. Cook], Curiosities 0/ Ale and Beer (1886), p. 365. 2 Cesar de Saussure, 29 November 1726 (A Foreign View of England (1902), p. 158). 3 Whitbread Records (Southill): Property Book, 1742-95. 4 Barclay Records: Rest Book, 1748. 6 Barclays brewed a ‘strong double-brown stout’ in 1802 at 60s. a barrel, when mild beer was at 35s. 14

The Introduction of Porter of the dominance of the London trade in the fortunes of all the porter brewers, for brown stout was the stronger beer which was sent to distant markets. Truman first named his ‘mild’ and ‘stale’ beer ‘intire mild’ and ‘intire stale’ in 1743, a belated recognition of porter in terminology rather than any change of product, for the price remained the same and the quantities involved were in no way out of trend. After two generations, to this total brew of porter, Barclays added the innovation of‘ale for India’ in 1799, at first scarcely noticeable beside their porter stocks, but none the less from which beginning there led a century and a half of steady change.1 Sir William Calvert and E. B. Greene, however, each insured a porter and an ale brewery in 1760.2 Introducing such a product as porter implied many preliminaries, none of which are known, but which would clearly complicate the isolated achievement of Harwood, who provides the ‘heroic’ explanation of change. From the first it was evidently a black, thick beer, bitter to the tongue, and of greater apparent strength and nourishment than existing ales. It demanded malt dried more ‘ high ’ than for any other beers known, which, being slightly scorched on the kiln, helped to give it a distinctive taste and colour. There is no mention of this new brown malt being made by Harwood in London, while the traditional malting areas in Hertford¬ shire were already famous for their brown malts and became the usual source for porter malt. Few London brewers seem to have malted their \ own in London at this time, for they enjoyed already a regional specialisa-\ tion in the industry. Hertfordshire produced the best brown, the West Country supplying (via the Thames) good ambers, and Norfolk and Lincolnshire good pales. Quality for quality, however, Hertfordshire stood unrivalled for most of the century. It is not known whether the new porter malt was first developed by Harwood in Shoreditch, on com¬ mission in Hertfordshire, or in collaboration with maltsters there, but very soon it was recognised as distinctive. Further mention is made on pp. 413-15. At first, it was said that porter could not be made fine or bright, and was matured for a few months in cask before being sent out, but within twenty years of its introduction great changes had come.3 Isinglass was then used to clear the beer of sediment; and, above all, the brewers had discovered the advantages of maturing it a year or more, first in cask but after 1740 in vat.4 The technical advantages given by these innovations deserve 1 Barclay Records: Rest Books, 1799-1830. 3 Gent. Mag. xxx (1760), 527-9.

2 G.L.M.R. Hand in Hand Records. 1 J.H.C. xxiv, 541-2. See below, p. 58. 15

The Rise of Porter Brewing separate mention, with the benefits of large-scale manufacture. For technical reasons they do not appear to have been applicable to ale, which was more temperamental in fermentation. Ale needed to mature in cask; it deteriorated when final fermentation took place while stored in bulk for a long time and, being clear and light, immediately showed up any deterioration.1 Although these developments made porter ‘ clear ’ it could never become bright, being probably much in the state that a dark beer, such as Irish porter, still remains. This had further advantages. First, it was greatly suited to the soft water of the London area—that of the Thames, the New River or wells—while a sparkling liquor was not.2 Such ‘liquor’ brought out the saccharine matter admirably in a brew designed for ‘fullness’ rather than ‘fineness’. This remained true, the hardness of Burton water being inimical to as complete an extraction of fermentable matter as London water until the coming of new techniques of processing in the nineteenth century. Then the natural advantages of Burton water— a sparkle given by a high percentage of calcium sulphate—was important enough to induce London firms to set up ale breweries there them¬ selves. Secondly, porter being delicate neither in colour nor taste, and eminently manageable in brewing, materials might be utilised more rigorously than in ale brewing. Successful brown malts could be made from barley less fine than that required for the best pale. Hops of the second grade did not prejudice the quality of porter as much as they might the finest ale. Always the porter brewers laid stress on the fineness of their materials, but this demand for the best was as much for economic reasons as technical—the variation in quality (and in the ‘strength’ to be drawn from materials of different qualities) being more extreme than the variation in price. Perhaps for these reasons, the ‘mashing’ and ‘boiling off’ of porter seems to have been a much more rigorous extractive process than that employed for ales. The London and Country Brewer gives the first good description of the technique for brewing strong brown ale, common brown ale, starting beer, the pales, the ambers and intire guile small beer, as well as that for stout and porter.3 In some, two separate mashes are 1 This was true of ales which were top-fermented, as porter. Bottom-fermented lagers were introduced much later under German tutelage. 2 London and Country Brewer (1742), pp. 14, 143; J. Richardson, Philosophical Principles... (3rd ed. 1805), pp. 29,72; J. Mills, New and Complete System... (1765), vol. V, pp. hi et seq.; J. Farey, Gen. View of Ag. of Derbyshire (1815), vol. II, p. 127. Combrune discounts the importance of different waters, but only ‘if they be equally soft’ (Theory and Practice of Brewing (1762), pp. 27-8). 3 Op. cit. pp. 21-31, 221-7.

l6

The Introduction of Porter made with the same body of ground malt. In all cases the lengths drawn, times of boiling and degree of hopping vary, but it was more in degree than a basic difference in process. ‘ Stout’ butt-beer was the strong version of porter, drawn to a length of only one barrel per quarter of malt; mashed first for an hour with oars in water at blood heat; then again with nearly boiling water after being ‘ capped ’ with more malt. Afterwards, it was to be strongly hopped and boiled for an hour and a half. Porter suffered a more thorough processing even than this, there being three, four or five mashings, with the last only for small beer. Having the first at blood heat was noted as a special London practice designed to ‘open the pores’ of the malt before the hotter subsequent mashes (rising from 1440 to 162° F.) extracted its ‘virtue’ to the full.1 Porter was hopped 3-5 lb. per barrel at each new run of liquor on the grains and thoroughly boiled until its estimated length was between ij and 2 barrels from a quarter of malt (a greater length by far was drawn by other brewers). This length slowly increased during the century, probably not to the detriment of strength, but taking up the added efficiencies given by storage in vat, exact measurement of strength and temperature in brewing, and the rising quality of raw materials (particularly with the increasing per¬ centage of pale malt used). As all calculations of strength were made by rule of thumb from ‘ length ’ in the books until 1830 (at least, for accounting purposes, even when the saccharometer had been in use for two genera¬ tions) there can be no exact estimate of intrinsic alcoholic content. But, by 1762, the length was reputed to be 2J-2I barrels per quarter and, by 1780-1800, 3-3I.2 It was then varied for a time under the duress of high grain prices and falling demand—being the least iniquitous of various expedients—dropping occasionally to over 4 barrels. It does not appear that the proportion of hops used varied as much. Some reports claimed shrewdly that the amounts increased with the length drawn to ensure the stability of weaker beer, but in Barclays, at least, there was little change from a 3! lb. per barrel average between 1780 and 1830.3 The real increase in the hop-rate to ensure safe storage for porter had come long before and Combrune knew that the secret of keeping beer stable was to vary the hop-rate with the temperature of the season. After being fully extracted 1 Op. cit. p. 24; Combrune, op. cit. pp. 242-4; T. Hale, Compleat Body of Husbandry (2nd ed., 1758). PP- 322 et se42 Combrune, op. cit. pp. 178 et seq.; Whitbread Records (Brewery): Brewing Books, 1805-30; Mills, op. cit. p. 163; Weekly Observations of Dublin Society, Letter xlviii; Porter Brewery Detected^ 1764),?. 6; Excise (TLB), 1356, f. 24 (1779). See below, Table 30 (p. 471) and p. 472m 3 Barclay Records: Hop Book, 1780-1830. 2

17

MBE

The Rise of Porter Brewing in this way during many mashings, the wort was then boiled off with hops until the requisite length was achieved, this degree of boiling also being designed to exploit the hops to the full. This mashing system suggests that raw materials were exploited more efficiently with porter than with ale; a claim which is backed by evidence that ‘ grains ’ left over after porter brewing were less nourishing as a cattlefood than ale ‘ grains ’—and bore a lower price.1 If this is true for mashing, contemporaries thought it equally the case with fermentation. Porter, they said, was ‘ fully fermented ’ in that the process was allowed to continue for one or two days, not being checked before it had reached its limit. Although technical opinion is not agreed on the point, it may be that the bitter taste of porter, in part derived from scorched malt and heavy hopping, came also in part from the complete conversion of saccharine matter into alcohol by ‘full’ fermentation. Where much was left in solution —as with English ale—it was characteristically sweet, even with hops. A chemist remarked to the 1818 Parliamentary Committee: ‘the object of the porter brewers is to produce the most highly fermented liquor that is possible... ale still having a certain clamminess or sweetness, showing that fermentation has been stopped before reaching its natural height.’2 More certainly, some of the bitterness derived from the completeness of the extraction process. So thoroughly was porter mashed that the last stages of the operation brought certain tannins out of the grain and certain other substances which would have made the drink a little cloudy. Neither of these results would have been tolerable for a fine ale, and, as remarked, the efficient exploitation of the raw material entailed many mashings and then much boiling off to bring the liquor to its normal strength—a robust¬ ness of treatment which was similarly impossible for other kinds of malt liquor.3 Technical efficiency, however, was not confined to mashing or the use of soft water. From these processes it might be assumed more potent than ale. But what was equally if not more important than this, it was almost certainly more stable. This actual chemical superiority in stability may well have been a deter¬ mining factor in first allowing the rise of mass-production in the brewing industry. Another important fact suggests that there lies at the base of the industrial and commercial redeployments in the London brewing trade 1 2 3 of a

See my article in Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. v (1952), 249. Pari. Papers, 1819, v, Evidence to Report on Public Breweries, p. 73 (A. Aitkin). Mr L. E. Hudson has given me much valuable advice on the interpretation of the diary brewer at Guinness’s, 1821-75. This section in particular owes much to his knowledge.

18

The Introduction of Porter a specific technological innovation. The failure of the ale brewers to ex¬ pand at an equivalent rate upon the same markets may surely be seen partly in the light of technology. Only when exact control of fermenta¬ tion became possible in ale brewing at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a technical advantage possessed by porter largely (but perhaps not completely) removed. In the century with which this study is primarily concerned a marked technological gap existed.1 The greater the volume of wort, as the scale of production rose, the greater the quantity of heat produced (mounting in proportion to the volume) and the slower, relatively, the process of dissipating it (being dependent upon the surface-area of the vessel). Scaling up the process of fermentation thus induced, in the absence of any device to regulate tempera¬ ture within the fermenting squares, a rise in temperature which had the same potential ill effects as brewing in the heat of summer—something which all brewers refused to do. The main danger in both cases was the increased risk of a bad fermentation but, in addition, the more violent fermentation increased the loss of volatile substances (which gave flavour and quality to the brew) blown out of solution by the carbon dioxide bubbles. The robustness of his product enabled the porter brewer to escape certain of these dangers, for his brew tolerated a greater amount of heat without deterioration than ale. The effect was marked enough to allow the porter brewers to continue production into warmer weather with greater safety than ale brewers. The brewing books of London porter brewers show a normal season to be from the beginning of September to early or mid-June, the Burton brewers commonly brewing for a month less on either end of the season. Burton admittedly is a special case—having a specialised product and a specialised market—but general evidence for ale brewing suggests that porter brewers did have an advantage. They could, therefore, cover their overhead costs much more efficiently. When the new internal cooling devices enabled the ale brewer to overcome this technological obstacle, he was able to profit by the increased economic advantages which largescale production gave. But even then, porter maintained a slight superiority, in that there were smaller risks of after-infection in the interval 1 I am indebted to Dr M. Ingram, of the Low Temperature Research Station, Cambridge, for guidance on this problem. Certain other hypotheses which suggest that the ‘browning’ in porter malt (furfural) may have slowed up the fermenting process for porter (and hence lowered the temperature) are not accepted by porter brewers at the present time. See articles by M. Ingram, D. A. A. Mossel and P. de Lange in Chemistry and Industry (1955), 63-4; D. C. Wilson and H. D. Brown in Food Technology, vn (1953), 250. 19

2-2

The Rise of Porter Brewing between manufacture and consumption, which was often prolonged well after the beer had left the brewery. ‘Dry-hopping’, which also began in the early nineteenth century, may possibly have given some extra pro¬ tection to ale when sulphur had been thrown on the kiln-fire, plus a more positive flavour. Certainly, after 1830 there seem to be no more technological obstacles hindering the ale brewer in his advance upon the established hegemony of porter. Once the porter brewers’ problems of increasing the scale of production in fermentation had been mitigated through the new brown malt after 1722, the same increase in the size of brewing utensils gave them an important chemical advantage in another way. The first problem of getting heat out of fermenting liquor, or preventing its production, was followed by that of letting air in. When yeast was pitched into the fer¬ menting squares, its presence in solution was on such a scale as to absorb all the available oxygen rapidly. It dominated the other micro-organisms present in solution in lesser quantities and denied them the chance of growth through lack of oxygen. But when the surplus yeast had settled out again and had been skimmed off after the main fermentation, came the most difficult time. Temperature would have been raised by the primary fermentation, while air would begin to infuse into the liquor. At this stage air was very harmful. Yeasts still active would continue to feed on it to reproduce themselves rather than to produce alcohol, thus making strength decline. Other micro-organisms which also grew in the beer at the expense of alcohol needed air to do it: the greater the infusion of air, the more rapidly was alcohol oxidised away and the greater the resulting acidity in the beer.1 All these chemical processes, of which only the unfavourable results were appreciated by scientifically illiterate generations, combined to favour the large utensil for the latter stages of fermentation and—more particularly—storage. As the size of the vat grew, so the chances of infection and aeration diminished (again in the ratio of its area to its capacity). Deep vats were more advantageous than shallow ones because the surface open to the air was exposed more dangerously than beer within the vat. Even better was the innovation of putting covers over the vats so that the natural efflux of carbon dioxide from the beer (which could be fatal to anyone leaning over the edge) might be maintained as an air-seal. The economic disadvantages of maturing the beer for so long in vat was, 1 Deliberate and complete aeration of a fermented wort by trickling it down through a tower was the basic process in vinegar-making. 20

The Introduction of Porter of course, the sinking of much circulating capital in beer stocks which f could be better employed elsewhere. Barclays had their beer valued at no less than £300,000 in some midsummer balance sheets in the 1820’s. In the same way the pursuit of chemical efficiency involving the use of only brown malt had the disadvantage that brown was not quite as ‘ strong ’ as pale malt made from equivalent barley because fermentable matter was destroyed in the process of browning. Both these problems came under attack within a century, as we shall see, but only when the ale brewers were moving up into a better competitive position in the mass market. It remained broadly true that the advantages of porter precluded the qualities of a delicate flavour, a clear, ‘clean’ appearance and taste, and sparkle—all of which were emphasised when pewter gave way to! glass. The paler ales of Burton were no less powerful than porter in alcoholic content, despite their appearance, and Combrune gave Burton ale—at 1-1J barrels brewed from a quarter of malt—as the strongest of all. When public favour turned towards these qualities, following the techno¬ logical progress of a century in the brewing industry and the mounting momentum of social change in England, the age of porter was over. With conditions in Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century, in these relevant aspects, similar to those in England almost a century before, porter brewing crossed the Irish Channel, and porter became the product upon which there, as in London, the industrialisation of brewing took place, and a modern structure of production arose. CHANGES IN THE STRUCTURE OF THE INDUSTRY IN LONDON

From the introduction of porter in London, for all the economic and technical reasons involved in its production, came the great changes in the brewing industry. As we have seen, the expansion of individual concerns had been remarked before this point, and no doubt the fiscal and regulatory system which had been applied to the industry since 1660 had been having an effect in concentrating the industry into fewer and larger plants: im particular, Common Brewers had favourable excise allowances.1 These changes themselves had been in part responsible for encouraging the introduction of the new product, which in turn increased the possibilities of much greater change. The London production figures which are known, also the number of Common Brewers registered within the same Excise area, strangely do not, by themselves, reflect any such important redeployment of resources. 1

See chapter x. 21

The Rise of Porter Brewing The absolute numbers of Common Brewers registered within the Bills of Mortality fluctuated as conditions in the trade were good or bad (low raw-material prices and consequent high profits encouraging temporary entry into the trade) but on the whole they did decline—slowly. From a range of 160-190 in 1684-1708 they dropped to 140-160 between 1709-22; went up to 160-180 again in most years between 1722-65; back to 140-160 in the next period until 1794 with then a more serious and permanent drop in the difficult times: 100-120 during the wars, and below 100 in the years just before 1830. This progress may best be seen in a table.1 The fall in absolute numbers did not coincide with any great increase in absolute quantities. Annual barrelage, which was running at 1-2 million up to 1727 gradually fell (under the impact of gin drinking) to between o-8-i million barrels, and did not recover until after 1758. Then produc¬ tion rose gradually to 1-5 million barrels, fell again slightly during the Napoleonic Wars to recover to new heights until the gin revival after 1826. The greatest developments in individual businesses came during the general expansion of the decades after 1760; but the potential market, it must be remembered, grew throughout the century as more people came to London. Within this modest change in total quantities and numbers of brewers the distribution of the amounts brewed in individual breweries— the relative deployment of resources within the industry—underwent very marked change indeed, in consequence of the efficiencies of large-scale production. It is this important relative change in relation to the modest aggregate expansion of production which distinguished the industrial evolution of the brewing industry from that of others, such as cotton or iron, which represent the Industrial Revolution. Ralph Harwood did not, as Abraham Darby, become a great industrialist by exploiting his own innovation, and unlike coke-smelted cast-iron, the new product and its brewing technique rapidly took hold in London, although a lag occurred before it was adopted by brewers in the large provincial cities. At no time was Harwood among the leaders. In 1743 Robert Hucks claimed to own ‘ several Thousand Butts, which he trusts in the Custody of the Victuallers’ and both Thrale and Truman were working on an equivalent scale.2 The two Calvert brothers could not have been far behind. Truman explained that such quantities of casks, which might absorb one-third of a brewer’s capital, were now necessary as trade had swung over to strong beer, which had to be stored for a year or more, 2 J.H.C. xxiv, 541-2.

1 Appendix, Table 38. 22

The Industry in London away from mild beer and ale which could be sent out in a month. Although he does not mention it by name, this is the move to porter which demanded control of manufacture and storage by the brewer. Maturing was not then being done in vat, save by Calvert and perhaps Parsons, but the great increase in individual productions was under way.

In 1748 the leaders

were outstripping lesser brewers by unprecedented amounts: Sir William Calvert then brewed 55,700 barrels, Felix Calvert 53,600, Benjamin Truman 39,400, Humphrey Parsons 39,000 and Hope 34,400. Together the first twelve houses produced 383,000 out of 915,000 barrels of strong beer and ale paying duty in the metropolis, and all the greatest were porter brewers.1 A decade later, when the leaders (now including Whit¬ bread) were in the 55,000-65,000 barrel range, Harwood brewed only 21,200 barrels, and in later years he did not attain even the degree of eminence required to be included in the published figures of‘important brewers’.2 His brewhouse, too, remained obscure. The changing status of the great brewer and the ‘Great London Common Brewhouse’ may be seen, too, in conditions of entry into the trade. The size and nature of the undertaking precluded apprenticeship leading to ownership as that had been commonly understood in trades organised on a handicraft or workshop basis. Campbell wrote: The Brewer in London, as far as I can learn, seldom takes Apprentices; his work is carried on by Labourers who have acquired their Knowledge by Experience, and those who intend to set up Business have either been acquainted with it, by being Son or Relation to some Man in the Trade, or take their chance by depending on the Skill and Honesty of the Clerks and Servants.3 [Most new blood, in these circumstances, entered existing concerns] .. .in Proportion to what cash they can advance, which is the most common way of their coming first into trade, for to erect a Common Brewhouse and lay in Stock answerable, will sink many Thousands before they see any Returns.4 For those few who did become apprenticed to one of the important brewers, the ‘consideration’ was as high as that for any other profession in London. From 1725, when the premiums are recorded in the Minute Books and Register of Apprentice Bindings of the Brewers’ Company, a £200 figure is not uncommon.

In 1733, James Hotchkiss gave 300

guineas to be bound to John Wightman, to whom, as Master of the Company in 1736, Samuel Whitbread was apprenticed in consideration 1 Barclay Records: Brewery Statistics (MSS.). 2 Truman Records: Beer Production Book (MS. 1802) for 1758, 1760 figures. Figures for later years are given below, p. 26. 3 London Tradesman (1747), pp. 264-5. 4 General Description of All Trades (1747), p. 34-

23

The Rise of Porter Brewing of j^oo.1 Peter Champion paid £350 to John Scott, a member of the Court of Assistants in 1742. Daniel Cholmley paid £500 to John Harrison in 1765.2 These are the peaks on a rising trend, but they do not stand alone. Many sons of brewers were able to become members of the trade and Company by patrimony or for a nominal fee of

55.,

and many other

apprentices were bound to humble brewers and victuallers for modest sums. The variations reflect the wide range in the size and importance of the businesses involved. For the great breweries, with which we are most concerned, the fees are in the highest range, and Campbell considered that to set up in trade as a brewer in London needed more capital (£2000£10,000) than most other trades. His exceptions are silk-manufacturers, vinegar-makers and merchants, for which occupations capital might be ‘unlimited’; a potter, he thought, needed £ 1000-^40,000; and a banker, ‘£20,000 ad lib?. With the beginnings of technical literature at this time, from the London and Country Bremer of 1734 to Michael Combrune’s Theory and Practice of Brewing in 1762, with the preface submitted to, read and ap¬ proved by, and dedicated to the Master and Wardens of the Brewers’ Company, great emphasis is placed on the professional status of the business and the inefficiency rife throughout all but the few London breweries.3

Great knowledge, enterprise and skill, both in the actual

brewing and in management, were needed for success. For those with such qualities, and sufficient capital, he said, the ‘Profits returned are proportionately considerable’. These books have all an air of advising the lesser London brewers and instructing the country brewers in the realities of an important trade. All these opinions are supported by internal evidence from the breweries. Ralph Thrale bought the Anchor Brewery at its commercial value for £30,000 in the eleven years after 1729 out of profits. The net capital in the valuations of 1749 was £78,800: it had risen to £149,200 by 1780 when the firm was sold at the rather depressed price of £i35,ooo.4 The Rest Books of Benjamin Truman show valuations of £23,340 in 1741, £92,320 in 1760, £171,860 in 1780 and £225,090 in 1790, with profits proportionate. Both of these capital houses were overtaken by Whitbread’s, when he moved from Old Street to his new brewery in Chiswell Street 1 2 3 4

G.L.M.R. Series 5450. See p. 261. Ibid. Series 5445/28/44:5445/30, 8 February 1765. Ibid. Series 5445/29, 9 May 1760; 13 June 1760; 10 January 1766. See pp. 272-3. 24

Plate i.

The Griffin Brewery, Clerkenwell

Plate

2. Plan of the Anchor Brewery, Southwark, 1792-1800

The Industry in London in 1750. His capital was £116,000 in 1762, £178,770 in 1783 and £271,240 in 1790.1 Other evidence—the rise in the numbers of casks and horses employed, the great vats, the control over distribution, the clerical organisation of the trade, the foundation of the porter-brewing dynasties and a tradi¬ tional social consolidation of wealth in the Home Counties and in London, are further aspects, direct or oblique, of this central economic reorganisa¬ tion within the London brewing industry. Before the mid-eighteenth century, a large porter brewery was as different from the inn brewhouse as the later cotton mill was from a cottage workshop. As the process continued so the pyramid of production developed ever more steeply sloping sides. At its apex were the few capital houses through whose vats and mash-tuns was flowing a greater and greater percentage of annual production in London; at its base lay the still large number of small brewers making ale, table beer and small beer or those brewing porter who had been squeezed out of the race to attain the most efficient scales of production. In 1778, when the Board of Excise2 had noted the great strides made by the large brewers in recent years, the trade admitted only six members to the charmed circle of those aspiring to own ‘capital houses’—Whitbread, Thrale, Truman, Sir William and Felix Calvert and Hammond.3

A table showing the rise of the few large breweries to

dominate the entire production of London—using the twelve largest as the expanding group rather than those self-designated capital houses of 1778—with the individual barrelage of the largest of them, makes clear the consequences of the efficiency of industrial brewing. The simple facts of production, moreover, entailed a revolution in managerial tech¬ niques and financing: a more obscure historical world which helped to make expansion possible. The Calverts were the first to brew more than 50,000 barrels each in 1748; Whitbread first brewed over 200,000 barrels in 1796, and Barclays were the first with more than 300,000 barrels in 1815. Much of the argument in other sections of this book is in elabora¬ tion of the implications of a 200,000 barrel annual production in fixed capital, casks, horses and drays, raw material costs, organisation and control. In 1800-30 the few great brewers brewed more than three-quarters of the strong beer drunk in London. The amount of porter not brewed by them—and this was the one staple, strong malt liquor in the metropolis— 1 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Capital, Production, Profits 1761-1815. 2 Excise (TLB), 1356, ff. 26-7. 3 Later Shum, Combe and Delafield (1787).

25

The Rise of Porter Brewing table

i. Production of strong beer in London, lj 50-1830

[sources: Total, from excise returns, where available. First twelve houses, MSS. and printed lists at the breweries.] The total barrelage is composed of all strong beer on which duty was paid, and therefore includes ale brewed. The first twelve houses brewed almost all porter and brown stout, so that the final percentage is based upon a total which includes a section of the market for which they were not competing. By 1820 the amount of porter brewed by the others was admitted to be ‘very trifling’. Figures in 1000 Barrels.

Year 1748 1750 1760 1776 1780 1787 1795 1800 1810 1815 1817 1830

Total brewed 9i5'5 979-5 iii4-5 1289-0 I3I9-5 1251-0 _*

1768-5 I532-5 I44I-5

First twelve houses

Percentage Whitbread of total

383-0 437-o 525-5 707'0 68o-o 965-0 978-2

41-9 43-6 47-1 54-8 52-8 77-1

99T5 1320-5 1401-5 1226-5

-

I200-0f

_*

77-7

8o-o 85-0

_#

63-4 102-5 97-4 150-2 159-0 137-0 110-9 161-7 I5I-9 I3I-3

Barclay (Thrale) 35-5 46-0 326 75-4 65-5 105-5

Truman 39-5 46-0 55’5 83-0 8o-i

I36-3 235-1 337-6 281-5

95-3 99-1 109-7 i45-o 172-2 168-8

231-3

150-3

122-3

* Figures incomplete. See Table 43, n. 1. t Figure based on the evidence of C. Barclay to Committee on Retail Sale of Beer (Pari. Papers, 1830, x, p. 21).

was admitted to be ‘very trifling’. In the other section of the strong beer market—ale brewed for the ‘quality trade’ or for export—no porter brewer was competing seriously, if at all. In these circumstances, within the marketing area enjoyed by industrial brewing of such magnitude, the position of the few firms and the few individuals who controlled them affected traditional conceptions of competition, pricing and the economic context, where individual actions were based upon the assumption that such actions would not significantly affect the general level of production or prices, or the decisions of rivals. Conditions which have affected other industries and some broad segments of the economy in later times may be seen operating in little in the London brewing industry by 1800. At that time industrial techniques of this maturity, from which these commercial —and even political—consequences followed, were not usual. Some very large textile spinning mills, rapidly increasing in numbers, a few very large ironworks, mines, Birmingham workshops, dockyards, chemical works and distilleries—many of these employing many times more labour than a first-rank porter brewery—did exist, and soon, in the nineteenth century, 26

The Industry in London the few great London breweries were eclipsed in size and capital by a multi¬ tude of concerns in the country at large. In London itself, however, they did remain among the largest industrial concerns. In the face of such precocity in the eighteenth century, it is important to recall once more that such large-scale brewing could exist only where un¬ usually favourable marketing conditions allowed. It remains to analyse in the next chapters the various developments affecting production in London where the market did allow the fullest exploitation of technical opportunities. Some further discussion of trends in national production will be found on pp. 369-83.

27

CHAPTER II

PORTER BREWING AND THE BREWERY ORGANISING THE STAFF

In the nature of the brewer’s trade, transactions were very numerous and mostly very small. When the Bristol Porter Brewery sent 600 casks of porter to the West Indies in one ship, or Benjamin Wilson 900 casks in a single ship to the Baltic, the contracts were quite untypical for the industry as a whole. There were, indeed, the occasional war-time porter contracts to the capital houses, and always particularly placed firms such as Cobb of Margate and Deal, contract brewers in naval ports, or the small business of John Smith at Oundle, when large barracks for the militia and French prisoners were established at Norman Cross. He seized the opportunities which a military mass-market offered, and sent over 9000 barrels of beer rumbling across ten miles of country lanes to the Great North Road between December 1798 and March 1800.1 John Smith was able to record all these sales in a few small pages of a barley book, whereas normally, accounting for such quantities would occupy many folios in a large ledger. This more usual type of trade (which had great advantages in being mainly for cash) necessitated a strict accounting system and an efficient office administration, once production began to rise above the 5000 barrel mark. Before then, as with Halsey at the beginning, or Rene Briand of Hoddesdon in the mid-eighteenth century—or even the last John Smith of Oundle before 1916—the accounts of the firm might be mingled with personal bills so that all current expenses came out of the till, whether for parcels of malt, insurance, clothes, wine for the hunt, servants’ livery or the child’s school fees. Even when the business was distinguished from the personal estate of the owner (as it had to be in the case of a partnership or a company) all the general commercial transactions tended to be in one or two books—rent for public houses standing next to a purchase of brooms in the same running account. In London, the aptly named ‘Great Ledgers’ soon 1 John Smith (Oundle): Sales Book, 1798-1800; Barley Book, 1814-28. I have seen these accounts through the courtesy of Mr Ludlow, of the brewery, Oundle. See Barnard, Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. iv, pp. 5-6. 28

Organising the Staff became clerical symbols equal to the giant vats for showing the extent of trade.1 They record the monthly deliveries to London publicans, being also known as Victuallers’ Books. For a poor public house the sales might be 2-3 butts a month, for a normal, fairly prosperous one 5-8 butts, with perhaps 15-20 per month for a major inn.2 A similarly vast book recorded the country trade—with an even larger number of less regular accounts; a Petty Ledger noted the private trade to friends and relatives and those favoured individuals with connexions with the firm; and often an export ledger for consignments bearing excise drawbacks. All these, with the yeast and grains books, recorded the sales. Other aspects of business produced a more bewildering array of accounts: there were the Brewing Books, recording the details of every guile brewed, entered up by the brewer himself as a detailed ‘log’ of production; the Malt and Hop Books, where the trade was great and the maltsters in account with the brewery very numerous; the Letter Books (which seem in general to have been destroyed) mostly about country-trade sales and malt deliveries; and the Loan, Bond, Interest, Rent, Inventory and Stock ledgers which germinated in the fertile soil of the tied trade. Beyond such routine business records in the Counting House were two more intimate series both kept in the partners’ room, and one sometimes in the owner’s or the managing partner’s own hand. The first series— which is significantly the usual one to have survived intact, for it contained the information most valuable to the owners of the business—is that of the Rest Books, or the annual balance struck at the end of the brewing season in early June. In this book everything, down to the brooms about the brewhouse yard, was valued; all outstanding debts to the firm and liabilities to tradesmen and creditors noted, so that the net worth of the trade might be exactly known. On this annual accounting, associated frequently with a splendid dinner, all decisions rested during the ensuing year. The amount to be ‘withdrawn from trade’ was arranged at this time, and if for any reason a partner withdrew, his share of the assets was calculated upon the figures of the previous ‘Rest’, in proportion to the fraction of the trade held by each. Being the important summaries of the firm’s value (even though, as cross-sections of the firm’s position at a single point in time they do not tell the historian anything about annual production, 1 They are scarcely manageable by one man, standing twenty-two inches by twenty inches, being perhaps six inches thick, leather-bound in massive boards laced with vellum, containing over 400 folios with tightly written triple columns—and current only for three or four years. 2 P. Colquhoun’s estimates (Observations and Facts... (i794)> PP- 4_7) talfi with accounts in the Great Ledgers. 29

Porter Brewing and the Brewery sales, annual costs, or ‘length’ drawn) the final page of the Rest Books had to be signed by each partner (who might demand his own copy) to signify agreement with the valuations. They were then carefully preserved against the future. Only where a firm was owned absolutely by a single man was a Rest Book, designed to avoid the possibility of disagreement amongst partners, unnecessary. In London, mere size or the quest for efficiency usually made it desirable to have an annual stock-taking, and even the terminology, like the technique of drawing up the books, was standardised.1 Rests were taken in a similar way at Lacon’s small brewery, in Yarmouth, at least from 1742, and at Charrington’s in 1743, where partnerships existed. The other books kept by the head of the firm were the Private Ledgers which recorded all details of loans granted to—or investments sought in— the brewery; and the loans and investments made by the firm. Sometimes, all those outstanding at the time of the Rest were listed individually in the Rest Book with all the other debts in and out of trade, as was the case with Barclays, but often just the total of these confidential financial dealings appeared in the Rest.2 The elder Whitbread entered up almost all these Private Ledgers himself—they were modest volumes—and kept them out of reach of his clerks as an arcanum beyond their responsibility or surveillance. Until the i76o’s he was still entering up general accounts. To track transactions through such a set of books is to explore the organisation of the firms. Merely to see a stack of Great Ledgers or a run of annual Rest Books is an archaeological glimpse of economic growth and continuity. They reflect, not indeed the heroic decisions out of which fortunes were made, or the entrepreneurial ability upon which success and stability depended, but the efficient machine which was needed also if decisions were to be effectively executed. Both able command and efficient control of execution were equally vital for success in a massproduction business which depended on the translation of its profits over such a vast number of retail transactions. More of this will be said in the discussion of the men themselves.3 Here some mention must be made of the organisation they developed, and the staff they chose. Not until the end of the eighteenth century does such 1 An incomplete copy of the 1764 Rest Book, surviving at Sou thill, shows the practice did not begin in 1799 with the partnerships at Whitbreads (Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4643)2 This is quite apart, of course, from those purely private dealings—which could spell life or death for the firm—in the private accounts and on the personal credit of the partner of owner, which need not be in the Rests at all. 3 See chapter vm.

30

Organising the Staff evidence become readily available—perhaps the history of the foremen and ‘ N.C.O.’s ’ of the Industrial Revolution can never be written. By then, however, the standardised staff positions common to all the great breweries show how institutionalised, almost how professionally bureaucratic, their organisation had become. Built up in the main by entrepreneurs running their own firms in their own way, the foundations of an organisation were laid which survived without violent transformation the changes in owner¬ ship over its head from entrepreneur-capitalist, to the group of partners, to the business company. At the head of the staff stood the clerks, or, when one of them stood supreme above his fellows (particularly when the head of the firm was much engaged in politics, as Henry Thrale or the younger Whitbread), the brewery manager.

Over the everyday executive routine they were in

absolute control: John Perkins was even forced to take important policy decisions himself in trying to prevent his master from taking bad ones. These men became silently transposed into the department managers of today whose functions they virtually had.1 The ‘Collecting Clerks’ had great influence in getting and maintaining trade, as they were, of all senior members of the brewery staff, those in most direct contact with the publicans, whose cash they collected. The ‘Counting House Clerks’ headed the administration ‘at home’ for all save the actual brewing. Naturally, such men needed to merit the responsibilities of their position. They were clerks with the old status of that term, in their trade the equivalent of the ‘Principal Clerks’ in the departments of state, rather than clerks in the debased coinage of today. Their numbers would not be higher than six or eight in a great brewery—and, as in the civil service, the seniors would gain responsibility only after many years’ patient progress up the ranks of seniority from entry as a youth on the pay of a labourer.

High premiums, without formal apprenticeship but not

uncommonly with a ‘ Connection ’, were paid for a humble position on such an important ladder. The rungs led up to high salaries. Before 1750, such brewery employees as the ‘Workman Brewer, Home Clerk or Broad Clerk’ [i.e. abroad clerk] had ‘seldom less than £50 a Year and some of them £200... ’2

In naval brewhouses earlier in the century the head

clerk received £60 p.a.—equivalent to his probable salary if taken on in 1 In Truman Hanbury Buxton the district managers are still called the ‘ abroad-clerks ’ after their eighteenth-century forebears who supervised the monthly collections from publicans; at Whitbreads there are still ‘abroad coopers.’ 2 General Description of All Trades (1747), p. 34-

31

Porter Brewing and the Brewery a private concern.1 In later years Whitbread commented many times, as well he might, on the ‘faithful clerks’ who had enabled him to build the greatest brewery in London. Of his entire staff—clerks, brewers, and coopers—he wrote that the record of service would at least prove a most striking picture of continuance of Masr. and Servants, as scarce any known before. At this time, Midsr., 1790, they have served as under: Mr. Maysey 43 yrs., Mr. Green 38 yrs., Mr. Yallowley 30 yrs., Mr. Sangster 26 yrs., Mr. Jennings 26 yrs., Mr. Phillips 35 yrs., Mr. Shepherd 29 yrs., Mr. Haswell 35 yrs., Mr Pryce 18 yrs. Together 9 Clks: 280 yrs. or 31 yrs. each on average.2 For all of them, the pattern was similar. They entered service usually with ‘wages’ of £40 or £52 p.a. or, in the case of Samuel Green’s son, who left under a cloud in 1801, a ‘ gift of £21 ’ at the end of his first year in 1781 (when he was a boy of twelve), then £50 for his next year’s salary, £130 by 1786, as the second brewer, and a rise to £220 (‘married’) in 1789.3 With his perquisites and gratuity he was gaining £750 when dismissed. Some rose even higher. By 1800, Elijah Pryce had been in service for 28 years and a collecting clerk for 19. He received £52 wages, £418 ‘poundage’ as a perquisite and a gratuity of £30, to bring his total re¬ muneration up to £500. Created manager (as Robert Sangster before him) in 1802, his gratuities rose on an incremental scale to make his total salary £1050 in 1813, when he retired. Samuel Sloper did not get further than ‘1st Compting House Clerk’ at £682 (composed of £52 wages, a small malt perquisite and the rest annual gratuity): Joseph Andrews, the shipping clerk, received §d. commission on every barrel shipped, besides wages and gratuity, to give him a rising salary on the same scale. It is the same with the clerks Haswell and Figgis when on duty in Dublin (with 6d. per hogs¬ head commission), Libbeus Dixon in the cooperage and all the others: they received traditional ‘wages’ of £1 per week, evidently paid weekly unlike the perquisites in kind which varied over the year, and an annual gratuity. Sometimes this annual lump sum was calculated, it seems, as to rob the perquisites and commissions of Whitbread’s servants of any incentive value. In 1764, there had been four clerks and seven coopers on his staff, which increased to sixteen by 1798, and fluctuated just below that until after 1830.4 Total staff payments varied between £2250 and £3000, 1 P.R.O. Adm. 110/9, f. 31. 2 Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4638. 3 Details are taken from Whitbread Records (Brewery): Gratuity Book 1798-1850; (Southill); Brewery 4638. 4 Ibid.

32

Organising the Staff depending on the numbers and seniority of those employed. Such figures were thought important by the first Samuel Whitbread, who wanted the record to be kept up to date. From them he had calculated just before his death that, since 1770, payments to his staff had risen, ‘faster by much than the Trade has increas’d, which has been rapidly.. .which proves they have been well rewarded and as good servants ought to be \1 Such men at the head of such a business—having professional positions which an attorney, a doctor or even a professor might respect for their salary—were men of status. One surprising feature of Whitbread’s private ledgers is the large sums deposited in the firm by the clerks.2 William Slater and Boughton Masey had invested £4000 each by 1772 which they both left on permanent loan. Yallowley and Samuel Green deposited amounts of a similar order. Such a stake in the capital of a firm doubtless supplemented their executive importance, whatever the formal structure of ownership. No one was more conscious of this than Samuel Whitbread himself at the end of his life. He acknowledged to his son how much he had always relied on them as buyers and in charge of the accounting, ‘ Indeed, I think it impossible even if I had my health and spirits’, he wrote, ‘to carry it on myself if any of their lives should drop.’ Full recognition was given to them at his death, when Maysey, Yallowley and Sangster became his Executors, and the latter two ‘commenced partner’ in 1799. This was a road which John Perkins and others had taken in very different circumstances. Their arrival in the ranks of the partners is discussed in chapter vm. Whitbread had Gainsborough, Gainsborough Dupont and Romney paint these seven faithful lieutenants.3 The portraits, still hanging at Southill Park (whose beauty their services helped to make possible), typify a kind of man as yet unusual in English industry. Nothing could be further from Carlyle’s ‘bag-cheeked, pot-bellied, much enduring, much-inventing barber’. At the technical head of the business stood the brewers—those respon¬ sible for the actual operation of the plant. Their leader was usually the owner himself or the managing partners, helped by a salaried assistant or two. These ‘workman brewers’ were upon the same ladder as the clerks, 1 Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4638, 4642. 2 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Private Ledgers 1770-1807. 3 Joseph Delafield (see p. 256), Jacob Yallowley, Sangster (by Romney); Maysey and Green (by Gainsborough); Phillips and Jennings (by Gainsborough Dupont). All these portraits, with that of Smeaton, hang in the library (Southill, A Regency House (1951), pp. 45~6).

3

33

MBE

Porter Brewing and the Brewery their salaries keeping pace for pace, and their gratuities supplemented extensively from the perquisites of surplus yeast, grains and hops. The owner or the managing partners did not customarily relax their control of this central function (even if the rest of the partners slept in ignorance of what a mash-tun looked like). Brewing being what it was, a single man, or two at the most, might direct operations, and take the collateral responsi¬ bility of choosing the malt and hops from samples. On the first function stood the reputation and sales of the firm; on the other the risks of profit and loss—for buying, without doubt, remained the core of commercial skill in an industry whose raw material costs made up so high a propor¬ tion of the total annual outlay and on whose quality so much depended. It is important to stress that these two brewers’ responsibilities were accepted at the partners’ or the owner’s level, even if the clerks advised in buying or the brewer had a part in both.1 Technical skills needed to be present right at the apex of the pyramid of organisation. Here, above all, it was courting disaster to allow a gap between experienced skill and final responsibility. As a partner after 1781, John Perkins continued to direct the brewing operations he had previously controlled as Thrale’s super¬ intendent. In cases where a new skill was being adopted—as in the spread of porter brewing outside London or the beginnings of ale brewing by the porter brewers themselves—a special brewer, such as David Slater, the ale brewer for Whitbreads in 1834, was not uncommonly appointed, if it was not immediately suitable for a son of the partners to learn the new practice at a brewery away from home. This was the normal procedure, and a ‘capital house’ would always have one or two salaried brewers at least, but where a firm relied completely upon an employee for this function, things could be difficult because he was the single sheet-anchor of success and did not share in the ownership. This was the awkwardness of Perkins’ position as manager, to be repeated in Whitbreads after 1796. David Jennings entered service there as a young man in 1764.2 In 1778 he became brewer, with the elder Whitbread himself, and, understand¬ ably, he was dissatisfied with the new arrangements after Whitbread’s death when Sangster and Yallowley, his fellow employees, became partners. He therefore left the brewhouse in October 1799, when the younger Whit¬ bread remarked, ‘ From this time Sami. Green undertook to conduct the 1 The sample bottles of malt and hops are still a common sight in the board-rooms of breweries. 2 Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4638, 4642; (Brewery): Gratuity Book 1798-1850.

34

Organising the Staff whole of the Brewing himself’. This showed the crucial importance of the single figure. The notice of Green’s own dismissal in 1801 indicates the scale of his remuneration: Brewer 13 years. Discharged May 28, 1801 for Neglect of Duty N.B. He owes for Beer and Casks—£110 and for Money received of Cowkeepers and which he had not brought to Account—£779, which sums are set against his 2 years Gratuity. Besides which he had Perquisites in Hops and Grains suppose between 3 and £400. The heads of other departments in the brewery were also accorded the status of inclusion in the ‘Gratuity Book’ by Whitbread.

In 1798-9,

apart from the four ‘collecting’—or ‘abroad’—clerks, the four ‘counting house’ clerks, two brewers, one shipping clerk and one storehouse clerk, there was the ‘Foreman in the Cooperage’ (who received £228 p.a.) the ‘Man in charge of the Tun Room’ (at £130) and a cooper and clerk for the Irish trade. By 1850, there were still only twenty employees in these staff positions, with the total payments to them running at £5872 annually. As only one full Gratuity Book has survived (at Whitbreads) one cannot be sure if the pattern shown there was absolutely similar in all firms of equivalent size. But what glimpses one receives of George Lester and John Field at Barclay Perkins, of Perkins himself under Thrale, of Benjamin Cleypole and Peter Merzeau at Trumans, it seems that their positions—certainly their responsibilities and doubtless their salaries— were not far different from those described for us in more detail at Whitbreads. Below the level of the staff, very little evidence has survived about the people employed in breweries, their conditions of employment, their pay or their precise functions. Such a paucity of record and comment itself suggests the economic truth that, relative to other industries, labour-costs were low in brewing, and that the fewer labourers employed in a welldesigned brewhouse needed strength more than skill.

Brewing was

a fortunate industry in this qualitative respect also, for its labour require¬ ments divided themselves into two distinct categories—a small number of highly-skilled men on the permanent staff (who alone appeared in Whitbread’s Gratuity Book) and a body of general labourers. The inter¬ mediary grades of semi-skilled men and women which other industries needed in such a high proportion, and amongst whom came the great difficulties of adjustment to factory conditions, were conspicuously absent in the breweries. There were, of course, the ancillary skills needed 35

3-2

Porter Brewing and the Brewery for coopering, and supervising casks and beer in publicans’ cellars, but labourers in the cooperage, as the draymen and horse-keepers in the stables, required only the range of skills to be found on the farm or in the village. Above all, the need was for strong general labourers—to manage the sacks of malt, to mash the ground malt before the days of mashing machines, to clean out the utensils and the casks, to do the racking into barrels, to press the surplus yeast, and manhandle the casks into the stores or onto the drays—the ‘drawers off’, ‘stage-men’ and ‘spare-men’. Conditions of unskilled employment in brewing have been, traditionally, as good as any in industry, often better than those in the most completely unionised trades. The absence of labour troubles reflected in the absence of much early trade-union activity in English breweries illustrates the advantages which a brewer-industrialist had over his fellows in this respect.1 The marginal importance of labour was less; the lower wage-costs encouraged a certain tolerance on the employers’ part—and there was always the solace of free beer which might assuage the bitterness of any dispute. As the wages of labourers, alike with all running costs, do not appear in the Rest Books—there being no debts outstanding in the case of weekly payments—almost nothing definite can be said about numbers, rates of pay or continuity of employment during most of the eighteenth century. Two enigmatic papers were left in the 1797 Rest Book at Barclays, which give what was, in all probability, a complete list of those below the status of ‘staff’. There were, from January 1791, four stokers, three moving coopers, four coopers, nine yeastmen, four miller’s men and eighteen draymen. The numbers of stagemen dropped from twelve to ten in the course of the next seven years; the horsekeepers rose from seven to twelve, the spare-men from fourteen to thirty (in 1796) and seven ‘ drawers-off ’ appeared in 1796-7. With these changes, the weekly wage bill noted for all the employees, who numbered seventy-five in 1791 and 100 in 1797, rose from £65. 115. to £83. 185. A second paper gives a figure for the total annual wages, which probably embraces both staff and labourers. This figure rose from £3488 in 1788 to £5748 in 1796. In Trumans similarly incomplete figures survive: the annual number of wage-earners employed rose from sixty-eight in 1760 to ninety-four in 1772. Total outgoings, which are included with those on 73-9 horses in the same period, rose from £10,423 in 1760 to £14,256 in 1772.2 1 The same is true of Molson’s in Montreal (M. Denison, Barley and the Stream (Toronto, I955)> P- 352)2 Truman Records: Rest Book 1772.

36

Organising the Staff It is quite impossible to tell from these bare statistics what increase on seniority scales or what rise in general rates there were or what pro¬ portion of the full working force was kept on between the brewing seasons—but the main fact emerges that the item of labour-costs was insignificant in comparison with outlays on malt, hops or casks for any brewery, and that, as a whole, the industry was no great employer of labour.1 Such considerations were relevant from the capital house down to the small Common Brewers and smallest Brewing Victuallers in country districts. Even with such relatively small numbers employed, a substantial brewery had a mobilised and disciplined working force, unlike many out¬ working industries of London such as the silk workshops in Spitalfields which employed several thousands. Lord Pelham sought to mobilise all such groups when invasion threatened in 1803. Four years before, Whit¬ bread wrote ‘ to make a tender of every service which can be desired from my establishment... for the Publick Good in the event of actual Invasion ’, and now his offer was taken up when systematic arrangements were made for the internal defence of business premises.2 Barclays agreed to raise a company of fifty men (needing only twenty additional stands of arms having made private preparations against any kind of attack after a narrow escape from the mob in the Gordon Riots) and draymen were to be seen drilling morning and evening in such smaller concerns as Elliot’s Stag Brewery in Pimlico—receiving strong beer ‘when they had done their duty’.3 PLANNING THE BREWERY

Where a suitable intensive market existed, brewing was technologically more suited to mass-production methods than most other manufacturing processes, given the methods of handling and forms of power available at the time.

Similarly, the lower costs resulting from such advantages

meant that the most efficient scale of production within the single plant was far higher than elsewhere, for the brakes applied to expansion by diminishing returns, whether arising from control of labour or materials, became operative at a much later stage. The twin pillars supporting such expansion were first the market, for large production implies mass1 Labour costs in London breweries were said to have risen 45. in the £ between 1791 and 1800 (jf.H.C. lvi, 240). 2 Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4641, S.W.—Pelham, 20 April 1798; (Brewery): Bullock and Broadley Coll. S.W.—Pelham, 29 June 1803. 3 J. Perkins—Pelham, 7 July 1803 (Bullock and Broadley Coll, ibid.)-, Heber Letters (ed. R. H. Cholmondeley, 1950), p. 143.

37

Porter Brewing and the Brewery distribution and mass-consumption; and secondly a stable product able to withstand, or to profit by such methods. London had long provided the first prerequisite and porter now gave the second. The consciousness of the economies of scale noticed by Burnaby in 1696 existed when the production of the greatest brewers was probably not much in excess of 5000 barrels yearly or 10,000 barrels at the most—large, no doubt, when one considers the number of transactions to be accounted for over the year, the number of customers regularly served, or even the relative standing of other trades; but nevertheless still insignificant in relation to their later triumphs. It implied little reorganisation of plant in response either to the technical necessities of rising production or to the deliberate search for economies in costs when the real scope of increasing returns became apparent. Upon the successful brewing of porter, the entrepreneurs broke through into a new world of size and ambitions which made them peers of the Industrial Revolution and their breweries the wonder of London. To brew on a larger scale meant, in exaggerated simplicity, using larger utensils.1 Equally, to manage a liquid in processing and to transfer it from one place to another was far simpler than moving and processing a solid such as cloth, iron or pottery. Pumping rather than carrying was cheap and efficient—in the eighteenth century much more so, relatively, than today. Labour costs did not rise commensurately with quantities handled until the beer came to be racked into barrels, and distributed. Then the numbers of drawers-off, draymen, horses, drays and casks did increase step by step with production. But still, during the actual manufacture, when the brewery had been deliberately designed for the efficient deploy¬ ment of labour and materials, a single man might open the tap on the largest utensil and allow the force of gravity to transfer its contents to the vessel below. Once the malt and the liquor (as brewing water was, and still is, named in the trade) had been raised to the top of the building, then, again, their movement might be left largely to gravity. Once in the mash-tuns, there came an inescapably heavy labour of mashing the ground malt into the liquor with wooden oars. As with those similar tasks which English labourers either would or could not do efficiently, the Irish— already the ‘chairmen, porters and coal-heavers’ of London—had this 1 The economies of a well-designed brewhouse are noted in my article in Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, v (1953), 208-24. Excellent photographs of the breweries and the brewers’ houses are in ‘The Functional Tradition’ (Architectural Review, cxxn (July 1957)) and B. Spiller, ‘The Georgian Brewery’, {ibid, cxxii (November 1957)).

38

Planning the Brewery occupation in their hands. It was the one brewing process expensive of labour, after carrying up the malt, that existed to tax the ingenuity of innovators, once steam-power had been applied to their pumping and milling. In the final process of manufacture, where again one man might pitch the yeast into the largest fermenting tun, beer literally brews itself, while in certain of the others involving milling, heating and cooling and moving liquids by gravity, little manual assistance was required. Men were' still required to shovel out the grains and clean the utensils, of course, but no other manufacturer in the eighteenth century who looked for ways of cutting his wage-bill by reorganising the ‘flow of production’ (even the phrase is significant) and increasing the scale of his manufacture had such opportunities as the brewer.1 Increasing returns from such reorganisation consequently beckoned him further along the road of expansion than others, and diminishing returns, so often coming first from the difficulties of super¬ vising the labour force, maintaining quality and preventing the theft of materials, set in correspondingly later. Sir Benjamin Truman’s homily on the need for an extensive trade if a brewer was to make a large fortune2 was followed by exact calculations of his own success, which show exactly how important these economies in scale could be. With a ‘ grist ’ of 126 qtrs. of malt in each guile of beer (that is, the quantity which might be run through the utensils at a single brewing) expenses were £382 and receipts £501—as they were in 1769-70. After expanding the plant, in 1774-5 the grist was 176 qtrs., the expenses £511, with the receipts £701 —a difference of £71 per guile, coming from the absence of an equivalent increase in overhead costs. Brewing 180 guiles per year, this made the increase in the gross profits over £12,750 p.a. Of course, one of the problems which was intensified by such expansion was that of storage space for the beer. Truman added a note to his calculations: ‘Cellers must be allowed one great article in getting this money.’3 When such opportunities were being eagerly seized in the brewing industry before they were discovered or discussed by many other indus¬ trialists, it is not surprising that some of the best eighteenth-century economic homilies on productivity and cost-cutting (rather than the division of labour) described London breweries.

All the morals were

drawn before the classic decades of the Industrial Revolution, and they implied the organising power of a Boulton rather than the inventive 1 Meticulous cleaning was the brewer’s great protection against ‘foxing’ and his wage bill here was heavier than in other industries. 2 See below, p. 265. 3 Truman Records: Rest Book 1775.

39

Porter Brewing and the Brewery ) genius of a Watt. Technical opportunities bred acquisitive, calculating, rational attitudes towards the design of the brewhouse, just as the un¬ revealed chemical secrets of fermentation kept rules of thumb and the instinctive wisdom of one’s forefathers alive inside it. Anyone who as much as mentioned the dread name of‘foxing’ was mulcted sixpence for breaking a taboo.1 By 1740, the ‘Great Common Brewhouse’ of London was a distinct phenomenon. The scale of production itself had forced the problems of de¬ sign upon the brewer who wished to supply a booming market. In the London and Country Brewer in the 1740’s, echoed by Watkins in 1768, all this be¬ comes quite explicit.2 The moral of the first book prefaced the description: In erecting a large work of this kind everything is to be considered that can save the labour of the people employed, for as everything is done in quantities, the difficulty of removing the ingredients from place to place would be very great, but for the help of such early care.... From the start, the brewhouse needed to be built independently of any other structure, created for its own function rather than converted from any other.

Ideally, three sides in the upper storey were to be of open

battens, slatted against sunlight yet open to the air; and the solid wall being to the south-west for the same reason. The copper was to be by this wall, at least 11 ft. from the ground. Its placing was crucial in relation to the other utensils so that ‘the liquor may be conveyed from one of them to the other, and so on in the whole course, not only without the labour of carriage.. .but even without pumping’. To put the copper below the mash-tun was not a serious fault with the size of guiles in the occasional family brewing; now it became of great importance as ‘the quantity is very great and the brewing continual’. Where double coppers were needed, they might be so placed that a single stoker could manage both the fires himself from a single coal-store. Similar foresight placed the malt-mills above the mash-tuns to grind directly into the tuns (and, where brewers felt the ground malt needed to rest for a time, a hopper might be interposed without loss of efficiency). ‘By good contrivance’ the beast which drove the horse-mill might work all the pumps required for raising the liquor initially to the copper, and pumping the wort back into the copper for boiling (an unavoidable ascent ] London and Country Brewer(1742), pp. 43-4; and p. 22 for a similar penalty if‘liquor’ was misnamed. A serious infection in the beer might halt production completely for a considerable time.

2 London and Country Brewer (1742), pp. 178-82; G. Watkins, Complete English Brewer (1768), pp. 134-46. 40

Plate

3. A small brewhouse in 1748

\ I ircwlicMilc

Plate 4- A large brewhouse in 1764

Planning the Brewery but needing no extra horses or men to achieve it). Previously, the pumps had had ‘long Iron Pendant handles with a large Knob of Lead fixed to their bottom ends for the greater ease of men’s labour’. The wort was run off from the copper through a false bottom designed to retain the spent hops, just as a similar device kept back the grains in the mash-tun. These ‘Jack Backs’ and double-bottomed coppers were a pre¬ porter innovation.1 Then the wort descended into wide shallow coolers which were ideally upon a single level, so that steam rising from a lower one would not inhibit rapid cooling in those above ‘and in part defeat the very purpose for which they were used’. For fermenting, the wort descended once again by gravity into the ‘great working tun’ below the coolers. Here there came a final caution: that the exit pipes at the base of this vessel should not be placed quite at its bottom, where sediment collected. A flannel strainer filtered the body of the beer being run off into storage casks or vats, while one ultimate economy guarded the dregs. These, though foul, could be strained through the cleaning plug, ‘the whole clear liquid catched in a tub and afterwards put to the rest... ’. Even this was not the end: when working on such a scale the grounds themselves, with the grains, spent hops and surplus yeast, accumulated in quantities large enough for specialised trades to develop. Such products had always formed part of the domestic economy on the farm or country estate which brewed at home, and were usually sold by Brewing Victuallers and the Common Brewers of small towns; but the scale and division of labour involved stood no comparison with London practice.2 Most of the cows kept within the metropolis did not, as one might imagine from contemporary prints, graze at peace upon the grass of open squares, but saw neither sunlight nor natural food in dark cow-keepers’ dens, being fed on brewers’ grains. The grains were also carried off to feed cattle fattening for Smithfield, and the grounds in the tuns were used as fertiliser. Similarly, the excess yeast skimmed off the working tuns provided regular supplies for local bakers and distillers in London and Scotland. Specialised intermediaries supplemented the direct trade between important distillers and cattle fatteners and the large breweries. The consequence of massive production made profitable subsidiary trades from by-products hitherto neglected altogether or exploited on no systematic scale by urban 1 Such perforated base-plates existed in 1697 (Excise (TLB), I341)2 See Econ. Hist. Rev. (2nd ser.) V (1952) for a fuller description of this trade in by-products by brewers and distillers. Almost all surviving trade ledgers record these sales. Peter Stubs . sold yeast but evidently not grains (T. S. Ashton, An Eighteenth Century Industrialist | (Manchester, 1939), p. 71)-

41

Porter Brewing and the Brewery victuallers and Common Brewers. Typically, Rene Briand, Common Brewer of Hoddesdon, had to send a servant with his yeast into London in an endeavour to sell it.1 In this the London breweries, and still more the London distillers, who fattened many thousands of pigs and cattle annually about their works on the ‘wash’ and grains, became part of a division of labour between industries quite beyond that of their own integrative pattern from barley-farmer to publican; and in such ways the London brewing trade provided important constituents for the production of Londoners’ bread, beef, milk and even their gin—quite apart from that central item of diet which the industry ostensibly existed to supply. When the rate of production was high, getting rid of waste products caused problems of disposal which in turn created opportunities for collateral profits: such opportunities tended to be developed to the full, and other changes from traditional practice encouraged, when times were bad at the end of the century. Here their systematic exploitation reflected obliquely that intensified search for industrial efficiency which began with porter brewing. By the 1760’s, Michael Combrune could say that, ‘in general the con¬ struction and disposition of most brewhouses would admit of very little farther improvement’.2 As far as their design and the relative positioning of vessels were concerned, subsequent experience has proved him right. Malt and liquor are still first raised to the highest point in the building, and gravity still moves the liquid as much as possible between mash-tun and receiver, copper, cooler and working tun. Combrune and the genera¬ tion of the first Samuel Whitbread would almost feel at home in these sections of a modern brewery, provided they did not stray to investigate the noise coming from the bottling machines and other post-brewing processes. We shall explore in subsequent sections the further develop¬ ments in mechanisation and the beginnings of exact regulation of the brewing process which Whitbread saw achieved in his own lifetime, with the consequent changes in technique which such innovations allowed or encouraged.3 None of these, however, affected the necessary structure of the building very much, which is the point at issue here. Combrune himself brought the thermometer into general use, as an initial device to raise the standards of control, which, now the layout of plant had been perfected, was the next most important area for improvement. Efficient design stimulated a rise in the scale of brewing and the size of 1 Cash Book, 1767-71, entry 16 November 1770 and passim. 2 Theory and Practice of Brewing (1762), p. 231 3 See below, chapter m. 42

Planning the Brewery utensils, which had an important effect upon the nature of the beer prior to those similar changes in the product deriving from the accurate control of temperature and specific gravity. The previous advance had paid the rewards of efficiency in handling, in particular those of saving labour and increasing the rate of production, but it gave an added dividend in quality. This was an intrinsic bonus coming from the mere fact of brewing larger guiles, quite apart from that which could result if the brewer decided that the fruit of lower handling costs should be a higher proportion of malt given to beer of standard price. Such strengthening could indeed come when price leadership was clear and all prices moved together, as they did in London after 1722. Then the sharp edge of competition cut into the smaller brewers who were unable to put out as strong a beer at the same price. This economic advantage is identical in result, of course, to keener prices by the great, but it is different in conception from the technical fact that beer brewed in a large quantity enabled a longer length to be drawn from the same quantity of malt and gave a better flavour than that brewed in smaller amounts.1 This was true, above all, in the bulk-storage of porter, but it derived in part from its bulk-brewing. The differential advantages of the large brewery were thus further increased; the ‘ quality bonus ’ (or, some might say, the unearned increment) being, perhaps, a less universal attribute of mass-production than economies in costs. It was nevertheless important in giving a further boost to increasing returns technically impossible for the ‘handicraft brewer’. A consequence of these combined advantages was that the small group of competing porter brewers emerged from the ranks of many lesser brewers to drive forward to the most efficient levels of production which could be sustained on the market available to each. For the technical reasons which have been illustrated, only porter could be produced under these new con¬ ditions, and, as this was very much an undifferentiated product amongst the small group of brewers making it successfully, a growing gap arose between them and the others. The critical minimum barrelage necessary to be producing at the most economical scale rose quickly, leaving those brewers below it in as vicious a circle of diseconomies and costs as the same circle was advantageous for those above the critical point. Those who could not keep pace found the slope behind them ever steeper, and the initial capital resources needed to break into the porter-market at efficient 1 Excise (TLB), 1356, ff. 26-7; An Enquiry.. .for reducing the duties on Malt and Beer (1830), pp. 26-7; T. Hale, Compleat Body of Husbandry (2nd ed. 1758); Porter Brewery Detected (1764), p. 4. 43

Porter Brewing and the Brewery levels of production became ever greater. The general results of such increasing production by individual breweries, with its dependent con¬ ditions of competition and pricing, are more fully discussed below.1 One earlier and familiar straw which revealed the same wind is the myth that porter derived its quality from the inimitable Thames water used to make it. From the first, writers pointed out that most porter breweries drew their liquor from wells or the New River rather than the Thames, but the tenacity of the belief was proof against such factual refutations.2 In Ireland, a similar myth about the Liffey water has survived logical rebuttal down to our own day. Its charm is that of the real folkmyth, which gives an irrational explanation to a true perception, and its significance for later times, similarly, is the admission of inferiority through an incorrect but wishful thought. The myth reflected the envy and frustration of provincial brewers prevented by their smaller scale of production and lesser skill, from achieving the increments in quality given by large-scale porter brewing. Given soft water (which in fact most large provincial cities possessed from the rivers they stood on), London porter was inimitable for almost every reason except that of its water—the London market, the London skills and the London scale of production. The appearance of the belief registered the impact of large-scale brewing upon those consumers benefiting from its advantages and would-be rival brewers excluded from them. Originally, the ‘Thames water’ myth had a more obvious prima facie truth. For some years, porter brewing was a London trade alone, with the corpus of technical skills it entailed completely localised, and the drink was still said to be peculiar to the metropolis in 1768, after attempts at imitation in many other parts of the kingdom had failed.3 Porter is reputed to have been first brewed commercially outside London by Thomas Rawson of Sheffield.4 Certainly, as early as 1744, Sheffield had seen the innovation for, in that year, a local brewer, Thomas Elliott, advertised that he welcomed orders for porter ‘ as good as any Brew’d in London ’, made for him by a fully-trained man late of a London brewhouse, and from malts bought at Queenhithe market.5 The scale of the operation was insignificant, however, for customers were asked to send their own casks and the first known ‘Common Brewhouse’ in Sheffield was not 1 2 3 5

See below, pp. 243-51. G. Watkins, op. cit. p. 5. Thrale used Thames water (see below, p. 91). Watkins, p. 122. 4 Barnard, op. cit. vol. Ill, p. 306. Leeds Mercury, 15 May 1744 (quoted R. E. Leader, Sheffield Old and New (1901), p. 209).

44

Porter Brewing established until 1758.1

Attempts were made to introduce the new

technique to Dublin in 1763 by a similar migration of skilled brewers from London; and one of these men, Nathaniel Chivers, was instrumental in founding porter brewing at Glasgow in 1775 at the breweries of Murdoch, Warrach and Co. at Anderston, and John Struther of Gallowgate.2 When porter did become a popular beer in Ireland later in the century (and proved to be the instrument through which the largest fortunes were raised in the brewing industry there) again it was by the migration of London-trained men to such native breweries as Beamish and Crawford of Cork that the diffusion of skill took place, and the same was true when the Younger family began to brew porter in Edinburgh in 1806. Benjamin Wilson announced the news of similar innovation in his own trade in 1803/ under the instructions of one of the first Porter Brewers in England ’. The same migration took place when porter brewing was carried to Sweden, Russia and Hamburg.3 By this time, porter brewing had been well known in some of the larger provincial towns in England for a generation. Watkins had urged its adoption in the ‘ great trading towns especially’ where many of the features of the London market were duplicated. Perhaps encouraged by the more accurate accounts of manufacture given by Combrune, Watkins and Richardson, the transplanted skills had taken successfully where the market conditions were favourable. Porter commonly appeared at good inns throughout the country when John Byng was on his travels in the 1780’s, and it was unlikely that much of this came from the country trade of London breweries.4 ‘Bristol porter’ was being brewed by Matthew White at latest by 1780,5 and eight years later the Bristol Porter Brewery was established by Philip George, son of a distiller, with a partnership capital of £ 16,000, responding at once to the potential advantages of size.6 By 1799, Brookes, Rose and Bromfield owned a ‘considerable porter brewery’ at Liverpool, sending large consignments to Manchester, St Helens and other inland towns.7 Greenalls of St Helens bought from 1 Leader, op. cit. p. 202; Barnard, op. cit. vol. HI, p. 309. 2 Senex, Glasgow Past and Present (Glasgow, 1884), vol. II, pp. 170-80; vol. ill, pp. 182-3. I owe this reference to Mr G. R. Stocks. See also Guinness, Dublin (1948). Arthur Guinness may well have begun to brew porter from this date, founding his brewery in 1759 upon ale brewing. 3 See below pp. 185-6 and D. Keir, The Younger Centuries (1951), p. 30; Allsopp Records: Letter Books. 4 Torrington Diaries (ed. by C. B. and F. Andrews, 1954)5 passim. 6 Excise (TLB), 1356, If. 88-9. 6 J. of Institute of Brewing, November 1943. 7 Excise (TLB), 1367, f. 202. Peter Stubs was buying porter from Capt. James Collinson of Liverpool in 1800 (Letters, 25 October 1800).

45

Porter Brewing and the Brewery them until after 1811, whereas by 1835 they were brewing porter them¬ selves in small quantities.1 Samuel Bamford found it in Manchester ale¬ houses regularly,but drank only ale in surrounding villages like Middleton, except where he took bottled porter.2 Peter Stubs of Warrington did not attempt it, and few Common Brewers in the smaller market towns would have had much incentive—either in the type of demand usual in country districts or from the size of their respective markets.

At Yarmouth,

porter is first named as such in Lacon’s valuations in 1803, although by then in all probability it had been brewed for many years.3 In any case, the coast was well served with London porter brought back in the coasting trade from the metropolis and distributed by local brewers such as Adnams of Southwold.4 Despite this fairly widespread growth of porter brewing in the latter decades of the century, Richardson, then the leading scientific writer on brewing, prefaced his work after 1800 with the hope that London might learn from the country the secrets of brewing the finer ales, while the country brewer in return still had to learn metropolitan standards in porter.5 By 1805, on the other hand, an observer could write: The most prevailing kind of malt liquor in the country is strong beer, called in some places ale, and small or table beer: that of the metropolis and all large manufacturing towns such as Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, with many of the seaport towns, Liverpool, Chester, Hull, Bristol, etc. is porter.6 This exaggerated the position in the provinces, and did less than justice to the traditional primacy in quality held by London porter. Such superiority was assailed, it is true, for a few years at this time, but nonethe¬ less had remained one of the ordinary advantages of life in London in the eighteenth century and was taken as one of the most obvious pieces of evidence to prove the fact by Londoners drinking inferior malt liquors far from home. This purely personal mechanism of diffusion in porter brewing raises an issue general to the business world of the eighteenth century: that of secrecy.

Clearly, diffusion of techniques is still very much associated

with the movement of individuals (although now this is but one channel 1 Greenall Records: Letter Book, 31 July 1797 and passim; Brewing Books 1835 et se42 S. Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (Heywood, 1842), passim. 3 Lacon Records: Rest Books, 1803. ‘Mild Beer’ was valued in the 1758 Rest. 4 Bills of Sale (1844), Adnams, Southwold. 6 Op. cit. p. 4. 6 Malcolm, Agriculture of Surrey (1805), vol. 1, p. 291; see also evidence of Giles and Frost (Pari. Papers, 1806, ii, Evidence to.. .Malt Report, p. 72).

46

Porter Brewing for the dissemination of new skills) and secrecy is still a necessary clause in service agreements. But the circumstances which made it of so much more concern in the eighteenth century no longer apply. Where the basic scientific knowledge of production was unknown, success was primarily a matter of empirical instruction, following rules of thumb. Some facts were common knowledge. Everyone knew in general terms what the various processes in brewing were; increasingly, definite¬ ness was being given by the exact measurement (and publication) of volume, specific gravity, temperature and timing for each process and brewing manuals were improving over the years.

But, within these

generalities, lay a complex of detail unexplored by any printed manual. The minutiae of brewing, the prior skills of buying (which in any case could not be written out) were revealed only by intimate personal contact with a master of the mystery. For practical purposes this meant either a long apprenticeship (more necessary in preparation for a career in large-scale brewing than in small); or the enticement of a skilled brewer away from an established position. A migration of skills necessarily involved a migra¬ tion of individuals, this being the main means of communication available to an age without much serious technical literature (above all without a periodical literature) and without much ‘institutional’ training. The production of skills, in fact, was still in its handicraft stage. Beyond these general conditions, almost universal in both the com¬ mercial and the industrial world at the time, which had also governed the introduction of beer brewing to this country in the fifteenth century, the particular nature of the brewing industry heightened the need for trust between the salaried brewer and his master. To diffuse such a skill as a new type of weaving or metal-manufacture a nucleus of workers would need to be transplanted.1

In brewing, a new type of beer might be

brought into a district by a single individual: only one key person was needed to direct technical operations in a very large brewery. For this reason it seems almost universal that the managing partners, or the single owner, fiever relinquished these skills themselves. How dangerous it might be was demonstrated conclusively to Mrs Thrale and Dr Johnson when, after Henry Thrale’s death, they found themselves at the mercy of the salaried manager, John Perkins.2 In the routine operations of a large brewery it was impossible for the managing partners (usually not more than two or 1 Such movements of weavers, miners and early beer brewers are well recorded, of course. For a recent investigation of another industrial skill see W. E. Minchinton, ‘The Diffusion of Tinplate Manufacture’, Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. ix (1956), p. 349. 2 See below, pp. 270-3.

47

Porter Brewing and the Brewery three persons), or the single owner, to be on duty the whole time. They needed, therefore, their staff of salaried brewers, with sometimes a brewery manager, so that a responsible, highly-skilled man might be on duty, in a rota system, whenever brewing was in progress.1 In their hands lay the technical safety and the competitive efficiency of the concern. Secrecy in their ‘mystery’ was very important for this, and jealously guarded. Casual visitors might be shown round without fear—it was the details of exact temperatures, quantities and timings in the total sequence of processes which mattered, with the skills of buying, and these could not be revealed quickly. For one of the skilled brewers to depart to a rival concern or to set up independently as Joseph Delafield,2 one of Whitbread’s brewers, did with George Shum and Harvey Christian Combe in 1787, was a much more serious matter. This need for a bond of loyalty amounting to secrecy between partners and their salaried brewers was, for the maintenance of competitive effi¬ ciency in the actual brewing, exactly equivalent to that necessary bond of confidence amongst the kinship group and friends of the partners so important for providing information, capital, and talented young men for the succession of management—other, and equally important aspects of business success. YEAST AND ISINGLASS

Apart from the water, which was certainly the main raw material used, if relative quantities be considered, the vital brewing material least dis¬ cussed in the eighteenth century, but at the centre of the ‘ mystery’ none¬ theless, was yeast. Doubtless, the general ignorance of its nature and organic action is the main cause, for here, more than anywhere else in the brewing process, rules of thumb and the wisdom of one’s forefathers were the only guide. The brewer knew, of course, what things were dangerous. When pollen was about, infection came easily. In hot weather, fermenta¬ tion got quickly out of control and the beer often ‘ foxed ’; when tempera¬ tures were low it was difficult to get fermentation brisk enough. When things had gone wrong, he knew that it was usually the fermentation and the yeast which were at fault, wild yeasts and foxed beer being the greatest technical hazards in the trade. Timber utensils, wooden channels, open coolers, no refrigerators, no attemperators until after 1800, all meant 1 See above, pp. 33-5. 2 He left with the good wishes of his employer, to join his brother-in-law. See below p. 256.

48

Yeast and Isinglass opportunities for infection and difficulties of control. If a strain of wild yeast did get in, everything had to be scrubbed out or fumigated, the beer destroyed and a new yeast culture obtained from another brewery. Sometimes, if a guile went wrong it might be cured by mixing in another vessel of new beer or by adding various preparations, which usually con¬ tained substances (such as ground oyster-shells, lime, chalk or flour) to counteract acidity. Sometimes, as with ‘oil of sulphur’, they were specifically bactericidal.1 Knowledge about yeasts and their action remained in this twilight until Pasteur, despite some earlier work on their microscopic structure. Once a brewer obtained yeast for his initial brew, the surplus produced in fermentation and skimmed off the tuns provided enough for future pro¬ duction and a surplus for sale, although he might prefer to replace his strains occasionally. Being always to hand in this way, without many prob¬ lems of supply, or cost, or quality, particularly in brewing a stable drink like porter which was fully fermented, yeasts tended to be taken for granted and were left undiscussed. The same is largely true of the provision of yeasts for other trades, a necessary traffic, widespread and continual, but largely unrecorded. Both bakers and distillers relied on the breweries for their supplies, as has been mentioned, but only when the brewers stopped production for a few months did the threat of interruption reveal its existence to many people.2 For the London brewers, yeast could be almost as useful a by-product as their grains; more so than for the country brewers whose only customers were the bakers, as they had an extra assured market in the London and Scottish distilleries. Distilling did not ‘produce’ yeast as did brewing, but used it on a large scale. The large distillery of Thomas Cooke at Bow, Essex, which produced 602,000 gallons of spirits in 1791-2, used almost 6000 stores of yeast in that time, or 2§ stores to a tun of spirits. In 1763, when the plant was far smaller, their annual bill for yeast was nearly £1000, so that a glance at the excise returns for total production of home spirits reveals the size of the yeast market, above the demands of bakers, which lay open to the brewers.3 Barclays were gaining over £2000 p.a. on yeast sales at the end of the century, and £6000-^7000 p.a. in 1827-30.4 So assured was their hold over this market that the porter brewers attempted to put a quota on their supplies at the end of the century and fixed the price at 21s. per store 1 See J. C. Drummond and A. Wilbraham, The Englishman’s Food (1939), pp. 238-9. 2 As Annual Register, vil, 177; xvn (1774), 85; Patent Office, Spec. 387 of 3 October 1711. 3 B.M. Add. MS. 39,683. 4 Barclay Records: Rest Books, Expenses of Brewing. 4

49

MBE

Porter Brewing and the Brewery through the Porter Brewers’ Committee.1 Normally, yeast prices varied very much, dropping in the warm months when it reproduced more abundantly and rising when cold weather contracted supplies. They also varied between 4d. and 6d. per gallon in the outports, to 15.-15. 6d. in London.2 The multitudinous small-scale bakeries in London were supplied with yeast by specialised middlemen, who bought wholesale from the breweries just as other dealers distributed grains to cow-keepers and cattle fatteners. Being organised on a larger scale, the distilleries had a direct trade with the brewers, without benefit of intermediaries. Large demands and the chance of large, regular supplies drew both together and gave the suppliers an opportunity to impose conditions. In the years 1827-30, Barclays were selling rather less than half their available surplus to dis¬ tillers at 11 per store and the rest to dealers at 18s. per store. Learning from Admiralty experiments in dehydrating beer, Matthew Felton of Goswell Street developed a technique for drying yeast, which made it easy to pack and preserve in a good state.3 He set up a large manufactory in 1796, and sent round to six of the biggest porter breweries collecting their yeast in butts, as it had been skimmed from the tuns. The beer was separated by pumping the mixture into sailcloth or worstedserge bags, and pressing them. It was run off through a series of filtration tanks until clear, and then returned to the brewers for their stocks of stale beer. The sodden yeast was subjected to very heavy pressure, spread and dried gently until it crumbled like flour. In this dry state, packed into barrels, it would keep perfectly, ready for use again when mixed with a little warm wort or sugar solution. Because the returned beer and the greater convenience of sub-contracting was worth more to the brewers than the 21s. a store which they charged for yeast in a new state, Felton had been able to develop a very large trade indeed and set up an efficient plant. He worked only for those porter brewers who could send him large supplies and did all his business on commission, returning the stale beer and selling their yeast for them to distillers. By 1811, he claimed that he was exporting 200 or 300 tons annually. This flourishing subsidiary trade became threatened in 1811 by the Excise authorities attempting to enforce anti-adulteration statutes, which 1 See below, p. 236; also Pari. Papers, 1803-4, V, Report.. .on London Bakers..., p. 8. Price series in sales from naval breweries, P.R.O. Adm. 110, passim, for London, Chatham Portsmouth, Plymouth. ’ 3 The following passage is based upon evidence given in Court of Exchequer, 18 February 1811 (Excise Trials, 587). See also Patent Specifications, no. 2091 of 22 February 1796 and t.ka6 of 5 March 1812.

50

Yeast and Isinglass prevented brewers receiving stale beer or mixing beers. It was a parallel charge to that forbidding the use of isinglass and equally unintelligent. With the assurance of propriety given by Barclay Perkins (who were being prosecuted for the offence) the trade survived. It is a good example of subsidiary skills and minor trades growing up in the shadow of a great industry, whose scale of operation induced specialisation even in handling its waste products. The same was true for the coopers and the copper¬ smiths—and even those valuers and auctioneers who began to specialise in public-house property in the rising real-estate market the brewers were creating after 1795.1 Clarity had always been regarded as an essential quality in malt liquors, if only because the onset of cloudiness was (and is) a usual sign of trouble. Cleansing porter of sediment in suspension was initially achieved by flannel strainers at the exit-pipes of fermenting tuns, but this did not touch the particles remaining from the tertiary fermentations undergone when the beer was being matured. At first, it was thought impossible to make porter quite fine because of this very long later conditioning which took place in cask or vat—unlike ale. By 1740, however, isinglass had been universally adopted in London to solve the problem, after attempts with elder-juice.2 When dissolved in stale, acidic beer it had the remarkable property, not belonging to gelatine itself, of being a natural membraneous filter. Poured into a vat of beer, or into new casks when delivered to public houses (as it had to be if the publican did not wish to wait a month for his porter to become clear by itself) these finings first spread evenly over the surface and then sank down through the liquid, taking with them what sediment they encountered.3 Russia supplied all Europe with this commodity, which was made from the gelatinous membranes, or ‘sounds’, of sturgeon and kindred species abounding in her northern rivers—in fact, a plebeian by-product of caviare. It was used to make finings for beer and wine, fish-glue and a clear starch. In the first part of the century, England received all her supplies from Holland (the Dutch having the trade from Russia)4 and the rising demand from porter brewers, in particular, brought several proposals for home manufacture, or the import of North American fish to save reliance on an 1 See below, pp. 128-34. 2 Gent. Mag. xxx, 527-9; Truman Records: Rest Books 1749; Barclay Records: Rest Books 1748 et seq.; G. Watkins, op. cit. pp. 123-5; J- Mills, New and Complete System.. .(1765), p. 174; London and Country Brewer (1742), pp. 21, 236. 3 Baverstock, Practical Observations... (1811), p. 20. 4 Combrune, op. cit. p. 12.

51

4-2

Porter Brewing and the Brewery alien and often precarious supply. It was an argument already familiar in the trade to the Baltic in staves (as well as more generally for pig-iron and naval stores), but, in this case, it was pressed more by would-be manu¬ facturers than prospective customers.

In 1760 Humphrey Jackson,

Thrale’s evil counsellor (or his namesake), an inveterate projector, took out a patent for making British isinglass from ‘fishes in general’.1 This merely copied the secrets of the Russian methods he disclosed to the Royal Society in 1773, of separating the gelatinous parts; washing, salting and cleansing them before drying in thin strips.2 Henry Jackson, another chemist, published details of a similar endeavour to break the Russian hegemony by importing pickled colonial sturgeon.3

But clearly the

British product was inferior, so that success did not arrive until supplies from Russia could not, and that was not until the Continental System sealed the Baltic during the Napoleonic Wars. Russian isinglass then priced itself out of the market, like Russian flax, as supplies dried up: from 35. per lb. it rose rapidly to 255. per lb.4, which brought the brewers quickly into the market for innovations, and their committee paid William Murdoch (of steam-engine and gas-lighting fame) £2000 for the recipe of the isinglass he had proposed to make in 1795.5 In 1809 James Butcher, a dealer in yeast between brewers, distillers and bakers set up a manufactory for it in Golden Lane, just opposite the new large brewery of Brown and Parry, where the unpleasant business of rubbing stale fish-skins and tissues through sieves into a mixture of stale beer and vinegar grounds commenced. It was soon interrupted by excise officers out to curb the evils of adulteration, using so literal an interpreta¬ tion of a recent statute forbidding the mixing of beers and the use of any ingredients in brewing save malt and hops, that they had classed isinglass as both fish and stale beer.6 On the latter count, some foreign isinglass had been seized at Calvert’s brewery in Thames Street, but formal charges for the double offence were preferred against Brown and Parry, when six casks of Butcher’s British substitute were tracked down in the brewery yard.7 The Commissioners of Excise, although aware that ‘it has in practice always been allowed to be used for Finings’, were backed by an en¬ couraging view of the law from the Solicitor General and so pressed

1

Patent Office', no. 749 of 26 March 1760. 2 Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. xm (1773), 361. 3 Jackson (Henry), Essay on British Isinglass (1765). 4 T. Tooke, History of Prices, vol. 11, p. 403. The following section is written from verbatim reports of the trial in Excise Trials, 582. 6 S. Smiles, Boulton and Watt (1865), p. 432. 6 42 Geo. hi, c. 38, s. 20-1; also 23 Henry VIII, c. 4. 7 Court of Exchequer, 2 December 1809.

52

Yeast and Isinglass forward, despite rumblings of common sense already coming from the Treasury.1 The trial fully exposed the stupidity of the Crown’s case (even, perhaps, its honesty of purpose). All the porter brewers had sponsored the new manufacture, although its produce had not been actually found on their premises. In any case, quantities of foreign finings as great as 4000 lb. were admittedly in store at some of them. By the time William Murdoch himself, Humphry Davy and Humphrey Jackson had testified to the virtues and advantages of the substitute, the decision was not in doubt.2 The judge praised Brown and Parry, Murdoch, Butcher and all those connected with the project, evidently knowing his Adam Smith: ‘They have tried to get out a substitute for articles rising prodigiously from the present situation in Europe’, he concluded. ‘Then is this doctrine of substitution to be checked? No, certainly, but to be encouraged.’ He decided that the Crown had merely misconstrued the word ‘mix’—for isinglass carried sediment, and itself, out of solution. Following this verdict, all the porter brewers successfully petitioned for official permission, by new legislation, to use foreign isinglass, British isinglass and harmless colouring.3

After the wars, Russian isinglass

returned again to its old position (sturgeon being intrinsically superior in its membranes, as in its roe, to cod or ling), although rising imports started from the new British trading region, South America.4 Filtration under pressure, through a filter-pack, did not replace this natural gravita¬ tional method until late in the nineteenth century. Significantly, the new technique had been proposed already by Joseph Bramah, just at the time when the expected shortage of Russian isinglass had induced the less radical innovation of a British imitation.5 CASKS AND VATS

Because of the scale of their demands, some of the main ancillary trades commissioned by the brewery were of great significance. First in im¬ portance, perhaps, was their demand for casks and coopering: when the several million barrels of beer sold annually are considered, even if each barrel was used several times, an unexplored tract of English industrial history is revealed, and the brewers’ demand was quite apart from the use 1 Excise (TLB), 1386, ff. 257-62. 2 When Humphrey Davy stood down, Counsel for the defence said, ‘“My Lord, we have another chymist”. Court: “After Mr Davy you need not trouble yourself”.’ (Excise Trials, 582). 3 Excise (TLB), 1380, ff. 34, 36-8, 154, 159. 4 P.R.O. Cust. 5/9-19. Persian isinglass is noted in the 1815 Rest Book at Trumans. 6 Patent Office: no. 2196 of 31 March 1797.

53

Porter Brewing and the Brewery of casks for packing spirits, wine, flour, pork, tobacco, nails, tallow, apples—to mention only a few of the commodities handled in these containers. The coopers had been long entrenched as wealthy city companies in such centres as London and Bristol, and had driven a prosperous trade throughout the country as long as the brewers themselves. Being a service industry supplying a quasi-capital good to many commodity-handling trades, they had a market wider than any one of them, so that some individual firms were able to control a very large production indeed. For them, the London breweries, organised increasingly as the century advanced in these fewer, larger establishments, plus the navy, provided the two greatest single markets. Imports alone revealed the dimensions of the trade—for example, the navy required 500,000 Hamburg pipe and 400,000 Hamburg hogshead staves to fit out the fleets in 1711.1 Foreign supplies came mainly from the new world, in particular New England, Virginia and Maryland (which together were sending anywhere between 20 million and 60 million annually in the mid-century) with rather less, but sub¬ stantial numbers from Sweden and the ‘East Country’, usually between 10 million and 30 million.2 For their tight casks the brewers preferred English or European oak staves rather than the American, although the preference may have been irrational or traditional rather than founded on a proved greater durability.3 The different ‘ taint ’ given to beer by its con¬ tainers had moved ale brewers away from oak altogether for their actual brewing utensils but all brewers appear to have been content to boil new casks with a ‘ flush ’ of wort for seasoning.4 The finest European crown staves were said to come from the Wielogurski provinces of Poland, seized by Russia in the course of the century.5 In fact, it was exactly to these southern shores of the Baltic that the Burton brewers turned for their stave imports. It is not known how far the brewers made their own casks on the premises. At the end of the century the strongly organised ‘great coopers’ in London were able to use the Coopers’ Company charter as a pretext for what seems to have been a successful intimidation of Robert Barclay himself (if his payment of a ten-guinea fine and promise not to offend again were not merely elaborate formalities).6 Cooperages there had al1 P.R.O. Adm. 110/5, f. 243. The navy bought 20,200 tight butts, 13,934 tight ‘puns’, and 3541 hogsheads on contract between August 1770 and November 1771, doubtless being the largest single contracts in England (Adm. 110/25, ff- 238-41). 2 Customs and Excise, MSS. nos. 1670-1740; P.R.O. T. 64/276 A/259-62. The East Country designated the Baltic coasts of Poland and Russia. 3 P.R.O. Adm. 110/25, f- 994 Excise Trials, 517, February 1778. 6 P.R.O. Adm. 110/44, f- 45°- This is Lithuania, with Memel as its port. 6 See p. 224.

54

Casks and Vats TABLE

2. Casks

[source: Rest Books at the breweries.] The percentages in columns (2), (4) and (6) are calculated on gross assets. The price of butts at Barclays given in column (9) is actual (i.e. used) value, not replacement cost, which could be over 20s. more per butt in all years shown. Butt prices, where known, in Trumans and Whitbreads differ significantly from those at Barclays, so that columns (1), (3) and (5) are not comparable. Numbers of casks are not given in the Rest Books at the first two breweries. Valuations of casks ,-*-, Whitbread Truman Barclay ,-*-, ,-*-, ,-*-, Casks Percentage Casks Percentage Casks Percentage (£1000) of capital (£1000) of capital (£1000) of capital Year (6) (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) p ? 1749-50 I5-48 17 n-75 15 p ? 1780-1 2468 11 14-77 8 ? p 31-64 11 20*02 6 1794-5 1809-10 2 27-58 6 12-57 39*32 5 1107 2 21-19 1819-20 32-61 2 4 1829-30 1 20*08 2 33-68 n-34 4

Total numbers and price at Barclays

59 Geo. Ill, c. 53; 4 Geo. IV, c. 51. 8

113

MBE

Distribution and the London Market price rose. The relation between the wholesale and retail prices was 305. per barrel and 3\d. per pot in 1761, 355. and 4d. in 1799, rising eventually to a peak of 555. and 6d. in 1804, reached again for a few months in 1813. With 36 gallons to the barrel, this meant successively a decline in the publican’s gross rate of profit on his draught porter sales—the staple trade for almost all publicans—from 125. on 425. (29 per cent) to 13s. on 48s. (27 per cent) and 175. on 725. (24 per cent). For some this might be allevi¬ ated a little by fraud on measure or strength and, for all, the 3d. in the pound discount (which was certainly in force by this time) eased profit margins. However, most advantage came to the publican by the more profitable, if less extensive sales of ale and spirits.1 Charles Barclay’s remark to the 1830 Committee—that publicans were virtually forced to adulterate if they cut these margins—hides a more active attempt by the porter brewers at the turn of the century to maintain retail prices amongst the publicans they served, in order to protect their trade and to try to prevent adulteration before it became widespread, accompanied by a lower price. In 1802, they had agreed to prevent publi¬ cans from underselling. Sampson Hanbury’s letters to various brewers contain many complaints about their customers selling below the agreed price and asking them to set about stopping it.2 The publicans were selling at \d. per pot below the set price both before the rise to 4\d. in 1802 and after it. Hanbury’s notes are in such brief matter-of-fact terms that this regulation seems to be at this time a routine detail of business. Messrs Brooks & Co: We are informed that your Customer Hooper at the Ship in Somerset Street continues to sell at* 4d. pr pot and shall be much obliged to you to put a stop to his doing so as it injures our Customers in that Quarter materially. T.H. & Co. * after duty has made Trade rise from 405.-455. In his turn, Hanbury defended one of his own customers in the Minories from a similar accusation by Calvert; and he acknowledged, in October 1803, to Whitbread that another was underselling ‘who if we find means to continue so doing, of course we shall decline sending him any more Porter’.3 Such attempts to control the retailers came with the growth of 1 Pari. Papers, 1819, V, p. 67; 1830, x, p. 99. See Observations and Facts by a J.P. (P. Colquhoun) (1794), p. 7. 2 Truman Records: Letter Book 1802-4. As with other developments of co-operation amongst the brewers, the loss of the Minute Book of the Committee of Porter Brewers and the lack of commercial correspondence prevent full analysis. 3 Truman Records: ibid. S. Hanbury to S. Whitbread, October 1803.

London Prices power over them by brewers as landlords and lenders, and probably does not become effective until after 1795. There is no mention of resale price maintenance in an earlier letter book of Hanbury, 1789-98, though several instances of other kinds of co-operation are recorded there. The meticulous control of prices did not remain everywhere effective, for a minority of publicans did sell porter at cut prices and were yet supplied by the large brewers. Evidently the scale of adulteration and price-cutting had got out of control. Charles Barclay remarked with regret in 1830: There was a time... when I could say there was not a single publican among our customers who sold at 4d., for they were the persons who cheated the public and the revenue, and it was only the enormous number of persons selling at that price that obliged me to submit to the serving those persons.1 All the price movements, which were now generally accepted over the metropolitan area, a market of over a million souls, came, as had the first rise in 1761, at the behest of the brewers.2 Such uniformity in extent, with such regularity in movement, is itself remarkable for retail prices in the eighteenth century. It was made possible only by the prior maturity of the industrial structure of brewing in London. The 1761 rise showed how intimately the porter brewers were involved with the public authorities. Although Whitbread affirmed that he had not been responsible for, or privy to, the rise in duty before its announce¬ ment—in fact, that he had ‘joined with several other brewers in remon¬ strating and complaining against it to the best of our power’3—once it had been made law it was the brewers who sought compensation for themselves and the publicans. ‘Sir Benjamin Trueman, Mr Whitbread, Mr Bullock and one or two other gentlemen of the Brewery’ waited upon the Duke of Newcastle to thank him personally for favours conferred upon them since the House of Commons had ‘ resolved to indemnifie Brewer and Victualler for ad¬ vancing the price of strong Beer and Ale which we acknowledge may be attended with infinite service to both Brewer and Victualler and even the public... ’.4 Since the great brewers were themselves already on the fringes of political power, and were in close contact with the sources of political 1 Pari. Papers, 1830, x, p. 20. 2 M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1951 e(D> P- 243 London Gazette, 3 February 1761, no. 10075. 4 Whitbread Records (Brewery): S. Whitbread to Newcastle, February 1762.

115

8-2

Distribution and the London Market influence, they naturally became the spokesmen for the whole trade in its relations with Parliament, as will be described in another chapter. The fact that they spoke for the victuallers directly, where their interests over¬ lapped, is one further sign of the manufacturers’ control over distribution. This was true of a variety of matters not directly connected with pricing. In 1726 the Court of Assistants of the Brewers’ Company prepared a peti¬ tion in the name of the victuallers against a proposed ‘pott tax’ on them, and at last in 1742-3, used their influence successfully against it.1 In January 1742-3 Alderman Calvert, Ralph Thrale, John Raymond and Robert Hucks—all leading brewers of their generation—formed a com¬ mittee to prepare petitions and to ‘wait upon the Lords of the Treasury to Endeavour to gett the Pott act repealed’. They duly told the Treasury Lords on 25 January that the victuallers desired to be relieved. Hucks presented a further petition from the London publicans on 27 January, explaining that they were the only victuallers in the country to be burdened with such a levy.2 By n February, the committee could report that their ‘best endeavour had been effectual’.3 Again, in 1796, when the publicans in general wished to stop their practice of sending out beer in pewter pots (because of the losses it entailed) the brewers tried to persuade recalci¬ trant publicans to sign the agreement, and they defended their interests again in 1830.4 With small issues domestic to the publicans there might be independent petitioning and hostile comments against the brewers where their interests were opposed, particularly when the publicans had formed their own permanent associations. Where the interests of publicans and brewers coincided, as in the protection of sales, by so assiduously taking the cause of the retailers upon their own shoulders, the brewers reveal how firmly the business initiative was held by the manufacturers. Their initiative in pricing, particularly, marks their control of the other aspects of distribu¬ tion. It was in these circumstances that the bogey of monopoly was born. 1 G.L.M.R. 5445/27 Minutes 8 April 1726. The Pot Act (12 Geo. I, c. 12) was repealed by 16 Geo. II, c. 12. The tax varied between £1.2s. 6d. and £6. 2s. 6d. according to the publican’s trade and the yield was £10,000-^19,000 (Excise MSS. 3087, 3070, ff. 80-1). 2 G.L.M.R. 5445/28. Minutes, 19 January 1742-3. See C.T.B.P. 1742-5, pp. 230-2; 25, 27 January 1742-3. 3 G.L.M.R. ibid. 11 February 1742-3. 4 Truman Records: Letter Book 1789-98, S. Hanbury to Brown, 24 August 1796. G.L.M.R. 5468, 19 March, 1 June 1830.

Il6

The Growth of Tied Trade THE GROWTH OF TIED TRADE

The substantial independent publican, dear to the hearts of the nineteenthcentury free traders, had always been an idealised figure, scarcely repre¬ sentative of publicans in general. In his own way, he had collected a little of the mystique clinging to the yeoman in English farming. The leading inns or hotels in market towns, the inns on important posting routes, the fashionable London houses, might be very prosperous concerns, and their owners men of substance. One London public house, the Vine, in Thames Street by the Customs House, had nine rooms for customers, with port and sherry stocks alone worth over £2000 in 1723.1 But of over 50,000 public houses in the country, and 5000 in London, these formed a relatively small proportion.2 Clearly, most publicans were in a small way of trade; men without much capital, their numbers suffering from a high rate of turn-over as savings put into trade wasted away. Many gave up business in these conditions, to give place to equally insubstantial or improvident newcomers. When there was open entry into the trade, particularly before 1800, standards were generally very low. Dr Johnson would not have had generous words to say about many taverns close to the Mitre or the King’s Head. As one hand-book for travellers stated: ‘The Elegance and Magni¬ ficence of some English Inns and Taverns are equal to those of many Noblemen’s Houses.. .but the generality of Taverns, in our opinion, are rather to be endured than enjoyed.’3 In 1686, the Commissioners of Excise commented on the poverty of London publicans, ‘Most of them being in debt to the Brewers and living on their Stocks... ’ and thought there were few of any great standing in other cities.4 In such circumstances, it was a very natural thing for a brewer to collect his debts by taking over what assets the publican might have; to secure ‘forced’ loans (created by the non-payment of accounts) by making the publican deposit his lease as a mortgage; to buy the lease or the house itself and lease it in turn to the publican as landlord; or, at least, actively to advance money for debts, which a conscientious publican might pay off in instalments, or a less determined man allow to continue at 5 per cent. When a prospective customer without capital enough to buy 1 P.R.O. C.M.E. C. 107/115. 2 See Treatise on Publicans (c. 1780); Excise (TLB), 1343, 7 March 1750. Licences issued in London: 5297; Country: 23,688 (Lady Day 1749-5°- This total does not include Brewing Victuallers). 3 W. Kitchiner, The Traveller's Oracle (1827), vol. I, pp. 110-11. 4 Excise (TLB), 1340. There were then 302 Inns (i.e. places with accommodation for travellers) in London. See also Case of Victuallers.. .(c. 1700. Guildhall Broadsides, 24. 115).

Distribution and the London Market or lease a public house presented himself to a brewer, all these natural incentives for becoming his creditor became even more obvious. Rising land values in London, the rising cost of equipping a public house, even before the premium put on the lease by the possession of a licence in the early nineteenth century, all made it more and more difficult for publicans to take up public houses without financial assistance. And, since this capital was required, what brewer could afford to refuse help, where the request for it implied a reward of all the house’s custom in porter? Rising wealth was being put out at interest or put into property by all groups enjoying prosperity in the eighteenth century. When such investment by the brewer coincided with his business interests in a more intimate way, it was but a particular aspect of a universal practice amongst those with capital. If a brewer possessed a large fortune, it was, of course, more ad¬ vantageous to him to invest a part of it in the purchase of public houses, than in buying land or keeping it in the funds.1 In the parliamentary enquiry of 1818, even opponents of the tied house admitted that a man had every right to become a landlord or a creditor. In any case, only a naive view of any economic system would regard the ‘cash-nexus’ as a sole bond of cohesion. More often than not, running debt exists in one form or other, or at least an obligation ‘in kind’ or for service, for which the opportunities are multitudinous. This being so, the question might well be asked, why did the tied house not completely dominate the brewing industry? It supposedly never existed in Ireland in the eighteenth century; it was known, but not prevalent in Scotland.2 One of the first conditions necessary for the acceptance of credit obliga¬ tions—or more formal bonds—by a manufacturer over a retailer is that the former should feel himself to be directly and, perhaps, almost exclusively affected by the fate of the latter. Obviously, if the trade of a shop were divided between many manufacturers and distributors, individually each would not feel his custom was exclusively committed to this point of sale. The volume of sales (or the degree of commitment by the producer) would not be sufficient to induce action to safeguard his sales on the part of the manufacturer or distributor. In the case of the brewing industry, these necessary conditions were existing in the eighteenth century. Almost all the trade in London and the larger towns was done on a considerable scale in 1 Baverstock, Treatises.. .(1824), p. viii. 2 Nor did it condition the retailing of beer on the Continent or in the United States at this period. Il8

The Growth of Tied Trade fixed points of sale, offering the public one or two staple commodities in mass demand. For reasons of mutual convenience the retailer would tend to get the bulk of his supplies from a single brewer. The brewer, therefore, knew exactly the places in which his interests and his fortune, alone with those of the individual publicans concerned, were engaged. The economic responsibilities of defending them had been thrust into his hands by the changes in the structure of production in the early eighteenth century. In later times, other traders have similarly sought to buy or control shops to safeguard their sales. Until almost the end of the eighteenth century the brewers do not seem to have deliberately set about gaining control of the retail trade, but they did accept commitments in retailing as an ordinary condition of their trade. From 1790 onwards, the economic significance of the dependent publican changed. A new impetus then gave momentum to the search for a tied trade. Evidence is both plentiful and widespread from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and earlier, that public houses were falling into the hands of brewers by the accidents of trade and bankruptcy, and tending to remain there. In Deal, before 1734, the local Common Brewers owned leases and received ‘payment of Beer and Rent’ from publican-tenants. By 1786, Lacons of Yarmouth had nineteen public houses valued among their assets, and their rent accounts for the year 1742 probably (although not certainly) include some from publicans.1 In 1697, the owners of the Anchor Brewery, Southwark, had bought and were repairing the Green Dragon brewhouse (certainly an inn as its cost was only £275, the rent and repairs £39. 19s.).2 In 1768, Christie’s brewery at Hoddesdon, Hert¬ fordshire, certainly owned two public houses (which would be additional to the tap-house) and probably three more (because identical names occur in different accounts for a steady trade in beer and also for rent).3 Samuel Whitbread’s first trade ledger, beginning in 1746, only four years after his first entry into trade, shows thirteen public houses in the immediate neighbourhood of the brewery on his rental; and, when the Rent Ledgers begin in 1756 there are twenty-four (including all the original thirteen).4 With Truman, twenty-six public houses are mentioned in the lease valua¬ tions for 1747 (fifteen of them having no positive values credited) rising from twelve in 1741.5 1 John Taylor (notary publick, Deal), Books of Precedents (MS.) 1719-34, pp. 3-5, 23, 125-7, 225; Lacon Records: Rest Books 1742; Property Book 1786. 2 Barclay Records: Cash Book 1692-1704. 3 Christie (Hoddesdon): Cash Book 1767-71. 4 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Trade Ledger 1746-52; Rent Ledger 1756-9. 5 Truman Records: Rest Books 1741-56.

Distribution and the London Market Such examples seem to indicate conclusively that the tied house was universal, and co-extensive with wholesale brewing: it may well have been coeval with it.1 Where the business records exist, public houses appear in the pages of all of them. In no case, however, in the years mentioned above, do such houses take an appreciable proportion of trade or absorb an im¬ portant amount of capital.2 Where detailed accounts are given, the evidence suggests that the brewer in London was seldom the freeholder of the houses he controlled, and that he did not usually make a profit as a landlord— often suffering loss in that capacity. He remained an intermediary land¬ lord between publican and freeholder, paying out to the freeholder almost as much as he received in rent from the publican and assuming the other responsibilities of owning property—upkeep and repair. From the be¬ ginning, therefore, it seems that this investment was not for profits in real estate. The brewer became a landlord only to further his own interests as a brewer, through the opportunity of getting all the draught sales of beer (or porter, where he did not brew ale) from his tenants. With Whitbread’s original thirteen houses, all held on intermediary leases, annual receipts of rent were £377 and annual rent payments £375. The repair bills varied greatly, but an item of £40 for the Oxford Arms, Whitecross Street, in 1748, was not extraordinary. The one surviving Rent Ledger confirms this pattern. All leases acquired before 1756 are maintained to the end of the book in 1759, with the further eight gained since. In 1759 the net income on rent from the property was less than £100 p.a. Moreover, some of the agreements that the brewery made with its tenants reveal that the incentives were purely those of trade: indeed, the Monthly Review complained in January 1773 that buying leases was a widespread—and unfair—trade practice. A typical transaction occurs in 1750. William Joslyn was tenant of John Castell in the ‘Sun’, Eagle Court, paying £22 p.a. rent. Whitbread paid Joslyn £28 to obtain the lease when he retired, bought his furniture for £12 more, and put in his own tenant, Paul Cockton, at a yearly rent of £26 p.a. At that point the house became tied, with a capital expended of £40, and a net gain on rent of £4 p.a. There was a likelihood that this would become a net loss when repairs had been paid for, but the importance of rent was in any case outweighed by the advantages of increased trade. When Whitbread paid the premium 1 Henry Leake, for example, in 1542. See above p. 5 and W. Rendle, Old Southwark and its People (1878), p. 39. 2 Truman, for instance, had about 150 London accounts with publicans, and forty country accounts in 1747. His casks were valued at £11,000, stocks of beer, hops and malt at £13,000 and leases at £1372. See Table 5 (p. 133) and Appendix, Table 46. 120

The Growth of Tied Trade for the lease of the ‘ Spread Eagle’ in the Strand, he put in his own tenant, Stephen Shorter, at £36 p.a. rent, remarking that this was, on the terms we hold it of Slade and as we re(ce)ive no advance Rent we are to doe no repairs and pr. Agreement inclosed in the Lease he is to have it so long as he deals with us and does such repairs and pays Rent. At the end of the century Sampson Hanbury thought it an evil imputation that he made a profit from rents. He protested to one person from whom he was renting a public house that he ‘never made the smallest advantage of the Rental as I always wish to give it to the Tenants’.1 Loans from brewer to publican cannot be dissociated from the owner¬ ship of leases, if only because the lender would cover himself with the deposit of whatever security the borrower could afford. Just as the people lending money to Whitbread in the times of stress after 1797 always took security in the title-deeds of freehold property which he owned, so the brewers covered themselves with the leases of customers to whom they had made loans. In these circumstances, of course, only the loan might be mentioned in the books of the firm and the value of the lease need not be entered in the assets. If the lease had been deposited when a loan became a bad debt, a consequential book-keeping transaction took place, as the loan credit was cancelled and the lease added to the property assets. Such trans¬ actions can be traced through the Rest Books each year. The formal loans—on the ‘note’ or ‘bond’ of the publican—are thus distinguished from the lease-tie, and occur in separate columns in the table on p. 133. But an indebted publican easily passed from one category to the other and economic motives behind the two categories of invest¬ ment and the results for the brewer were the same. Each method had different advantages and drawbacks for borrower and creditor. The lease tie was formal, but could be onerous for the brewer because of repair bills; the loan tie, with interest universally at 5 per cent was more profitable, but more risky. In addition the loan tie did not create so clear-cut a depen¬ dence for the publican, who could exchange creditors more easily than he could exchange landlords.2 In addition to these formal loans, there existed a multitude of small ways in which the brewer gave credit to the publican and created obliga¬ tions, which were doubtless rewarded in the undivided custom of publicans who received them. Where the London Victuallers Books survive in the breweries they reveal the complexity of concealed credit passing from 1 Truman Records: S. Hanbury to Waller, 23 November 1798. 2 Pari. Papers, 1830, x, p. 23 (C. Barclay). 121

Distribution and the London Market brewer to publican, and masked by the brevity of the Rest Books. Here, only the annual balance owed by each publican is mentioned: there is no way of telling how much of this is a normal monthly credit, and how much something more significant. In most cases, the vast books have been destroyed—understandably so, with the problems of storage they created— but many have been preserved at Trumans.1 They make it clear that the brewery very commonly provided even the furniture and fixtures for the publican even where no formal loan was shown. The first stock was put into the cellars free, and often a ‘ trial ’ would be sent without any obligation of payment. All payments to the Abroad Clerks tended to be on sales rather than upon deliveries. In a bad month debts were often allowed to run on, and might finish in a year or so by being dignified by the status of a formal loan. It is obviously impossible to calculate what degree of obligation and indebtedness merited the entire custom of a public house, nor has it been possible to track down many identifiable names of public houses in the books of more than one brewery to see how their trade was shared.2 But the probability, confirmed by the volume of sales indicated by the ledgers, is that publicans receiving these favours—and half the accounts of Trumans suggest them—did take all their draught porter from the one brewer. This probability is reinforced when beer in publicans’ cellars begins to appear in the brewery stock valuations in 1765. At Lacons, as has been said, it had been so valued since 1742. By the mid-century, it seems likely that there was a purely cash nexus between only a minority of the 5000 publicans in London and their brewers; the individuals in this minority being completely independent, offering their custom to as many brewers as they wished, their obligations ceasing when payment at a month’s credit was made for deliveries of beer. This does not mean, of course, that the publican under some more signifi¬ cant tie was not free to invite some other brewer to provide the credit and services he had been receiving from a rival. Even the formal loan could be transferred in this way from one creditor to another in the height of the tieing race after 1790.3 Only the lease was an absolute monopoly bond between a specific brewer-landlord and a specific public house. Even then economic pressures were not abolished by the brake applied to their operation by the lease tie. If the publican could no longer change his custom, or only with some inconvenience, the customer was still free to 1 Truman Records: Town Ledgers 1739-84. 2 Identification is made difficult by the duplication of names and the frequent omission of addresses. 3 Pari. Papers, 1830, x, pp. 23-8; W. Hyde, Letter to Sir jf. Danvers (1791), pp. 29-32. 122

The Growth of Tied Trade walk across the street to another house, particularly in London where public houses were numerous in all districts. In a village, on the other hand, a tied house was very much more of a monopoly point of sale. If a brewer fell seriously behind his active competitors in efficiency, assuming the uniform price level which in fact existed, the difference in costs and profit rates would be translated into the different quality of beer he could afford to brew at the same price. With a public acutely conscious of any marked differences in its beer, and with plenty of alternative beer-shops available, sales in such tied houses would decline in favour of those selling the product of more efficient rivals. When Samuel Wells failed to get a public house licensed in Biggleswade (Bedfordshire) Whitbread—as J.P.—wrote to him: I am...sorry that the House happens to be yours. I have this consolation however, that your Beer will be followed and although the Publick Houses are fewer, I hope your consumption of Beer will not be lessened.1 This economic argument ignores all the social reasons, having nothing to do with the quality of the beer, which induce a regular clientele to frequent a given public house. How much weakening of the beer this allegiance to a particular public house will stand remains one of the mysteries of brewing. If the difference in quality is marked, then nothing will hold against it. If discreet, then social cohesion may control it. In this marginal position, the fact that the publican cannot spontaneously take his trade to someone else vindicates the expenditure of money by the brewer, particularly when mass-advertisement was unknown. The brake on the free working of the market declined in power as the obligations of the publican became less formal, less onerous and more easily transferred. It was easier to find new creditors for small debts than for large ones. Probably, for the brewer, the main advantage of the loan tie lay in holding the entire trade of a publican, assuming dissatisfaction less than that needed to induce him to go over entirely to someone else, rather than in preventing such a change in allegiance. As long as the loan tie existed, the publican could not divide his trade in porter between two brewers. This brought a secondary advantage apart from the increased sales—which is more difficult to estimate: that of helping the brewer to estimate sales. Beer would not keep indefinitely. The brewer was under an obligation to take back what had not been sold. Hence, when the 1 Whitbread Records (SouthiU): S. Whitbread to Wells, 3 September 1813 (Beds. Magis. no. 345). 123

Distribution and the London Market publican could not order greatly differing consignments from different brewers, the sole supplier had a good idea of what his sales would be. It depended to a certain degree upon the weather and the state of employ¬ ment in the locality, of course (when silk-weaving was depressed, for example, then Truman in Spitalfields suffered more than Barclays), but, even so, ‘normal draught’ was roughly known and remained surprisingly consistent. Forecasts of sales helped much in planning production and storage. Similar advantages lay in reduced delivery costs, where the brewer knew consignments to a public house would be large. Scattered small orders from 2000 publicans were much more onerous to fulfil than regular deliveries to 400. As the manufacturer of a perishable commodity the brewer had a further incentive to control its distribution. If customers did not receive their beer in good condition the fortunes of the brewer would suffer as well as the fortunes of the publican. By investing capital in the retail trade the brewer might hope to be able to maintain the quality of his product as well as ensuring the outlets for its sale. Similar motives influenced the margarine manufacturers a century later when they sought to control multiple shops.1 The ‘artificial value’ given to a public house began through goodwill payments for the lease offered by incoming tenants. Quite apart from the instances when a brewer wished to interpose himself as landlord, and offered money for the opportunity of securing the lease, the mere site and trade of these shops, with regular custom and bulk-sales of a common necessity of life, gave them a business value above the price of the building and the stocks valued inside. This, again, created a further need for capital on the part of the incoming publican, for which he would instinctively turn to a brewer. Here was the one person who had good reason to listen to his plea, and the one creditor whom a publican might certainly reward in kind. To the extent, therefore, that publicans tended to be without capital, being drawn from the ranks of ‘gentlemen’s servants’ and the like, and goodwill payments existed, lending by the brewer became necessary.2 Often the payment of ‘goodwill’ would be divided between the brewer and his incoming tenant. When the new tenant, in turn, handed over to a successor, he would have to repay that part of the money put up by the brewer out of what he was able to charge the newcomer. Such 1 Charles Wilson, History of Unilever (1954), vol. 11, pp. 67-8. 2 R. Henderson, Inquiry into Laws on Retail sale.. .(1817), pp. 62-72; Pari. Papers, 1830, x, pp. 60-4 (evidence of a broker). I24

The Growth of Tied Trade transactions begin with the first of the Whitbread ledgers.1 The payments remained modest (usually under £60) but varied widely according to the trade of the public house in question and, in most cases, Whitbread paid the whole sum himself. He put up £105 for the ‘Spread Eagle’ in the Strand, and £100 for the ‘Black Horse’ in the Barbican, shared with the tenants, both of them being more fashionable houses. When the Justices of the Peace in brewster session began to restrict their issue of licences after 1790, to this ‘goodwill’ value was added another ‘unearned increment’ in the case of public houses with licences. It is impossible to distinguish how much of this increment was due to the restriction of licences and the consequent competition for houses amongst the brewers, or how much derived from the possible rise in the goodwill value of sites. From both the policy of the Justices and the policy of the brewers, however, the price of premiums began to mount to astonishing heights. The influence of restrictive licensing was not new. For many years the fortunes of the drink industries had been potentially in the hands of the magistrates. Ale-houses had always provided, if not the cause, at least the opportunities for the expression of sloth, lax public morals and disturb¬ ances of the peace. As such, for centuries, a surfeit of them had been condemned by those responsible for public welfare as ‘nurseries and seminaries of distress and wretchedness’.2 Periodic surveys, special taxes, and restrictive selling regulations traditionally circumscribed the free operation of these establishments, which all agreed were as necessary as the necessity of life they sold. Criticism of ale-houses occurs intermittently throughout the period, in a vein already familiar when proclaimed from the pulpit by Colet in the sixteenth century. It was, however, scattered amongst widely separated localities and seems to have had little effect upon national sales of beer. The Excise authorities were very conscious from the beginning of the effects which over-zealous magistrates might have upon tax yields. Several times they complained against raising taxes on ale-houses (notably just before 1689 when the government was searching for extra-parlia¬ mentary ways of raising money) but only once did they submit formally to the Treasury that magisterial policy designed to safeguard public morality was threatening the interests of the public revenue. In 1689, the Justices of the Peace for Bedfordshire, by suppressing sixteen licences on 1 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Rent Ledger 1756-9- See also Public House Keeper’ Monitor (1725). 2 Gent. Mag. xlvi (1776), 355-6°. 125

Distribution and the London Market the excuse of disorder, brought forth a plea that ‘ the suppression of Ale Houses is a growing mischief to the Revenue’ and four years previously the Commissioners wished the Treasury to encourage magistrates to license: ‘The more Ale Houses there are the better it is for the Excise.’1 This theme was not repeated much during the eighteenth century, and there is little concerted complaint from those whose interests lay in the sale of beer against those anxious to control it. The licensing system (as opposed to excise taxation) did not influence the development of the brewing industry in the generations when the production and distribution of beer were being reorganised. Press and parliament urged action occasionally and Mr and Mrs Webb have seen a much more general campaign against ale-houses taking shape in 1786-7 (although the trend of beer production paying duty was not affected by it).2 Magistrates in London and beyond, armed with various statutory regulations adequate for their needs, suppressed ‘surplus’ numbers on many occasions, and had tried to move against the gin-shops after 1730. The campaign here had to be fought with the differential taxrate rather than the licence, and, in retrospect, the affair showed the ease with which new retail ‘shops’ might be established. From the accession of George III, licensing policy remained more a question of the administra¬ tion of law (particularly the interpretation of the word ‘disorder’ by the J.P.’s) than of new legislation.3 Patrick Colquhoun in London led the concerted moves to kill unre¬ stricted licensing. The most sober and best-informed pamphlet on the topic came from his pen in 1794. This advocated, not so much general repression but that those houses with a trade in beer and ale insufficient to support their publicans without fraudulent practices to increase their profits (which he thought to be anything below six butts per month) were self-evidently surplus to the legitimate needs of their localities.4 He 1 Excise (TLB) 1340,1 February, 27 October and 23 November 1686 \ibid. 1338,21 November 1690. 2 S. and B. Webb, History of Liquor Licensing.. .(1903). A characteristic contemporary plea is Disney, Thoughts on the great Circumspection necessary in Licensing public Alehouses (1776). In 1751, 40 licences in the parish of St James and ‘near 40’ in the Tower Hamlets were suppressed {Gent. Mag. vi (1736), 537; ix (1739), 8; xxi (1751), 426). See also J.H.C. xxvi (I7S3)> 64; xlvi (1791), 564; XLVil (1792), 338, and The Times, 30 August 1792, for instances of debate and action. 3 The main licensing statutes were from 5 & 6 Ed. VI; 3 Ch. II, c. 3; 2 Geo. II, c. 28; 26 Geo. II, c. 31; 5 Geo. Ill, c. 40; 6 Geo. IV, c. 34. Sec f.H.C. xxxiv (1774), 392. 4 Observations and Facts.. .by a J.P. (1794). This argument, if pressed, of course reverses the usual charge that the evils come from too much drinking. He says (n. to p. 12) ‘while they [Publicans] can support themselves it would be cruel to take away their licences’. The facts abounding in this work were used to support more radical policies than he advocated. 126

The Growth of Tied Trade declared that ‘Revenue is no object in a great country like this when obtained at the expense of the health and orderly conduct of the lower classes.. .’.1 On this issue, magistrates and clergy, reformers like Wilberforce and Thornton inside Parliament, evangelicals, protestant non-con¬ formists and the increasing number of those paying poor-rates for outdoor relief (convinced, like Arthur Young, that a village ale-house was the prob¬ able destination for much of this financial assistance) combined to agitate for suppression of licences. Drunkenness, for long a subject for public scandal, was now made a demand for public action. Henry Fielding made the same plea (and proposed the same solutions for the problems) in 1751.2 The average density of public houses in greater London was one per twenty-five inhabitants, rising for some wards near the Tower to one for every seventeen. Colquhoun thought that sixty families were needed to support a public house (and a publican) adequately and that the Justices should license only sober, worthy men in houses where porter sales were not a mere excuse for the sales of spirits.3 From this time, the London magistrates, followed to a lesser or greater degree by their colleagues in the country, began to look for opportunities of withdrawing licences at the annual Brewster Sessions in September when all licences came up for renewal. They refused to augment the numbers granted unless population in the area had substantially increased. This new attitude (revealed with some of the abuses induced by it) was much discussed in evidence to the reports on the Police of the Metropolis (1817) and on the Public Breweries (1818).4 In addition, the cost of excise licences for the sale of beer and spirits was increased and changes in the licensing laws gave wider oppor¬ tunities to Justices who wished to adopt a hostile attitude and to indi¬ viduals who wished to organise opposition to applications for licences.5 It is clear that, for the first time, restrictive licensing was having an impor¬ tant effect upon the development of a tied trade. The new policy was undoubtedly inspired by an increase in crime in London. In the nature of things at this period, this became inevitably associated with the 1

Ibid. p. 27. 2 H. Fielding, Enquiry into Causes of the late Increase of Robbers (i75x)- See L. Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Lam (1956), vol. Ill, pp. 18, 75-7> rl5i x99> 266. 3 Op. cit. pp. 14, 17, 21. There were then 5620 ale-houses licensed within the Bills of Mortality (including the whole of Middlesex). See also S. and B. Webb, History of Liquor Licensing, pp. 116-26. 4 Pari. Papers, 1817, vn; 1819, V; Hansard, xxxix, 135 (for an instance of refusing hcences in Bristol). 6 See list of statutes in Pari. Papers, 1830, X, p. 55- In 1824 new licences were only to be granted if they had been applied for, and advertised, three months beforehand. Estcourt’s Bill of 1828 had similar provisions. I27

Distribution and the London Market public house, which was one of the important centres of communal life. It coincided with several other trends, to be described, which were important in exacerbating the struggle amongst the brewers to control public houses: bad harvests, war taxation, and a decline in demand.1 In the last quarter of the century, the porter breweries had grown upon the rising trend of total London production, taking up the sales of in¬ significant competitors crushed by the efficiencies possible only to the great. Now, with many of these very small Common Brewers already squeezed out, even the great began to jostle shoulders uncomfortably in the market. In 1799-1800 when interest was not paid on capital in some of the leading firms, and in other years when there were no profits after interest had been paid, these misfortunes pressed all the more severely upon the others. Those now succumbing were often of the 10,000 barrelsa-year class or above, with financial resources large enough to attempt a defence.2 In particular, the decline in the rate of building in London at this time affected the industry, when coupled with the new attitude to licensing.3 When there were fewer newly built-up areas in which fresh licences for public houses could not be denied, even more pressure for sales mounted behind those already licensed. The change in policy, at the same time as it forced brewers to look to the control of established houses, made a ‘ tie ’ the more certainly profitable when obtained: only if there were some guarantees that the control of a licence ensured monopoly sales in its immediate vicinity would it pay brewers to put out great sums in real estate and loans. This is precisely what occurred. A rival could no longer set up across the road to bid for the same custom. With the certain advantages that putting capital into the retail trade might now bring, came the fear that rivals would buy up public houses, thus forcing the same defensive policy upon everyone to ensure survival. It was, in fact, the smaller brewers inside London (who were yet large enough to muster sufficient capital), and the provincial brewers in the peripheral-marketing area around the metropolis, who used the system most intensively as a protection against the expansion of the great brewers. Thus, the per¬ centage of trade in the home counties tied by local brewers, and by brewers 1 See below, pp. 228-44. 2 Pari. Papers, 1819, v, pp. 101-2. Numbers of brewers in London dropped from about 150 in 1790 to about 100 by 1815 (Excise Statistics 1662-1805, p. 144, and annual printed accounts post-1815). 3 H. A. Shannon, ‘Bricks—a Trade Index’, Economica, 1 (1934); J. Summerson, Georgian London (1951), pp. 136-7. 128

The Growth of Tied Trade of the second rank in London, was, in relation to their turn-over, greater, it appears, and consequently more onerous, than upon the great.1 The free trade remained in the latter’s hands, as proof of their superiority. In Elliot’s Stag Brewery at Pimlico—a prosperous house of the second rank in the capital—the Interest Ledger shows a rapid accumulation of debts to publicans after 1782.2 No less than 140 accounts are running in the book by 1790, most of them between £100 and £200 but some as small as £20 and some above £400. Most above £100 were secured by mortgage. This development seems in advance of the average dependence of the largest porter brewers upon loans. In Reading, also, the complaint was that no London porter could get any outlet for public sale, and similar petitions were received from Maidenhead and other places.3 In Chertsey, the one house not tied to the local brewer had a ‘great sale’ because of the higher quality of ‘London Porter’ supplied by Barclays. A great deal of supporting evidence revealed the zone of intense tieing which lay round the capital from Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Berks, Hants, the Isle of Wight, and Surrey.4 That the purchase of public houses in these areas was an automatic policy for the local brewers is illustrated by Samuel Wells at Biggleswade, who had gone into brewing from malting, but still kept up trade and friendship with his neighbour Samuel Whitbread, whose country home was only a few miles away at Southill. In a corre¬ spondence over the troubles he was having with the Justices, Wells wrote in 1813: It was never my wish to increase the number of Public Houses, nor I never did apply to get a licence to a House that was not licensed before, neither did I ever purchase a Public House out of my trade, those that I supplied of course I bought, and some of them at a very high price... .6 Charles Barclay knew a country brewer with 3000 barrels output a year, who had a capital of £30,000, over half of which was in public houses.6 Competition for houses was less intense in Wiltshire, Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Gloucestershire, although as leases fell in and tenants changed, 1 Pari. Papers, 1819, V, p. 98 (Barclay); 1830, x, p. 58; 1817, vn, pp. 241 (Martineau), 238 (Ch. Barclay), 213 (Calvert). This, and the following passage, depend mainly upon evidence given before these Committees on Police, Public Breweries and the Retail Sale of Beer. All evidence supports the conclusions about the areas of most intensive control, and the fact that the great brewers kept all the free trade in their hands. 2 Watney Records. By 1802 there were 300 interest accounts.

3 J.H.G. lxxvii, 263. 4 Wallingford, Chertsey, Egham, and Andover receive special mention in these counties. 5 Whitbread Records (Southill): Beds. Magis. nos. 344 (31 August 1813); 346 (7 September 1813). 6 Pari Papers, 1817, VII, p. 238. 9

I29

MBE

Distribution and the London Market the brewers in Somerset were said to be buying in 1817. The marketing influence of large breweries in Bristol did not seem to spread out into its hinterland as in London. In those parts of the country where home brewing and inn brewing was still the rule—the extreme south-west, many parts of the Midlands, Lancashire and rural areas in the north—the brewers were naturally not in the race. Even here, however, there was occa¬ sionally an interesting short-circuit induced by the same economic pressures. In this older pattern of production, the powerful men in the trade tended to be the merchants who supplied malt or barley to the Brewing Victuallers. They felt the same pressures on their outlets of sale as the brewers elsewhere, and in order to secure their sales of grain bought up the leases of the Brewing Victuallers in an attempt to congeal at this immature stage the local structure of the industry. In no sense was this widespread, and in any case the practice was swept away when industrial brewing advanced from the towns, but it shows the instincts of selfpreservation which the magistrates aroused in all those with interests in the sale of beer.1 In London, where evidence is more abundant, the race to control public houses, and the premium which licensing policy had set upon a licence, together placed a very high ‘artificial value’ upon them. Whereas the ‘goodwill’ payments of the eighteenth century were usually under £100, now at the end of the century and beyond, the bidding for a lease commonly put its price up to between £500 and £2000 depending on the trade. Published statements which claimed that £1900 was given as premium for a lease are fully supported by evidence from the ledgers of the breweries.2 In the country, the average price was said to be still about £100, but three public houses which were rented by a brewer for £150 p.a. in the Mitcham area before 1800 were let to another for £237 p.a. in 1811, which suggests that premiums would also be rising strongly in that area.3 In such circumstances as this, all that has been said before about the publican’s lack of capital inducing the brewer to become his creditor applies on an increasing scale. Fewer and fewer publicans could find the capital for rising premiums out of their own savings, and there was an 1 Pari. Papers, 1819, V, pp. 52-3. Such merchants might come into the ownership of public houses, of course, through the accidents of bankruptcy in the same way as the brewers. See below, p. 256. 3 Pari. Papers, 1817, VII, p. 30. 2 P.R.O. C.M.E. C. 107/106. The first lease may not have been on strictly business terms, as the lessees were relatives. 130

The Growth of Tied Trade added incentive for the brewer to invest capital in leases as long as the premiums continued to rise. The total needs of the publican for his ‘coming in’ (as the payment for goodwill and the licence was called) reinforced the desires of the brewer. When a profitable year’s trade brought in surplus cash which was available for loans the inducements were even stronger.1 A tied trade became inevitable, given these economic conditions. It was not the result, as so many assumed, of a double dose of original sin on the part of the brewers or the magistrates. Distillers had an equivalent interest in securing sales, and so they some¬ times shared the capital expense of tying the trade with the brewers. Whitbread and Barclay never ‘shared’ a publican in this way, but with Truman, and many of the smaller brewers, the practice is well established by 1802.2 The device saved the brewer from the full impact of rising premiums, but never became very common, and, even where employed, Trumans still put up the major part of the loan. The fact that virtually all tied houses are today brewers’ rather than distillers’ houses, shows where the main business leadership lay in the drink industries in the years when their modern structure was being formed. The effect of all this upon three of the great brewers is shown in Table 5, which illustrates both the rising amount of capital devoted to this purpose, and its increasing ratio to annual production. Unfortunately, it has proved impossible to find equivalent evidence for a representative brewer of the middle rank in London or a country brewer in the home counties. As far as leases alone were concerned, Martineau owned thirty-three valued at £18,400 in 1811, when their production was 25,000 barrels; Steward and Head of Bow, Middlesex, owned 100 public houses and had £50,000 invested to secure trade with a similar scale of production.3 This is certainly a higher proportion of lease capital in relation to production than was common for the capital houses at this time; but, as many loans to publicans lie concealed in other figures, it is impossible to discover their complete commitments in capital for the purpose of securing trade. It was reported publicly that Meux Reid had £61,000 in property in 1809, at the time of the sale, with a production of 150,000 barrels, but the full implications of this on their sales was not widely known.4 However, when Richard Meux wrote to Whitbread in 1808, proposing his son Henry as 1

Pari. Papers, 1819, V, p. 97 (C. Barclay). 2 Truman Records: Letter Books 1802-4, passim; Pari. Papers, 1819, V, p. 94. 3 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Martineau Trade Ledger 1810-12; Pari. Papers, 1830, x,

pp. 87-91. 4 Monthly Mag.

xxvii

(1809), pt. 1, 175; Pari. Papers, 1817, vn, pp. 236-9.

131

9-2

Distribution and the London Market a partner in the Chiswell Street brewery, he mentioned the way in which their town trade was divided.1 Out of a total barrelage of 171,000 pro¬ duced in the previous year their ‘free house’ sales were 43,290 barrels, the ‘lease house’ draught 45,430 barrels and the draught of ‘houses with loans’ 82,290 barrels. From the nature of the porter trade at the time one may assume that this does not give a very distorted picture of the general pattern of trade of a porter brewery of the first rank. We are not concerned here with the effects which this new need for capital had upon the ownership and control of breweries, but only upon the structure of retailing. In the deliberate race to secure sales, the sub¬ ordination of the retailer became explicit and formal, and many more of them became subordinate, although it is impossible to determine the precise numbers of publicans affected in London. Apart from the figures given, more general estimates are offered by witnesses—brewers and others —to the committees in 1817, 1818 and 1830, but none have authority. All agree, however, that the proportion of trade tied by the large brewers reached a peak in the decade after 1800, when it was usually above 80 per cent. Although they accumulated much free trade after that, the absolute numbers of public houses under their control at any one time increased greatly. More important to the brewers, the capital costs of tying the trade rose in relation to their output. In Whitbreads the percentage of control fell from 80 per cent in 1810 to 57 per cent in 1818 and was 65 per cent in 1830. With Trumans there was 78 per cent control in 1810 and only 57 per cent in 1818. Barclays had 80 per cent tied in 1796 (before their great expansion), 58 per cent in 1811, 52 per cent in 1818 and 60 per cent in 1830. In 1830, there was a report that the controlled houses were roughly equal in number to the free. If, however, the usual opinion that the smaller breweries had lost more of their free trade than the great is correct, then this is patently an underestimate, for three of the greatest houses had over half of their trade controlled either by loan or by lease. What circum¬ stantial evidence exists suggests that the smaller brewers were buyers of houses, while ‘ Messrs Barclay, Whitbread and some others ’ would not buy. There remains the further difficulty that the position varied in different parts of London. Where one brewer was moving in to control licences he induced competition in his wake from others. Some of the building areas were affected by the race more seriously than others. Trumans had one of their partners, T. B. Aveling, detailed to keep an eye 1 Whitbread Records (Southill): R. Sangster to S. Whitbread, 3 August 1808.

132

The Growth of Tied Trade table

5. Growth of the tied trade in London [source:

Records at the breweries.]

Figures incomplete because of gaps in records. Whitbread

Year 1790 1794 1799

1805 1810 1816 1830

Barrels produced 175,000 189,000 203,200 103,623 110,939 168,855 131,300

Total no. of publicans served

Loans made A r

No.

Value {£)

456

90 130

476

254

11,856 20,847 38,882

372

268 205 —

438

308 5i3 670

365

53,712

90,656 — 316,406

Percentage of A publicans f No. Value {£) ‘tied’ Leases held

— — 29 36 5i 118 68

— — 6,l8l

— —

14,295

82 82 —

23,840 60,320 39,200

59

65

£ per barrel ‘tied’ — — 0-172 0-564 1-032 — 2-714

Thrale-—Barclay Perkins 1748 1767 1780 1790 1796 1800 1811 1820 1830

35-579

329 216 265 —

57

137,812 105,905 264,166

329 — 477

21 — — 186 — 160

275,183 23L34I

722 882

359 476

—

65,462 126,725

5,672 2,706

24 26

4,936

38

17,700 20,667 24,003 60,512 176,788

62 84 88 117 81

332,571

5i

1,822

25

L9I3 2,861 8,868 16,882 15,180

22 — — 82 — 58 6l 60

53,767 42,655 23,480

0-208 — 0-120 0-209 0-272 0-368 0-433

o-8oo i-5i4

45,98o

215

1760 1770 1780 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830

60,140 —

233

80,730 93,7i6 101,562 144,990 190,122 203,532

— — — 380 481 — —

— — 12

— — 1,942

34 51 139 284 306 —

5,754

26 3i

L737 3,708

37

4,i33 13,053

9,925

53 52

3L344

40

94,525

94?

165,696 266,081

174? —

9,646 6,624 27,H5 49,678 79,5n

— — — — —

O 6 \U>

1750

00

Truman Hanbury Buxton

47 78 — —

0-373

0-002

0-232 0-207 0-838 I-I34

1-693

on building developments, in order to obtain new licences as houses came to be finished, and on occasions they helped speculative builders with capital in order to be in a better position to sue for the licences.1 This is, perhaps, the ultimate conclusion to an attempt to create and develop a market. As a whole, however, the period of the most intense competition for leases (the most formal tie which refused publicans any exchange of creditors) was before 1815, and had been induced by the curtailment of building. A broker—unconscious of the implications of his remark—told 1 This story was related by the senior partner in the brewery, Sampson Hanbury, to the 1817 Police Committee {Pari. Papers, 1817, VII, pp. 213 et seq.).

133

Distribution and the London Market the 1830 Committee, that most of the leases owned were in the older districts. ‘In the new districts’, he said, ‘they are principally free houses, and in the old districts there are more brewers’ houses.’1 He was referring more to leases when he said this, and thought that almost all the publicans would have loans from their brewers. Table 5 shows that, within the section of the trade which was controlled, there took place a movement such as he described from formal lease-ownership to loan ties after 1815. This supports the view that it was only during the years of stagnation in building and suppressed demand that the trade fell back on the most formal and rigid method of control. When expansion got under way again they sought the advantages of being creditors without the responsibilities of being landlords.2 Such loans allowed, as described, a certain choice to a dissatisfied publican if he could find an alternative creditor, while giving a monopoly of sales to the brewer over all those in debt to him at any one time.3 The brewers claimed, on this account, that loans ties did not constitute a monopoly. In the sense that a change of creditor might occur, their claims were justified; to the extent that until resistance to change was overcome, all the trade of a publican flowed naturally to his creditor, they were not. Certainly, the result in the short run did not deny competition in the long run. The criterion which might justify a change of brewer was also not unequivocal. Where the desire for change was ‘ spontaneous ’ on the part of a publican, his brewer could not stand in the way of a transfer of the debt to another. The proposed new creditor (with power and influence on a level with the old) might then act as a champion for his prospective customer. If the request for change was ‘induced’ by the servants of a rival brewer, on the other hand, then the old creditor-brewer might ‘refuse to give him up’. Such was the formal agreement made by the Porter Brewers’ Committee at Brewers’ Hall, and the correspondence of Sampson Hanbury rings with charges of‘seduction’ against his rivals and affirmations of his own intentions of keeping to their agreement. From this reluctance to assume the more onerous lease-tie, flexibility increased after 1815, although the rate of turn-over of public houses between brewers was not as rapid as it doubtless would have been if all the trade had been free. 1 Pari. Papers, 1830, x, p. 59 (T. Wharlters). 2 This specific move was discussed ‘at a general meeting of the brewers’ in 1816. 3 By the 1880’s the formal lease-tie was very uncommon in the London trade, almost all the capital used for tying trade being in loans, while the lease tie was predominant outside London (D. M. Knox, ‘The Development of the Tied-House System in London’, Oxford Economic Papers, X (no. 1), 1958). Before 1830, similarly, it seems that provincial brewers put more capital into leases than into loans.

134

The Growth of Tied Trade Although the porter brewers appear to be justified in their general defence that competition still existed, that interest on the capital employed to tie the trade could not materially affect the price of beer, and that efficiency still won out, there was no denying that new problems arose with their concern with the retail trade, and that it provided new sources of temptation.1 Where a brewer had influence with the magistrates his sales might prosper at the expense of others. And where there was not overt collusion, which did occasionally exist in London (seemingly proved, for instance between Trumans and the Tower Hill Justices in one or two cases),2 inevitably there was influence.3 An important brewer moved in the social circle to which the magistrates themselves belonged. There was instinctive ground for an attitude of trust between them, when a brewer might use his influence to keep public houses orderly. Individual publi¬ cans did not have this weight behind their applications for licences, nor the help of employees skilled in law and argument to be present in the courts when applications came up for review. Clerks in the larger breweries attended brewster sessions to help their publicans. The brewers were powerful men in their districts, acting according to their principles more for good than evil, being ‘neither demigods nor heroes’, and it was impossible to keep this power completely out of the brewster sessions. When magistrates were looking for ways to withdraw licences, it would help a publican to have the protection of a brewer. To say this is to ac¬ knowledge a fact of eighteenth-century political life. The licensing policy after 1800 merely increased the opportunities for such influences to be felt. They remained completely tangential to the real foundations of economic strength belonging to the great. Against this no legislative favours to retail and intermediate brewers, nor the abolition of the licensing system itself, could prevail: the structure of the industry remained virtually unchanged between 1820 and 1850. Well might Charles Barclay tell publicans who were worried by the prospect of retail brewers that nobody could brew as cheaply as the great brewers.4 1 C. Barclay’s estimate was £5 million employed to tie 50,000 publicans. A production of 6-5 million barrels at £3 per barrel totalled £20 million value. Capital ‘charge’ on the £20 million at 5 per cent would be £1 million. Brewers got 10 per cent profit on average, so the extra on the ‘pot’ deriving from the capital laid out in tying the trade would be less than half a farthing (out of 5d.) {Pari. Papers, 1830, x, p. 1). 2 Pari Papers, 1817, VII, pp. 193, 227, 277; Hansard, xxxvi (1817), 930, 1218. For an early instance see Hist. MSS. Comm. Portland, n, 162. 3 L. Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law (1956), vol. II, pp. 274-5, 294-5. The corrupted officials were usually the magistrates clerks. 4 Pari. Papers, 1830, X, p. 1 (C. Barclay).

135

Distribution and the London Market The development of control over retailing provides a suitable oppor¬ tunity to mention the general issue of advertising. One of the attributes of the modern commercial situation, absent from the sophisticated industrial structure of the London brewing industry at this time, is the branded product. There was virtually no deliberate ‘sales-promotion advertising’, and the porter of different breweries does not seem to have been different enough (or sold in packaging distinct enough) to allow a publicity campaign to take hold. This had its impact, of course, both upon the firms in the absence of selling costs, and upon the public in the absence of any attempt to create a ‘mental’ monopoly bond towards any one brewery. Doubtless the nature of retail sale—having by law to be in established and licensed shops—directed aggressive competition into capturing the sites (and the publicans) rather than the ultimate buyer. Even so, some new practices took root eventually, when the porter brewers had become powerful as manufac¬ turers and increasingly committed to controlling public houses. These were the seeds from which large-scale advertising developed in later generations. Routine notices announcing sales, of course, there had always been. Each firm had its own trade card with the insignia of the brewery upon it— all large breweries had a special device—and the terms upon which they dealt. London brewers would put notices in the provincial and Irish press announcing the presence of their beer and the names of their agents; Scottish and, doubtless, Irish brewers did the same in England. All this however, remained in the nature of ‘ information ’ rather than ‘ advertise¬ ment’ until well after 1830, and trade developed in new areas by creating local contacts with merchants or by appointing agents with already established connexions with local retailing. For their non-local trade no brewers seem to have considered the advantages of direct ‘ sales promotion ’. Within London, the porter of the great breweries remained very much a standard product, undifferentiated within the group of brewers pro¬ ducing it, but clearly distinct from all beers outside it; and to customers judging porter in relation to other beers it was always its own advertisement. Within the firms themselves, little thought seems to have been given to the problem, and even less committed to writing. The social positions of the leaders of the trade—from Humphrey Parsons, elected Lord Mayor of London in 1730 before whom there marched on Lord Mayor’s Day ‘Four and Fifty Draymen with White Aprons and Truncheons, in decent Apparel’, to Henry Thrale and the younger Samuel Whitbread—led them to be often centres of publicity, which they welcomed but did not exploit.1 1 G.L.M.R. 5445/27; Brewers’ Company Minutes, 9 October 1730.

136

The Growth of Tied Trade Such deliberate exploitation would have been quite alien to their standards, even though most of them were conscious of the useful attributes of fame. All of Southwark knew Thrale when elections came round; when Whit¬ bread entertained his King and Queen with three of the princesses, a throng of celebrities attended and a large crowd of Londoners gathered outside.1 Vast dinners with steaks grilled over the furnaces on malt shovels delighted the aristocratic connexions of other breweries. Joseph Delafield complained to his brother that ‘our Pride is become very trouble¬ some being almost daily resorted to by Visitors.. .’.2 Foreign celebrities in particular seem unfailingly to have been taken round one or other of the largest concerns by their hosts to marvel at the vats and the horses. In this, as in other things, royal precedent was a great thing. The King of Prussia was to have seen Whitbreads in 1814, some of Mr Piozzi’s ‘noble friends from Milan’ and a ‘fine Italian Countess’ were among those going to Barclays.3 The published memoirs of these travellers and the visitors’ books in the breweries themselves emphasise the place they enjoyed as one of the sights of London.4 Personal publicity the great brewers had in plenty, particularly when their benefactions to hospitals, schools and almshouses be considered, and no doubt then, as now, the attraction of a name was powerful, particularly in the absence of competing commercial advertisement. However, it was still no more than a result of the industrial prowess and social position of a ‘great fermentator’, not a conscious striving to attract public attention and to promote sales. More narrowly defined, there is little ‘sales promotion’. As a partner in Barclays after 1781 John Perkins received £200 p.a. ‘for entertaining customers’, and extensive hospitality ‘in kind’ was universal.5 A more specific device arose only with the tied trade. When a house sold the beer of only one London porter brewery to the exclusion of all other porter, then the situation existed where a ‘ brand ’ might be exploited and the product openly differentiated at the point of sale. As might be expected, the brewers’ names began to appear on the signboards of public houses in their trade, or under their obligation. The innovation is apparent in 1

London Chronicle, May 1787 (quoted Whitbread's Brewery (1951), p. 13). 2 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Letter of 1 March 1786. 3 Whitbread Records (Southill): 4720. Lord Bentinck to S. Whitbread, 14 June 1814; Barclay Records: H. L. Piozzi to J. Perkins (n.d. but post July 1784)4 See for example, Faujas de St Fond, Travels in England 1784 (Glasgow, 1907), pp. 102 et sea.; L. Simond, Journal of a Tour... (Edinburgh, 1817), PP- 182-5; Crapelet, Souvenirs de Londres (Paris, 1817), p. 107; Baert, Tableau de la Grande Bretagne (Paris, year vm), p. 52. 6 Barclay Records: Private Ledgers 1781-98.

137

Distribution and the London Market a print of 1816, where a shop sign depicted in the background is adver¬ tising a dealer with Whitbread, but the date could probably be pushed back to the last years of the eighteenth century.1 When a publican re¬ decorated his house in 1814, he described ‘the front imitating oak or wainscot, with chequers at each end, and the porter and ale-brewer’s names’.2 Truman Hanbury Buxton had their name on publicans’ sign¬ boards by 1817 (when a witness to the Parliamentary Committee mentioned that the weavers preferred Truman’s porter to any other)3 and the signboards themselves were valued in the Rest Books of Meux Reid, after 1809. In the year 1809-10 the partners evidently decided to provide show boards for most of their London publicans, between 400 and 600 being valued annually.4 They soon became one of the ‘services’ uni¬ versally supplied to the publican. Here, at last, is a glimmer of a positive advertising function being assumed by the manufacturer. In the 1850’s many of the houses owned by the porter brewers seem to have had the brewers’ names placarded prominently about them, and by the time Barnard was writing in the next period, when a second race to tie the trade was on, the signboard shops of breweries were places of great activity.5 From this point, modern advertisement in the industry was under way, with an irreversible contagion of its own. But that epoch is well beyond the years which concern us here. 1 ‘Selling a Wife’, published March 1816, Sherwood and Co., Paternoster Row. 2 Henderson, Inquiry into Laws on Retail Sale... (1817), App. p. 123. 3 Pari. Papers, 1817, vii, p. 22; Truman Records: Rest Book 1828. 4 Watney Records: Meux-Reid Rest Books 1809-13. 5 See the numerous paintings and prints of public houses in Crace Coll., B.M. Also, G. Dodd Food of London (1856); Barnard, Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland (1889), vol. 1' pp. 205, 263-4.

138

CHAPTER V

DISTANT MARKETS (I) THE BRITISH ISLES For Englishmen in the eighteenth century, as long before, beer remained one of the usual assumptions of life, to be taken for granted because of its ubiquity as much as dogs or horses. As such, it followed them to whatever parts of the globe the call of profit and empire had drawn them, so that, in studying the movement of strong beer and ale as commodities being traded over long distances, their omnipresence tends to mask what particular net flows there wrere. Apart from a generalisation about ubi¬ quity—itself, of course, of importance—further search becomes easily involved in a forest of detail which springs so readily from just this ground of universal incidence.1 To see the important inter-regional and international traffic apart from the incidental, must involve drastic dis¬ crimination in the choice of evidence. As we have already stressed, beer could be traded over long distances only under conditions of water-carriage direct to an urban, or coastal market, because of its great bulk and low value. Where its destination lay across the open seas a technical difficulty was added to the economic one. Beer of standard ‘length’ brewed for the home market (usually three or four barrels of beer per quarter of malt for porter in the eighteenth century) would not survive the constant motion of a ship.2 Agitation was a foe second only to heat. Where both were present, as in a voyage to tropical markets, the risk of a spoilt cargo was very great indeed. The solution of the difficulty had its advantages for the brewer: the ‘keeping beer’ designed for distant shores was brewed stronger, to withstand these rigours, and was consequently higher in price in relation to its bulk. This meant that it stood up to the long voyage better, economically as well as technically. Such a product was a general feature of non-London trade, 1 The risk of error is not diminished by the names of local public houses. Thomas Greenall of St Helens added a post-script to a letter ‘P.S. Have you got all the empty barrels from Botany Bay?’ Samuel Whitbread repaired ‘the ship’ in 1750, which another account reveals to have been in Grays Inn Road; and ‘King George’, in account with Gardner’s of Cheltenham in 1775 is neither the monarch taking the waters, nor the name of a public house, but George King, a merchant. 2 See pp. 204-5.

139

Markets in the British Isles and the stock of ‘ brown stout ’ in porter breweries was generally destined for their non-local markets. A notice advertising the sale of Meux Reid’s brewery in 1809, for example, said of its output that the proportion which was sent away from London consisted of ‘ high-priced porter, which yields a much better profit to the brewer than the inferior kinds’.1 Guinness exports to England illustrate the same truth.2 When water-transport was the only key to unlock distant markets, it was quite natural that many public breweries of earlier times should be in the ports. In Tudor times the brewhouses near the Tower, as has been mentioned, supplied the needs of sailors and brewed for export to the Low Countries (particularly when English troops were on the continent) as well as for Londoners. At the time, most of the beer drunk in the towns themselves would have come either from innkeepers brewing their own, or from a great number of small public breweries selling to a few publicans. Those brewers supplying a non-local demand, through provisioning ships or exporting, were probably significantly larger than the others because of this ‘extra’ trade. But after the reorganisation of the London trade in the course of the seventeenth century, when most beer was produced by public breweries, the non-local markets ceased to have this determining effect upon the relative size of breweries. At Burton-on-Trent it was another story. In the course of the eighteenth century the exploitation of a Baltic market by Burton brewers raised their size considerably above that which could have been sustained by local demand alone. It must have been the same with some Scottish brewers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, also with Guinness in Dublin, and with certain brewers along the coasts supplying the Navy’s demand for beer. When the London brewers began to control the distribution of beer to dependent publicans, opening up for themselves the whole teeming metro¬ politan area, that unprecedentedly ‘intensive’ market became the main source of their commercial opportunities. It was in the ‘home’ trade that the industrial and commercial reorganisation took place and upon this 1 Monthly Mag. xxvii (1) (1809), 175. ‘Stout’, ‘brown stout’, and ‘double brown stout’ stocks in all the London porter breweries confirm this. Hence the order of ‘an export’ in public houses today implies a rather better drink than usual. The ‘XX’ mark for the 1695 shipment mentioned on p. 141 is, of course, the traditional sign for extra strong beer (W. Brande, Town and Country Brewery Book (1829), pp. 151-2). Despite this, the risk of deterioration was great enough for the brewers to refuse to accept responsibility for the state of their beer on arrival abroad. Trumans made this a point of principle, stating: ‘as it is totally impossible to guard against the causes of Porter losing its Quality, in Cask, on a voyage to the West Indies, they do not hold themselves liable to any loss that may arise on what they ship in account of their customers (Truman Records: Letter Book, S. Hanbury to R. Seddon and Sons, 9 February 1804). 2 I.e. This firm’s beer was usually known as porter in Ireland and stout in England. 140

Markets in the British Isles the great ‘ porter ’ names arose. The instrument by which their main market was exploited thus proved to be a brewer’s dray, not a Thames wharf. This is not to say, of course, that the trade to non-local markets dis¬ appeared. In absolute terms, it increased; but its economic significance so far as the structure of the industry was concerned sharply declined. When the first known surviving Cash Book (of the Anchor Brewery, South¬ wark) opens in 1692, the bulk of the receipts are credited from customers ‘pr. Day cash Book’, while only a few items are credited from export shipments, as that of 10 February 1695, ‘15 Tunns of XX Beer sent to Beerbadoes... 24^ \1 Sales for provisioning ships, contracts for the Navy, even supplies to merchants making up cargoes for foreign ports, may lie concealed amongst the day cash-book totals (which book does not survive) but at least one may say that the despatch of export consignments from the brewery were few enough to deserve direct entry into the main Cash Book, and insufficient to merit a subsidiary book of their own. The first existing Trade Ledger of Whitbreads records a few small shipments to Gibraltar, Jamaica and New York but they are lost amongst more regular cargoes going to Ireland, and all the accounts are overwhelmed by London sales.2 The country and export trade began once more to assume importance to the larger London brewers only after the first half of the eighteenth century. After concentrating their main energies upon the London market, and working on a very big scale, they were efficient and expanding and looked round for further opportunities to exploit the efficiencies created by that metropolitan demand once the limits for ex¬ pansion in London had been largely reached. In the sections which follow, the ‘country trade’ of brewers to other parts of Britain will be considered first; then their Irish trade; finally exports to foreign parts. And, because the fleets may also be deemed a ‘non-local market’, the trade which naval contracts brought to some brewers in the ports will be considered in this context. THE COUNTRY TRADE

Although none of the important London brewers was primarily depen¬ dent upon his country or export sales, these non-London markets affected each in a different way. Whitbread and Thrale had a strong Irish connexion, which accounted for much of this section of their sales, and they were consequently hit by its disappearance more than the others. Meux Reid, not concentrating on Ireland, still had as much as one-third of their output 1 Barclay Records: Cash Book 1692-1703. See above, p. 8. 2 Whitbread Records: Trade Ledger 1746-52.

Markets in the British Isles going into the country in 1809. Truman appears to have sold less than any of these outside of London. The Country Trade ledgers still remaining in London breweries are almost as bulky as the Great Ledgers for the London victuallers, but the accounts are interesting more for their geographical range than their im¬ portance to the firms. Apart from the Irish sales, most trade was scattered and piecemeal. With Whitbread some few accounts rose to over £1000 in a single season—as did Thomas Hubbard’s at Yarmouth. He took 5000 barrels in each year from 1789 to 1799 and Samuel Smith of Norwich took over 3000 barrels each year (possibly in conjunction with malt shipments to London). James Hall of Leith had a yearly account of about £3000 and Mark Hill of Dartmouth was averaging £1000. These few merchants trading between London and the out-ports came more under the con¬ ditions of the Irish trade, taking shipments by water direct to an urban market. However, consignments continue with the years over the face of England, mostly to those places linked to London by water; but some evidently went overland to particular customers, for there are accounts with Thomas Howland, the Thame carrier; William Judd, the Barking carrier and Thomas Ward, the Shipstone carrier. Apart from merchant firms, which make up perhaps half the country-trade accounts, a few individual coaching inns were supplied, such as the Swan in Bedford, the Mitre at Portsmouth Common, and the Red Bull at Cambridge, and there was a multitude of private accounts.1 With all these dealings, in the case of firms no less than individuals, there was usually some link with the brewery beyond that of a formal request for a sale. Listed in the favoured Private Accounts, were Whit¬ bread himself, with his friends in Bedfordshire and London; then his clerks and senior employees with their own private accounts, and their friends. A personal connexion lay behind very many of these distant sales. Mrs Thrale, living in the country, took bottled porter from her old asso¬ ciates long after she had sold the brewery and had married Piozzi. Dr Johnson wrote from the Hebrides, to ask whether a cask of porter could be sent to his Macleod hosts in Skye, not wishing to be ‘thought forgetful of civilities’.2 Marked beside the name of almost every customer 1 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Rest Books 1799-1830; Great Ledger 1812-16; Private Ledgers 1770-1818; Martineau and Bland, Ledger 1810-12. (Southill): Country Trade Ledgers 1790-1821 (Box 1); Town Trade Ledgers 1790-1812 (Boxes III, IV). 2 S. Johnson, Letters, ed. R. W. Chapman (1952), vol. 1, no. 348; Rylands Eng. MS. 598, f. 69 (bills paid by Mrs Piozzi in 1810 from Denbigh); Barclay Records: Thrale-Piozzi Letters, no. 59 (eleven dozen bottles sent in crates on regular account). 142

The Country Trade lacking a private link with the brewery was his ‘recommendation’ or his ‘character’, given by some trusted friend of the house. The cobweb of personal recommendation and trust is much looser than that existing in the financial ledgers (where all those depositing money at interest also have some known connexion)—the bad debts from the country trade show this, if nothing else—but it is still there as evidence of the risks involved in trading on a national scale with payments made by bill on a three or six months’ credit. The letters of Sampson Hanbury confirm this fact, though they exist only for years when he had uncertainties of wartime as an added incentive for caution.1 More than once he had to remind a prospective customer: ‘we never open an Account with anyone till we are previously satisfied as to his responsibility’.2 Unfortunately, there are few records which show the exact proportion in which total production was shared between various markets. The evi¬ dence from letter books, while important for showing the geographical pattern, the administration and particularly the hazards of the country trade, can give no idea of its economic significance. This rested on the relative volume of transactions involved, rather than on the dimensions of the marketing area or the number of customers. For this, the letter books are themselves deceptive; no correspondence derived from the monthly visits of collecting clerks to London publicans, always the real key to success.

A certain oblique light is cast upon the crucial matter of the

volume of country trade by other accounts. In particular, the Rest Books show the normal trade debts outstanding to the brewery in both the London and country trade when the midsummer balance was struck; and the amount, or the value, of the various kinds of beer and casks in stock. Comparison of these totals shows how little Truman gained from the country trade, and how severely Whitbread felt the disappearance of the Irish market. From 1799-1800 (when the Whitbread Rest Books begin) to 1810, the town trade debts (at one month’s credit) fell from £46,400 to £38,900 (with prices up from 355. to 45*. per barrel) and the number of publicans served dropped from 468 to 32^. The number of country customers rose in the same period from 136 to 331, presumably as the result of an effort to balance the dropping London and Irish trade, but country debts (at six months’ credit) fluctuated about the £20,000 mark except for a temporary peak of £30,000 in 1805-7. The stake which non1 Truman Records: Letter Books 1789-98, 1802 4. , 2 Letter Books. S. Hanbury to Peter Swan, 31 January 1803; S. Hanbury to John Lloyd, 18 March 1802.

M3

Markets in the British Isles London trade had in the total business of Whitbreads is made explicit for the period 1798-1806 and is best illustrated in Table 6. After 1810, both the numbers and the amount of debts in the country trade of Whitbreads fell away to about no accounts and £8000 by 1830, while their London trade swelled to over 650 publicans and a £83,000 balance in current debts. If these town and country debts continued to represent a ratio of transactions of six to one (from the different credit periods applying to each), then the volume of transactions in the town trade dominated that in the country trade by nine to one in 1799, twelve to one in 1805 and 1810, and sixty to one by 1830. The bad debts in the Private Ledgers show a similar story, except in the extraordinary years 1806-8, when country totals approach those of the town.

In all, the

Napoleonic War years were more harassing to Whitbreads than to their rivals, in part for reasons of management not general to the industry as a whole.1 Production fell from 200,000 barrels in 1796 to barely above 100,000 in each of the years from 1804 to 1809, and climbed painfully back to its former peak only during the course of the next twenty years. In adversity, their sales shrank down to the core of the London market. table 6.

Whitbread's country trade, ijg8-i806

[source: Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4645.] Figures in 1000 barrels. Year midsummer to midsummer 1798-9 1799-1800 1800-1 1801-2 1802-3 1803-4 1804-5 1805-6

Country trade* Stock 92-5

124*0 91'0 IIIO

1180 115-8 105-8 95-6

Brewed

Bought

203-3 137-1 1580

8-9

i35-i 131-8 102-7 103-7 104-3

Total sold

A

Barrels

Percents

180-7 181-5

31-0

17-2

6-6

24-5

I3-5

144-5

8-5

—

128-9

—

I33-I 112-8 113-9 114-9

12*0 11*2 12-8

n-5

—

— —

8-6

8-8 9-7 7-6

9’5

8-3

u-6

io-i

* Country trade includes exports and Irish trade.

Other evidence shows how much more Barclays were profiting from their country trade.2 Their country trade debts are well over half the total of London debts; and, when bottling and export balances are included, they are actually above the London figures, which implies that well over one1 See below, pp. 306-12. 2 Barclay Records: Rat Books 1748-50,1752-9,1767,1780-1830; Brewery Statistics; Letters of H. L. Thrale (Piozzi) to J. Perkins, 1773; Cash Books 1776-1809.

I44

The Country Trade sixth of their trade lay beyond London. reflected a rising country trade.

Both cask and beer stocks

In 1767, 163 butts and twenty sea-

barrels were valued in the country trade, with nearly 12,000 butts for London. The number of puncheons and barrels, used for distant markets, rose steadily in relation to the number of butts, which were always used, three to a dray, for delivery to public houses in the London area. By 1800, with butts running between 13,000 and 16,000, ‘puns’ and barrels are each above 1000 in number. In 1816, the country trade was using 2700 ‘puns’ and 2600 barrels, while the London butts numbered 17,000. Of the stronger beers sent into the country, pale stout (valued at 36s. per barrel when regular porter was at 27s.) first appeared in 1767. From 1800, brown stout (at 545.), bottling beer (at 445.), ale for India

(505.)

and, just

occasionally, strong double brown stout (at 605.)—all when mild beer, the regular porter, was at 35$. per barrel—together made up perhaps half the volume of ordinary porter stocks, and therefore considerably more than half their value.1 They kept the same ratios of price to that of porter: the ‘base price’ over which all moves in beer prices were argued throughout. After 1820, porter stocks in Barclays reasserted their great primacy over all the stronger brews; and in 1835, for the first time, the explicit figures are given: publicans 270,731 barrels, country trade 60,383 barrels, bottlers 14,400 barrels; private trade 1623 barrels; exporters 13,667 barrels. Thus, London publicans take 75 per cent of a total of nearly 362,000 barrels. Barclays were distinguished both from Whitbread and Truman by the extent of their country trade. This factor largely explains the leap in their fortunes after 1800, which puzzled contemporaries. In their Rest Books, Trumans did not distinguish their country customers in many years; but it seems unlikely that they ever did a large trade beyond London, and certainly, from 1790, Sampson Han bury was not anxious to accept any new trade. In 1810, for example, there were 481 customers on Truman’s books and 182 customers in the country, with sixty-seven accounts of friends and relations in the Petty Ledger. As the country consignments were fairly small, this does not amount to very much; while, from 1815, the country and export accounts died completely away. Petty Ledger sales remain, and bottling debts (which evidently comprehend both country and export sales for this purpose) rose to over £10,000 yearly, with London balances at £80,000. The books of three out of a dozen large breweries are clearly a small sample on which to generalise. On aggregate, however, there is no doubt,

1 The difference in time needed to mature beers of various qualities forbids these figures being translated directly into ‘production coefficients’. 10

145

M BE

Markets in the British Isles as Robert Barclay and Joseph Delafield told the Committee of Trade, that London was the principal market for porter.1 An arid review of figures from the ledgers is the necessary basis upon which some more meaningful discussion of the country trade may be based. As a whole, this branch of trade grew significantly in the eighteenth century. When brewers realised the superiority of their product, evolved for and from the environment of the intensive market, over provincial brews, they tried increasingly to exploit more distant markets. The econo¬ mies which large-scale production gave over costs—emphasising the superiority of the great brewer over smaller provincial brewers or Brewing Victuallers—itself increased this marketing area, where water transport was convenient.

Barclays, Courage, Martineau and Goodwyn were

actually on Thames-side, while others, like Whitbread, Meux Reid, Calvert and Charrington, were not far away from its northern bank, most renting their own wharfs. However, all the advantages which London gave to the organisation of a brewery were lost in the country trade. The London brewer facing the London market was the new man of industrial capitalism, astride the businesses of merchant, wholesaler and manu¬ facturer, controlling his product directly from his own mash-tun to the cellars of public houses, and indirectly from the barley field to the tankard. His servants kept a close and personal watch upon recalcitrant or ‘ insubstantial ’ publicans, increasing numbers of whom were accepting financial obligations from their brewers. The discipline and standards set by a brewer of the first rank held many millions of retail transactions annually to account in a commercial cohesion impossible where these bonds of manufacture, distribution and retail sale were divided and relaxed. In the country trade there were just those disadvantages which the com¬ mercial reorganisation of the London market had overcome. In the nature of things, therefore, the country trade was fraught with petty administrative impediments at the best of times. They could become, collectively, a major obstacle when their incidence mounted sufficiently. Inevitably orders were scattered geographically and most of them were small. The six-months’ credit (which seems to have been universal for long-standing customers) could mean a tedious absorption of working capital in some years, while a host of excise and shipping difficulties caused trouble for the clerks and dissatisfaction to the customers. Apart from the usual difficulties of getting payment within six months and running debit balances, Sampson Hanbury found the return of casks 1 B.M. Add. MS. 38,393, f. 25 (1791).

146

The Country Trade a perennial difficulty. They were chargeable to the customer, or merchant, with a refund on their return within nine months; but, even so, with delays and disappearances the brewery was not compensated for the incon¬ venience of a sudden shortage at the crucial season of the year in May, when stocks of beer for the ensuing summer were at their height.1 The very existence of correspondence often presumes some hitch in normal transactions, so that the burden of complaints filling the letter books can be no reliable guide to the satisfaction prevailing on both sides in the country trade. But when letters from Sampson Hanbury reach the point of refusing customers, on the grounds that his country connexions were more trouble than they were generally worth, the selective evidence itself becomes very significant. The customers voiced a chorus of complaints from 1789 to 1804 about half-filled casks. They were always told in reply: We are so very attentive to filling the Barrels that we can prove them perfectly full when delivered at the Wharf and should recommend your obliging the Captains to pay the deficiencies.2 The loss was even greater on the return of unsold beer, which was a uni¬ versal obligation on the brewer. In war-time, particularly, the extra risks prejudiced the advantage of the trade. ‘We hope there will be no occasion to return us any in the future’, wrote Hanbury to Robert Gorton of Manchester in 1800, ‘as the waste from Pilferage is so great you had better get rid of it at a loss in price if possible....’ Apart from pilfering (or ‘leakage on board’, as the captains claimed) all returned beer had to have sworn affidavits accompanying the consignments to ensure that the import duty for foreign beer should not be charged on it by the Customs upon relanding at London—another tedious labour when accounts were many and small.3 The same sort of petty disadvantages from high insurance rates in the war years (when Whitbread determined to take all the risk himself), temporary embargoes on Thames shipping (as in 1795 and 1803), the risks of war themselves, the many chances of beer going bad—all told cumula¬ tively against the profitability of small country-trade and export accounts.4 Even before the war, the solution sought by Hanbury was to channel his country trade through a few merchants—who would themselves 1 Truman Records: S. Hanbury to Abbott and Treffry (Plymouth), 23 March 1802; to Taylor and Markham (Hull), 12 May 1791; to T. Gilchrist (Berwick), 12 August 1802. 2 E.g. S. Hanbury to John Burn (Berwick), 20 January 1791; to Robert Gorton (Manchester), 23 December 1789. 3 S. Hanbury to Burn, 11-12 February 1789. 4 S. Hanbury to Cavendish, 17 May 1803; to Burn, 21 February 1795 > 6 March 1795. Also Excise Trials, 544, f. 25; Excise (TLB), 1358, f- 199-

147

E. Sparshall,

10-2

Markets in the British Isles organise transport into the localities and distribution to the customers— in an endeavour to duplicate as far as possible the better conditions of the Irish trade. At the same time he refused private customers who were unwilling to buy through these local agents. From 1789, the year in which the letter books begin, such people are being turned away or given the name of the appropriate merchant, pleasantly but firmly. He wrote to William Allen of Alnwick, Northumberland, it is our custom to do as little as possible in the Country trade, we therefore thank you for the preference you have shown but must decline opening a new Connection.1 The reason was obvious: ‘ we do not particularly wish for country trade unless a prospect of doing a good deal’.2 Similarly, an inquirer from Nairn hoping for consignments was turned down because he was ‘unfor¬ tunately at so great a distance’.3 The least shipment considered at any one time or vessel was ten hogsheads (520 gallons), at three months’ credit to a new connexion.4 In September 1803, even a General was required to order through a merchant.5 Much depended, as would be expected, upon past experience.

New merchant contacts were accepted only charily,

while old friends are treated with consideration in credit and price ‘ merely to keep up our old Friendship’.6 A lower profit rate and sure sales were a better bargain than hasty shipments to an unknown trader. The most assiduous merchant connexions of Trumans were scattered at many entrances to ‘interior navigations’ round the coasts. Their best account was with John Burn and Co. (later Thomas Gilchrist after Burn’s death in 1795) at Berwick, ‘who deals so largely with us as to be enabled to supply you on better Terms than we can ourselves, nor are we inclined to increase our Country Correspondents’.7

Others included Robert

Gorton and Co. at Manchester; Drewe at Exeter; Robinson, Armstrong and Co. at Liverpool; John Smith of Gainsborough; Abbott and Treffry of Plymouth. A small but steady country customer might be treated rather differently and with greater consideration, as was Thomas Parry who kept the tap-house in Chatham Dockyard and who was supplied with beer through the Kentish hoymen bringing malt and hops to London for the brewery. 1 S. Hanbury to W. Allen, 21 February 1793; to Musgrave and Bass, 27 March 1792. S. Hanbury to John Steane, 20 August 1798 j to Gilchrist, 6 January 1797. 3 S. Hanbury to G. Blair, 4 April 1794. 4 S. Hanbury to Gray, 6 June 1798. 6 S. Hanbury to Gen. Seaforth, 19 September 1803. 6 E.g. S. Hanbury to Gorton, 17 November 1799. 7 S. Hanbury to Isabella Jopson (Holy Island), 14 March 1797.

148

The Country Trade The real theme of the letter-books remains a stream of complaints occasioned by the brewery having to extend credit, with occasional threats of legal action if returns were not made. But even such a desperate remedy on the brewer’s part was thwarted—as the debtors well knew—by the smallness of individual accounts and the weight of legal fees. On the whole, the country trade in these years seems to have been debilitating and frustrating. Sampson Hanbury was not a man to hide his feelings about it: ‘ I wish the beer had never been sent, ’ he wrote to one of his maltsters in Colchester. ‘ It is not only a plague to us but I think it has made us act unhandsomely... and whatever opinion others may have, that is mine, and I had rather relinquish Trade altogether than hush my own feelings.n He did not consider himself always to be at fault. W. and J. Drewe at Exeter received a letter from him in 1795 about a lagging account, which ended: if you suppose using such expressions as an Insolent Letter from me has or can in the least affront me you are mistaken, and I the more rejoice it will be the means of finally closing our acct. And I repeat unless it is speedily done I shall either send me Clerk, or as you add, Bailliff.2 Such letters as this, even though they might soon be followed by others reopening trade, emphasise how inconvenient an extended country trade could be when cash was tight.3 An offer of 2$ per cent discount for pay¬ ment within a month, introduced in order to avoid the drawbacks of sixmonth credit in war-time, did not seem to make much difference. Such were the uncertainties—more those of man than of nature

which lay

behind the fair words on the printed consignment notes. Under the head¬ ing of the brewery emblem ran the legend: Shipped by the grace of God, and in good Order and well Conditioned, in and upon the good Ship.. .whereof is Master under God.. .for this present voyage and now riding at Anchor in the River Thames, and by God’s grace bound for .to be delivered in the like good Order and well Conditioned... (the Danger of the Seas only excepted) unto.. .or Assigns, he or they paying Freight for the said Goods... .And so God send the good Ship to her desired Port in Safety, Amen.4 London was the great source for the movement of beer within England and abroad, and also a regular destination for ale; the specialisation of 1 S. Hanbury to John Kemp, 27 January 1804. 2 S. Hanbury to W. and J. Drewe, 29 December 1795. Hanbury had as robust a sense 01 justice as Thomas Greenall of Warrington (Barker and Harris, St Helens... (1954), P- I04)3 S. Hanbury to Drewe, n January 1796. . 4 Example from Rylands Lib. Eng. MS. 598, f. 57, invoice note of Barclay Perkins, used by Thackrah to send hops to Mrs Piozzi in 1810.

149

Markets in the British Isles London in porter accounting for the trade. Most things available for sale in whatever parts of Britain have always found their way to London; and, ships to London, as the greatest coasting as well as the greatest exporting port in Europe, were always liable to be carrying small quantities of local ales. These consignments never satisfied a popular market (as did the much greater imports of spirits) selling at double the price, or more, of local beer, and they remained in much the same market position as foreign beers do today. Pepys could drink ‘ several bottles of Hull ale ’ at a London tavern in 1660 and Burton (which was probably the place where this ‘Hull ale’ had been brewed) was well known in the capital for its ale in the seventeenth century—reputedly the first consignment was sold at the Peacock, Grays’ Inn Lane, in 1623.1 From Wales, Dorchester, Kingston, Windsor, Nottingham, Derby and many other localities noted for their malt liquors, strong ales other than those of Burton became well known outside their counties and in London at the end of the seventeenth century.2 They were then drunk by fashionable residents and visiting gentry. When the traffic increased at the end of the eighteenth century, the cause was a slow but more widespread change in taste: the people of London were beginning to favour the clear drink. In the early nine¬ teenth century, this change in taste in London, supported by technical developments which brought new efficiency to the uncertain technique of brewing ale, was bringing such London ale brewers as Kirkman and Goding up to the size of small porter breweries, and encouraging the porter brewers to make ale themselves, as well as bringing profits to ale brewers beyond London.3 One of these was James Baverstock, the writer on brewing, who left Alton in Hampshire to set up an ale brewery with J. and R. Ramsbottom at Windsor in 1786. At first they brewed only 10,000 barrels a year, but developed their trade on shipments to London, beginning in 1796. They had trebled their production by 1801. In 1805, Windsor breweries were sending over 15,000 barrels a year down the Thames to London.4 1 See pp. 174-5; Shaw, History and Antiquities of Staff's (1798), vol. 1, p. 13. 2 Pepys, Diary, ed. Wheatley (1926), vol. II, p. 255; Gent. Mag. xxx, 527-9. This general statement is directly corroborated by the account book of Col. Robert Walpole, M.P., who drank Nottingham ale regularly during his visits to London for the parliamentary sessions {Account Book of R. Walpole, 22 October 1690-30 December 1690. The book is in the possession of Lord Walpole, and I owe the reference to Dr J. H. Plumb). Defoe noted these local ales regularly, on his Tour; they are reported in almost all contemporary literature on ‘cottage economy’ and brewing. See also: Excise (TLB), 1343, f. 248. 2 V.C.H. Surrey, vol. 1, p. 392. See above, p. 12. 4 Shannon, Practical Treatise in Brewing (1804), pp. 248-55; Baverstock, Treatise... (1824) p. XIX.

The Country Trade From Scotland, too, there was a small reverse flow of ale into England, balancing the tide of porter imports into Scotland from London; although until later years consignments to London were never very large.1 Total ale imports from Scotland to England reached 1000 barrels in 1805 and were not more than 15,000 barrels in 1818; but even so, they were probably still overshadowed by porter exports from London. Despite the smallness of these quantities of Scotch ale involved, it may very well be that no inconsiderable proportion of the strong drink brewed in Scotland came to England. Apart from a few public brewers in the bigger urban centres (well established in Edinburgh by 1640 and at Aberdeen in 1765)2 the expansion of Scottish beer and ale production was a movement of the later eighteenth century, based upon the slow migration of skills, a rise in urban populations, and lower rates of duty on malt. It always had been, and always remained, dwarfed in importance for Scottish consumers and Scottish agriculture alike, by whisky. While the standard beer drunk in Scotland tended to be ‘twopenny’ (rather weaker than porter), the excise authorities took note of trade in strong beer to northern England in 1779 and remarked that, because of the lower tax rates, it had

been lately

extended, and is likely to be increased to a very great degree.. .’.3 The first important expansion of Younger’s brewery of Edinburgh, which was one of the representative large breweries in Scotland, came in the following two decades, while their attack on the Scottish national market and upon London started seriously only after 1800. They were advertising both cask and bottled ale at the ‘Edinburgh Ale Vaults’ in the Strand by 1802.4 Rising trade here evidently took up beer previously going to markets beyond the seas, for these exports abroad from Scotland show a declining trend from nearly 5000 barrels annually in 1809 to under 2000 by 1830. The mutual trade between Scotland and Ireland at no time rose above a trickle.5 THE IRISH MARKET

The export of beer from England to Ireland during the eighteenth century reached a scale so much greater than the trade to most other places beyond the seas that it merits separate attention. In no other export market did English brewers reap so richly the reward given by their lead in 1 Pari. Papers 1821, vm, Report., .on Malt in Scotland, App. xni; 183°) x, pp. 44> 12 • 2 Brereton, Travels (1634-5), p. 104 (quoted A. and N. Clow, Chemical Revolution (1952), DP. 536-7).

3 Excise (TLB)> x356> f- 40-

4 Keir, The Younger Centuries (1951), PP- 26-32; Morning Post, Gazetteer 19 May 1802, Pari. Papers, 1830, x, p. 128; 1835, xxxi, 15th Report... App. LVil, p. 146 (J- Lyall). 5 Pari. Papers, 1828, xviii, pp. 472-3151

Markets in the British Isles manufacturing skills and their good raw materials; and, when those skills themselves migrated, seldom was retribution so swift or so complete. An annual export of over 100,000 barrels in 1790—with a peak of 125,000 barrels (or 4-5 million gallons) in 1793—died away to under 10,000 barrels by 1803 and had vanished completely by 1820. Even more, by then, the attack on English markets by Irish brewers had already begun. Such was the brief glory of an episode lasting just a century: in the second decade of the eighteenth century exports of beer to Ireland were still under 500 barrels a year, the figure to which they had returned by the second decade of the nineteenth. For part of the eighteenth century, English brewers received fiscal advantages over the native brewers when selling in Irish markets. From 1689 to 1741 the only duty charged upon English beer in Ireland was

is.

per tun for strong ale and beer registered for export (and so certified by officers at the ports, who received an extra 3d. per tun for their pains).1 In 1741, a new duty of 2s. 10d. per barrel (of thirty-two gallons) imposed on these imports into Ireland sought to equalise the fiscal burdens—for previously, while the English brewer paid is. 3d. a barrel import duty (and, of course, all the shipping charges, which might be

35.

a barrel at this time)

he received a drawback for the domestic excise levy in England. The Irish brewer was paying a domestic excise of 45. 6d. a barrel. Not unnaturally, the Excise Commissioners in England complained to the Treasury that this act, designed by the Irish Commissioners to bolster declining excise revenues in Ireland, would discourage the rising exports from England and so prejudice the revenue from the malt tax in England (which, unlike the beer duty, could not be drawn back). But, ironically, the small imports into Ireland up to this date (of which the English Common Brewers had about half, Brewing Victuallers a slightly smaller proportion, and ‘ brewers for exportation ’ at Bristol a small fraction of the trade), were but the pre¬ lude to a far greater trade—which the changed duty in no way inhibited.2 The larger imports of beer into Ireland in 1740 and 1741 came from the temporary scarcity of barley in Ireland in the famine seasons, possibly encouraged by a lapse in demand in London; but the increase which began from these years was a response to more deep-seated changes within the brewing industry in England.3 In the decade of the 1740’s, industrial brewing in London had set out energetically upon the road of expansion as previous chapters have sought to describe. The better product which 1 W. & M. c. 22. 2 Excise (TLB), 1348, f. 340 (5 December 1741). 3 For trade in brewing raw materials with Ireland, see Table 9, p. 168.

152

The Irish Market table 7.

Ireland: production of beer and imports

[source: Morewood, Philosophical and Statistical History..., Addenda (Dublin,

1838). Figures taken from excise returns and Parliamentary Papers (see Morewood, Essay.. .on Inebriating Liquors (London, 1824), p. 351).] Five-yearly periods, 1720-1820. Years ending 25 March. Figures: 1000 barrels, annual average during period.

Year

Production, paid duty

1720-4

Registered imports

514

o-3

1725-9 1730-4 1735-9 1740-4

525 505 468

0-3

517

4-o

1745-9 1750-4 1755-9 1760-4

535 602

87 177 14-6 20-3

1765-9 1770-4 1775-9 1780-4 1785-9 1790-4 1795-9 1800-4 1805-9 1810-14 1815-19

507 598 552 476 462 45i 388 5ii 552 5°i 798 #

0-9 IT

35-i 48-2 62-3 53‘4 67-4 107-4 54'9 12-2 2-3 0-7 0-2

* Figures of production unavailable after 1809.

large-scale production gave was drawn to more distant markets by its own economic superiority, as well as by the demand it created. The Irish market had potential advantages which powerful, determined men might exploit. It was, above all, a market of expanding urban populations along an eastern coastline conveniently open to English ports. The Georgian glory of Dublin still testifies to its great eighteenth-century expansion, and, in Cork and Waterford, the growth of Dublin was being repeated on a smaller scale. Each town offered an intensive market where large ship¬ ments might be delivered direct by water to a few points—the only conditions under which beer might constitute a large trade. Hence, it is not coincidental that, as the London porter breweries grew, so beer imports into Ireland increased, almost all the increased trade being in porter from London. Only from England’s participation in the Revolutionary Wars of 1793 came the abrupt decline, as Table 7 shows. Changes in English and Irish internal duty rates (without corresponding 153

Markets in the British Isles adjustments in import duties and drawbacks) meant that fiscal burdens again became disparate after 1760. Even after they had been levelled up once more in 1789, when a 5s. per hogshead import duty was imposed, and again in 1791, when the bounty was abolished (so that English brewers bore the natural disadvantages which freight charges and English malt and hop duties imposed on their beer) the quality of English porter still won. From 1760, beer exports had begun to receive some stimulus from the Corn Laws, enjoying a bounty of is. per barrel when barley was at or under 24s. per qtr.1 After the import duty of 5s. per hogshead, imposed in 1789, there was no fiscal advantage given to English brewers exporting to Ireland; yet two of the exporters could affirm that this new imposition only ‘ caused a little suspense in the Trade but it soon recovered itself’. Throughout the period their consignments had borne the fiscal burden of 2s. 6d. which malt and hop duties added to the cost of each barrel shipped (all the 8s. per barrel of the English beer duty being drawn back); and, in 1785, their freight charges were 4s. per barrel (or 18 per cent). By 1791 these had sunk to 3s. 6d. per barrel (15! per cent exclusive of the drawback).2 This meant that the Irish brewers now had an advantage of 6s. per barrel over London beer at the point of sale in Dublin, and only slightly less than this in the case of beer sent from nearer ports in England, which had rather lower freight charges to Ireland. Moreover, if they used English malt (which had a 2s. 6d. per qtr. bounty on export when the price of barley was under 22s. per qtr.) they received a bounty of 20 per cent over the cost of malt in England (which gave them 2s. 6d. per barrel advantage); whereas the English brewer received only is. per barrel bounty in years when export bounties were being paid. This being the situation, Robert Barclay and Joseph Delafield, two of the London brewers in the Irish market, were asked by a committee of the Privy Council investigating Anglo-Irish trade, To what cause do [you] impute the advantages which the Beer brewed in London has over the Beer brewed in Ireland, in the Irish market, notwithstanding the burthen of freights.. .and the duties of Malt and Hops, to which Beer brewed in London is subject and the Beer brewed in Ireland is not subject... and from what causes does London almost exclusively enjoy the Export Trade of Beer to Ireland? [They replied,] From local circumstances, but chiefly in a superiority of materials produced in this Country, with a superiority in manufacturing such articles. The export trade of Beer from London to Ireland is for the most part Porter, of which London is the principal or chief market.3 1 1 Geo. Ill, c. 7. 2 B.M. Add. MS. 38,394, f. 143 (8 March 1791). 3 B.M. Add. MS. 38,393, f. 24 (11 February 1791).

154

The Irish Market The inquiries of 1791, unlike the new duty of 1741, originated in a longcontinued quest by the Irish administration to encourage the production of good beer in Ireland so that the national vice of spirit drinking might decline. As the Irish brewers already had this decided economic advantage over the English, the Privy Council thought that further advantage would decrease the stimulus of competition and rob them of all incentive to improve the quality of their beer. As things stood, the increasing export trade from England was based on a better product resulting from the full exploitation of the economies of large-scale production (the real reason behind the ‘superiority in manufacturing’) and better-quality barleys. The committee anticipated, logically, that the trade would ‘diminish in proportion as the People of Ireland improve in the art of making malts and of brewing’.1 Before describing the fulfilment of this prediction some mention must be made of the organisation of the trade itself. As the committee noted, it was almost completely confined to porter from London, the source of most of English beer sent overseas; and, even when the trade was from English ports other than London, it still tended to be limited to porter. A little beer was being sent from Exeter to Dublin, Cork and Waterford from the 1760’s; a little from Liverpool; probably slightly more from Bristol.2 In 1788, when the Bristol Porter brewery was established, the Irish market was evidently very much in the minds of the proprietors, for they immediately sent Richard Bradley to Ireland looking for orders. His diary mentioned that Cork alone was importing up to 60,000 barrels in a single season (some of which, if the figure is true, was unregistered). In the case of the Bristol Porter Brewery, exporting ambitions were not fulfilled, but a steady if small trade continued to Ireland from Bristol in the hands of bottle-manufacturers, coopers, brewers and merchants.3 All this trade was marginal, however, in comparison to the larger quantities shipped annually by the large London breweries. The impor¬ tance which Henry Thrale attached to this market may be seen in his sending John Perkins (his senior executive) regularly to Ireland, rather than one of his clerks. Perhaps the regard which the Irish had for the 1 B.M. Add. MSS. 38,393-4, loc. cit. The seeming discrepancy of barley bounties beginning at 245. per qtr. and malt (which is barley having undergone an industrial processing) at 225. per qtr. is explained by the swelling which took place in the grain during malting. There is, there¬ fore rather less grain in a quarter of malt than in a quarter of barley. 2 W. G. Hoskins, Industry, Trade and People in Exeter (1935), App. C, passim. Two ships were regularly engaged in the trade. B.M. Add. MS. 38,393, ibid.; Pari. Papers, 1817, xiv, p. 297. 2 Diary destroyed in 1940. B.P.R.L. Lading Lists, 1773-80,1801-20; 7. Institute of Brewing, November 1943.

155

Markets in the British Isles trade, as well as for Perkins, is reflected in the Freedom of the city of Cork, given to him in 1773.1 In default of the actual figures of sales to Ireland by the firm, only the rising totals of ‘brown stout’

stocks (the

stronger porter used for export markets), the country-trade debts out¬ standing in the annual balance sheets and the physical presence of the brewery’s agents in Ireland reveal the importance it was assuming. They kept a permanent agent in Cork (who went bankrupt in 1783) and were exporting in consignments at least as large as 600 barrels.2 With Whitbreads there is a little more detail about the internal organisa¬ tion of the Irish trade. Unfortunately it is to be deduced only from the pages of ledgers after 1790, not from the more explicit commentaries of letter books. The bulk of the trade was then directly under the control of the firm to the actual point of wholesale delivery in Ireland, the porter being under the charge of their salaried servant in Dublin. In 1750, how¬ ever, Irish deliveries seem to have been sold to London merchants, Hodges and Co., without any clerk of the brewery being in contact with the market. From the beginning of the Country Trade Ledgers in 1790 until July 1791 the clerk was Thomas Haswell, who, in addition to his weekly wage, received payment for expenses and a commission on each hogshead passing through his hands.3 All the rest of the trade was in the hands of McFarlane and Mazure, and Carruthers and Boyd, two established houses with whom negotiations might be direct and simple. The general complications of the Country Trade Ledger—composed, apart from the orders of a few large merchant connexions, of a multitude of tiny, spasmodic accounts—were conspicuously avoided in the Irish trade. McFarlane and Mazure took over £1000 worth of beer in almost every year; Carruthers and Boyd (of Cork) over .£13,000 for the period September 1795 to April 1798—a trade by that time almost as high as that done through Samuel Figgis (who replaced Haswell in 1791). The brewery paid insurance for beer consigned to all three Irish recipients until November 1792 (from midsummer 1787 until midsummer 1792 insurance payments totalled £1452), when the head clerk noted in the ledger that from that date ‘Mr Whitbread pro1 Barclay Records: S. C. Barber, History of Perkins Family (MS.). These journeys are known because it was the regular office of Perkins, when travelling to and from Ireland, to visit Mrs Thrale’s estates, collect the rents and inspect the property, a service he continued to arrange for her many years after the brewery had been sold and he was himself a partner. She recorded them in her diaries and letters (Letter Book, H. L. Thrale—J. Perkins, 6 Letters AugustNovember 1773). 2 Excise (TLB), 1358, f. 199; Excise Trials, 544, f. 25. 3 Evidence for this and the next section is taken from Whitbread Records (Southill): Gratuity Book 1798-1850, Country Trade Ledgers 1790-1821 (Box I); (Brewery): Rest Books 1799-1815.

156

The Irish Market posed to take the whole risque himself’. In addition, the brewery paid freight charges, stood losses from casks and accepted fairly heavy expenses for the journeys of clerks (accompanied occasionally by their wives) to Ireland. From Charles Carruthers and William Boyd, on the other hand, the firm received regular payments for discounting in the years when the brewery was not pressed for cash, presumably from their own trade bills to customers. In turn, Figgis was paid a discount for quick return of cash in the war years, ij per cent in 1796, 7^ per cent in 1797, 5§ per cent in 1798 and no less than 13 J per cent in 1799 (when the famine prices of malt were causing a liquidity crisis in the trade). Most porter sold through Figgis was at 33s. per hogshead, with a little at 355. 3i., these prices ruling from 1790-5. The trade with the Dublin agents followed the national pattern, with the rate of decline after 1793 being rather slower (Table 8). table 8.

Whitbread's exports to Ireland, 1789-1803

[source: Whitbread Records: Country Ledgers.

Some minor personal customers

may be excluded from these accounts.]

x hogshead =

barrels.

Season usually October-June

Value

GO

Hogsheads

1789-90 1790-1 1791-3 1792-3

7652

6238 4600 5970 5972 11400

1793-4 1794-5 1795-6 1796-7 1797-8 1798-9 1799-1800 1800-1 1801-2 1802-3

9951 9810 18114 12643

14341 13638 7423 -

7854 8462 8i55 4400 3438 3400 2471 1453 1288

These declining fortunes in the Irish trade were reflected in the numbers employed to manage it. From the beginning of the Gratuity Book at Whitbreads in 1798 there were two such people on the staff, surprisingly well paid. Samuel Figgis, the clerk, perhaps by then recalled from Dublin, received 6d. per hogshead commission on the total shipped on his account, a salary of 31J. 6d. a week, and an annual gratuity of £185 which was raised to £210 in 1801, £235 in 1802 and £400 in 1803. William Wilkins, cooper to the Irish trade, received two guineas per week wages, an allowance for cooperage, and a small gratuity of £15? to make up a total remuneration 157

Markets in the British Isles of about £150 (while Figgis received about £350 in most years). In 1803, both names, and even the category of ‘staff for the Irish trade’, dis¬ appeared from the book as the trade itself dropped away, leaving the single shipping clerk to continue alone until 1815, when his job, in its turn, was combined with that of the store-house clerk. In Gratuity Books custom¬ arily reflecting an increasing trade through rising numbers of staff, this contraction marks one of the only branches of trade in permanent decline. The disappearance of such a prospering branch of trade, which rose to importance under the direct control of the London breweries, may be more accurately termed—in antithesis—the success of Irish brewers in capturing their own markets. The decline, in fact, was redressing an abnor¬ mal situation. Where a long-distance trade depends only on superior skills in the exporting country—with few intrinsic economic advantages beyond those skills to account for the traffic (apart from transient economic factors which caused the skills to develop first in the exporting country rather than in the other) it might be anticipated that, with time and experience, the skills themselves would be exported, and with their emigration a trade on such unstable foundations would be bound to fail. The soil and climate of the country were such that Ireland could produce native barley of high quality (if not good hops) and, other things being equal, the local manu¬ facturer should have the important advantage of lower marketing costs from lower charges for transport. Where there was a prior, significant difference in the respective size of two marketing areas, a brewery in one might grow naturally upon its larger local market to a scale of production much bigger than a brewery in the other. This would give economies of large-scale production (engendering increased skills to augment the happy circle of cause and effect) more than sufficient to outweigh transport costs to the smaller marketing area. Given this lead, one set of brewers, being larger, might successfully prevent the rise of rivals, even though the second market should increase in size, until some sequence of events interrupted their trade and broke their hold. In these circumstances the loss of the export market would be a permanent one, once the structure of the native industry in the export marketing area had responded to the new conditions. This sequence of conditions, drastically foreshortened, probably lies behind the industrialisation of brewing in Ireland, in so far as the import of beer from England affected domestic development there. The earlier maturity of the industry in London explained the place which British exporters possessed in Irish urban markets; and this stake in Irish urban markets helped to retard the growth of an Irish brewing industry. 158

In

The Irish Market particular, it delayed changes in the structure of the native brewing trade which would result from industrialisation based upon the handful of urban, coastal markets. This is not to say, of course, that no beer had been brewed in Ireland. Half a million barrels of beer had paid duty annually for several generations. But that total had been rather dropping as the population rose, and no significant proportion was brewed by large establishments. Undoubtedly, the most powerful factor in this develop¬ ment had been the rise of distilling. Spirits had become, and were to remain the national drink of the Irish, despite every effort of the admini¬ stration. Imports of beer from England remained a side-issue to the main determinant of developments in the Irish brewing industry: the internal struggle between ‘malt-liquors’ and ‘ardent spirits’. The London porter brewers became excluded from their traditional Irish markets partly from circumstances stemming from the wars. The rise of the Irish brewers came partly in response to these circumstances, but was more dependent on changing relations with the distillers. The coincidence of the two factors mingle the issues of cause and effect but their combined effect is not in doubt. In 1790, the structure of the Irish brewing trade was similar to that current in England in 1730; by 1810 it was well on the road towards the maturity which the industry possessed at the time in the larger English towns.1 There was a strong movement in Ireland, similar to that reigning in England from the 1730’s, to encourage beer drinking in the place of spirits for the benefit of public morals. The inquiries made into the beer imports to Ireland in 1791 had been originally broached by Parliament, as has been mentioned, to encourage the Irish brewing trade, and in order to stop the ‘immoderate use of spirituous liquors’. The resolution of this year ‘that decisive advantage be given to the brewery over the distillery’ showed a determination which became expressed in a series of minor statutes and administrative concessions. Legislative favours formed the background to the major theme of changing commercial power. Apart from levelling up the respective duty rates to make the English brewers bear the full economic burdens of exportation, rebates in the stamp duty were given to city publicans in Ireland upon proof of their selling beer and ale in the proportion of one barrel to every three gallons of spirits. Such an incen¬ tive was first created in 1805, and extended through a bounty of 35. 4d. per barrel in 1810.2 1 See below, pp. 166-7, for figures of production of leading brewers. 2 For 1805 and 1810 Statutes: Stz J.H.C. ix, 245, 430; lxv, 365, 372, 482.

159

Markets in the British Isles Even more direct measures were taken against distillers and retailers of spirituous liquors, with the firm and explicit intent to curb their trade. Duty rates were increased successively to reach 6s. per gallon (corn spirit) and 5s. 11 \d. per gallon (sugar distillate) by 1810.1 At times of distress distilling from corn was prohibited completely (as it was in England). Stricter licensing regulations tried to limit the facilities for retail sale of legally distilled whisky, and then to prevent illegal stills.2 Meanwhile, the Irish brewers had been favoured by the abolition of the beer duty in 1796 (long advocated by Grattan), the abolition of duties on exports from Ireland to England in 1816 (equated again at 7s. barrel in 1822) and by special allowances for any increased duty on malt.3 Such encouragement implied regulation. The brewers were forbidden to use unmalted corn (to protect the yield of the malt duty) or any substances apart from malt and hops. Here the object of the legislature was not only to curb the sale of spirits but to ensure that a good quality malt liquor would maintain the loyalty of consumers first attracted to it by the legislation against whisky.4 It is little wonder that the Irish brewers stormed their markets with unnatural speed under cover of this battery of statutes, with the state fighting their domestic battle with the distillers for them, and the French becoming indirectly their ally in the struggle against English rivals. The prevalence of illicit distilling alone prevented a more complete victory. The many adverse effects, which war brought to the English trade in beer to Ireland, make it difficult to assess the relative importance of each factor, or to find a single operative cause for disaster. This came not only from the effect war had upon prices. The decline in shipments came immediately after the declaration of war and before higher duties on malt and bad harvests really began to affect English domestic prices after 1797. Similarly, it could not have been merely the disruption to shipping, with the higher risks and charges which war brought; other branches of com¬ merce in waters more dangerous than the English Channel or the Irish Sea did not disappear.

It is even more doubtful whether the London

brewers wanted to curb all non-London trade after 1793. Some of their most prosperous years came after that date, and the Irish trade did not tie capital up with long delays on small returns in the same way as some 1 B.M. Add. MS. 33,119, f. 294 \J.H.C. lxii, passim; lxvi, 337. 2 Pari. Papers, 1845, xlvi, 507. 3 35 Geo. Ill, c. 19-20. Pari. Debates (Ireland), Reports, xi, 68; Morewood, Philosophical and Statistical History... (Dublin, 1838), p. 623; jf.H.C. lxxv, 320; lxxi, 481; lxxvii, 85; Pari. Papers, 1816, ix, 73; E. Wakefield, An Account of Ireland (1812), p. 745. 4 B.M. Add. MS. 33,1x9, ff. 293-5 \ 3-H.C. lxiv, 250, 358, 381. 160

The Irish Market of their ‘country trade’. Most of the fiscal and administrative encourage¬ ments for the Irish brewers came after imports had already started on their steep decline, while the strong measures of 1789 and 1791 did not check the growing peace-time shipments from England. Despite these considerations, the conclusion seems inescapable that the war was of decisive importance in timing the decline of the trade, if only for the added weight which it suddenly threw into the scales on the side of more deeply seated economic factors to tip the balance. What cannot be measured is the slowly closing gap in skills of manufacture and quality of product, upon which, basically, the fate of the imports into Ireland depended. All these fiscal, economic and military hazards converged in these few nodal years. The choice of probabilities left to the historian make it proper to conclude that, as the outbreak of war was the marginal factor, its effects may be judged to be the operative cause in producing the sharp reversal of trends which occurred in these years. Insurance rates (and the risk of mischance for the uninsured) rose at once. The London brewers in particular faced a long exposed journey round the southern coast of England, and often had the safe alternative of bulk orders in public contracts for the army and navy to compensate them for war-time burdens on the Irish markets. From 1799, a more serious development prejudiced what remained of the trade, and led to its per¬ manent demise.

As the Irish brewers were striving to improve their

product, to overcome the crucial gap in quality, London porter lost its primacy in quality and—perhaps more important—its reputation. One of the inevitable consequences of years of high prices, high duties and depressed demand was an increase in the ‘length’ drawn from the malt as brewers made an attempt not to raise prices further than the minimum. Although the larger breweries remained clear of more recondite vices, admitting the drop in strength, adulteration became widespread among smaller brewers and publicans as they attempted to create an artificial pungency in the place of alcoholic strength.1 Drugs, weak porter and high prices broke down the prestige of London beer seriously for the first time, in its local market, and, where exported beer would not stand dilution, prices had to be higher still. Increased malt and hop duties in England, and higher production costs in the inflationary years, all added expense to exports. Ireland, by contrast, remained free from some influences raising 1 The matter is discussed at length in Pari. Papers, 1819, V, Evidence.. .on Public Breweries. See below, pp. 420-2. 11

l6l

M B E

Markets in the British Isles prices in England. Where the conscious regulation of prices by the leading brewers in London perhaps prevented their dropping as rapidly as they would have done under conditions of more general competition, one more economic stimulus was given to Irish brewing. In addition, there was even less incentive to home brewing in Ireland than in England once the duty on beer had been removed. Then all purchasers of malt, whether private families or public brewers, paid the same amount of duty, while, in England, beer brewed for private consumption escaped the levy on that brewed for sale. After the long rest which the price of domestic porter had had during the last half of the eighteenth century in London at 305. per barrel, it began to climb steeply, and did not fall below 45L per barrel and 5d. per quart for more than a few months between 1803 and 1822, although the only increase in the beer duty—which did not affect exports—was 2s. per barrel imposed in 1802.1 In 1809, Beamish and Crawford were still selling at 10d. per gallon in Cork.2 If the results of this array of changed circumstances must be reduced to a prime economic factor, it is that of relative quality which, from the nature of the product, can bear a perfectly continuous relationship with price. Demand seems to have been pecu¬ liarly sensitive to quality. Once alienated because of poor quality, public favour was recapturable only with extreme pertinacity some time after good quality had returned. Where a decline in standards in English beer was being met by rising standards in Irish beer, this changing ratio of price and quality sums up the arguments which explain the shift in trade. The economic and fiscal setting in which the accretion of brewing skills took place in Ireland upon a basis of rising home demand has already been described. Of the actual flowering of the Irish brewing industry it would be presumptuous to write at length in a study mainly concerned with a complementary movement, the decline of English exports to Ireland and, to a much lesser degree, with a later direct result of the growth of the Irish industry—the reverse flow of beer across the Irish Sea into England.3 However, the outlines of the story of developments in the Irish brewing industry, which largely mirrored those which had taken place in London some generations previously, need to be sketched in as a frame to the main picture. 1 Brewery Statistics MSS. at Barclay Perkins. See Table 39. 2 Wakefield, op. cit. p. 744, note. 3 I have profited greatly from conversations with Mr P. Lynch and Mr J. E. Vaizey who have written the early history of A. Guinness, Son and Company Ltd.

162

The Irish Market The absence of any indigenous writings on brewing—comparable to the technical bibliography already available in England at the end of the eighteenth century—is only one sign of the contemporary lack of professional skill (or consciously skilled management) in contemporary Irish brewing. The main exception to this general void is a series of letters contributed in 1733 to the Weekly Observations of the Dublin Society, an Irish institution founded in 1731 equivalent in purpose and activity to the Royal Society in England.1 Through the prizes offered for the best barley, hops, malt and beer, these letters formed part of the only important attempt to spread knowledge and incentive for better brewing in Ireland before the legislative measures nearer the end of the century. Most of the matter in them was culled from the best authorities in England. Observers of the economic scene thought them of much importance when considering the improvement which took place in the cultivation of barley and the manu¬ facture of malt and beer in Ireland. Most of these comments, however, came only at the time when changes were already taking place, long after the publication of the letters. One ambition of the Dublin Society was not fulfilled: hop-planting did not become successfully established in Ireland. Periodical comment in the Irish legislature throughout the century lamented the sad state into which the brewing industry had fallen—or that state from which, more accurately, it had never succeeded in emerging. One important sequence of such agitations (themselves possibly symptoms of recovery although they seemed to portray the nadir of economic mis¬ fortune) came to a head in 1779, when several leading Irish citizens submitted recommendations for helping the national economy to the Lord Lieutenant. These included the staple demands: preference for Irish corn in British markets, open trade with the colonies, free export of linen and— as a ‘temperance’ measure familiar in England—encouragement for brewing at the expense of distilling. The measures sought were duty-free imports of hops from abroad or, at least, the abolition of the duty on hop-imports from England.

Pery, the Speaker of the Irish House of

Commons, supported this plea in a letter to Lord North: as the brewerys here’, he claimed, ‘are in a wretched state and require assistance’.2 The partial exception made for English beer (as a ‘corn product’) when the duties on many other commodities traded between the two countries were levelled up in Pitt’s Irish Propositions of 1785, caused further 1 These writings were praised by many English writers on brewing

as Shannon, New

Treatise... (1805), pp. 268-9. 2 C. Gill, Irish Linen Industry (1925). PP- 218-19; Hist. MSS. Comm. 8th Report, I, 206b. 163

II-2

Markets in the British Isles agitation, which the debate in 1791 brought to such a point that deepseated changes could no longer be withheld.1 From the English side of the negotiations, Lord Grenville told the Earl of Westmorland at Dublin Castle that the difficulties of abolishing the is. per barrel duty bounty in years of cheap barley, or of allowing the Irish to impose a balancing import duty, were ‘ almost insuperable ’—so great was the pressure of the brewers and the landed interest at Westminster. In the new schedules proposed, the twin duties and drawbacks—apart from the bounty—still gave the English beer a fiscal advantage of lod. per barrel in Irish ports instead of the previous i^d. Westmorland hoped that the opposition in Ireland might not fully recognise the fact if English brewers and politicians did not advertise it. He added: You must, I am convinced, see that it will be impossible in argument to resist them; and perhaps the clamour upon the injustice and absurdity of giving English beer a preference at the time that our pretext is to encourage the Irish brewery (may) make such a preference more unpopular and difficult than the thing is worth. I am in great hopes, as there is some difficulty in understanding the duties, that patriotism will be silent. I would recommend the English brewers not to open their lips....2 Grenville thought this might not be too objectionable. But he pointed out that, while there was a bounty on beer exports from England, there was also a bounty on exporting barley, which the Irish brewers could take advantage of against the English, thus neutralising any injustice. He, too, recognised the need for discretion and ended his letter: ‘ I hope, however, these questions will not be stirred, and... I think our people will be wise enough to be silent.’3 The new strength of the brewing industry in Ireland sprang up with astonishing rapidity after this great parliamentary debate of February 1791. The advantages promised to the Irish brewing trade at that time were, indeed, to prove decisive. Grattan was already demanding that the duty should be abolished, and many witnesses were brought to testify to the plight of the brewers. As in 1773, when they claimed that the ‘ London brewers have now nearly engrossed the whole trade in Dublin and send their own factors to sell here to the retailers’, all the well-tried reasons for public favour to the brewers were rehearsed.4 Obviously, all the 1 Hist. MSS. Comm. Fortescue, I, 251; H. of C. Abbott Coll. 37, Reports vii, 63, 64 (App. C). 2 Hist. MSS. Comm. Fortescue, 11, 22, 27, 30. Westmorland’s reports provoked the delibera¬ tions in the Committee of Trade: B.M. Add. MS. 38,393, ff. 24-5, 35; 38,394, ff. 141-5. 3 Hist. MSS. Comm. ibid. 33-4. 4 J.H.C. (Ireland), ix (1796 ed.), App. cliv, Report of 10 December 1773. I owe this reference to Mr P. Lynch.

164

The Irish Market influence possessed by Dublin brewers (then becoming persons of weight in the community) was being used in Dublin Castle, as well as on the floor of the chamber. Mr Guinness, a brewer of thirty years’ standing, said that he had not known the industry in a worse state since 1767; others protested that it would pay them to leave Dublin and export beer to Ireland from Holyhead or Caernarvon. But, with their immediate rewards of 1792—higher import duties, higher spirit duties, the beer excise levied on a larger gallon—the French war beginning in the following year and the abolition of the duty two years after that, the blood transfusion took and the patient displayed an energy he had never known before.1 The recovery was not marked at once by a stream of technical literature —that was still coming from more advanced circles in England—but the actual transfer of skilled men to Ireland was of more importance than the written word, once the many incentives began to be translated into innovation. Shannon spoke of ‘well-informed brewers, who have been invited from London and placed at the head of very considerable breweries there’, with others who had migrated thither with their capitals since the Union, perhaps encouraged to take this decision by English taxation of incomes.2 In part, the reward of the influx of skill—and it would need only a handful of men to make a very great deal of difference to the quality of beer brewed inefficiently—depended on the prior rise in the standard of Irish barley which accompanied general agricultural improve¬ ment in that country, as in England. Even so, the Irish brewers had cause to complain that bad grain produced by poor soils prejudiced the brewing of good beer, and as late as 1812, one of them still considered that English barley gave 20 per cent better strength than the Irish.3 By the turn of the nineteenth century, with the distilleries temporarily stopped, the real advance in the Irish brewing industry was under way. In 1805, a commentator remarked that brewing was ‘now a favourite pursuit in Ireland.. .rapidly advancing towards perfection’. Three years later, an Irishman qualified his statement that whisky was the traditional common drink of the land: ‘latterly we have got much into the habit of brewing. There are several erected in the North, and I think the people are getting more into the habit of using Malt Liquor than they were four 1 Pad. Debates (Ireland), Reports, xi, 79-82; xn, 121. See especially the resolution of 4 February 1791. 2 Shannon, op. cit. pp. 270-1; E. Gillett (ed.), Elizabeth Ham (1945k PP75, 83-4, 93; Barnard, Noted Breweries... (1889), vol. II, p. 365. Charles Page, a London brewer, became porter brewer for the Anchor Brewery, Cork. 3 Wakefield, op. cit. p. 745; Shannon, loc. cit.

165

Markets in the British Isles or five years ago’.1 This development, which had been both the aim of policy and the prediction of the Council of Trade in 1791, was most clearly demonstrated in 1810; the occasion of its revelation being that most useful of phenomena to the historian—a threat to already established prosperity. In March of that year, distilling was licensed again after a break of twenty months, at a burden of less than half the previous rate of duty. The brewers of Dublin, Cork and Waterford thereupon claimed that legislative encouragement shown in the progressive increase in the duties on spirits, had led them ‘to entertain a confidence that the Brewing Trade was considered as an object of national importance and would consequently continue to experience the kind protection of the Legislature’.2 Under its influence they had spent ‘ large sums in extending and improving their works’ to meet the extending demand so beneficial to health, morals and the public revenue. The brewers were then forbidden to use any raw barley, as they had commonly done beforehand, and consequently felt the unchanged weight of the malt-tax more heavily than the distillers, who used a mixture of malt and barley. There had been a boom in sales of cheap spirits, at 8s. a gallon, and a consequent depression in the brewing trade, where 66,000 less barrels had been sold by the leading nine brewers in Dublin in the year ending 25 March 1811 than in 1810. Hence the peti¬ tion for relief.3 The committee appointed to examine the matter substan¬ tially agreed with the brewers in their charge, diagnosis and recommenda¬ tion, redressing the balance of the duties once more in their favour in the following year. Home consumption of ‘legal’ spirits which rose from a low level of i-8 million gallons in 1808, and 0-7 million gallons in 1809 to 7-8 million in 1810 and 7-4 million in 1811, dropped back again to ri million in 1812. The total rose again to 5-1 million in 1813, but did not reach the heights of the low duty period again for many years.4 By this time, there were public breweries in most of the market towns, although of recent origin as public breweries (rather than as establishments of Brewing Victuallers). In Dublin—an older centre of public brewing— nine breweries already had one-third of the national production in their hands.5 The nine were led by Guinness (with 70,000 barrels brewed in 1810), Connolly and Somers (50,000 barrels), Trevor and Keogh (27,500 1 Shannon, loc. cit.; Pari. Papers, 1808, IV, Use of Sugar and Molasses, p. 130. 2 Pari. Papers, 1810-11, v, i-j;jf.H.C. Lxvi, 263, 337 et seq. 3 Pari. Papers, 1810-11, v. 4 Morewood, Philosophical and Statistical History— (Dublin 1838). Addenda, Duty on Irish Spirits. Duties on spirits rose from 2s. 6\d. to 5s. i\d. per gallon in 1812. 6 Wakefield, Account of Ireland, p. 744; Pari. Papers, 1810-11, v, Report.. .on Brewers of Dublin and Waterford.

l66

The Irish Market barrels), Grange Leeson (27,500 barrels), and Egan (26,000 barrels). These firms, with Beamish and Crawford of Cork (who were the first brewers in Ireland at this time with a production of 100,000 barrels a year), were advancing rapidly towards the size of an eighteenth-century ‘ capital house’ in London.1 Already, the structure of the Irish brewing industry was approaching the more mature English pattern, with a few dominant units of production in the cities expanding at the expense of the small marginal producers: already three steam-engines had been ordered from Boulton and Watt for Dublin breweries and, by 1813, Guinness had two engines of 15 horse-power each.2 In Ireland, however, there was no race to ‘tie’ retail trade, as in England, although some of the Irish brewers probably advanced money to publicans for their licences.3 Commercially, too, change was already apparent. Cork was exporting beer on a significant scale in 1810. Dublin followed suit probably in the following year, encouraged by the dropping demand at home, and these consignments became part of a trend very different from the scattered shipments from Ireland in the eighteenth century.4 By the 1830’s the biggest Irish exporting port for beer was Dublin and the largest exporter there was undoubtedly Guinness, then at the beginning of a century of unparalleled expansion. Over 11,000 barrels of Irish porter came across to England in the 1829-30 season, primarily to Lancashire markets, from which, by then, it was driving out London porter, but some even reached London and Burton. It seems clear (as Arthur Guinness explained) that some of the price leadership which Irish beer enjoyed at this time came from the use of ‘unpaid, illegal’ malt, which was selling up to 45. per barrel cheaper than ‘paid’ malt, but the whole structure of industrialised brewing in Ireland now lay behind the export of beer.5 By 1840, over half of Guinness’s annual production of 80,000 barrels was sold in England, while the only comple¬ mentary commodity crossing to Ireland in large quantities was hops.6 The wheel of industrialisation had come full circle. It may be appropriate to discuss here the flow of brewing materials between England and Ireland, rather than in the separate chapters on 1 Wakefield, ibid.; Pari. Papers, 1835, xxxi, Evidence to 15th Report... App. 100, 220. 2 Soho MSS. Engine Book. 3 Wakefield, ibid. pp. 744m 74^4 Pari. Papers, v, 1810-11, loc. cit. 5 Pari. Papers, 1835, loc. cit. App. LVII, 14, 157. ‘Mr Bass.. .tells it [Irish porter] is selling next door to him at Burton cheaper than he can make it.’ Ibid. App. xcvii, 212; Pari. Papers, 1830, xxii, p. 162; 1834, xxv, 10th Report..., p. 589, Morewood, ibid. pp. 629-30. 6 See Barnard, op. cit. vol. 1, p. 6.

167

Markets in the British Isles table

9. Exports of beer, malt, barley and hops from England to Ireland, in quinquennial years, i6gj-ijj5, 1800

Customs and Excise, nos. 1, 682-1,734, 1670. Years run from Christmas to Christmas.] [source:

Figures: Barrels, quarters (malt and barley) cwt. (hops). Barley

Hops

1696-7 London * Out Ports 162 1719-20 L OP 528 198 (This year saw 2500 qtr. barley sent from Ireland) 1724-5 L IOOO OP 1729-30 L 6 OP 114 228 381 1734-5 L 854 OP 27,068 12,588 552 1739-40 L OP 2,178 810 i74 3,462 1744-5 L 3,9n 793 OP 696 36,720 52,638 *1750-1 L 26,184 OP 56,689 L476 3,93° *1755-6 L 10,392 OP 1,074 64,406 1,156 1759-60 L 19,668 OP 1,086 3L247 i,i45 1764-5 L 23,466 OP 6,960 43,30i 1769-70 L 49,188 299 440 OP 4,320 2,215 57,044 81,714 1774-5 L * ... OP 1,118 100 6,391 1799L and OP 1800 9,048 21,200

5 4,483

Year

Beer

Malt

4,6oi

2,141 5,39° 19,384 L430 I9T34 1,262 L545 2,115 3,877 36,593 L494 3L430 2,060 26,463 12,802 28,348 1,828 32,285 427 32,562 200 13,284

* Years missing from series.

malt and hops—the prime unity being the changing equilibrium between the trade in beer and raw materials across the Irish Sea. After 1770 the value of beer exported from England was, in most years until 1800, greater than that of any other commodity exported hence to Ireland, except when it was itself surpassed by the value of malt or hops sent. With malt, barley and hops, this primacy had been a general rule for over a generation. With the failure of hop-planting in Ireland, imports of hops have continued until our own day, always being predominantly from England. It was after the virtual exclusion of continental hops through protective legislation—as far back as 1711—that the English hegemony in the trade 168

The Irish Market began.1

In fact, this traffic derived more an economic necessity than

administrative tyranny, for the evidence suggests that English hops became markedly superior to all others. Despite every encouragement, the hop never became a willing migrant to Irish soil. The reasons are still uncertain, or rather, explanations are so numerous that they vary from the elemental failings of soil and climate, to the early lack of capital, poles and skill amongst Irish planters, and the later commercial policy of Irish brewers. The failure is probably more that of nature than of man.

In

1733, the Dublin Society published Instructions for Planting Hops to intro¬ duce the culture.

It was potentially profitable, following the ban upon

cheap Flemish hops, and was always beneficial for the public revenue, the balance of payments and the poor. There was a rumour in the next few years that considerable plantations were being laid down, but sales from England soon recovered, even with the drawback taken off, and nothing of permanence remained of the attempt. None were being grown in Ireland by 1835.2 Depending on the year, imports fluctuated between 10,000 and 30,000 cwt. until 1830 and beyond, rising with the increasing export of beer. Ireland was the only bulk overseas market for English hops, with Germany, Denmark or Sweden occasionally taking over 1000 cwt. The trade derived almost entirely from Southwark. Shipments seem to have been mostly in the hands of general merchants trading to Ireland with mixed cargoes; there appears to have been no trade through agents working on commission for Cork or Dublin brewers. In the season, hop exports from Southwark were said to make ‘ one third or one quarter part of the lading from hence to Dublin and other parts of Ireland’.3 For the smaller consignments being sent from the provinces, the place of origin was undoubtedly the gardens in the Hereford-Worcester area (London being the market for Kent and Sussex hops) and the exporting ports were Chester and Bristol.4 The trade in malt and barley did not have the same absolute or relative importance as that in hops for either country. Fairly large quantities of

1 2

j.H.C. xvii (1710), 484-5. Pari. Papers, 1835, xxxi, Evidence to...i6th Report, p. 13; Present State of the British Distillery (2nd ed. 1736), pp. 39-40; C.T.B.P. 1735-8, 307; Money Book, xxxvm 478-80 3 Excise (TLB), 1358, ff. 261-4 (statement by Wm. Skirrow and Peter Broadley in 1785). The ledger of Thackrah’( 1804-14) does not indicate any commission trade. Large sales were made to general merchants exporting to Ireland and English ports from London by Thackrahs. When complaints about hop drawbacks or duty rebates are made to the Excise, they come from general merchants, not hop-factors. See Excise (TLB), 1366, f. 445 (O’Connor); 1368, f. 298 (Prince and Johnson); 1372, f. 190 (Barnewall); 1385, f. 144 (Jos. and Th. Shee). 4 B.P.R.L. Lading Lists, 1773-80, 1801-20; Excise (TLB), 1356, ff. 190-2.

169

Markets in the British Isles malt, it is true, did pass annually from East Anglia to Ireland. In years of poor English harvests, a little barley flowed in from Ireland, but, when these quantities are compared with native English or Irish production, or with total English exports, it cannot be seen as vital.1 Without English hops, on the other hand, the Irish brewers would have been seriously handicapped. Irish demands for malt and barley (like the English) were evidently for quite a different—and higher—grade of malt than that needed in Holland; so it seems evident that the destination for shipments of malt from East Anglian ports to Ireland was the mash-tuns of breweries rather than distilleries. The totals of malt and barley registered for export to Ireland, and their small proportion to total exports (except in certain years after the mid-century when exports to the Continent were forbidden), may be seen by comparing the totals involved in the Irish trade with those in the national trade which appear in the chapter on barley and malt.2 The fiscal impetus from the English side of the trade came from the bounty of is. 6d. per quarter on malt when barley was at or under 245. per quarter. The Irish maltsters were not, it seems, as competent as their English rivals in malting and Irish barleys were not as fine as English varieties, so that brewers in the coastal towns of Ireland had a strong incentive to buy imported grain. Malt imports were sustained by a com¬ bination of the same fiscal and economic factors which supported the trade in beer. These malt bounties were continued even after 1785 when non-corn bounties were abolished in Anglo-Irish trade. As the rising population of England absorbed the export surplus of English grain which existed in normal years, and created the need for imports during bad ones, this traffic in malt to Ireland shrank. By 1813, a Parliamentary Committee could consider imports of grain from Ireland as ‘normal’. By then, too, the standards of Irish barley and malting had risen, cutting out much of the difference in quality which had previously encouraged imports. In their turn, exports of malt-kiln tiles and malt shovels from Bristol rose.3 The movement of barley from Ireland to England in the early nine¬ teenth century may be seen as supplementary to the flows of beer. Both were rising: barley imports were 8500 qtr. in 1810; 87,000 qtr. in 1820, and 189,600 qtr. in 1830, most shipments going to West coast ports.4 All the currents in the trade, except that of hops, had now reversed them¬ selves and, throughout the nineteenth century, the tide was to run ever more strongly from Ireland to England. 1 See below, pp. 425-8. 3 B.P.R.L. Lading Lists, ibid.

2 See below, pp. 425-37. 4 For London imports see below, p. 435. 170

CHAPTER VI

DISTANT MARKETS (II) EXPORTS As Table io shows (and the years chosen there are not unrepresentative for their period) the modest exports to foreign parts from England rose slowly in the first half of the eighteenth century, from about 9000 barrels a year to above 13,000; then more rapidly until 1800 when they touched 90,000 barrels; and, if Ireland be included, much more. The Napoleonic Wars brought an end to this expansion and in some northern European markets the skills of brewing were themselves exported and the trade closed. Rising demand in India did not fully balance the decline in the Caribbean or European—particularly Irish—markets.

So, from 1800,

figures for total exports fluctuated about a declining trend, being between 50,000 and 70,000 barrels annually except for a post-war return to over 80,000 barrels annually between 1816 and 1819. London always had the dominant position in exports of beer—as in many other things—taking between four and five times the volume of the out-ports; although the preponderance of London probably masked ale originating in Burton-onTrent and elsewhere, entered coast-wise for London and then exported in ships loading in the Thames.1 Of the 9000 to 12,000 barrels customarily exported from these out-ports in the early nineteenth century, Liverpool had the lion’s share (going to plantations and colonial markets), while the exports of Bristol remained as a tithe of Liverpool, in this as in so many other ways. Burton-on-T rent, similarly, provided some of the beer shipped from Liverpool. The main fact must be emphasised that these figures are equivalent in scale only to the annual production of one second-rate London brewery, or to only a quarter of the output of a single London ‘ capital house ’. Even so, the demand which pulled English beer to such distant ports was so insistent that the trade may bear a more particular inquiry.

Imported

porter was selling at 6 guineas per hogshead in Canada in 1782, before the first native brewery was established there: evidence alike for the strength 1 This may be true for foreign markets other than the East Indies. Excise (TLB), 1348, f. 497. Robert Burridge of Lyme Regis sent 1289 gallons in cask and 220 gallons in bottle to his agent, Joseph Houghland, in London, for export abroad. 171

Distant Markets table io. Beer exports from England to foreign parts, 1700-1830 Customs and Excise MSS. nos. 1682, 1713, 1735, 1670; Pari. Papers, 1831, 68; 1828, xviii, pp. 472-3.]

[sources: xvii, p.

‘Europe’ includes Mediterranean ports and Turkey. ‘Africa’ includes Madeira and the Azores. ‘Asia’ means almost entirely the East Indies until 1830 (when New South Wales took 7827 barrels of the total). ‘West Indies’ includes re-exports to other areas. ‘America’ includes the entire continent, but trade was almost entirely to North American ports before 1800. Destination Europe Africa America 1 West Indies) Asia Totals

1697

1750 2,928 i,254 120 12 9,186 7,308 (included above) 696 1,482 9,378

1775 17,328 636

1830 7,579 1,878

1,680

810 21,522 45,642 9,162

14,748 27,402

39,846

90,654

60,630

io,344

9,858

13,608

1800

I3,5i8

9,023

of the demand and the high incidence of transport costs.1 That these costs were not completely prohibitive for all distant markets may well have been due to the peculiar structure of British foreign trade which demanded shipping space for imports much more than for exports. The great capacity employed to bring in the cargoes of colonial staples of sugar and tobacco, timber, wine and even such relatively minor commodities as fruit (all, like beer, of much lower ‘value density’ than the textiles which dominated so much of the export trade), meant, accordingly, that freight rates inward bore the brunt of shipping charges both ways. Vessels sailing from England, being often half empty and usually with some ballast aboard (like the colliers going back to the Tyne) had room enough for barrels of beer and the even bulkier crates of bottles at a moderate charge. Had the conditions of trade been reversed, such a cargo could never have paid the higher freight rates involved.

Beer was usually in the same

marginal economic position as the loads of bricks regularly sent to the West Indies. The scattered nature of trade in beer, too, in particular the very small individual consignments shipped and many scraps of evidence in contemporary correspondence, suggest that much originated from the spur of friendship rather than for profit. The official returns, which are probably not inaccurate by contemporary standards just because of the bulk and cheapness of the commodity, recorded all beer shipped abroad for whatever purpose, apart from that registered for the use of crews at sea.2 Under these conditions, it is scarcely accurate to call some of the traffic by the name of ‘trade’ at all. For example Maurice de Nassau 1 M. Denison, Barley and the Stream (Toronto, 1955), p. 26. 2 See below, pp. 341-2. Excise (TLB), 1340, legal opinion of 18 January 1687. I72

Distant Markets exported ‘ 12 Tuns of English Beer’ to the Low Countries in 1624 ‘for his own and lady’s use’; and Lord Dursley wrote in 1695: ‘We hear nothing of Mr Prior’s coming for England (from the Continent) and, therefore by the next opportunity intend to send you some cider and ale, supposing English drinks may not be disagreeable to you.’ Just after her marriage to Samuel Whitbread, Lady Mary Whitbread wrote to tell her brother, Captain the Hon. William Cornwallis, that ‘Mr Whitbread had ordered the clerks at the brew-house to send two hogsheads of porter at once to his ship lying at Plymouth’.1 These single instances from a steady, and most understandable flow of such cases, show them to be the actions of relatives, friends or private individuals (not those of entrepreneurs or merchants) ‘ exporting ’ for the same reasons as Johnson sent Thrale’s porter to his hosts in Skye, or provincial families their best local brews to sons in London. Such pleasing, but non-commercial, enterprise does not need emphasis here. The larger business operations must concern us, above all those of the Baltic and the East Indian markets. THE BALTIC AND INDIA

So bound up were the fortunes of the brewers at Burton-on-Trent with the Baltic market, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, that it would be inappropriate to discuss the general evolution of the brewing industry in Burton-on-Trent in any other context, or at any other place in this book; even though the business operations which were grounded upon exports of ale became more complex than the simple shipments of the casks of beer from Hull. Even though these dependent ventures amplify the scope of this chapter, to ignore them here would be to distort the way in which the export market in ale operated for the Burton brewers: the economic evolution of the town up to the deployment of the home market after 1840 would be falsified. In fact, the century from 1740-1840, in which exports conditioned the rate of expansion in the brewing industry at Burton, was sandwiched between periods when the home market (but not the immediately local market) was the determining factor. The town had become noted for its ale in London before the eighteenth century. In this fame it was linked with other places in the Trent valley, in particular Derby and Nottingham; which shared (although not to the same degree as Burton) the geological 1 Hist. MSS. Comm. 4th Report, 313 (March 1624); Bath MSS. in, 74 (March 1695/6); Various Coll, vi, 310-11 (August 1769-70).

173

Distant Markets strata which made the local water famous. The excellent barleys growing in the southern regions of the country and in Lincolnshire also gave intrinsic advantages in production. These had long been appreciated, although the paucity of local demand was not fully overcome by the wider marketing area given by efficient land transport until the railways. On his visit in 1680-1, Dr Plot noticed that the peculiar qualities of the local water were exploited by Burton brewers; and Dr Darwin, years later, remarked even more pointedly that they deliberately chose the hard water which they could get from wells, when good soft river water, such as other brewers preferred, flowed by neglected in the Trent.1 With the beginnings of scientific investigation into brewing, these qualities were soon delineated. Combrune and Richardson, later Shaw and Molyneux, assiduously boiled off Burton water to discover the salts in solution.2 Richness in inorganic deposits, they found, was combined with freedom from organic sediment—a happy combination for the brewer of sparkling ales—and, although the salts did not favour drawing a long ‘length’ from malt, they gave qualities which a soft water could not. The water-table around Burton was established over a stratum of ‘ gypseous rock’—with Kemp marls, sandstone and valley gravels. Wells sunk through to these layers, although not beyond them, gave different results in different places, but the water everywhere had a mineral content as high as 60-120 grains per imperial gallon. Predominant in most samples were sulphate of lime and carbonate of lime, with sulphates of magnesia and soda and traces of sodium and potassium chloride—in all perhaps 250 lb. of gypseous matter per 1000 barrels of liquor.3 Water from the Trent was used only for cooling and cleansing. Shaw was told in 1798 that the first Common Brewer in Burton was Benjamin Printon, who set up in trade with three servants about the year 1708.4 This would give it much the same tradition as other small market towns in England; but as early as 1623, claimed the antiquaries, Burton ale was being sold in London—a distinction few provincial towns could rival.5 In the latter years of the same century, the Trent valley became more widely noted in London as the source of fine (and expensive) ales. Pepys’ Hull ale, Nottingham, Derby and Burton ale, are often mentioned in the 1 R. Plot, Staffordshire (1686); E. Darwin, letter quoted in J. Pilkington, Present State of Derbyshire (1789), vol. I, p. 270. 2 Shaw, History and Antiquities of Staffordshire (1798), vol. I (Natural History); W. Moly¬ neux, Burton-on-Trent (1869), pp. 204-10. 3 Molyneux, ibid. 4 Shaw, op. cit. vol. I, Burton, p. 13. 6 See above, p. 150.

174

The Baltic and India literature of the times; and in household accounts they are usually priced per dozen bottles rather than by cask.1 Prices varied very much, but, when compared with standard London prices for a quart pot of strong drink, they are always in another class, being designed for the fashionable market. The brisk qualities of these ales would have been enhanced and preserved in bottle more than those of a full beer like porter. Even the corking would have created a slight internal pressure favourable to them. In the seventeenth century, the literary evidence (in the absence of pro¬ duction figures), suggests that Nottingham and Derby enjoyed precedence over Burton in the London market. For example, Defoe praised the ale of the first two towns but did not mention Burton ale.2 This is probably more from the economic advantages of better transport than an intrinsic superiority of product. Not until the next century did the fame of Burton ale develop in the Baltic area, and then reflect back to its advantage in London and elsewhere. In the period with which this study is concerned, the true importance of Burton lies in its Baltic market. The industrial history of the town has been set by the stages in which the problems of transporting the commodity which its brewers could produce pre¬ eminently well have

been overcome.

After 1750, developing water-

carriage took the bulk of production beyond the seas; a century later rail transport developed the inland market. Initially, the improvement of the Trent to Gainsborough, in 1698, made the way out to Hull and the wide world more convenient commer¬ cially. Yet there was a delay of over a generation before Burton ale had joined the list of commodities traded on a significant scale to the Baltic. In truth, little important progress came in the navigation to the sea until the canals of the 1770’s; for Lord Paget’s attempt to clear the river for traffic as far as Burton remained largely unsuccessful.3 Further widening of their market for the Burton brewers came in the inland direction also: in 1774-5, when the Trent and Mersey canal opened barge traffic through to Liverpool and Birmingham. The fame given by quality, however—justly bringing much literary evidence in its trainmust not mask the relative insignificance of the quantities involved, even in 1 See, for example, in W. Beveridge, History of Prices (1939) j J- E. T. Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices (1866). 2 Defoe, Tour, vol. n, pp. 140-6, 156-7. Cf. advertisement for Pale Ale in London l ost, November 1700 (quoted Athenaeum, 6 August 1870). 3 J. D. Chambers, The Vale of Trent, 1670-1800 (1957), PP- 10-11; A. C. Wood, ‘History of Trade and Transport on the River Trent’, Trans. Thoroton Soc. liv (1950), 19-23; Defoe, Tour, vol. 11, pp. 140-1.

175

Distant Markets the traffic to Hull (which far outstripped the inland markets), at this time. Until 1740, virtually none was recorded entering the Baltic. In 1750, a mere 270 barrels had gone from England to the East Country and 470 barrels to Russia from all the outports combined. By 1775 these summer shipments had risen to 3170 barrels and 7855 barrels respectively, with 985 barrels from London. In 1800 (a depressed year), Prussia, Poland, Sweden and Russia took 3985 barrels and Germany 4115 barrels from England as a whole. Nevertheless, the foundation of some of the nine¬ teenth-century giants of the brewing industry in Burton date from this time—for example, William Bass in 1777, Worthington in 1744—suggest that Burton, in relation to its size, was already more a ‘ brewing town ’ (in the economic sense) in the eighteenth century than most others. By 1800, the list of Common Brewers of Burton registered in the county directories contained all the well-known nineteenth-century names except Salt (who was malting for other brewers),1 and all of them who were well known had made their names primarily as exporters. In 1850, there were sixteen, but, whereas the greatest in the first year were brewing only 5000 barrels annually (and Bass brewed only 10,000 barrels annually in 1830), indi¬ vidual productions had risen more than tenfold by the latter date. The population of the three central parishes, Burton-on-Trent itself, Burton Extra and Horninglow (which together became the three wards of the town in the municipal act of 1853) was only 4667 in 1801, rising slowly to 5640 in 1831, 8478 in 1851 (when 867 men and 61 boys were employed in the breweries) and more sharply to 14,351 in 1861, by which time the boom in the home market was on.2 By 1790, the trading initiative in the Baltic market was held completely between the brewers and the Danzig merchants. Most of the letters to English merchants are concerned with subsidiary problems: the means of remittance from the Baltic, and the arrangements for shipping the casks of ale. Local carriers took these by barge from Horninglow (the closest shipping point on the canal to Burton, just over a mile away from the Trent) to Gainsborough. There they were placed in the care of Benjamin Wilson’s regular correspondent, John Smith, transhipped to his schooners and taken down-river to Hull. Wilson then had to arrange with the captains and owners of the Baltic ships, who received the ale at Hull, as to which vessels were to carry the orders to his various customers waiting for 1 Tunnicliff, Survey of Staffs. (1789), quoted Molyneux, pp. 224-6; Barnard, Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland (1889), vol. 11, p. 112. 2 Molyneux, op. cit. pp. 123, 215, 238; Murray, Handbook to Derbyshire (1868), pp. 145-6. 176

The Baltic and India its arrival at a Baltic port. Sometimes they wished him to place their orders on a particular ship (probably for the same motives which dictated his own choice of vessel)—a right they possessed as customers—but, more usually, they were persuaded to let Wilson himself arrange all details of shipping.1 The culmination of the transference of the initiative in the trade from the Hull and London merchants to the Danzig houses is shown by a general letter, in German, which Wilson sent out to his Baltic customers in November 1791. This announced that he had taken an assistant into his office who was well acquainted with the German and Dutch languages to facilitate his correspondence ‘ in Consequence of the great increase of my foreign Friends for some years past’.2 The risks of trading in such a distant market were such that little could be left to trust. Wilson refused, on principle, to accept any responsibility for his ale beyond Hull; he declined also to involve himself with any financial arrangements after that point. He included with his account only freight charges to Hull (which were themselves not an inconsiderable addition to the price of the ale). ‘Our friends always pay us for ye Ale delivered at Burton,’ he wrote to a customer, ‘ and defray the consequent Expences of Fret, and shipping themselves, and as we ourselves wish to reap no Benefit therefrom, take this opportunity of subjoining.. .an acct. of the Fret, to Hull.’3 Insurance seems usually to have been arranged on the same plan, the customer asking the shipper rather than Benjamin Wilson to take it out for him. Similarly rigid conventions minimised the dangers of mismanaging the returns. All customers applying for ale received notice that ‘ it is my in¬ variable Custom that my friends by giving me an order at the time lodge a Credit either in Hambro’ or London’.4 Until he was thus ‘guaranteed in Foreign Connection.. .in some Indubitable House’, Wilson did not attempt to supply ale. Amsterdam merchants became just as important to him as his connexions in Hamburg or London for this purpose; they served also as security for the Baltic merchants selling staves and other goods to Wilson in return for ale. B. D. Weyland, J. and W. Anderson, Isaac Solly, William and Thomas Raikes, C. A. Petersson, Smith Wienholt and Co., Aubery and Co., Henry Law and Co. were the principal houses with an English office who acted as these intermediaries. Most 1 Allsopp Records: B.Wilson to Hingelberg and J. Abegg, 20,22 October 1791. See pp. 187-8. 2 Previously J. and W. Anderson, the timber importers, who shipped cargoes and arranged payment for Wilson had been doing his translating (B. Wilson to J. and W. Anderson, 1 September 1791). 8 Barnard, of. cit., vol. B P- 124. 4 E.g. B. Wilson to Walker (Danzig), 5 September 1802; to B. D. Weyland, 7 September 1791. 12

177

MBE

Distant Markets were prominent themselves as timber or stave importers from the Baltic. J. W. and M. van der Schaal, W. van Bruiven and Sons, Dupper and Co., were the main Dutch houses involved. In the 1790’s, Anderson was by far the most important. When Wilson had been assured by one of these connexions that his customer was sound, and that a sufficient credit for his consignment had been lodged, he would send off the ale, prove its departure from Hull with the bill of lading and draw a bill of exchange on the intermediary at three months. Occasionally, when money was tight, he pleaded for permission to draw at two months.1 Once, when he allowed Gorr of Danzig six months’ credit, he begged him not to disclose it, 1 as from the Advantage of the extended Credit, it might operate to my Prejudice with my other Dantzig friends... ’.a The pattern of trade, into which the Burton brewers were drawn, was not simply that of organising returns through Dutch and British merchants for their exports of ale to the Baltic. The Danzig customers who took the ale were themselves eager to offer commodities, rather than credit, in payment for it and the general circumstances of Anglo-Baltic trade were such as to encourage returns being made in commodities when the local situation of the Burton brewers did not discriminate against it. Britain’s balance of trade with the Baltic was very unfavourable. Her economy remained primarily dependent upon that area for the imports of a major raw material, timber, and other forest products; while the possi¬ bilities of sending equivalent quantities of goods to the Baltic were limited. The market was a restricted one in any event, and a major stake in that market belonged already to the Dutch. Hence gold poured into the area in the normal course of trade in settlement for the large timber, planks, staves, masts, raff, which made up the ‘timber’ imports and the iron, hemp, pitch, tar, turpentine and other commodities which came out of the Baltic. The freights of beer did little, collectively, to offset this unfavour¬ able balance. There were more bills of exchange on Hull and London available than there were credits on Danzig. There was every incentive, therefore, for Baltic merchants, who were primarily concerned in AngloBaltic trade as exporters rather than importers, to use their consignments of ale (which were convenient and useful to them as back-carriage and return cargoes rather than a main commodity in their trade) as credits for timber and staves. The lack of an efficient short-term credit market in Danzig, and the need for multilateral dealings on Amsterdam or Hamburg, encouraged this. In turn, the brewers needed large quantities of staves 1 B. Wilson to Tauber, 26 March 1791.

2 B. Wilson to Gorr, 26 March 1791. 1:78

The Baltic and India themselves. Where exchange rates could be unfavourable, there were advantages in taking returns in kind; and Burton itself was a useful distribution point for iron, staves and timber. The traffic fitted neatly with their use of barges and their merchanting connexions at Hull, London, Gainsborough and Horninglow. The Baltic merchants, too, found it convenient to reload the ships which had brought the ale at once and simplify their dealings by direct returns to those whose customers they were for ale. Not least, there were the slack summer months when the mash-tuns had to lie idle because of the high temperature. Then brewers might bestir themselves as merchants, handling the cargoes which came back to Hull in the same ships which had cleared before April with their ale. The extent of this reciprocal purchasing through such Danzig merchants as Barstow and Elliott, Zimmerman, Gorr, Guillaume du Bois, and von Ankum, depended on the state of the market in London and Hull, as much as on Benjamin Wilson’s own requirements at the time. Undoubtedly, he was pressed to take part of his returns in staves: occasionally, he did so despite the inconvenience. ‘ I assure you I would not order any this season,’ he wrote to Barstow and Elliott on 9 May 1791, ‘but on the Principle of Gratitude and Reciprocity—I have lately bo1 my Staves principally in London, where I send my Fourman to choose them, and tho’ they come higher in Price, the Advantage and Satisfaction wch result from the Liberty of Picking them, countervail Much for the Dearness thereof. ’ From the business accounts of Wilson (in the 1760’s) and Worthington (in the 1780’s) which Barnard saw on his visit to Burton in 1888, he thought that ledger-barter seldom exceeded 25 per cent of the returns for ale exported. But the occasional season might see importing on a scale extensive enough to overtop the value of exports. Between December 1789 and September 1790, for example, Wilson bought £16,500 worth of staves from his Danzig connexions, selling off small parcels to customers in Burton, Tamworth, Newark, Leicester and else¬ where. Even if he chose the best available in London for his own use, extensive dealings in them for profit multiplied the gains of his exporttrade, and were a condition of extending that trade in future seasons. A long series of letters makes clear how important such promises to buy the other merchant’s goods were, when offering goods of one’s own. And always, attached to the offer of purchase (which established the reciprocal obligation in the ensuing season) was the request for the staves to be shipped on the ‘Porter’ or ‘Humber’, ‘in both wch. Ships I have 179

12-2

Distant Markets a Property’.1 Rothlander and Boyd of St Petersburg accepted a trial consignment of 29 half-barrels of ale in March 1789; also on condition that Worthington accepted payment in staves.2 Staves were not the only item which figured as a return consignment to Burton. Benjamin Wilson accepted occasional loads of hemp, or even ‘sable iron’ and flax, in payment for beer,3 and his own specialisation in staves must be seen within a more differentiated family enterprise. His father, also named Benjamin, had been the founder of the brewery and, towards the end of his life, had set up in trade with his sons, Benjamin Jr, William and John Walker Wilson, in joint partnership. Benjamin Wilson Jr became the active member of his father’s family enterprise, travelling regularly to Hull, and even to Danzig, searching for orders and negotiating with merchants at their base.4 His brother, John Walker Wilson, eventu¬ ally set up on his own as a brewer and ‘Raff’ merchant at Burton. He became, apparently, the wealthiest of the three, more fully committed to importing timber, hemp, flax and iron than the others, although concen¬ trating on his timber-yard and being registered in the trade directories only as a ‘brewer and raff-merchant’.5 His exports of ale, too, were more than balanced by imports of Baltic produce in some years.6 In his balance sheets, after 1778, the net assets of the brewery are worth much more than the timber stocks and debts, but both are surpassed by the valuation of his estates. From this time onward he became steadily more involved as an investor in canal shares and landed property as wealth piled up which was not reinvested in trade.7 In 1795, he was paying calls on £19,000 in canal stock; while he had at least a further £7000 in Consols.8 Little is known about the business fortunes of the third brother, William Wilson, who bought flax and hemp from John Walker Wilson9— presumably for resale—but whose original partnership with his brothers in brewing had lapsed before the letter books of Benjamin Wilson Jr begin 1 E.g. B. Wilson to Fremants, 9 May; Von Ankum, 11 June; G. Freize, 18 June; J. Gorr, 28 June; Zimmerman, 8 July; W. T. and J. Kenworthy, 15 August 1791. 2 Barnard, op. cit. vol. 1, pp. 411-12. 3 Allsopp Records: Day Book, 27 December 1789; 8 October 1790. 4 Ibid. Journals, 1770; History of Samuel Allsopp and Sons (1924). 5 Molyneux, op. cit. pp. 224-5. 6 Allsopp Records: J. W. Wilson, Stock Book, 1778-83. 7 Valuations in 1783 are: Brewing Account, £4700; Raff Account, £2015; Estates, £8410; other credits (net), £2935. The brewery was sold to Worthington in 1790 (Barnard, op. cit. vol. 1, p. 411). 8 Allsopp Records: J. W. Wilson, Private Ledgers. The canals were the Union, Worcester and Birmingham,Ellesmere, Grand Junction, Warwick and Birmingham; Warwick and Napton, Warwick and Braunston. 9 J. W. Wilson, Journals, 1770 et seq.

l8o

The Baltic and India in 1789. He is mentioned independently in the British Directory of 1791 as a brewer.1 Benjamin Wilson’s only daughter, Ann, had married James Allsopp of Derby (also of Birlingham Hall) in 1778. Their son Samuel, born in August 1780, was to take over the partnership from his uncle in 1806, after several years of joint enterprise.2 As a young man, he followed his uncle’s initiation into the business by travelling to the Baltic, meeting customers in 1801,3 where his brother Thomas Allsopp is also said to have searched for orders.4 The family involvements in the Baltic trade may well have led to a certain degree of specialisation between the brothers in imports. John Walker Wilson, although himself a timber merchant, bought staves from Benjamin. Benjamin Wilson himself took, as returns, little except staves and bills, and he refused to form a connexion with the trading house of John and William Hentig because John Walker Wilson already had an interest in Carhill and Company of Hull.5 The extensive trading activities of the Burton brewers were not only induced by their commitment to the Baltic market, but flourished also on the raw-material side of their brewing business. Benjamin Wilson’s role as a brewer was thus flanked at both ends by his role as a merchant. His ventures in the grain and hop markets do not appear to have been as extensive as the trading he conducted on his returns from exporting beer. Even so, more capital was put out to profit in this way in collateral ventures to brewing than accumulated in fixed plant at the brewery. Collectively, it is conceivable that, in some years, the trading ventures might bring a greater return than the central brewing enterprise; commercially the brewery stood as the foundation of them all. Benjamin Wilson bought barley much in excess of his own needs as brewer, in order to supply customers in both barley and malt—and even wort—(in quantities large enough to net him £500 on a single lot purchased). He sometimes bought quantities of Danzig wheat costing above £1000, purely for re-sale. When he had to enter the London markets, sometimes he speculated just enough— as he put it—that ‘ I might sell it again to pay my Expences of my journey 1 Molyneux, pp. 225-6. 2 Allsopp Records: Letter Books, S. Allsopp to T. Shorthose, 6 November 1806; to T. Williamson, 19 January 1809. A receipt of B. Wilson dated 24 October 1807 acknowledges £2750 from S.’ Allsopp for part of the assets transferred ‘30th Sept. last’. 3 Incomplete and inaccurate accounts are given by Barnard, op. cit.; W. H. Beale, Romance of Great Businesses, vol. 11, pp. 73-80; Illustrated London News, 16 July 1853. 4 Beale, op. cit. pp. 77-8; History of Samuel Allsopp and Sons (1924). No mention of Thomas Allsopp occurs in surviving letter books at Burton. Samuel’s travels are mentioned inB. Wilson s letters to Von Ankum, 5 September 1801; to J. Sales, 14 November 1801. 6 Letter Books, B. Wilson to J. and W. Hentig, 11 March 1791.

l8l

Distant Markets to and from London’.1 He kept hops at the warehouse of his Southwark merchants, waiting for a rise in price, as a similar investment—unconnected with brewing but dependent for success upon his experience in the markets as a brewer.2 When he became an active partner in a cotton mill in 17843— his business venture most completely dissociated from brewing—the side of the business he undertook was the buying of raw cotton, where much of his general commercial experience of raw-material markets could be put to use. His commercial contacts as a brewer, in any case, had led him to Danzig, Amsterdam, London, Hull, Manchester and Liverpool—in all of which centres he found scope for collateral trade and profits. When French conquests and Russian hostility closed the Baltic to British trade in 1806, a complete reorganisation of trade was forced upon the Burton brewers. Some might attempt to smuggle ale in supposedly neutral vessels, and as Russian property, from Heligoland; but the oppor¬ tunities of getting away large consignments at low freight and insurance rates were gone while the countervailing imports were problematical. Samuel Allsopp (who had now taken over his uncle’s customers) wrote to an old customer who managed to get a load of staves to Hull from Stettin, ‘This appears to me a very hazardous proceeding and that Idea is borne out by the enormous premium required for Insurance... ’.4 Fie, and his fellows, were forced to turn to the home market as the main stop¬ gap for their vanished foreign trade, although a little of the ale sent to Liverpool was destined for the Belfast, Dublin and West Indian markets. There were two key areas within the country which absorbed most of the old Baltic consignments—London and Lancashire. Some contacts in London already existed, and Burton ale was known by repute there, reaching the capital in the traditional way down the Trent to Hull. More important, since it was stronger and more expensive than most beer sold in the country (it was, on average, id. per quart above London porter), the wealthiest possible market was needed. Lancashire itself was one of the most rapidly expanding areas of consumption in the land. Much the greater part of the consignments sent by canal into the county was sold in public houses there rather than exported from Liverpool; although transport charges from Burton were still too heavy to allow its ale to challenge local manufacturers in the mass market. ‘ If we lived only a few 1 B. Wilson to F. Kabuun, 5 September 1801; to J. F. Laber (Danzig), 12 November 1803; to Brocksop and Newman (London), 23 May 1805. 2 B. Wilson to Sir William Stephenson, n June 1791; to Sir James Sanderson, 19 May 1791; to Prince and Co. 30 June 1804. 3 Series of letters beginning April 1801. See p. 323. 4 S. Allsopp to Russell and Muir, 28 July; to B. Wilson, 11 July 1809. 182

The Baltic and India miles nearer..wrote Allsopp to Arthur Heywood of Liverpool, ‘we could sell our Malt Liquor upon the same terms as the Liverpool Brewers do and would soon acquire a fortune.’1 Samuel Allsopp arranged for trusted contacts at West Bromwich, Hull, Manchester and Liverpool to act as his agents (at 5 per cent commission), seeking customers, arranging deliveries and remittances. Every letter sent out to other clients begged them to recommend the ale to their friends. ‘We have no connections in your part of the country,’ Allsopp added to such a request he made of James Culmer of Canterbury, ‘not having been engaged in the country business long. ’2 Taking every opportunity open to him, he pressed samples upon peers and London publicans with equal assiduity.3 Supplying the internal market sometimes entailed more complicated journeys by canal than had the Baltic consignments. The orders were also smaller and less regular, so that it proved more difficult to arrange full cargoes for the boats, which might then be accompanied by a guard. Pilferage was a perennial trouble on the canals as much as on the sea-going ships. Allsopp was eventually persuaded by this problem, as much as by slow sales, to abandon the West Bromwich agency.4 The business foundations which Benjamin Wilson had laid for supply¬ ing a few contacts in London could not bear the weight of the trade which Samuel Allsopp wished to develop in the Metropolis. Getting sufficient ale in good condition regularly to many customers, with casks and receipts returned as regularly to Burton, demanded, he considered, vaults and salaried servants on the plan Youngers had begun to operate, rather than an ordinary agent working on commission. He therefore rented a ware¬ house in Love Lane, Eastcheap, and appointed a manager. This man, Robert Oates, was prudent enough but unenterprising. At first Allsopp thought that ‘his connexions were not sufficiently extensive’.5 Within a year, he suspected that the lack of returns from London signified that Oates had begun to trade with his brewer’s capital. Hence the pulverising rebuke launched from Burton on 28 August 1808: ‘I wonder you did not startle back with horror and say within yourself, “I am not the man I pretended to be. I have abused my trust”. Why, Sir you ought to have sold 500 Casks of Ale for a Salary of Eighty Pounds pr. Annm. and got the Money in by this Time.’ Understandably, it was the aggravation ol 1 Letter dated 13 April 1808. 2 Letter dated 10 October 1808 3 E.g. S. Allsopp to W. E. Lester (Poulterer’s Arms, Cheapside), 28 November 1808; to Lord Doveridge, 10 October 1808. 4 S. Allsopp to J. Gilbins (W. Bromwich), 24 December 1808. 5 S. Allsopp to T. Shorthose, 19 September 1808.

183

Distant Markets similar annoyances occasioned by doing business at a distance (which could not be directly under their personal control) which called forth the similar outbursts from Thomas Greenall and Sampson Hanbury. When Oates’ salary had been stopped until such time as he had made the sales, business—and tempers—improved. His partner, Thomas Shorthose, proved to have the opposite faults of temerity and negligence; whereupon Allsopp gave up the idea of direct management and curtailed his original plan. ‘ I am not an advocate for doing a vast deal of Business,’ he wrote in October 1808, ‘and supplying the Metropolis without dis¬ crimination. I had rather do less and do it well... I am now quite dis¬ gusted with the system of keeping a vault in London; bad Management eats up more than my Profits.’1 He therefore turned to his old practices in the Baltic market in an attempt to reduce his risks and avoid the fixed charges of a warehouse and salaried servants. Commission sales began with the same two men as agents, in Hatton Garden and Catherine Street, Strand, receiving 5 per cent commission, the costs of carriage and an invoice price of 2s. 6d. per gallon. On one point he refused to compromise or to abdicate his personal responsibility and the chance of personal reputation: Oates and Shorthose received the warning ‘ I never agree to my ale being sold under any other firm than my own name’. He sketched out the form of words they were to use for their card: Samuel Allsopp, Successor to Benj. Wilson, Ale Brewer, Burton upon Trent. Shorthose and Oates, agents.... ’2 Developing inland markets meant adapting a traditional product to their new requirements. The Baltic merchants had often complained that Wilson’s ale was excessively dark in comparison to that of his rivals in the trade, evidently believing that paleness was a desirable quality. Wilson’s reply was always that the high colour was a mark of strength and that he was not surprised, therefore, that his ale was ‘higher’ in colour than his neighbours! Strength, he maintained, was a greater virtue than colour.3 He always promised to suit their wishes with regard to colour ‘but the Xth [strength], he insisted, ‘must be preserved or the Liquor will not, cannot keep Sound’.4 The traditional Burton ale sent to the Baltic was 1 S. Allsopp to T. Shorthose, io October 1808. S. Allsopp to Oates and Shorthose, 1 November 1808. Eventually, Shorthose developed wild plans for supplying the Walcheren Expedition with Allsopp’s ale. He became negligent and went bankrupt in Allsopp’s debt (S. Allsopp to J. Shorthose, 31 August, 6 December 1809). 3 I.e. B. Wilson to Fremants and Co. 9 May 1791. 1 B. Wilson to Tauber, 16 May 1791. 184

The Baltic and India reputedly ‘ nut-brown fairly sweet, and of great strength. For the English market, the ale needed to be much paler if it was to compete successfully with the increasingly popular ales brewed in London and the home counties. Allsopp, therefore, wrote to customers in various parts of the country asking ‘ whether Pale Ale or that of a darker Colour is most liked with you,n in an attempt to conform to regional tastes, and he even asked his London agent to send him a ‘ bottle of the Windsor ale—in a Box safe and say how it is sold pr. Bareli’,1 2 so that he might model his brew upon it. Similar accommodation was offered to customers in the degree of bitterness the ale possessed. The Liverpool market demanded more hops and, conse¬ quently, greater bitterness in the beer than other regions—a trend London was also adopting.3 To follow the spread of London habits in the provinces, Allsopp added porter to his other brews ‘ under the Instructions of one of the first Porter Brewers in England,’ following an unsuccessful exchange of his ale for consignments from the Coventry Porter Brewery.4 Such attempts to model the product to a changing market were tem¬ porarily forgotten when the Baltic market reopened after the collapse of the Continental System. Always, the Burton brewers had regarded their policy of developing the English market as a temporary expedient until normal trading conditions returned. ‘ I sincerely wish affairs on the Con¬ tinent would brighten,’ wrote Allsopp to an old correspondent in Danzig in July 1809, ‘ so that things might return into their old Channels again.... ’5 However, tariffs were soon to end for good the prosperous trade which Napoleon had only interrupted. Throughout these years, porter had also travelled to St Petersburg and the Baltic market from London, possibly in even larger quantities than ale from Burton, and the skills of porter brewing were first transplanted to the Baltic. An ex-M.P. for Bletchingley, Mr Stein (who was caustically described by the London porter brewers as ‘entirely devoted to the service of his country wherever it did not interfere with his own interest’) set up a porter brewery in St Petersburg; in 1822, the local trade was rewarded with a monopoly of sales through a heavy tariff.6 With the one large urban area which was 1 S. Allsopp to Dey and Co. i April 1808. 2 S. Allsopp to R. Oates, 19 April 1808. 3 S. Allsopp to R. Oates, 21 January 1809. 4 S. Allsopp to A. Hey wood (Liverpool), 25 April 1808; to W. Yates, 29 August 1808; to Summerfield, Lloyd and Owen (Coventry Porter Brewery), 6 May 1809. Allsopp asked the Coventry brewers to take back the inferior porter he had bought from them at a reduced price, under the threat of his advertising it in the local press at a cut-rate—which would kill their reputation. 5 S. Allsopp to J. C. Splitgerber, 29 July 1809. 6 We had also discriminated against Russian timber, hemp and corn {Pari. Papers, 1821, VI, Report.. .on Foreign Trade, p. 62). 185

Distant Markets able to receive direct shipments barred to British exporters, the Russian market ceased to exist. When a local porter brewery was founded in Gothenburg in 1826, English exports of beer to Sweden came under the same axe. However, such misfortunes had the happy result of turning the Burton brewers towards India and other ‘British’ markets overseas. These became more than a compensation for the lost Baltic market, developed less than a century before. Throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century documentary evidence makes it clear that Benjamin Wilson’s sales were predominantly to the Baltic market. It may be inferred from less direct evidence that his competitors, Bass, Worthington and then Salt, had a not dissimilar pattern of trade. This did not exclude English customers. Wilson was selling consignments of thirty casks to merchants in London in 1789, before difficulties arose in the Baltic, and he supplied local public houses in Burton, distant publicans at Manchester, and private customers as far afield as Battle in Sussex, Ramsgate, Chester, North Shields and Here¬ ford.1 Such accounts abound in his ledgers but they remained for the most part petty and scattered; while he did not refuse such customers, his main efforts were devoted to extending the foreign trade upon which his business fortunes—not only his fortunes as a brewer—so largely depended. Indeed his sales within England flourished only because the shortness of the trading season, for a brewer exporting to the Baltic, gave some convenient weeks for brewing in the late spring, before the hot weather put a stop to production until the autumn. ‘My business... being principally in the Brewery for exportation, ’ he wrote to a London friend, ‘ in the Summer months I have but little or nothing for a Clerk to do. ’2 The seasonal rhythm forced upon his activities by nature and commerce explains much about his varied interests. Normally, he would not begin to brew regularly until the beginning of November, preferring to wait until the harvest was fully gathered and until he had had time to buy much of his barley for the season and to prepare a stock of malt in advance. It seems clear, too, that he was sometimes distrustful of the weather in October, although, for brewers generally, this was the prime month for the new season’s brewing. From early November until March, Wilson worked almost exclusively for the ships which would be clearing from Hull to the Baltic in the spring. When a Derby customer sent in an order in mid-March he replied that it was totally out of his power to send ale for 1 Allsopp Records: Day Book, 1789. 2 Allsopp Records: Letter Books, B. Wilson to G. Freize, 5, 10 March 1791.

186

The Baltic and India summer consumption there, ‘ having been every Day unremittingly busy for Exportation’.1 When the ships had gone (by the end of the month) then he could turn his attentions to Derby. By the time that other vessels arrived from the Baltic or the first boats, which had cleared from Hull, had returned for a second trip, it was too dangerous to brew again for a summer voyage. The vagaries of the season were a constant hazard in the Hull trade. In particular, a spell of fair weather in February always tempted shipowners and captains to set off in ballast, in order to secure the better prices for Baltic produce in this country which were available for the first cargoes landed in the new season. The beer, which provided one of the chief freights on the outward run, was always liable to be sacrificed for this chance of gaining on the import prices. The spring of 1791 was such a season. Heavy rains had prevented good navigation between Burton and Gainsborough, delaying Wilson’s cargoes,2 yet the Elbing and Danzig merchants were eager to see their ships clear from Hull. ‘The wind has been Westerly for a long Time this Spring,’ he wrote in February, ‘which has induced the owners of the Ships who had no Expectation of Freight out to depart unusually early.. .it is not possible to send away the Ships earlier than about the Period any year, except the Weather is very favour¬ able indeed for Brewing.’ When working ‘in the full spirit’ of his business, Wilson took a month to brew 500 barrels. As he did not dare begin until the end of October (because the temperature until then was usually ‘really dangerous for ye Quality and also for its ultimate Preservation’),3 he could never promise to deliver the substantial quantities needed for nearly empty ships at Hull before the end of January.4 If owners wanted freights, they had to await the brewers’ convenience. ‘ I am not willing, notwithstanding the Importunity of the Shipowners, to open my Winter’s Business sooner’, he explained to a Danzig merchant. ‘These men think of obliging you and engaging your Freight for another Year by Promises of a very Extraordinary Kind, without considering the bad Consequences ... I am of Opinion if the Ships leave Hull by the Middle of March it is soon enough.... ’5 When weather conditions were not suitable for an early departure from Hull, or where shipowners knew that their vessels could not catch the first Baltic consignment of the season, they sought freight from the Burton brewers to prevent an unprofitable voyage out¬ ward. Here they had to face the preference which the brewers naturally 1 3 3 4

B. Wilson to T. Barrow (Derby), 16 March 1802. B. Wilson to Moiling, 17 February; to J. Hingelberg, 19 February 1791. B. Wilson to J. D. Abegg (Elbing), 19 February 1791. Ibid. 26 March 1791. 5 B. Wilson to J. and J. Roskampff.

l87

Distant Markets gave to ships in which they possessed an interest. In 1789-90, Benjamin Wilson had one-third of the profits of eight voyages which the ‘Porter’ and the ‘Humber’ had made to the Baltic (which share totalled £358); and one-sixteenth of the profits of two voyages of a ‘ Greenlandmen ’ ship (probably a whaler), which came to £18. 15.?.1 He also sought to take an interest in R. Etherington’s new ship in 1802.2 When his ale was sought by J. and W. Anderson, in 1791, he declined because serving their ship, he told them, would mean that the ‘ Porter ’ would have to leave Hull with an incomplete cargo ‘and is the ship I am immediately concerned in’.3 The consignments offered, although relatively few in number, were large enough to be of great value for the outward freight of the chosen ship. Wilson sometimes felt that his interest was strong enough to delay the date of sailing. ‘ I believe it will be in my Power to serve your Ship with several Hundred Casks4 of Ale providing you are willing to make the time of sailing agreeable to me ’ was a proposal he made to the owners of the ‘Dantzig’ in 1802 and, in the event, 900 half-casks were sent off to reach her by 30 March.5 Usually, the ‘Sally’, the ‘Humber’ and the ‘Porter’ received at least three or four hundred casks of ale from this one brewery, on which the freight charges would have gone some way to covering the overhead costs of their outward voyage.6 Sometimes, Wilson claimed that his orders alone could almost fill a vessel.7 Since he often had an equivalent interest in bulk freights in staves from the Baltic, it was very natural that he should invest in the profits of the voyage itself through part-ownership of the vessels and make sure that his own orders contributed to the profits of the chosen ships. Such mass cargoes, how¬ ever, were very different to the small number of casks of beer which were exported to other foreign markets. The Bristol and Liverpool ships, in particular, very seldom had any significant proportion of their freights in beer. Only some of the vessels loading in the Thames for Ireland took on porter in equivalent quantities. From 1790 onwards, the great bulk of these Baltic cargoes were destined for Danzig, with lesser quantities going to Elbing, Riga and St Petersburg. It may well be that the direction and the organisation of the trade had 1 Allsopp Records: Day Book. 2 B. Wilson to Capt. Rosindale, 8 February 1802. This was ‘only if the proprietors were “Substantial”’. 3 B. Wilson, 28 February, 11 March 1791. 4 Burton casks differed in size from those in use elsewhere, being of 40 gallons and 80 gallons (S. Allsopp to Dey and Co. 1 April 1808). 6 B. Wilson to R. Etherington, 3, 24 December 1802. 6 B. Wilson to John Smith (Gainsborough), 10 February 1804; to T. Burnby, 28 February 1803. 7 B. Wilson to E. du Bois (Danzig), 24 February 1791.

l88

The Baltic and India changed since the mid-decades of the century, although the lack of letterbooks for the period before 1789 make it difficult to be sure of Benjamin Wilson’s previous pattern of trading. In the mid-i770’s, despite some direct contacts with Danzig and St Petersburg merchants, Wilson affirmed that his main negotiations were with Hull and London houses ‘which may be called their Representatives and from whom we receive the greatest Share of our orders’. At that period St Petersburg also seemed to have been relatively more important as a market, orders for over 600 hogsheads being received for the 1774 season, although not completed.1 Of course, ale sent to Danzig may have been re-exported. Exports of ale to the East Indies probably began with the founding of the first British settlements in the East; certainly they rose as British commitments in the sub-continent increased, reflecting the increased export of Britons for administration, trade and fighting. Six hundred and ninety-five barrels only were registered for export from England to these parts in 1697; 1480 barrels went in 1750; 1680 in 1775; 9000 in 1800 and 19,500 in 1830. After 1815 almost the entire trade (worth almost £3 per barrel) was in the hands of free traders rather than the East India Company, and the great expansion in shipments had been largely en¬ couraged by the abandonment of the Company’s monopoly in 1813.2 Both porter and ale risked the journey in increasing amounts, almost entirely from London, although certain of the consignments leaving the Thames on East Indiamen may well have reached London from the outports. Only the strongest malt liquor brewed would stand any chance of survival in the long journey through the tropics. Beer in bottle probably did better than beer in cask, aided by being air-tight and under pressure through corking. Benjamin Wilson and Samuel Allsopp often advised customers to bottle the ale which they wanted to survive into the summer, leaving the bottles uncorked for a time to allow the ale to get flat.3 This was exactly the procedure adopted by a London wine merchant, Kenton, who is said to have first shipped porter successfully to the East Indies. Once flat, it was corked and sealed so that secondary and tertiary fermentation on the voyage brought it up to the necessary state of ‘briskness’ by the time it reached India.4 1 Barnard, op. cit. vol. I, pp. 182-5; B. Wilson to C. Best, 12 January 17742 Pari. Papers, 1821, vii, Report...on Foreign Trade, p. 322, App. L., P. Over-trading caused a decline in shipments from 40,925 barrels in 1817 to 10,850 barrels in 1820. 3 Allsopp Records: S. Allsopp to R. Pickering (Liverpool), 31 August 1808. 4 J. Brasbridge, Fruits of Experience (1824), pp. 244-5; Hist. MSS. Comm. Graham MSS. p. 55. The rise of sales from the porter breweries to ‘bottlers’ suggests the development of this practice. 189

Distant Markets Some ale, perhaps unregistered as exports, went in the private baggage of officers of East Indiamen and naval commanders in the eighteenth century, to be advertised for sale in the Calcutta newspapers on arrival.1 The early specialisation of commercial shipments, however, and the place London brewers had in the trade, are revealed in the first name to become well known—almost branded—in the export trade in beer to India, which was that of Hodgson. George Hodgson was brewing at the Bow Brewery (on the banks of the Lea by the old bridge at Bow, East London) from October 1752, when the first partnership was formed. His son, Mark Hodgson, of the same brewery, petitioned the Board of Excise in 1802 in order to regain the duty paid on a consignment of 150 barrels of ale which had been shipped for the East, and subsequently wrecked, in the ‘ Hindostan’.2 By this time, as the quantity in this single shipment indicates, the India market was playing as important a role for Hodgson as the Baltic had done in the fortunes of the Burton brewers. ‘Hodgson’s India Ale’ had become a generic name in the trade. One or two other small London brewers could also depend primarily upon this export market for ale. Barclays brewed ‘India Ale’ from 1799 onwards, and some shipments were made from Scotland.3 Even so, Hodgson’s India Ale had the main trade until after 1821. Thereafter, the rising demand and good prices obtainable in the East Indies lured other London and provincial brewers into the trade. As in the Baltic market, the absence of full freights out¬ ward meant that the shipping charges were relatively small, considering the distances involved. Traditionally, it was said in 1833, they were the same as the charges from London to Edinburgh: the more valuable home¬ ward cargoes had to make the profits on shipping charges for both the outward and the inward voyages.4 Charringtons had supplied a steady home trade in fine ale of 16,00020,000 barrels annually (plus a proportionate quantity of table beer) for many years, sending only occasional shipments abroad.5 But following successful trial shipments to Madras and Calcutta in 1827, when a few hogsheads were sent to each Presidency, more regular foreign trade began. 1 E. Cotton, East Indiamen (1949), p. 35. 2 Jf.H.C. xxxiv, 103; Excise (TLB), 1372, f. 399; 1354, 23 February 1770; Fortunes made in Business (1884), vol. 11, pp. 419-21; Pennant, History of London (1790), p. 278; B.M. (Prints and Drawings) Crace Coll, xxxm, 28; Notes and Queries, 7th Ser. vi (1888), 329, 417. 3 Pari. Papers, 1819, v, p. 479 (Walsby); 1831, VII, p. 44; 1835, xxxi, pp. 38, 183; Barclay Records: Rest Books, 1799-1830 (Beer Stocks). 4 Pari. Papers, 1833, vi, Report.. .on Manufactures, Commerce, Shipping, Q. 2200 (E. de H. Larpent). 6 Charrington Records: Letter Book, C. to Griffith and Co. (Madras), 18 March 1828.

The Baltic and India The brewers announced to Griffiths and Co. at Madras; Adam, Skinner and Co. at Bombay and Bruce, Allen and Co. at Calcutta that they were prepared to supply foreign markets to a large extent, should their ale be approved. The brewery always demanded ‘ good bills ’ in return; refusing on principle to accept returns in merchandise which their correspondents in the East and elsewhere pressed them to do.1 Individual consignments sent were usually 30-40 hogsheads each, but some were as large as 120 hogsheads. Occasional orders went to such far-flung places as Valparaiso, Colombo, Batavia, Demerara (always being consigned to British merchants there); but the heart of their foreign trade remained the East Indian markets of Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. To these places, freight charges and servicing costs were over 20 per cent of the value of the beer. As the trade entailed shipping crates of bottles and corks (so that it could be bottled on arrival if not actually sent in bottles on the voyage), further expense was unavoidable. For example, one consignment of 30 tuns (120 hogsheads), sent to Bombay, cost £753 in all, excluding insurance. Of this, £540 was for the ale, £118 for freight and ‘primage’, £95 for bottles and corks.2 One of the difficulties of such distant trade was that so long a time necessarily elapsed between placing the order and receiving the ale, that commercial conditions and prices might well have changed for the worse in the meanwhile. When this happened (as in 1830), Charringtons limited their shipments3 because the chance of loss was so high; in any case, it was impossible for them to ship the beer home again from a distant market. Even if it stood the strain of the double voyage without deteriora¬ tion (which was unlikely) they wrote that, after repayment of drawbacks and new freight charges, ‘it was of little or no value’.4 Charringtons called all the ale they shipped to the East Indies Pale Ale’, and it seems clear that the qualities of paleness and brightness were those chiefly sought by tropical markets. Bottling the ale for final sales would in itself, of course, emphasise the characteristics of clarity and ‘sparkle’ and tend to put a thick, dark beer, such as porter, at a disadvan¬ tage. Samuel Allsopp was conscious that this also applied to consignments for the West Indies, writing that it was of no consequence if the ale did become ‘a little hard and old so that it is bright, in short it is preferred.’5 1 2 3 4

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

C. to Capt. E. Denny, 9 May 1828; to J. Geddes (Demerara), 28 December 1829. C. to Adam, Skinner and Co. 6 November 1829. 18 March 1830. C. to Capt. H. C. Mackay (Boston), 25 January 1828; to Mitchell and Ashton

(Valparaiso), 22 May 1829. 5 Allsopp Records: S. Allsopp to W. Coulborn, 28 December 1809. 191

Distant Markets And, when Burton brewers turned to the East Indian market as a substitute for the Baltic, they set out once more by deliberate research to design their product for the new market, modelling their brew on Hodgson’s style of ale which had been so successful in the East. Salt, Allsopp and Bass each claimed precedence for the achievement of imitating Hodgson’s India Ale in the years immediately after 1821, when the new product Burton ‘East India Pale Ale’ brought them fame in the home market as well as prosperity from sales to India.1 In 1832-3, of 12,000 barrels of strong beer and ale reaching Bengal, Bass had exported 5200 barrels, Allsopp 1400 and Hodgson 3600.2 Almost certainly, the virtues of Burton water enabled them to eclipse the original product in the trade which they had begun by imitating. The salts in the water of the Trent basin developed the qualities of ale brewed in Hodgson’s style beyond the point to which he was himself limited by the softer waters of the Thames basin, less charged with sulphates and carbonates. Burton ‘India Pale Ale’ had the remarkable virtue of arriving pale, clear and sparkling in Calcutta, more successfully than any other. The name survives to show the importance of this foreign market for the Burton firms when they were still relatively small. India was the initial market for a new product which was, in due course, to have so large a stake in the fortunes of the Burton brewers in the British market. Considering the high relative costs of transporting beer (which have conditioned the marketing structure of the brewing industry so power¬ fully) there is irony in the fact that the fame of the product which the railways enabled at last to be deployed in the home market should have been born and nurtured in places as far distant as the Baltic and India. Nothing could show more clearly the difference between the costs of overland and water carriage in the pre-railway age or the importance which the disparity of bulk between exports and imports in certain trading areas could have upon the economics of transport.

For these special

reasons Burton on Trent remained the only true example in the British Isles of a ‘brewing town’ in the same economically significant sense that Dundee was a jute town or Merthyr Tydfil an iron town. In virtually all other places the size and development of the local urban market con1 W. Tizard, Theory and Practice of Brewing (1846). See Barnard, op. cit. vol. 1, p. 118; vol. 11, pp. 112, 421; vol. iv, p. 5; W. H. Beale, Romance of Great Businesses, vol. 11, pp. 78-80; History of Samuel Allsopp and Sons (1924); Fortunes made in Business (1884), vol. 11, pp. 419-21. 2 Comparative View of the External Commerce of Bengal (Calcutta, 1833) (quoted Baxter, Ph.D. thesis, London, 1945, p. 56). 192

The Baltic and India ditioned the size of its breweries. In Burton alone was the growth of the town itself in the nineteenth century, and even before, determined by the localisation there of a factor of production for the brewing industry— special water—and special local skills. OTHER OVERSEAS MARKETS

The West Indies, Africa, New South Wales, South America, Madeira and the Azores, Spain and Portugal—even such destinations as ‘ports in the Mediterranean’—all took-anodest "but unceasing shipments of beer from England. The trade reflects the same story as the Indian market. Where Englishmen—^perhaps, more prominently, Scotsmen—settled, or worked, abroad in these conditions, English beer went out to them with the mixed cargoes of cloth, ironmongery, bricks, tiles, nails, glass-ware, muskets, powder and shot, spirits and wine, puncheons of felt hats, the inevitable ‘great bugle’ going to Africa—all that mixed parcel of dry goods which life and trade evidently demanded.

And not only the traders: when

Colonel John Graham was on his way to the Cape of Good Hope in 1805 he wrote to his mother in Scotland: ‘The men are regularly supplied with fresh beef, oranges, pumpkins, and for some days back a quart of English ale per diem—what do you think of that?n Being a boiled liquid, beer was often medically preferable, quite apart from reasons of morale, to local water. Shipments of beer for the West Indies were not all for British planters in the islands. Some was re-exported, in return for specie, to the French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, with the negroes, furniture, pro¬ visions and hardware traded to them.2 As might be expected, the beer and ale went out, with the other goods, from the ports in the British Isles where the sugar and the rum, the tobacco and the cotton came in—London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow.

Always, London beer exports were

dominated by porter, or the export variety of that beer. In the case of the West Indies, imports largely declined after 1800, under pressure of German and Swedish brewers moving into the South American and Havana markets, which, until then, had been served mainly from Jamaica.3 1 Hist. MSS. Comm. Graham, MSS. 72. 2 B.M. Add. MS. 38,390. Committee of Trade, 8 June 1787. 3 Pari. Papers, 1835, xxxi, 15th Report..., 38. Tennent says here that Havana was a large market. It took the largest consignment ever recorded before 1830 from Bristol—of 600 barrels, from George’s Brewery, 29 April 1819 (Bristol Public Reference Library, Lading Lists, 1819). As early as 1705, Bristol merchants successfully petitioned against an import duty of is. 6d. per dozen bottles of beer, imposed by the governor of Jamaica (Hist. MSS. Comm. House of Lords MSS. 1706-8, 267). 13

193

MBE

Distant Markets A closer look at the trade from Bristol after 1770 may reveal exactly how miscellaneous it could be.1 Total exports of beer were modest in all years, being between 3000 and 7000 barrels.

At first, the trade was almost

entirely in the hands of people other than brewers; four glass-manu¬ facturers, eight coopers and hoopers, two general merchants and one brewer were exporting in 1773, the brewer shipping under 100 barrels; and more was in bottle than in cask. It went out in ships great and small, to destinations far and near; and was never absent from those going to colonial stations. A consignment was seldom as much as 100 barrels; and beer was never the only cargo carried. The presence of the glassmanufacturers as beer exporters is explained by the bottles outside the beer. Very large quantities of empty glass bottles left Bristol annually— particularly for Ireland and Portugal—and, where beer was wanted also, it was obviously convenient for the glass-manufacturers to fill up their bottles with it. By 1820 the position had changed. The same kind of ship was leaving Bristol for the same kind of destination, both within the peripheral area of the Bristol Channel to Ireland (for which Bristol was the local metropolitan centre) and in her long-distance trades to Spain and Portugal, Africa and the West Indies. The ships carried the same mixed cargoes. But the beer on board was now much more in cask than in bottle, and the trade was entirely in the hands of general merchants—eleven in 1819—and three or four brewers. Five of the merchants were named ‘bottled-liquor dealers’, a new trade which had sprung up in the wake of large breweries. Now, the brewers had over half of the export trade in their hands. The development was a reflection of the change in the structure of the brewing industry in Bristol, as in other larger English towns, where a few Common Brewers were dominating production. It will always be impossible to tell how much of the English beer sent to the rest of Europe and the Mediterranean was drunk by Britons. Some evidence suggests that the greater proportion satisfied English thirsts—as when Whitbread sent porter to the English Hotel, Flushing, to Hugh Jones in Paris and J. Walker at Calais or when Trumans supplied the Rising Sun Hotel at Boulogne.2 Shipments from Trumans after 1809 (for which period an export-ledger survives) were always under 1000 barrels annually, being sent in small consignments to the West Indies and North European ports; occasionally to Lisbon and Gibraltar.

In some

1 B.P.R.L. Lading Lists, 1773-80, 1801-20. 2 Whitbread Records (Southill): Box I, Country Ledger, 1792; Truman Records: Letter Books, S. Hanbury to Hasketh, 26 June 1789, Export Ledger, 1S09-24.

I94

Other Overseas Markets years, no consignments at all were recorded; in no case is the recipient of the order named. However, one may presume that beer would tend to remain in the ports for reasons of transport costs, and the English, apart from travellers and diplomatic staffs, remained in the ports for reasons of trade. Excited observers might claim that English beer was of more esteem among the Turks than any other sort of drink, but Moslem temperance and the Smyrna factory could account for all that was ever sent there.1 The same situation may well have been the case with Spain and Portugal, the ‘Streits’ and Italy, where the indigenous population belonged to a Latin, and therefore wine, culture. Where they did not, in northern Europe, imports were little larger.

France imposed high tariffs;2 the

Danes, the Dutch and the Germans coulcTbrew as well, anWas" cheaply, as ourselves. Perhaps one should ascribe the presence of Englishmen in these countries, as well as a fashionable demand for foreign luxuries there, as the reasons for any trade in beer at all. PUBLIC CONTRACTS

Not a few of those brewers who were able to lift themselves above the stature of their more numerous brethren, particularly in the outports, depended on a mass-market other than the crowded streets about their brewhouses. At all times, beer was a necessary victualling store for ships lading from England; but never more important to local brewers than in war-time when a fleet was based on their port. From an early date, the Admiralty had set up naval brewhouses in the main fleet ports (one littleknown instance of public initiative in manufacture), but they could never satisfy the large temporary demands of a mobilised fleet appearing at irregular intervals. Rich spoils, therefore, awaited the contract brewers of London, Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth, as well as lucky local tradesmen in other places, when chance brought a squadron off-shore. All the troubles of extracting payment on depreciating tallies from a reluctant Navy Office, were usually worth their while. Indeed, delays in payment were mainly responsible for keeping naval contracts in the hands of the few contractors who had sufficient capital behind them to sustain delay in the returns— this being a support to the quasi-monopoly position which built up in the contract-market for beer in the various ports, as it had done for staves, timber, coopering and iron. 1 Goldsmith Pam. XVII, 47, 333. /rrT 2 j)uty rates were lowered in the 1786 Treaty but reimposed in 1814 (Excise (TLB), i394> f- 232f 195

13-2

Distant Markets Other brewers, not enjoying public contracts, sometimes complained that war brought a reduction in demand as well as higher excise taxation. Beer brewed for the public service in naval brewhouses did not find its way into the excise returns. This makes difficult any precise deductions about the effect of war on production, or on the malt and barley markets. But, certainly, the commissioning of new squadrons and, to a lesser extent, the armies in camp at home or deployed abroad, changed the distribution of demand somewhat, and brought a new market to many brewers in the ports. It is certain that this public demand, in an age when the state of war (and the economic effects which that brought in its train) proved almost as ‘normal’ as a state of peace, was not nearly as important for the brewing industry as it was for capital goods industries, such as timber and iron, or even for textiles. However, the navy and the army, as institutional customers for appropriating many national resources, were unrivalled in size. If the demand created by the forced savings of taxation and borrowing be given its full place in the economic changes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the increasing scale of bellicosity may be seen as of more moment than many other things. One cannot ignore the scale of public demand, even in the history of the brewing industry, when the official naval ration was a gallon of strong beer a day per man. So far as the sailors were concerned, this had been their traditional quota (being based on the quantity which all able-bodied men might expect as their desert) at least since Tudor times.1 Afloat, as ashore, beer was the national drink. It remained so throughout the century, except on tropical stations where spirits or wine were substituted because of the nearly inevitable deterioration of naval beer in those conditions; or on voyages to any far station, where ships did not have enough space to stow their full quota of such a bulky commodity.2 In port, ‘harbour beer’ or ‘petty warrant beer’ was the rule, of lower strength than ‘sea beer’. The latter had to be drawn to a length of not more than i tun (6 barrels) from a quarter of malt, which was almost half as strong as normal strong beer and ale ashore, although considerably stronger than small beer.3 The truth was that it had to be of at least medium strength to have a hope of sur¬ viving on the high seas. In their liquor ration particularly—as in the quantities of victuals generally—sailors in the fleets were more fortunate than their fellows in 1 C. Lloyd, Nation and the Navy (1954), p. 5; P.R.O. Adm. 1x0/2, f. 119. 2 P.R.O. Adm. 110/1, f. 119; 110/12, f. 285; 110/6, f. 27; Pepys, Shorthand Letters ed. Chappel (Cambridge, 1933), pp. 79-80. 3 P.R.O. Adm. 110/5, f. 258. 196

Public Contracts merchant ships; if, that is, the quality did not deteriorate too much and rations were honoured.1 Despite multitudinous instances of complaints, it would be difficult to judge the normal, relative standards. With beer, however, there was one continuing, unavoidable trouble. If a fleet needed to be revictualled in the summer (when cruising was at its height) stores, which were reckoned to be full by Easter or Whitsun, would be stripped and new beer brewed in the heat. This was not a practice amongst com¬ mercial brewers at large.

No more convincing proof of the need for

a summer rest between brewing seasons can be found than the stream of complaints about ‘ foxed ’ beer coming in from captains in the late autumn and winter, following such summer brewing. It was for this reason that contract brewers always had to accept the condition of repaying the price of all beer supplied to the navy which went bad within six months of delivery.2 The flow of petitions from naval contract brewers well advertised how their profitable trade placed them in an awkward position between two Boards. One was that of the Excise Commissioners, demanding payment of duty in specie at the time of brewing, with the threat of impounding their utensils and selling their stock; the other, the Victualling Com¬ missioners, paying only with tallies after great delay. One of the most important contractors along the Thames, Anthony Phillips of Wapping and Deptford (accustomed to 20 per cent, and more, depreciation on his tallies) appealed from this invidious position to the Treasury Lords who stood as arbiters, anxious that the demands of the revenue should not prejudice the main object of policy, which was keeping the ships at sea adequately victualled.

Phillips’ complaint was, ‘That the money he

now owes for Excise is contracted since January last and for the very Beer delivered to his Matie for which he hath not yett received one farthing though it amounts to above

£2000.. .’.3 When two other major

contractors, Thomas Ridge and Henry Player of Portsmouth, had each

£ 10,000 owing them and threatened that this was the limit of their credit, the Victualling Commissioners themselves pleaded with the Excise that ‘it could be an extraordinary Prejudice to his Majesties Service if any obstructions should be putt upon their Brewing’.4 When pressed to what the Treasury thought was, indeed, the point where they might refuse to go ‘still brewing on to give his Matie further creditt’, permission to pay their 1 See J. Ehrman, The Navy in the War of William III (Cambridge, 1953), pp. 121, 146. 2 This was also the great, and reiterated, argument for enlarging stores at naval brewhouses. See Adm. 110/15, ff. 228-9, 3 Excise (TLB), 1341, f. 224 (3 August 1696). 4 Excise (TLB), 1344, 13 June 1699. 197

Distant Markets duty out of tallies was usually given, to the fury of the excise accountants.1 In the end, as with the Excise and the brewing trade generally (or the Navy Board and the naval contractors generally), each side knew that it would be foolish to hold out against the other to the extent of prejudicing either the demand of the Navy or the existence of the breweries. They usually compromised, so that the injustice and hardship detailed in so many petitions seem seldom to have led to disaster.2 In any case successful fraud was often a counter-attraction and the cessation of contracts was much more to be feared than their hazards. It would be tedious to relate, and even more tedious to extract, the volume of public contracts for beer and the production of naval brewhouses from the central accounts during the eighteenth century. Their importance will rather be to show, in general terms, how individual brewers prospered on naval demand, and how the ports became centres of demand greatly in excess of that resulting from their natural urban size. Naval contracts made some of these breweries outside London extensive for their generation. Mrs Jean Shea’s business (later John Pellat and Co.)3 at Portsmouth supplied £8900 worth of beer between April and December 1694. Anthony Phillips, who brewed little other than naval beer, took over his second brewery to fulfil a contract of 600 barrels per week in 1690.4 Noah Overing of Wapping delivered 1800 barrels in 16 days in 1705; Samuel Ratcliffe and Benjamin Andrews were together under contract for £600 supply per month.5 While some of these quantities suggest extensive sub-contracting, others who contracted to supply 180 barrels per week seem, from their dealings with the Excise Commissioners, to have actually brewed that quantity as brewers rather than supplying part of their contracts as merchants.6 In the fleet ports, despite the naval brewhouses, a few established persons continued to enjoy regular contracts when fleets were in com¬ mission. Thomas Ridge (a Member of Parliament), and James Dixon in Portsmouth, Jeremiah Kelly at Deal, John Rolfe at Harwich, Thomas Best at Chatham enjoyed the most regular commissions. Often they had inherited the trade from their fathers and passed it on to their sons, as had 1 Excise (TLB), 1338; C.T.B. ix, 1298 and passim in both series until 1713. 2 Even so, it could be a burden: £21,100 was outstanding in debts on tallies to nineteen brewers in 1694 (C.T.B. x, 689). 3 Excise (TLB), 1341, 9 July 1697; C.T.B. x, 888, 897, 918. 4 C.T.B. xi, 222; xx, 464; P.R.O. Adm. 110/5, f- 174. 5 Excise (TLB), 1338, 2 February 1690; x April 1691. 6 Like Joseph Helby of Chelsea, Noah Overing and John Cholmeley (C.T.B. ix, 27 March 1691; XI, 361, 1 April 1692).

Public Contracts those brewers working for more stable civilian markets. Much of the beer which Francis Cobb brewed at Margate in the second half of the eighteenth century was sent round to Deal for the fleet, and, eventually, he bought a second brewery at Deal to accommodate this market more efficiently.1 The high level of contracts given to these few brewers, who developed quasi-monopolies of contracts in their own ports for reasons of convenience or collusion, does not reveal the degree of fraud involved, which prejudices many of the conclusions which might otherwise be drawn from the Contract Ledgers. Thomas Ridge, for example, claimed to have delivered 124,400 barrels of sea-beer (at a price of £66,300, with the cooperage) between January 1707 and October 1710, yet he was forced later to confess that, in the latter two years, he had actually brewed only 19,278 out of 33,078 barrels.2 The remainder had been ‘ delivered ’ through purely paper transactions to ships’ pursers, who were bribed at a rate of 305. per tun to sign the receipts (which were worth 56s. per tun with 4s. cooperage to Ridge). His partner, Dixon, confessed to similar frauds of 35,532 barrels in the same period, Kelly to 8830 barrels and Thomas Best to 3450 barrels. Another Chatham brewer, Tyhurst, was implicated as deeply as Best; while neither John Rolfe at Harwich nor Henry Player at Portsmouth could be persuaded to confess, although almost certainly as guilty as the others. In London, few brewers were involved in naval contracting. Anyway, this was not on a large enough scale to warp the structure of production based primarily on the metropolitan market. Sir John Parsons had tallies outstanding in 1708; his son Humphrey Parsons, and Thomas Hucks, had contracts in 1733.3 In general, however, the emerging porter brewers did not get much initial boost for expansion from contracts. Before the mid-century the naval Hartshorne Brewhouse on Tower Hill supplied most of the normal needs, so that such a year as 1778, when large porter contracts were placed (Whitbread supplying 3000 barrels, Thrale 2692, Gyfford and Hammond 1500 and Calvert 3300) proved exceptional.4 When Thrale died, he was supposedly enjoying some contract with Whit¬ bread, worth £23,000 annually to each of them.5 This may well have been for supplying troops abroad, since the army was unable to rely on the naval brewhouses very often. In 1761, troops in Germany were sent some 1 See below, p. 370; also G. E. Clarke, F.L.A., Isle of Thanet Gazette, 18 April 19572 J.H.C. xvi, 498-502; P.R.O. Adm. 110/6, ff. 218, 280-9. RidSe was expelled from the Commons and prosecuted. 3 P.R.O. Adm. 110/4, f. 89; 110/12, f. 185. 4 P.R.O. Adm. 112/162. 5 Thraliana (1951). vol.

199

II,

p. 939, n. 2.

Distant Markets thousands of barrels of porter, and 3000 were sent ‘with all expedition’ to America for the winter of 1776. Calvert, similarly, is known to have sent porter to military hospitals abroad, for use as an anti-scorbutic.1 These and other facts suggest that, in war-time, the army abroad was of more impor¬ tance than the navy for the porter brewers.2 As a whole, between 1793 and 1800 the army took the surprising quantity of 2-53 million barrels. Much of this probably came from the larger establishments where it had to be shipped.3 In England, the commanders of isolated camps might grant licences for brewers to come and brew on the spot. John Grant had done this for the camp and its hospital on Hounslow Heath as long ago as 1686, and he had successors throughout the wars of the eighteenth century.4 Such fortunes seldom survived the breaking up of the camps. There were exceptions: John Smith of Oundle returned successfully to his modest local market at Oundle when the camp at Norman Cross dispersed and Simonds of Reading, later in the nineteenth century, expanded beyond their local trade when the Aldershot camps were set up. In such a profit¬ able by-way of trade, earlier in the century John Walsby of Battersea had supplied all naval hospitals in England with stout.5 The spasmodic nature of naval demand occasionally meant that urgent needs set brewers to work over a wide stretch of coast. At Plymouth, the town brewers never had enough store-room to prepare adequately for emergencies; so that the usual message from the local navy agent to London, ‘We have engaged all the Brewers yt. can be had there and parts adjacent’ was usually followed by requests to send supplies round from other places along the south coast or from London.6 Eight vessels were chartered to rush a fortnight’s supply to Sir George Byng’s squadron off the Nore in 1703 ‘at the explicit demand of his Royal Highness’. When Sir John Norris arrived in Torbay in July 1740, the Plymouth and Portsmouth stores were stripped, the naval brewhouses and all the con¬ tractors along the coast set to work despite the summer heat, and fifteen vessels had to be sent round with beer from London, Dover and Ports¬ mouth.7 On northern cruises it was not uncommon for admirals to send 1 Excise (TLB), 1373, f. 442. Felix Calvert sent ‘double brown stout’ to the West Indies, Goree and elsewhere. For the use of beer in the navy as a remedy for scurvy see pp. 207-9. General Calvert was a member of the brewing family. 2 See Faujas de St Fond, Travels in England, 1784 (Glasgow, 1907), p. 102. 3 Pari. Papers, Printed Accts. 1801. 4 C.T.B. VIII, 638; Pari. Papers, 1831, vn, p. 49; Excise (TLB), 1356, ff. 88, 98. 6 Pari. Papers, 1819, V, p. 47. 6 E.g. P.R.O. Adm. 110/2, f. 124. 7 Adm. 110/2, f. 435; no /12, ff. 152, 159, 246.

200

Public Contracts demands back to Harwich and London complaining that the ‘Town of Newcastle cannot Brew fast enough for the Consumption of the Squadron’.1 These orders to non-fleet ports came even more irregularly than the other naval contracts, and only when war conditions existed. The Admiralty ledgers show them clustering in the years after 1756, 1776 and 1794. Absolutely, such supplies as were bought on commission by the general naval contractors at ports around the British Isles from Penzance and Milford to Cork and Whitehaven were not great, being under 10,000 barrels in the year 1776; under 22,500 barrels in the war year 1780, dropping again to 11,800 barrels in 1785 and mounting to over 30,000 barrels when new fleets were in commission in 1796.2 Despite this, many of the places from which the beer was drawn were tiny. For the local brewers, such military demand was relatively as important on the coast as it was for John Smith, inland at Oundle. NAVAL BREWHOUSES

The contract brewers, although employed throughout the centuries to satisfy war-time needs, remained in the eighteenth century as adjuncts to the naval brewhouses themselves. These were being directly administered by the Victualling Office. One early successful venture was with the main yard at East Smithfield, which supplied the important cadre of the fleets fitting out in the Thames.3 There a naval brewhouse was existing by 1683, and from its success came arguments for extending the experiment to other ports where naval dockyards were established. During the Marl¬ borough Wars, others were either bought or leased in London: one at St Katharine’s Wharf;4 another close by (apparently a separate concern), the Hartshorne Brewhouse, near the Tower in East Smithfield, for which the previous owner, Sir Thomas Draper, was paid over

£5000

in 1702

following Sir Christopher Wren’s survey for the Admiralty.5 One was established at Insworth (near Plymouth), one more at Dover during the same wars,6 and, after long negotiations begun in 1707, the series was completed by another permanent naval brewery at Weevil, Gosport, first leased and then finally purchased in 1753, to serve the Portsmouth ships.7

1

E.g. Adm. 110/14, f. 329. 2 Adm. 112/162, 166, 171, 182. 3 P.R.O. Adm. 110/1, 31 December 1683; C.T.B. IX, 478; J. Ehrman, The Navy tn the War of william III (Cambridge, 1953), P- 153- Naval brewhouses were established at Portsmouth in Tudor times (Monthly Bulletin, xxvm (i957)> 138)1 C.T.B. xvi, 230; xvii, 222xiii, 766, 809. 3 C.T.B. Intro, to Vols. XI-XVII, pp. dlxiv-dlxix; vol. xvi, pp. 37, 4», 93* P.R.O. Adm. 110/2, f. 124; 110/3, ff. 250-2, 264, 274, 284, 391; 110/4, ff. 10, 251. 7 P.R.O. Adm. 110/5, ff. 448-9; 110/16, ff. 270, 317; no/17, f. 184. 201

Distant Markets From the beginning, the Victualling Commissioners pressed the advan¬ tages of public ownership upon the Treasury, asserting: With this brewhouse a good part of the Beer may be provided which will be wanted at that Port in time of little action at a far less expence as well as better in quality than what is furnished in Contracts; the Crown will also thereby be secured from the ill effects of Combinations too frequently found among Contractors where they have it in their power to make their own terms... the Contract Brewers never brewing but as the Beer has been demanded so that in cases of Emergency the Service has been at all times subjected to delay and disappointments and especially in their brewing beer in the Summer Season.1 With such memorials they submitted figures of comparative costs to prove that a tun of beer brewed at Plymouth, London or Dover cost less than one bought at Portsmouth. When the Victualling Commissioners took steps to purchase a brewery in Portsmouth, some contract brewers, conscious of impending fate, offered their businesses for sale. The Weevil plant was such a brewery. The owner, a Mrs Oates, had the astuteness to get in first with an accept¬ able bid, whereupon all the Portsmouth contractors, led by the ageing Thomas Ridge (now a respectable knight) came under pressure.2 In 1761, at the height of what would normally have been, for him, a profitable war, Ridge complained that no beer had been ordered at all, while the king’s brewhouse was using water with ‘stinking minerals’.3

It was his last

protest. Six years later, after his death, the ‘Great Brewhouse’ of Ports¬ mouth, which he had raised to eminence mainly through naval contracts, was offered for sale to the Victualling Office by his brother, only to be refused as surplus to their needs.4 The Hartshorne remained the main ‘victualling brewhouse’ until a new one was erected at the Deptford yard in 1792. In its early years, it may have been one of the biggest in London. Where Edmund Halsey paid k2280

in excise during the 1692-3 brewing season, the officers who gauged

the Hartshorne (and who even tried to extract payment of duty from the Victualling Office until the Treasury got a legal opinion stating the stupidity of their claim) had charged £2478 for the months May to November 1689, which implied a production of perhaps 20,000 barrels.5 A generation later, eight persons were employed there at a total wages of £430 p.a.; the Clerk earning £60 p.a., the Master Cooper getting £100 and his house, and the Master Brewer £59, with doubtless many per1 P.R.O. Adm. 110/8, ff. 393-6. 3 Ibid. 110/20, f. 388. 6 C.T.B. ix, 692.

2 Ibid. 110/8, f. 393; 110/16, f. 270. 4 Ibid. 110/23, f- 289.

202

Naval Brewhouses quisites.1 He was of sufficient status to be chosen normally on the recom¬ mendation of some of the most eminent members of the trade in London. Production figures in the early years of the century are as suspect here as for the contract brewers. In 1701, many subversive sales from the King’s brewhouses to the ordinary public were exposed, and the Excise were consequently given authority to continue surveying naval breweries ‘ being a cheque upon the officers employed... in preventing Imbezzlements therein’.2 Outside London, the naval brewhouses remained among the largest of all provincial breweries until towards the end of the century. A proposed new one atHamoaze, Plymouth, in 1729 was to cost £11,000; in 1742, the capacity of the old one at Insworth was 480 barrels per week, to be increased to 1080 barrels per week in order to supply 6000 men.3 The stores there, which were usually too small to satisfy all demands, were similarly enlarged to hold 3000 barrels, ready to be supplemented when necessary by 480 barrels weekly from Dover and 300 from the town brewers.

During the enlargements induced by the American war, the

capacity of the Weevil (now with new plant designed by Smeaton and a large new cooperage)4 was raised to 300 barrels a day when working at full pressure. It brewed 100,000 in a peak year; the old Hartshorne, with new storage vats and cisterns, brewed 57,000 barrels in such a year.5 This scale of brewing was that of a medium-sized porter brewery such as Hammonds, or Clowes. It said much for the good relations between London brewers and the Victualling Commissioners (who still might ask the trade for a special consignment to be rushed through in an emergency) that, when Clowes’ brewery was devastated by fire in 1785, and Goodwyn s in 1788, the Commissioners allowed them to take over the Hartshorne, idle in those years of peace, on very moderate terms until their own premises had been rebuilt.6 Such ventures in the manufacture of liquor by the navy, paralleled in that of ships’ biscuit, were almost repeated in distilling during the disas¬ trous experiment with British malt spirits in 1742-7 and 1752-6, con¬ ducted before any allegiance to the West India interest and rum was assured.7

Only the failure of this experiment, and the failure of the

1 P.R.O. Adm. 110/9, f. 31. , 2 C.T.B. xx, 676; Excise (TLB), 1338, 14 June 1692; 1346, 13 November 1705.

34 Ibid. P.R.O. Adm. 110/10, ff. 165-7; no/13, f. 139. ,A/fC 110/22, ff. 4, 185; 110/18, f. 407; Smeaton, Catalogue of Engineering Designs (MS. Library of Royal Society), iv, f. 56; 11, 46-7, 123-7. 6 P.R.O. Adm. 110/30, ff 100, 119. 6 Ibid, no/33, ff- II9> 39°- They gave surety and paid £100 p.a. for wear and tear. 7 Ibid. 110/13, ff 255-8, 295; 110/14, ff 308, 389; tio/15, ff 374, 392-

203

Distant Markets attempts to concentrate beer, led to supplies from naval brewhouses being regularly supplemented by rum and grog issues.1 Individually, the naval brewhouses remain interesting concerns, but, collectively, as with all naval contracts, they can scarcely have been important enough to have had a great impact upon the malt and hop markets. Relative to civilian demand, which was running above a million barrels annually in London and several millions annually (for strong beer only) in England as a whole, military supplies were comparatively insignificant.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VI THE SEARCH FOR A CONCENTRATE

It might have been expected that keen businessmen searching for ways of cutting costs would have turned their attentions to the great problems of transporting beer cheaply. The revolution in the scale of brewing, although the conditions necessary for its success derived from market and technical opportunities, was, after all, the conscious achieve¬ ment of able and energetic individuals. When sent on a voyage, beer, unlike port and sherry, was liable to spoil and, because much of beer by volume was water, great saving in transport costs was theoretically possible by concentration. Again, everyone knew that the stronger beer was, the better it would keep. ‘Freezing out’ the surplus water (as with applejack brandy) had already been suggested by a chemist.2 The production of

extraordinarily strong beer, and spirits above proof, was a not unknown device for defrauding the revenue. In 1718, the Commissioners of Excise first complained to the Treasury that ‘for some time past the brewers have made their common strong drink of greater strength than usual heretofore and do sell it.. .at prices proportionable’.3 Since all beer conventionally valued above 6s. a barrel paid the same flat rate of duty (a similar rule applying to spirits both home-produced and imported) it became profitable to brew or distil at double strength and then, after the duty had been paid, to double the volume again without cost by adding water and to sell the product as normal strong drink. By such a simple sleight the rate of duty might be halved. Obviously, any tax imposed on such an ungraduated scale invited this sort of evasion. In their turn, such excursions by sharp entrepreneurs evoked a more stringent 1 P.R.O. Adm. 110/18, f. 407. 2 P. Shaw, Lectures on Chemistry (1755), pp. 212-13. 3 Excise (TLB), 1343, 13 March 1718. 204

Naval Brewhouses and harassing public regimen upon their manufactures, as strength became limited by law.1 Apart from these academic and criminal essays in concentrating beer, there does not seem to have been much commercial thought given to the problem in the eighteenth century. Yet a body more acutely conscious of these problems than any businessman, for whom the rewards of success were more than commercial, thought for a time that the answer had been found. It was the British Admiralty. The experiment merits a place in any discussion of the export of beer, for all the general problems facing the brewing industry of marketing at a distance from the point of produc¬ tion are involved. It was also an instance where scientific skills and tech¬ nique—personified in the members of the Royal Society—were deliberately brought to bear upon an economic and technical problem. Sometimes the ships were ordered to be ‘floored’ (the beer was stowed normally on the ground tier next to the ballast) with water and brandy, for as well as being unstable in hot weather, beer was so space-consuming in stowage that ships seldom carried their full complement of casks. It then became a better bargain for the Commissioners of Victualling to use the space for brandy or rum, which were served diluted with water (this being replenished without much cost on the foreign station).2 French brandy was the preferred substitute for beer until near the end of the century, despite the importunings of the West India sugar merchants for issues of rum, and of London distillers for ‘British Malt Spirits’.3 Had the search for a beer concentrate been successful, the navy might never have formed its traditional alliance with rum, for all spirits were first used as conscious substitutes for beer. When British Malt Spirits were given their last un¬ successful trial in 1756 the post-mortem explanation ran: The introduction of malt spirits into the Victualling was intended to enable H.M. Ships employed at home service to lengthen their Cruizes, they not being able to stow a proportion of Beer answerable to their other provisions.4 Operations in the Baltic brought to light a further dilemma. Here, it was technically possible to use beer, but transport costs were prohibitive. The usual plan was for the Baltic Squadron to take three months’ supply at full rations and buy more, as needed, at Copenhagen or Elsinore through the local navy agent there. It was preferable, but impossible, to send more 1 C.T.B. IV, 222; Impartial Enquiry into.. .Distillery (1736); Excise (TLB), 1363, ff. 1, 496; 1367, ff. 23-4; 1370, ff 365-72; 1339. 12 May 1685. And see 42 Geo. Ill, c. 38. 2 P.R.O. Adm. 110/12, f. 285. 3 Ibid. 110/8, f. 288; 44, f. 42; 23, f- 271. 4 Ibid. 110/18, f. 407. 205

Distant Markets out to them. In May 1715, for example, replenishments of 1000 tuns were needed. Hoys were too expensive to hire for the job; the only merchant trading to Muscovy and the ‘East Country’ area of the Baltic who had freights to spare, William Astell, could take only 400 tuns at 7s. 6d. per tun. He used eight ships in taking it. In a similar situation in 1719, he was again the only available merchant, and this time he could offer only one ship, which he was not anxious to fill up with naval beer. Once more, French brandy was to be the solution.1 On 8 January 1772, the Admiralty sent to the Commissioners of Victualling a letter they had received signed ‘Marinus’, describing how beer might be made at sea from ‘inspissated Juice of Malt’.2 The writer of the letter, Henry Pelham, Secretary to the Commissioners of Victualling themselves, then revealed himself. He used a method described by Glauber, but added hops before simmering away most of the water from the wort in double boilers (so that it would not burn) until it was ‘ thick and viscid’. This, he thought, was a further saving as ‘the Room which Hopps would take up, tho’ small, would be of Consequence in Long Voyages’. He sent samples of ‘hopped’ concentrate and ‘hopped and fermented’ concentrate, adding: this Juice might.. .be afterwards made into Beer at Sea without any other Trouble than the mixing it with the necessary quantity of warm water and letting it stand to acquire a proper spirit and Briskness. He further suggested that suitable receptacles for boiling down wort were already to hand, provided by the Commissioners of Victualling to make broth in for sick and wounded seamen. On 16 January the Admiralty ordered an experiment to be made. Six weeks’ supply for 200 men was to be put on board the sloops Resolution and Adventure, then fitting out at Deptford under Captain Cook ‘for remote parts’; in the following October, more essences of spruce and molasses were taken on board the barque Endeavour and the schooner Penguin fitting out for the Falklands.3 A chemist, H. Jackson, was put in charge of the work. He was probably Henry Jackson, but possibly Humphrey Jackson whom Mrs Thrale and Johnson strove to prevent inveigling Henry Thrale into costly brewing experiments (perhaps these very ones, as it was ‘J-ck-n’s copper’ Thrale was in danger of falling into, and the Admiralty imply that he had appara1

P R O. Adm. 7, f. 103; 8, ff. 35, 198, 288; 9, ff. 304, 307. 2 Ibid. 25, f. 166. 3 Ibid. 25, f. 228; 26, f. 101. The other side of the correspondence may be followed in the out letter-books of the Secretary to the Admiralty 206

Naval Brewhouses tus for reducing wort all ready).1 His coppers were deep; so the process took a full week, and the liquor darkened with the heat despite the double boiler. But Jackson was enthusiastic about it. By 29 April he had pre¬ pared twenty-five half-barrels of hopped, and six half-barrels of hopped and fermented wort, which made a good small beer in two days if diluted with twelve times their quantity of water. Already shallow pans were under construction to do the job more quickly. He added to his letter: ‘ Being so much convinced of the Practicability as well as Usefulness of the scheme... I am determined to attempt its introduction to the Public as a new Branch of Commerce.’2 Two other people, Henry Taylor and Thomas Bridge, however, took out the first commercial patents for a beer concentrate in August of the same year.3 One might have thought the ground was now prepared for commercial innovation if the naval experi¬ ments proved successful. Everything now waited upon the report of the captains carrying the experimental stores. Captain Cook duly sailed from Deptford with the inspissated juice aboard. It was one of many experi¬ mental provisions he carried: malt, ‘sourkrout’, salted cabbage (which he had ordered specially), ‘Portable Broth’, ‘Saloup’ (a rob, or conserve, of oranges and lemons), mustard and marmalade of carrots (invented by Baron Stosch of Berlin).4 The last preparation, with the juice, had been sent particularly for trial as anti-scorbutics.

For the beer concentrate

the ambitions of the Commissioners of Victualling were wider, as Cook recognised. He made the point exactly: that ‘it was probable this inspis¬ sated juice would keep at sea, and, if so, a supply of beer might be had at any time... ’.

He, his fellow-captains and an accompanying scientist

all mentioned that it answered in a cold climate beyond all expectations.5 From it, good beer was brewed in the most far-flung seas, in New Zealand in 1772-3, and later in Kamchatka and the west coast of America. With shoots of spruce and dried yeast, spruce beer was made from the wort essence. The concentrate and the ‘sourkrout’ kept scurvy within bounds throughout the voyages. Cook himself claimed that it was undoubtedly one of the best anti-scorbutic sea medicines then discovered; Captain 1 S. Johnson, Letters, ed. Chapman (1952), vol. I, no. 303; J. Clifford, H.L. Piozzi (1941), pp. 2 3 4

96-7. P.R.O. Adm. 110/25, f. 229. ; Patent Office, Spec. no. 1022, n August 1772, for a ‘spruce-beer ._ P.R.O. Adm. 25, f. 131 and Admiralty to Victualling Commissioners, 25 November

I?3 Cook, Voyages towards the South Pole (1777), Introd. pp. xxxi-ii, 68-70; vol. 11, pp. 289-90, (duplicated in Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. lxvi, no. xxii, 402); A. Sparrman, Voyage round the World (English ed. 1953), pp. 26, 112. 207

Distant Markets King of the Discovery, on his return from the third voyage in 1781, subsequently said, I attribute the superior Healthiness of the People of the Discovery over those of the Resolution in a great measure to the Beer we brewed in these two Passages, having the satisfaction of carrying only one Invalid into the Cape of Good Hope and not an ailing man into the Orkneys.1 By that time the virtue of the concentrate had been preserved for three years. Similar praise had come back from captains using samples in the West Indies.2 Meanwhile further experiments, by Robert Thornton in 1778; had succeeded in reducing wort to a solid form (‘brittle as glass’) in double boilers heated by steam, which did not suffer from over-violent fermentation in hot climates. From this, claimed the Commissioners of Victualling, beer of any strength might be brewed which was as good as fresh beer. It had ‘the genuine pure flavour of the malt and hops’ and was ‘remarkably agreeable to the palate’.3 Had this been validated by all the seamen in the fleets (perhaps any reminder of beer was welcome to a small group exploring in the Antipodes) the brewing industry would have had its marketing limits indefinitely extended, as the iron bonds of transport costs and risks were broken.

If these claims had been true,

beer might have become as ideal a marketing commodity as tea or coffee. Following these good reports there was a surge of hope. Admiralty orders of 20 September 1779 gave the Commissioners of Victualling directions to purchase essence of wort for normal issue to all H.M. ships proceeding to sea on channel or foreign service. Thornton, as patentee, was com¬ missioned to supply it to the various victualling ports on a schedule which ranged from 3 tons 10 cwt. for 6 months’ foreign service, and 1 ton 12 cwt. for 4 months’ channel service for a ‘First Rate’ (850 men); down to 8 cwt. and 4 cwt. respectively for a sloop (100 men). Captains were to order general distribution to the crew ‘as a wholesome beverage at the rate of J lb. of essence in lieu of a gallon of Beer, which will save the Beer, preserve the health of the Men and not increase the expence of victualling them’.4 Two years later the Commissioners of Victualling admitted that these sanguine claims had not been justified. They reported to the Admiralty, We find from repeated trials that the said essence, though universally acknowledged to be extremely salutary for the purposes recommended [i.e. as an anti-scorbutic] will not be accepted on board H.M. Ships but as a medicine.5 1 P.R.O. Adm. 110/29, f- 2852 Ibid.128, f. 380 (4 August 1779). 3 Ibid./2-j, f. 415; 28, f. 41; Patent Office, Spec. 1190, 5 April 1778. 4 Ibid.128, ff. 414, 417,434. This meant that one-third of short beer rations would have been provided by the concentrate. 6 Ibid.129, f. 73 (15 October 1781). 208

Naval Brewhouses The scale of issue was consequently limited to f lb. per month per man and printed instructions for its use as a medicine sent to each ship. The last sentence still echoed, though a little forlornly, their disappointed ambitions: ‘ The Essence is very pleasant to eat and very probably many modes of taking it may be thought on, which by way of change may be both agreeable and useful.’1 Essence of malt now became the leading antidote for scurvy in the navy, leaving behind its more ambitious aims and joining an older tradition of experiment and innovation, with the saloup, the marmalade of carrots, pot barley and patent vegetables.2 One or two other ventures with wort-cake, hop-essence and yeast-powder were tried in pursuit of the elusive reward which the ‘inspissated juice’ so nearly won.

In the early years of the

Revolutionary Wars, Sir John Dalrymple obtained the use of the old naval brewery, the Hartshorne, at Tower Hill for preparing some extracts. A Mr Campbell was granted the status of midshipman with two guineas a week to accompany the experimental product to the West Indies on trial.3 Nothing came of it. The medicinal essence of malt was manufactured under contract in large quantities at £88 per ton by Messrs Houldsworth and Barnard, costing between £2000 and £3000 annually from 1781 until 1798.4 Even this gradually dropped out of use. After 1794 its use was restricted to ships proceeding to foreign stations (despite the request of Admiral Graves at Spithead). On 15 February 1798, following the extensive use of lemon juice against scurvy, the Admiralty ordered all issue of essence of malt to be discontinued.5 The experiment was over. Two other patents taken out in 1813 and 1825 seem to have existed only on the paper of their specifications.6 The technique of boiling off worts became restricted purely to making a colouring for the new porter brewed with a high proportion of pale malt. 1 Admiralty Order of 18 February 1782. See P.R.O. Adm. 44, f. 4°7- A copy of this leaflet is stuck in f. 73 of Adm. 110/29. . .. ,. . , 2 As an indication of the interest taken in applying the latest knowledge available to naval problems, particularly in devising preparations for preserving ships’ timbers against worm, distilling sea-water, and finding better anti-scorbutics, see Digest to correspondence of Secretary to Admiralty, where there are separate headings for ‘Projects in Chemistry’ and ‘Diseases of the Fleet’. 2 P.R.O. Adm. 110/39, f. 42s; 40, f- 4535 4i, ff- 529/31 (1795 and 1796). 4 See P.R.O. Adm. 112/168-84, under Miscellaneous Accounts for details of the annual P 5 P.R.O. Adm. 110/39, f. 400; 43, f. 483, and Board Minutes, 7 February 1798. 6 Patent Office, Specs, nos. 3651 of 20 February 1813 (John Robert) and 5091, 10 February 1825 (George Lamb).

14

209

M BE

PART TWO

THE PROBLEMS OF ENTERPRISE AND FINANCE

14-2

CHAPTER VII

COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION 1700-1830 The development of control over retailing may be regarded as one aspect of the industrial maturity in brewing which had evolved in London on the production of porter. It was part of a sophisticated business environment which possesses certain attributes of an economic pattern more typical of a later epoch. By 1800, the generation of ‘heroes’ was already passing away—the

handful of brewers who knew that an industry had been trans¬

formed under their efforts; that they had broken down established frontiers and triumphed. They were giving place to the administrators, men no less reliant and efficient than their fathers, but applying their skills in a different situation. The giant concerns had been created: they now had to be run. New inventions like the attemperators and refrigerators had to be brought into use; the new sides of business in loans and real estate had to be reduced to as smooth a routine of administration as the sale of beer had long become.

New wealth had to be brought into breweries through

a widening circle of partners; new contacts with banks, lawyers and brokers established. These changes, some of them cutting costs as much as the eighteenth-century innovations, were more matters of discussion and decision round the partners’ table and over dinner, which could not be publicly acclaimed in London as visible additions to the

unspeakable

magnificence’ of a great brewery. Representative of this new tradition of innovation is the reduction of storage time for porter from above six months to below six weeks. Scarcely known outside the inner circles of the trade, it proved as important an innovation in its way as the first appear¬ ance of the huge vats of a previous generation had done, while the latter astonished visitors at the same time. Many of the new developments came in response to the changing structure of the industry in London, described in preceding sections of this book. When so great a proportion of production was in the hands of so few, certain questions whose solution had formerly appeared auto¬ matically through the workings of the market, now seemed to demand conscious manipulation.

One might say that the

invisible hand

had

materialised. To the horror of Benthamites and free-traders, they saw it 213

Competition and Co-operation clasped firmly by the great brewers, and guided in the direction they thought it ought to go. The growth of this new business environment, of which the control over retailing is but one aspect, proved to be in conflict with the economic aspirations of the post-war generation. Legislation was therefore called in to redress the balance which the rise of the giant breweries had distorted. The problems of distribution, of pricing, of competition and collaboration were at the heart of this antagonism between business and politics. All had been created by the triumphant solution of the problems of production. The change in the structure of the industry in London, concentrating power, as it concentrated production, in the hands of a few individuals, may be seen from the table onjjage 26 which shows the percentage of beer paying duty within the Bills of Mentality which had been brewed by the twelve leading brewers. Their share rose from under half in 1760 to over three-quarters by 1790, and grew still to four-fifths of the whole by 1815. In 1829, there were only twelve firms brewing more than 40,000 barrels a year—the leaders producing more than five times that amount— only fifty-one brewing above 10,000 barrels, and eighty-seven between 5000 and 10,000 barrels. In the porter market, as has been explained, the dominance of the great was complete for the figures of total production include ale, in which section of the market the porter brewers were virtually not competing. As this degree of control by the few developed, and as the diminishing number of brewers in the first rank became absolutely more influential, so the policy of each began to have a conscious effect upon the fortunes of his competitors. The automatic functioning of the price mechanism and the free-trade market began to creak and groan. This had never operated as freely in brewing as in many other industries because of the importance of taxation, licensing and price control in the economic fortunes of the industry, so that, when these conditions emerged to induce a measure of co-operation amongst the brewers, the ground was already well prepared. Every assembly of merchants might raise a qualm for the public welfare in Adam Smith. The existence of permanent institutions for such assemblies in the guilds and companies of London might have been expected to draw a more severe rebuke from him, as the East India Company had done in foreign trade. Like the more rigid utilitarians and free-traders coming after him, Adam Smith favoured the withdrawal of the state from inter¬ ference in most branches of the economy. They had the faith of‘economic protestants’, wishing every individual to approach the market inde214

Competition and Co-operation pendently, without the interposition between it and them, of any cor¬ porate body with special advantages, perhaps with the authority given by official status and an exclusive charter, perhaps only with the de facto power of a naturally-produced business monopoly to guide its operations or interpret its expression. There must be no collusion between indi¬ viduals to make manifest the invisible hand. To this economic protestantism, both monopolies and licensing systems were twin aspects of the same heresy. Although both convictions were clearly held by the forward-looking members of each generation after 1750, there does not appear to have been an explanation of one evil in the light of the other for the brewing industry—the charge that interference in the market-place by the state was encouraging a united self-defence by the interests affected. Yet this seems to have been one of the most impor¬ tant reasons behind the growth of many trade associations. Where such growth was not a result of hostile state action upon individual interests, it was often an aspiration for state action to help them. In both cases the leadership, funds, spokesmen and organisation necessary to present a case to the House of Commons, and defend a case against the Customs and Excise in the courts, induced collaboration and more general association amongst manufacturers and merchants: a feature of the other industries within the excise system as well as with beer, malt, hops and spirits. When a bounty was to be withdrawn (or needed to be imposed), when a new duty or a new tax was projected, merchants would combine to protest or plead. Even where a tax was to be abolished or reduced, the established interests were encouraged to reinforce their association in fear that the move would allow rivals with less capital to compete successfully with them. The West India merchants banded together to put pressure on the Treasury and the Admiralty for naval contracts 5 the glass manufacturers took concerted action to get more lucrative waste allowances from the Excise.1 2 The Cheshire salt proprietors flourished upon excise control and high taxation until 1822.2 The hop-merchants sought a less vexatious method of control against fraud; the brewers sought a more effective one. The hop-planters petitioned, through their committees, for extended credit in bad seasons.3 The brewers were always affected by the need (political, if not legal) to establish a claim for a price rise, and the publicans 1 P.R.O. Adm. 110/26, f. 320; 110/44, f- *992 See particularly Hughes, Studies in Administration and Finance (i934), ch. ix. 3 See below, pp. 521-2.

215

Competition and Co-operation combined to protest first against too harassing a licensing law, and then against the abolition of all licensing laws. The identically worded petitions on these issues crowding the table of the Commons and coming from all parts of the country tell their own story of collaboration, fund-raising, management committees for passing information, money, advice and directions between a multitude of scattered individuals.1 When the hand of the state lay so heavily upon the economy the incitements to combina¬ tion, and favours to those with capital, were widespread. The pre¬ dicament of the brewing industry is exactly illustrated by a letter from Richard Twining to the Excise on a similar issue which began: A new regulation relative to weights has led to the Appointment of a Com¬ mittee of Tea Dealers to investigate a measure which, if carried into execution, will certainly press very hard upon the Trade in general... ,2 To state their case a group of petitioners had to have a spokesman. The attempt made more sense, and carried more weight, if he could represent the united opinion of as many people as possible; hence an active drive to get support. A petition had to be drawn up which emphasised a common predicament and claimed concessions which before might have seemed to many individuals beyond the bounds of realisation. When it came to the point, the process of petitioning itself was expensive, needing sub¬ scriptions, correspondence, representatives to argue with lawyers over the actual document, to attend at Westminster in case a committee were appointed, and in any event to dance attendance upon the M.P.s over whom they might hope to have some influence. These occasional parliamentary tussles for resisting prejudicial legisla¬ tion and demanding redress of grievance by legislation3 were supplemented by the continuing need to oppose the excise authorities in a more sustained struggle. Inevitably, many of the regulations in their code of inspection and control escaped precise delineation by statute and became then, as now, subject to administrative conventions established directly between government servants and the private interests affected. Over such matters as the repayment of duty upon exciseable goods accidentally destroyed before use, for example, the Commissioners usually granted concessions— 1 See, for example, jf.H.C. lxxi, LXXii (1816-17), passim, from victuallers and brewers. Also jf.H.C. lxxvii, lxxxiv-V, passim for the results of trade associations in petitions over the 1822 and 1830 bills. Examples are given below, pp. 214, 363-6. 2 Excise (TLB), 1372, f. 198. 3 Tithing, for example, was a recurrent issue for hop-planters which led to united protests (jf.H.C. xxvi (1758), 98-9; xlvii (1781), 519-20; xlviii (1782), 381-2). Other instances of combinations in the hop industry are mentioned on pp. 521-3. 2l6

Competition and Co-operation but only ex gratia—and it helped to bring combined pressure to bear in supporting, and if possible in enlarging these conventional privileges. Perhaps the clearest instance of government regulation calling a trade association into existence is described at length by William Ford in 1849.1 The regulations against sprinkling malt ‘on the floor’ quickly led to the formation of an association of country maltsters who extracted a promise from the minister to allow it on the eighth day after steeping. An opposing group then persuaded him otherwise. From this internal conflict, Ford drew the moral that a trade had to be united in its approach to the legisla¬ ture and the government if confusion and contradiction were not to bring the trade into disrepute. If effective, the new regulating acts would have seriously impeded the industry but the ‘effects of these hardships.. .soon led to the formation of an “Association of Maltsters in the United King¬ dom’”.2 Four representatives of the now united trade, in the presence of E. B. Portman, M.P., then negotiated successfully with Sir F. Doyle, the Chairman, and three of the Surveyors General of the Excise. Part of Ford’s purpose in 1849 was to advocate the election from the trade of a ‘con¬ sulting Board or Council’ to confer as occasion arose with the minister. Malting was one of the most closely controlled of any industry—the timing, sequence, even the details of each process of manufacture being prescribed and inspected by revenue officers. It is not coincidental that this regulation inspired a trade association organised with equal care. On a larger scale, the General Chamber of Manufacturers of Great Britain was born in the agitation aroused in 1785 over the Commercial Proposi¬ tions for establishing ‘community of benefits, community of burdens’ between England and Ireland; and broken over divided attitudes to the French Treaty in 1786.3 As evidence gathers to show what fertile soil the British economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proved to be for spawning state monopolies, chartered companies and multitudinous unions of entrepreneurs and merchants (some few of them tenacious, even if most were as ephemeral as fungi) one feature of them all seems to be that growth was encouraged in, if not caused by, the long shadow of the state which lay over them.

Involvement with public authority might

force collaboration upon merchants and industrialists even when one purpose of parliamentary or administrative interference might be to dis¬ courage combination. 1 W. Ford, Malt Trade and Malt Lams (1849). 2 Ibid. pp. 6-14. 3 T. S. Ashton, Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution (1924), ch.

217

VII.

Competition and Co-operation It was not necessarily politics alone, of course, which called combina¬ tions into existence, and usually it was the economic situation which decided their fate. So much depended upon the structure of the industry con¬ cerned. Many people depending on changing local markets, and affected by different economic pressures, would not cohere as effectively as a few merchants, or manufacturers depending on a single foreign market, experiencing the same strategic and political conditions. (Such features as this help to account for the extraordinary tenacity of the sugar interest and the East India monopoly.) Equally, in the case of an industry where units of production were large, with much capital sunk in fixed plant, or in fixed charges of all descriptions which were independent of the rate of production, there would be a much greater incentive to keep production going at remunerative rates through marketing and pricing agreements. Where most capital was laid out in raw materials and goods in process of manufacture, with the manufacturing itself centrifugalised amongst many workers resident over a large area (often with some alternative source of subsistence) then combination tended to be ineffective and temporary. Much depended on the mere possibility of control with the numbers of entrepreneurs involved. Where they were few, it became possible; some might say, inevitable. These were also just the economic conditions of oligopoly where the assumptions of perfect competition no longer existed. If one of the group dropped his price, then the sales of his rivals would be noticeably affected (even if the price-cutter went bankrupt by pitching it too low): unless all raised their prices together, no single one of the group could afford to do so. The ‘ market price ’ at its minimum could be set by any one person; above that it had to be set by them all. To this condition of oligopoly, so different from the ephemeral ‘price rings’ of a less ‘mature’ industrial structure, the brewing industry in London had developed by 1800. 1700-1795 A century before this, when production was scattered between many people, some of them large capitalists for their time, but no single person having any significant percentage of production in his hands, threats of collusion had little permanent meaning. The Brewers’ Company provided the nucleus of a potential organisation, with official status, paid clerks, annual gatherings and banquets for everyone throughout the period. Yet the frequent meetings of its elected committee, the ‘Court of Assistants’, seem to have had little commercial importance at this time. Few of the 218

1700-1795

important brewers took a lead in its activities in the first half of the century and some were not even members. When summoned to take up their freedoms, most were content to join, pay a fine and stay clear of the responsibilities of office and the inconvenience of regular attendance. For some matters, such as apprenticeship and the occasional need to petition Parliament for themselves or the victuallers, the Company remained the centre for collaboration and control. But as far as their records suggest anything (and conversation then, like the telephone now, must have been a medium of communication preferred to minute books) the fact that some important brewers were not members, and that those who were, frequently absented themselves when the lesser brewers were discussing commercial issues, seems to indicate that combination was not important. Nor was it likely to be as long as the opportunities for expansion were not blocked by an established—and powerful—interest. From the beginning of the century all ambitions which the Brewers’ Company, along with the Stationers’ Company and others, had of regu¬ lating trade in and about London through compulsory membership, were thwarted. When legal advice was sought on their powers under 5 Elizabeth, c. 4 (the apprenticeship clauses) and the authority given by the last issue of the Charter under Charles II, the result was uncompromising. The courts maintained their traditional attitude against restraint of trade.1 In 1700, counsel told them If any person have used the trade of a Brewer or other Trade within the Act by the space of seven years without interruption though they never served an Apprenticeship or if they have been educated or lived under a Brewer or other Tradesman by the same space though they were never bound to the Trade, the Judges look upon.. .it to be equall to an Apprenticeship and have declared such persons to be out of the Intention and Penalties of the Act.2

In 1719, the Company was considered to have limited rights over apprenticeship, but nothing else. ‘The Charter and By-laws bind none but such as are members of the Company ran the opinion, and neither the Charter nor any Byelaw can compell any Person to become a Member of the Compa. without his Consent.’3 So much for the claims of their Charter to regulate trade within four miles of London, to search premises for offenders against its regulations, lay a Quarterage charge on all brewers, and recover any penalties levied in the name of the Company. 1 See C. A. Cooke, Corporation, Trust and Company (1952), pp. 62-5. 2 G.L.M.R. MS. 7294. Brewers’ Company Records: Opinion of counsel, 20 June 1700. 3 Ibid. Mr Sjt. Whitaker, Mr Common Sjt. Dee, Mr Shayler, 10 April 1719.

219

Competition and Co-operation The point was put with devastating clarity when the opinion was checked yet again in 1742: ‘The Question is, whether it be a Restraint upon ye Trade or not; if it is, ’tis Void.’1 This was the sense of all legal opinion taken, despite attempts to bypass it by getting the Common Council of the City to breathe life into the dead charter through incorporating some of its provisions in city ordinances. They did get support from the City in August 1753, and one case reached the courts in 1769,2 but it was on the limited issue of forcing an existing member of the Company to make his partners also take out their freedoms or, as a member of the Company, suffer the consequences. Even here the case was settled out of Court. With their legal powers abrogated, only influence in the trade and upon legislators remained, and this depended largely upon economic circum¬ stances. For certain matters the Company was always a convenient organ for publicity and pressure. This minor theme of co-operation, vis-a-vis Parliament or local authority, can be traced through years of deep-seated structural change in the trade. The clerk of the Brewers’ Company spoke for all in the trade in routine matters of toll-rights, and the limited hours when drays might be taken through the streets.3 In certain cases the Company might help with legal expenses when such an issue was being tried in the courts. Similarly, the Company supported memorials to the Treasury that private brewing should be taxed, that hop frauds be prevented, and imports allowed in the hop famine of 1772.4 They combined with the Coopers’ Company to enforce correct gauging of casks in 1762 and 1775.5 In 1772, they tried to get the pending Bankruptcy Act applied to publicans, so that brewers might recover their debts more easily. Before 1770, the clerk was ordered many times to write to the principal Common Brewers of the city who had not taken out their freedoms, requesting them to do so. Sometimes surveys of all the brewers in London were made by the company, but membership was seldom pressed strongly on any but the important ones. The response of these men to requests for more frequent attendance, and that they accept the traditional sequence of offices from Renter Warden to Master, was usually the same. Felix and Peter Calvert ‘ fined ’ for all these offices, not even appearing at the meetings 1 G.L.M.R. MS. 7294. R. Draper, 12 October 1742. 2 Most of the following evidence is taken from the series of Minute Books of the Court of Assistants of the Brewers’ Company, now on deposit at the Guildhall, London. The series begin with G.L.M.R. 5445/1. 3 Ibid. 8 July 1743; 14 November 1753. 4 Ibid. 13 January 1726-7; 11 July 1746; 10 January 1772; 24 March 1774; 8 April 1774. 6 Ibid. 10 December 1762; 7 February 1763; 10 February 1775. 220

1700-1795

to refuse. In 1750 and 1753, Sir William Calvert, Felix and Peter were rebuked for not attending the Court. The first office a member of the family took was when Felix became Renter Warden—and accepted—in 1769 (although Sir William had been a dilatory member of the new standing committee on Trade and Franchises from 1752). From this point Peter (Jr.), Robert and Charles Calvert in their turn go up the scale of honour. The same story of non-attendance occurred with Ralph and Henry Thrale. Although Henry was appointed one of the ‘Assistants’, neither appeared when elected to office; nor did they reply to letters ordering them to attend meetings. Henry Thrale ‘fined’ as Renter Warden in 1770, ‘on account of the multiplicity and other business in which he is engaged ’, and was ‘totally unable to give the necessary attendance’ as Master in 1773.1 In contrast, when the Barclay and Perkins families finally enter the Company in 1794 and 1795, offices falling to them are seldom refused. Robert Barclay eventually became Master in 1813, Henry Perkins in 1819, Charles Barclay in 1826, Frederick Perkins in 1827. The commercial significance of the Brewers’ Company can be seen even more clearly in the case of Whitbread. Coming into the trade without relatives or connexions, he began by formal apprenticeship before setting up in trade for himself. He joined the Company and played an active part in its affairs until he joined the race to become the greatest brewer in London. Then he resigned from the Court of Assistants in 1757, ‘his Business not permitting him to attend the court’, and from then on stood outside the inner circle of the Company, urging it to act for the trade.2 It is perhaps to be expected that the few brewers who were expanding much more rapidly than any others should be too busy to attend meetings at Brewers’ Hall, and even feel disinclined to involve themselves with others whose relative success was being affected by their achievements. This increased influence of the few rising porter brewers is shown in 1772, when Whitbread, Calvert and Thrale, with other important brewers not in the habit of attending to the affairs of the Company, were petitioned by the Company to give their aid in negotiations with Parliament for the import of Flemish hops. Whitbread and Thrale (both M.P.s) were then asked to draw up the petition.3 The same thing happened over the bid to encourage barley and malt imports in the famine year, and to stop hop frauds in 1774.4 In trying to act for the trade, the Company revealed that it was depending primarily upon those not active in its ranks. 1 Ibid. 10 August 1770; 10 September 1773. 3 Ibid. 10 January 1772; 24 January 1772. 221

2 Ibid. 14 October 1757. 4 Ibid. 1 May 1772; 8 April 1774.

Competition and Co-operation In this same year, 1772, came the first intimation—apart from the un¬ known activities of the Committee on Trade and Franchises set up in 1752—that the Company was to become important in the regulation of trade.1 On 14 August, Sami. Whitbread Esq. attended and represented to the Court [of Assistants] that a customer of Mr Peter Hammond in Fryer Street, Blackfryers, is acting in a manner very detrimental in its consequences to the whole Brewing Trade, and therefore desired this Court would interfere so far as to apply to Mr Peter Hammond in relation to the said matter.

The clerk duly wrote; but the offence, and the remedy sought, are not known. Seven years later Whitbread again wrote to the Master of the Company asking him to protest in the name of the trade against proposals to raise the tolls on the river Lea.2 This was the prelude for a more significant proposal. On 14 December 1781, the Court discussed a letter from Whitbread recommending it to them that they order the Votes of Parliament to be delivered to their clerk, and give him strict charge to Peruse them carefully, and if anything appears relative to Corn, Malt, Beer, or the Brewery in general to give immediate information to the Master of the Company (as Bills had often made progress in Parliament and even gone through, without any attention of Persons who afterwards found themselves hurt by them) the same was ordered accordingly.3

Here was the beginning of greater cohesion; but again, it came from outside the formal organisation of the Company. Within a year came the opportunity to exert pressure on the government. With fears of new taxes, a bad harvest, and pressure on the trade to prevent a rise in price, their traditional weapon was a threat to stop brewing. In the negotiations over the price and duty increase in 1761-2, the porter brewers supplied customers from stocks, refusing to brew.4 They now repeated the same threat, and the combinations met, as in 1761, without reference to the official meetings of the Brewers’ Company. As Robert Barclay happened to be in Norwich at the time, John Perkins wrote to tell him what had happened. Barclay replied: Norwich, 29 Oct. 1782 My Dear Friend, I rec’d with much pleasure the account of the Congress of Brewers at Felix’s and I own I applaud your resolutions to cry out helpmen and brethren, for truly 1 This committee was set up, with other, more domestic ones, on 14 August 1752. 2 Ibid. 9 April 1779; 11 May 1779. 3 Ibid. 14 December 1781. 4 See pp. 115, 361. 222

17oo-1795 the times require a combination of all the wisdom of the craft, and when I reflect how nobly H.T. [H. Thrale] & Co. are represented, I am perfectly easy to abide by the result of your debates. Your idea of brewing short I think most expedient to our Interest, but perhaps were we to stop directly for two months, I believe it would prove a more powerful argument to Ld. Shelburne, who would be clearly convinced that our union gives us a consequence he is little aware of. At all events I shall be anxious to hear of yr. determination pr. return of the Coach, wch. sets off every night from the Bull, Bishopsgate Street, at 9 o’ Clock—tho’ its most probable I shall see you on Monday or Tuesday next for 2 or 3 days... A

A similar action was threatened in 1794 to break a combination against the brewers in the malt market. The newspapers reported ‘we are informed that the Porter Brewers have had a general meeting at which they have unanimously agreed to stop brewing, in order to reduce the hitherto unknown high price of malt; for having been early to brew this season, they have such stocks of Beer as will enable them to supply the publick as usual’.2 By this time, however, if not in 1782, this was the decision of a standing committee of the porter brewers, in whose charge such decisions lay. The succession of incidents makes clear that the Brewers’ Company, despite the efforts of Samuel Whitbread to give it a more important economic significance, had become again a formal body, its potential strength passing to ‘a lesser commonwealth in the bowels of a greater’. With the Coopers’ Company, too, when an issue came to the test, it was economic pressure, not legal status, which lay behind their assumed authority. Test cases revealed that a similar structure had developed in coopering as in brewing. Real power in the trade at the end of the century had been assumed by a small committee of the leading manufacturers working though their traditional institution only where their own interests coincided with those of the rest of the trade. As with the Brewers’ Company over apprenticeship, the Coopers’ Company had a watching brief over gauging and standards, sheltering under the umbrella of public law in these instances. But further claims, to prevent brewers and others from doing their own coopering on their own premises, were as unwarranted as the attempts of the Brewers’ Company to enforce membership. In their Court Minutes there is sur¬ prisingly little reference to people coopering without being free of the 1 Barclay Records: ‘Felix’s’is an evident reference to Felix Calvert’s brewery or house Barclay Perkins paid Mrs Thrale (Piozzi) for permission to continue using the old name ol Thrale and Co. until 1795. „ ,, „ „ .. , 2 Cutting from the Morning Advertiser (Bullock and Broadley Collection). 223

Competition and Co-operation company.1 However, in April 1797 a special court was summoned on the ‘offence’ and all the partners of Barclay Perkins, with William Butler, a Common Brewer of Deptford, and their journeymen coopers, were ordered to attend. The coopers were reprimanded by the Master and sent away: Robert Barclay ‘promised never to carry on the Trade again and put into the Poors’ Box Ten Guineas as a Fine for such Offence’.2 Several other brewers also acknowledged the authority of the Company by paying a fine, which, prudently, was pitched well below the probable cost of a court action.3 Encouraged by this, a committee of the ‘greater coopers’) (supposedly organised amongst themselves against the ‘lesser coopers’, and including some of the greatest names in the trade, John Chippendale, Rixon and Co., Thomas Allen, Richard Dowding, Charles Rich, Benjamin Pritchard and John Lasceles, asked the court to put an advertisement in the press warning the trade about sending out un-gauged and un-sealed casks.4 In an ensuing flurry of cases ordering brewers to pay ten-guinea fines for coopering on their own premises, Clowes refused formally, and by letter, on 4 September 1798.5 The Clerk of the Company was thereupon ordered to write to the ‘Committee of the Coopers Trade and inform them of the contents of such letter’. Three months later he wrote again to the secretary of the Committee. In November the Chairman of the Coopers’ Trade and Mr Rixon were asked to attend the Court and ‘explain what steps the Gentlemen of the Trade mean to take as to Messrs Clowes and Co who carry on the Coopers Trade’.6 When another brewer refused payment in 1799, the Company asked the Committee if they proposed taking any proceedings.7 No reply was obtained and the issue was never raised again. It is from this time—not coincidentally that at which the tied trade also begins to assume new economic significance—that more regular co¬ operation began amongst the porter brewers. Conditions of oligopoly now existed; more important, their effects were apparent for the first time under difficult conditions of trade. The impact of war upon the economy, in loans, and taxes with disturbance of trade and credit; a series of bad harvests; a decline in demand as food absorbed a greater fraction of 1 Records of the Coopers’ Company are deposited in the Guildhall Library, London: Court Minutes, G.L.M.R. MSS. 5602/10 et seq. 2 Ibid. 5602/10, ff. 309,341. 3 Ibid ff 343> 348_ 4 Ibid. f. 355. See pp. 56-7. The dominance of these ‘great coopers ’ may/be seen from the Naval contract ledgers (P.R.O. Adm. 112/162). 5 Ibid. 5602/10/363-3. 6 Ibld- ff- 366, 369. 7 Ibid 5602/11/16. 224

i7oo-i795 diminished budgets, and a changed licensing policy—all these had shattered the commercial conditions which the brewers had known for many decades. The long years of easy expansion were over. Decline in production was no longer a case of the temporary crisis, as in 1772 an^ 1782, which hit in a single year and was gone with the next harvest. In particular, the eighteenth-century convention of a constant retail price, with the brewers taking the loss in a season of high grain prices and the gain in a year of glut, could no longer be maintained. And with the need for price changes, immediately the few competing brewers who led the industry faced a problem which they could no longer ignore. Although a rise in price was not now illegal, following the legislation of 1761-2, the matter tended to need discussion in political circles. Much depended on possible changes in the duty rates, and the government was always hostile to a rise in price. Where an increase in the duty was likely to be temporary, the trade could wait upon events; where future incre¬ ments would clearly have to be made, these needed to be discussed so that consequent price changes could be agreed. With a small group of leading brewers in Parliament, together with a wider circle of their friends and relatives, the opportunities for such negotiation were encouraged. Like¬ wise, when the few brewers whose wealth, power and political influence brought them into these same political circles found themselves negotiating in the name of the trade, this was already co-operation in matters affecting their common interest. They were members of the same broad social group as the policy makers, well-known in the City, owners of country estates, leading members of famous hunts (which had then the social and business implications which famous golf-clubs may have today), with a bond of instinctive understanding of common problems and common interests. This does not, of course, deny competition between them. In all cases, as owners of their firms, they were, with the other partners, more immediately affected by success or decline than the salaried managers of our own day. In this sense, their interests never coincided, and a ‘catand-mouse competition’ remained. But over certain areas of competition, hitherto considered traditional, the new conditions needed new solutions which denied economic assumptions common in many other parts of the economy. From a convention that pricing did not enter the economic debate (and hence, it may be claimed, from conditions where there existed already a tacit agreement to prevent this factor from being a ground of competition) a change of price became a matter for conscious collabora¬ tion. The public noticed the implications for the first time. 15

225

MB E

Competition and Co-operation Porter had been born in an attempt to undercut other beers (and other brewers). When it soon established leadership in price and quality over all other beers, theoretically, as economies in production increased and profit margins widened, there was scope for price competition within the group of porter brewers working at the most efficient scale of production. There was never a law against lowering the price of beer. Other costs (such as the price of casks and horses and beer stocks) did rise, it is true, but they were more than outweighed by other advantages. The truth was that simple price competition had never been a serious factor in the trade, when considered on its own. Price relative to quality was always a com¬ pletely different case, of course, and here there could be competition up to the hilt. Competition through changing the retail price of beer in the conditions of the age had its difficulties. The public liked a traditional price: the trade was predominantly free. ‘London porter’ as brewed by the great brewers was virtually a ‘standard good’, none was branded and aggressive advertisement was unknown.1 In unsettled circumstances, too, publicans could not be trusted to maintain the quality of a beer in their cellars if it was notably dearer than others. They might charge a flat rate, too, even if they got it at a cut price from brewers. The porter brewers could not entirely prevent price cutting and adulteration, nor could the Golden Lane brewery stop some of its publicans from selling at the ‘regular price’ charged by the established houses which they wished to undercut.2 Price competition immediately ran up against the problem of changes in quality, which tended always to make the brewers compete in quality rather than price under stable conditions of trade. Efficiency varied, of course, between the larger brewers, and temporary inefficiency could be reflected in quality without sales suffering. Mrs Thrale revealed how much latitude there could be on occasion. How great ought our profits to be [she wrote in 1773] if the following position be true, that to brew as good Beer as Calvert we must by a reduction of the Quantity drawn from each Qtr. of malt lessen our profits 9000^. Does not this proposition assert that we must have by our present mode of Proceeding all Calvert’s Profits and 9,000^ more and can this be true?3

Further comment on the double-edged standard of competition in price and quality—changes in one not being fully significant until related to changes in the other—comes from the Burton brewers. General agree1 F. A. Accum, Art of Brewing (1821), p. 242. But see Accum, pp. 68-70. 2 See below, p. 251. 3 Rylands Library, Eng. MS. 616, Box 1: Small grey note book (1773). 226

17oo-1795 ment about prices had been reached there, as in London, during the wartime years of widely fluctuating grain prices, although no united effort seems to have been exerted in Burton to control the selling prices of publicans. At the time, the brewers there were too anxious to build up sales in the home market to be over-anxious about the price policies of independent publicans—in contrast to the activities of their own agents. Their trade was too far-flung to allow the close controls which the London porter brewers were able to exercise over local publicans. Moreover, the Burton brewers had little or no capital invested in tying trade. Few of the publicans selling their beer in London or Lancashire had it as the mainstay of total sales. In November 1808, when the Burton brewers determined to sell no ale under zzd. per gallon, Samuel Allsopp remarked somewhat ruefully that the publicans had raised their price by id. per quart, which ‘amply and more than remunerated’ them for the brewers’ advance.1 The brewers had decided to raise prices in the knowledge that some local porter brewers had resolved upon not advancing prices but lowering quality proportionately.2 In the market exploited by the Burton brewers, quality was of more immediate concern than price. Allsopp was certain that his customers would tolerate an increase in price more readily than a decline in quality. Within the closely competing group of brewers, he relied upon higher relative quality to sell his ale in preference to that of Salt, Worthington or Bass. When customers objected to the price, he gave back a straight and simple answer: to a Manchester customer who tried to wring a concession in transport charges from him, Allsopp replied that it was ‘quite immaterial whether we pay the freight or not; if we pay it we shall send an ale of weaker Quality, and if it is charged on we send a better article’.3 His uncle had always made the same point when writing to his Baltic customers. For example, in 1791, when he had raised his price to 20d. per gallon to enable him to maintain the highest quality he announced the unwelcome news in a circular letter which ended ‘ I can brew it at 19d. or even at any Price which in its departure from that affix’d to the best Quality will govern the goodness thereof’.4 Because a ‘free-good’ was universally available as the instrument whereby quality might be varied to any degree (within the limits necessary for preserving 1 Allsopp Records: Letter Books, S. Allsopp to Mr Pott, 7 November 1808. 2 Prices of Burton porter were 50*. (per 36 gallon barrel, wholesale, to publicans) in December 1808. Brown Stout 60s. per barrel (raised to 54J. and 645. per barrel). Carnage costs were \\d. ner cask per mile in addition. 3 Allsopp Records: S. Allsopp to W. Worthington (Manchester), 12 May 1809, 4 Allsopp Records: B. Wilson to J. Abegg (Danzig), 6 October 1791. 227

15-2

Competition and Co-operation the beer) simple discussions on changes in the price level do not have very much relevance for exact discussions on the effects of a bad harvest or the existence of competition, particularly as little precise evidence is available for estimating all the variations in the strength of beer. Mrs Thrale’s comments illustrate the wide gap which could exist in the quality of beer brewed by two comparable establishments. Amongst the great brewers, and in the expanding market of eighteenthcentury London, competition at the stable price level was never more explicit. To the virtues of Samuel Smiles’ disciples at the height of a Victorian boom, imbued with the principles of self-help and Manchester economics, was added a very real ambition to be the greatest men of the industry and the greatest brewer in London. Goodwyn would have been mortified not to get the first steam-engine in London—for reasons of personal pride as well as industrial efficiency: Richard Meux had set his heart on building the largest vat in the world.1 Henry Thrale’s feud with Samuel Whitbread, more conscious on Thrale’s part than Whitbread’s, was carried to the pitch where personal ambition—the real spur to expan¬ sion and competition in Thrale’s case—continually threatened his solvency. Her Master’s unregenerate pride persuaded Mrs Thrale that speculation was the real ‘curse of commerce’.2 Here was competition indeed, even if retail prices remained constant throughout it, and even if Whitbread and Thrale might together draft and present petitions for the trade, and be sharing a military contract.3 1795-1830 These boisterous days were left behind in the next generation. Yet com¬ petition, though less flaunted, was not absent. Barclays expanded to a greater degree than any other major brewer in the years after 1810, causing concern to all their rivals. The tied-house system was itself encouraged by fear of competition. In that half of the trade in London which remained free, competition was as open as before, while not being entirely prevented in the section of it tied by loans. The new situation can best be appreciated through the activities of the Committee of the Porter Brewers, both for what it did and for what it did not do. This committee existed at least from 1795, possibly from 1794, meeting in Brewers’ Hall and employing a clerk from the Brewers’ Company to send out notices and do the necessary administration. Funds 1 See above, pp. 61, 88-9. 3 See pp. 199, 221.

2 Thraliana, ed. Balderston (1951), vol. I, p. 333.

228

i795-i83° were raised by a levy based on the annual production of the brewers who attended. Minutes were certainly being kept after 1830; they are no longer extant, if they ever existed, for the years before then.1 The only evidence left in the Brewers’ Company by the group in its early years was a gift of a hundred guineas to the Company in 1800 when ‘Mr Lake... was deputed by the Committee of the Porter Brewers to return their thanks for the Accommodation they had experienced in having the use of the Hall for five years past.. .’.2 This, possibly, accounts for the fact that business done in the Court of Assistants becomes purely domestic from this time onwards. The inception of a standing body is made clear also by an entry in one of the ledgers at Trumans:3 For occasional subscriptions for ye purpose of ye Trade with other Brewers Vizt: for paying ye Clerk ye Brewers Hall exps: attending and writing for meetings to be held respecting ye Stopping Brewing, and, if necessary, to try to prevent the great circulation of copper or any other circumstances [that] may occur injurious to ye Trade. Subscription pd. Jan. 1st. 1795: ioj. pr. 1,000 Bas. of Beer of last Year’s Brewing, £23. 55.

The main purpose of the Committee was to regulate price changes, of which the necessity was soon apparent. Once the inertia of a traditional stable price had been removed, changes became frequent in response to wide fluctuations in the price of malt. The wholesale price jumps of 55. per barrel (with \d. per pot changes retail) were universal in the London trade, as was the brewer’s discount. More latitude in price, rebates and credit seems to have been shown in country trade, depending upon the standing of the customer and the policy of individual breweries. Through discounts, obviously, price competition might have existed among the brewers concealed beneath a stable retail price. Little is known of the practice, but the discount seems to have been granted at the same flat rate by all brewers. There is no mention either of ‘aggressive’ dis¬ counting being used as a weapon on their part or demanded by an organised body of publicans on the other. That rising prices induced adulteration, both from diminishing retail margins and fears for demand at a higher price, is clear. In turn, as has been described, it led to an agreement between the price-fixers to enforce resale price maintenance upon their publicans—a measure supporting their prior determination of the upper level of prices. The issue is not quite the same as in modern conventions in this field, because advertising and branding were almost 1 G.L.M.R. MS. 5468.

3 Truman Records! Alult Book

2 G.L.M.R. Series 5445/32> f- 426 (I2 December 1800). 7>

3*

229

Competition and Co-operation absent, while quality could be varied very easily, but its purpose was obvious none the less.1 The reputation and sales of London porter had been built up on the clear superiority of the product. That good name and quality were worth more than a very low price. Some weakening there had to be when times were bad—the lengths drawn gradually increased, as all the brewers admitted in retrospect—but they strove to keep the degree and nature of the changes under their own control and to prevent the publicans using more violent and vicious practices.2 If porter became commonly adulterated to the extent of less reputable malt liquors (the publican taking the extra profits) then its clear pre-war distinction might not be easily regained. Hence the 1802 agreement to maintain retail prices, if possible: a device purely instigated by the manufacturers in their own interests, uninfluenced by the pressure of distributors’ or retailers’ associations trying to defend themselves against competition. The complete success of this policy soon broke down under the pressure of bad years and higher prices, and the brewers admitted to serving ‘ cutrate’ customers. For some time, it seems that adulteration became wide¬ spread, and the brewers could not stem it. Certainly the great brewers, with one unimportant exception, were cleared of all charges of adulterating beer. Equally certainly, adulteration was widely found in that brewed by small brewers and in beer sold by publicans generally, although the peak of complaints was reached before the return of peace in 1815.3 Co-operation over prices charged to the publican survived the attempt to enforce retail prices and became part of a smooth routine. When brewers met at the corn or hop markets, prices would be discussed. When they had been allowed to ‘settle’ after the harvests, one or other of the dozen great brewers could summon a meeting of them all at Brewers’ Hall, by asking the committee’s clerk to send out notices.4 Charles Barclay and Calvert claimed that the first pressure for a rise came ‘almost invariably’ from the smaller brewers outside the group ‘feeling the pressure and 1 For a discussion of contemporary practice see B. Yamey, Resale Price Maintenance (1954). 2 E.g. Pari. Papers, 1817, vn, p. 242 (Martineau), p. 238 (Barclay). See above, pp. 114-15. 3 The matter is discussed below, pp. 419-23. Evidence is clear in all printed works on the trade during this period and in the three main parliamentary enquiries. Thomas Meux (of Meux Reid) had been successfully prosecuted for using salts of tartar—but at a time, he alleged, when it had not yet been classed as a deleterious ingredient. The drug was used for ‘throwing a head’ on porter {Hansard, xxxvm, 1194-1201; Pari. Papers, 1818, in, no. 399, pp. 16-19). This was the only prosecution of a major brewery amongst 34 prosecutions between 1813 and 1819. 4 The evidence for the Committee’s activities comes from Pari. Papers, 1819, v, and 1830, X. Evidence by Barclay, Calvert, Buxton, Martineau, Perkins. See also S. and B. Webb, History of Liquor Licensing (1903). 230

1795~l83° severity of the times long before the larger establishments’. ‘I believe that upon every occasion in which any advance in beer has been made, there have been frequent applications from the small breweries to the larger ones saying “when will you agree to raise the price of beer?”’1 This claim is substantiated by the impressive list of absorptions and amalgamations proceeding through these years. At the meeting of the Committee, its members asserted, there was jealousy and competition, so that a rise in price was not authorised ‘until the necessity of the case forces them’. It was a cat-and-mouse situation, with those at the highest scale of production standing to pick up trade from the lesser brewers if they could themselves tolerate the margins. Agreements were, in any case, purely optional. Anyone might break them or not adhere, as they all knew when making them. Therefore decisions to raise had to be unanimous. Buxton explained in 1830 that if any of the big brewers stayed low—although it be ruinous in the long run—others must come down, as it would be ruinous for them in the short run if they did not.2 Calvert echoed him in 1819: ‘if Barclays lowered then all must lower’.3 Frederick Perkins did not see any value in the meetings for this reason, but they were defended by Calvert and Barclay as necessary to ‘prevent confusion’ and ‘create certain prices’. Against the charges of monopoly, which, with the tied houses, had been the reason for parlia¬ mentary enquiries, Buxton thought that the public had to rely in some measure upon the decision of the brewers—who, he thought, never raised prices until costs forced them to. Calvert thereupon interjected: ‘we have no patent for a brewery. If we raise the price too much others may commence as porter brewers... .We have only the exclusive supply of the public from the lowness of price and the goodness of the article.’4 Some of the implications of this assertion may be seen in the fortunes of the Golden Lane brewery.5 Barclay and Calvert enlarged upon the same point, insisting that if prices were fixed too high there would first be com¬ petition within the group in quality up to the new level, and then a loss of the free trade to brewers outside the group. There would only be real combination and a justifiable charge of monopoly, they claimed, when both price and quality were fixed. In 1819, Barclay included a further point which operated amongst the brewers themselves in moderating 1 Pari. Papers, 1819, V, pp. 85, 1803. See below, p. 422.

2 Ibid- 1830, X, p. 20. Ibid. 1819 V p. 103. The situation described here, and in the pages immediately following, has striking resemblances to that described by Hall and Hitch in Oxford Economic Papers f 1020) See also E. Chamberlain, Theory of Monopolistic Competition (5th ed. 1945), ch. 3. * Pari. Papers, 1830, X, p. 20. 5 See below, pp. 243-51.

3

23I

Competition and Co-operation prices: ‘We all find, that when the trade is a very thriving one for a short time, and the price has been kept up, what might be called in some measure unnecessarily, there is always a very great eagerness in obtaining trade, in purchasing houses, and lending sums of money.’1 This is obviously in a different category to his other arguments, implying a more subtle and oblique form of competition which sprang from successful rather than adverse trade. On the other side were general charges of monopoly and that an extra penny had been ‘kept on the pot’ in 1804 and 1818 as a result of the pricing agreements. It is doubtful whether this could have happened for as long as a year, but with prices needing to have conscious decisions taken over them, it may well be that they did not drop quite as quickly as they would have done under assumptions of ‘perfect competition’—or at least under the conditions prevailing before 1790. Barclay’s remark is an admission of what had happened when prices ‘ stuck ’ in this way. It will always be difficult to determine the precise position of individual firms in costs and profits over these years. In Barclays, apart from three bad years at the turn of the century, profits were kept up well in absolute terms (although the rate dipped in some years from the rapid expansion in capital). Despite protests from the brewers against the assertion, the drop in 1804 was partly induced, it appears, by the projection of the Golden Lane Brewery (or at least a rise in the next few years was inhibited by the rival).2 Vansittart, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, then complained in the Commons of ‘unreasonableness’ on the brewers’ part, provoking the reply from Whit¬ bread that they had determined to restore quality before dropping price.3 Calvert stated that members of the group were always sensitive to the potential effect which a rise in price might have upon demand (thinking that a fairly stable proportion of a working man’s budget was spent in drink) but disclaimed the obverse—that an increase in demand affected prices.4 Because of the nature of a brewery it was always fairly easy to supply a much greater quantity of beer to meet a sudden increase in demand—intensifying the use of plant without the immediate need to extend it. It was costs plus profit that governed the need and the extent of a price rise, not variations in demand—which might prevent a rise or induce a lowering of price and a weakening of the beer. Malt prices were produced to support this contention for the period 1800 to 1818. From the rise to 5d. in August 1803, beer prices were stable until 1812. Then

1 3

Pari. Papers, 1819, V, pp. 97 et seq. Monthly Mag. (1818), pt. I, pp. 177 et seq. 232

2 See Pari. Papers, 1819, v, p. 97. 4 Pari. Papers, 1830, X, pp. 18-26.

1795~l83° movement began again with peaks of 6d. per quart for almost a year in 1813 and for a year and a half in 1817-19. The tables will make these variations clear, and the prices may there be compared with the changes in duty and the cost of malt.1 Even this can give no certain conclusions as to the virtues of the policy, for the strength changed, the quality of barley was apt to vary imperfectly with its price (in years of bad harvest always inversely with the price) and great changes occurred within months or even weeks in both the grain and hop markets. The projection of numerous breweries in 1804-7, and the public agitation which culminated in a parliamentary enquiry came at times when prices were high and quality often doubtful. This is not to say that much exploitation of an oligopoly position occurred for any length of time. It will be seen that no thought of limiting production entered the heads of anyone of the protagonists in the Committee of Porter Brewers. In the exceptional case of wanting to bring pressure to bear on the ministry, this remained a strictly temporary expedient. It was rather the threat of a decline in the quantity of sales which prejudiced a projected rise in price, and a general fear that lesser brewers would take up any section of the market left unsatisfied by the great if they were not able to satisfy all the demands made upon them. After 1805, the Golden Lane Brewery was a standing memorial to this fear—and possibly to oversanguine decisions taken by the porter brewers in 1803. On the other hand, if it be granted that, on occasion, the prices fixed by the Committee were in fact liable to ‘stick’ before a fall rather longer than would have been the case under conditions of less conscious movements in price (where many competing firms near the same efficiencies in production let their prices be ruled more automatically by the market) then demand might have been indirectly rather less, and production rather less than at a lower price. In all cases, however, it was only possible to change retail prices by a minimum move of \d. per quart, or 55. per barrel to the publican, which created fairly large discontinuities—or a difference in receipts of £25,000 to a brewer of 100,000 barrels—so that this factor would operate only marginally, and in respect of time rather than long-run price. In addition to their predominant concern with price changes, the Com¬ mittee of the Porter Brewers did attempt to regulate other matters. Several times they sponsored moves to break what they thought to be combinations against them in the malt markets. In 1794? Robert Barclay, Henry Goodwyn and Joseph Delafield wereappointed as a sub-committee 1 Appendix, Tables 39, 40. 233

Competition and Co-operation to purchase up to 40,000 quarters of foreign barley to be thrown on to the London market in order to lower prices. On the 27,000 quarters purchased and sold through Claude Scott, a leading corn factor, there was a loss of £2450 which was divided amongst the subscribers of the ‘shares’. Trumans’ 9 shares suffered a loss of ^iqo.1 Again, in 1800, they sent an agent to the Continent to buy barley for the same purposes. This time the Bank of England, thinking that speculation was afoot, inquired into the transaction when bills of such large denominations began to be drawn on one person in Hamburg. Timothy Brown, a banker and managing partner in Whitbreads, explained that the ‘conspiracy’ was to supply the market and lower the price, ‘since which’, he said, ‘they have discounted that Description of Paper more liberally, seeing it was for a public Benefit’.2 Similar efforts may have been made with barley in 1819, and hops in 1817.3 The same concern over their concerted presence in the grain market, bidding up prices, lay behind a more oblique negotiation by the brewers in the crisis of 1812. A possible alternative to a price rise (which, as it proved, was forced upon the group in November 1812 and January 1813) might have lain in the use of sugar. At the end of October 1812, Birming¬ ham and Yorkshire merchants had come to bid for barley in the London market, and malt prices had risen to between 1125. and 120s. per qtr.4 Robert Sangster, another partner in Whitbreads, wrote to Samuel Whit¬ bread on behalf of the trade, asking him to use his influence in getting the minister to allow the use of duty-free sugar.5 Already an Act had enabled them to use sugar temporarily, and a proclamation was extending its operation.6 As Whitbread himself was averse to a rise in price, this might have been the way out of an already critical situation where ‘not only Interest cannot be made of the Capital, but a very great loss must be sus¬ tained \7 Whitbread wrote for them to Vansittart. With Combe and Calvert, he put the argument before the minister in person on 5 November.8 Two bad harvests in succession had then made the brewers use up all their stocks: they were now defenceless, being forced into the markets for the needs of current production. At prevailing raw-material prices, this spelt 1 Truman Records: Malt Book, 1790-7, f. 103. 2 Pari. Papers, 1801, II, 7th Report.. .on High Prices, App. 8, p. 45. 3 Barclay Records: Rest Books, 1819; Hop Book, 1786-1893. 4 Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4686. 6 Ibid. 30 October 1812. 6 J.H.C. lxvii, 415; lxviii, 71, 858. 52 Geo III, c. 45 (9 June 1812) was eventually con¬ tinued to 1 October 1813 by proclamation dated 26 October 1812. 7 Whitbread Records (Southill): ibid. 8 Ibid. 4686-9, 4691. 234

ruin for the smaller houses. At the existing price of beer, they said, it was ‘impossible for the Brewer to purchase Malt, Hops or Sugar’ to carry on at all. In the general calamity (which had affected all grains and potatoes) they asked that great stores of sugar awaiting exportation in bond might be put to use in the brewing trade in an attempt to influence the price of malt. This might allow them ‘barely to save their capitals’.1 There was another meeting at Calvert’s town house in St James’s Place on 9 November. After further negotiation with the obdurate Wharton (a junior to Vansittart) the group met Lord Liverpool and Vansittart on the following Friday.2 The question at issue was a significant one— emphasising the intimate relations inevitable between politics and business in the brewing industry. Liverpool wished to know how large a price increase was proposed; what would be the highest price of barley at which a rise would not take place, what rebate in duty the trade would find equivalent to the use of duty-free sugar, and what assurances he might have that beer made under such concessions would not be sold at the higher price.3 In a written reply on the next day the brewers stipulated that barley at 50s. per qtr. or above would mean that they could not save their capital, and that then a rise of at least 6s. per barrel and \d. per quart would have to come. With concessions, no rise would take place, they promised, during the experiment with sugar. The main relief this would afford was not so much in the use of the article itself, but in the effect that the use of a substitute might have, if advertised, in the malt markets.4 They would be able to say within a month whether the use of sugar had this effect. Complicated calculations about relative prices and relative utilities of malt and sugar (which in any case could not be used in a pro¬ portion greater than 1 in 4), revealed that mutual duty rates, absence of credits from the sale of yeast and grains when brewing with the su bstitute, the effect of increased demand upon the price of sugar, technical difficulties in manufacture and an inevitable difference in taste, would all prejudice the success of the experiment.5 Beer prices therefore went up on 16 November and again on 12 January 1813. The negotiations had been fruitless. But they clearly showed, once more, how important it was in these difficult times to have a committee of the trade able to approach the government quickly, to speak with an authoritative voice and to be themselves men of 1 2

Ibid. 4691: Whitbread, Combe and Calvert to Vansittart, 6 November 1812.

Ibid. 4694-6. 3 Ibid. 4690. \Ibtd'o^2rw • 1 a 5 Ibid 4698: Joseph Todhunter to S. Whitbread, 15 November 1812. This is a long and technical analysis of the position. Todhunter asserted that the use of sugar would be clearly uneconomic unless it might be used duty free.

235

Competition and Co-operation substance. If state regulation encouraged trade combinations, war-time conditions stimulated the spread of both. One other agreement amongst the porter brewers does appear to have aimed at a more formal control of price and supply, although only in the subordinate sale of a by-product, yeast. Being the traditional suppliers of yeast for baking and distilling, there was evidently a sufficiently inelastic demand for the commodity for the brewers to place a premium on its supply. Little evidence appeared about the matter, and it does not seem ever to have provided ammunition for those attacking the porter brewers. Some restriction, however, there undoubtedly was. From 1795 they had agreed not to sell yeast under a guinea per store. Hanbury was quite open about it when replying to an order from one of his regular customers, Cooke, the important distiller at Bow, Essex. ‘ I... should have been happy to have supplied you with Yeast at any price’, he wrote, ‘had I not agreed with the Rest of our Trade not to sell under one Guinea pr. Store. If any alteration takes place I will instantly inform you and shall be ever ready to renew our Connection.’1 That same year the trade agreed to contract for yeast for the whole season. This involved some restriction on the supply to justify the price. As Hanbury wrote to Charles Barclay ‘by all means I recommend supporting the plan as the only step we can take to establish our present exorbitant Price for Yeast. I have sold all my yeast and could double the Quantity, but I have delv’d my proportion this week and shall continue so to do. ’2 How long he did continue; how long any such restrictive agreements survived, are not known. Within two years Barclays were valuing their yeast at only 125. per store (more like the general price before 1795), but by 1827 they had returned to a price of 20s. per store to distillers and 17s. to ‘distributors’ (the ‘yeast-men’ supplying yeast in London for baking) which differentiation perhaps suggests a new agreement.3 Apart from these certain measures of agreement over articles traded—of which the pricing of porter was by far the most important—the Committee of the Porter Brewers naturally assumed a role as arbiter in conflicts over tied trade. Its members agreed that creditors might be exchanged by publicans who spontaneously wished to change their brewers; where the spontaneity was in dispute they agreed to entrust a verdict to two members 1 Truman Records: Letter Books, 1789-98. S. Hanbury to Cooke and Co., 3 May 1796, 26 November 1795; to J. Delafield, 12 November 1796. See above, pp. 49-50. 2 Ibid. S. Hanbury to C. Barclay, December 1796. 3 Barclay Records: Rest Books, note on cover of 1800 Book; 1827-30. Accounts of ‘Expences of Brewing’. 236

!795-i83° of the trade who were not involved.1 In 1816, they tried to come to terms about not purchasing houses outright, and in 1841 they were trying to agree about loans—probably to limit their extent.2 These measures, with the attempt to prevent publicans from cutting prices, may all be grouped under the heading of ‘preventing confusion’. The agitation raised against the porter brewers on charges of monopoly, which influenced the line taken by the Select Committee on the Police of the Metropolis in 1817, and inspired the enquiry into the Public Breweries in 1818, now needs description, with two minor legislative moves against the status quo, and the one important commercial challenge. Active competition for public houses amongst the brewers was obviously not hidden from public eyes. Brokers began to specialise in this sort of property (almost seventy of them were flourishing in 1830);3 more and more publicans were acknowledging receipt of loans or the surrender of their leases; brewers’ names were appearing on the sign-boards of public houses.

Even the annual production figures, published each summer,

emphasised the preponderance of the few and the weakness of the many. When prices changed, printed orders were circulated from the porter brewers to all publicans, and the meetings of their committee were reported in the press. In such a situation, most complaints tended to be shrill protests against the existence of this economic strength (rather than an attempt to prove an abuse of power) on the crudest post hoc ergo propter hoc lines. The mere existence of these giants in aggregate was felt to be a threat to the interests of consumers, once the facts of their power were sufficiently advertised. Inevitably, fear of abuse—so easily becoming belief in abusehid the more fundamental economic fact that size was conditioned by efficiency. Oligopoly conditions resulted from the struggle to produce a superior article at the cheapest possible price (even if success in the struggle was due to further factors such as managerial ability and the ability to get capital at crucial moments). It was, in a way, the fulfilment of the process of evolution generated under conditions of perfect competi¬ tion, given the technical and marketing conditions of the industry in London—an ironic reflection for such determined free traders as led the ‘anti-monopoly’ movement.

Such subtlety was not expected in the

1 Truman Records: Letter Books, 1789-98,1802-1804, S.Hanbury to Sangster, 10 June 1795, S. Hanbury to Elliott, 26 July 1797; S. Hanbury to Clowes, 19 July 1803. 2 G.L.M.R. MS. 5468: 19 November 1841. . . , 3 Pari. Papers, 1830, x, p. 114; P. Boyle, Publican's Daily Companion (1795), PP- 95 106» \y. Harris, Brewer, Victualler and Gauger's Assistant (1793)-

237

Competition and Co-operation crude fracas of opinion then current, but the main point was made that without such large breweries, costs and prices would inevitably have been much higher than they were with them. The fact that the prices of all raw materials—labour, horses, casks and building—had all risen in proportion much more than the price of beer was adduced to prove the point. Through¬ out the debate the brewers maintained that: ‘We say we can sell cheaper and better than others. We are not afraid of competition.’1 The report from the 1818 Committee agreed to the extent of publicly announcing their support for the ‘superior article which it was ascertained they [i.e. the great brewers] were enabled to furnish from the better arrangement which their large and extensive capitals necessarily commanded’.2 In creating the economic situation, the effect of an increasing rate of duty upon the brewing trade, as upon malting, was not denied. Barclay acknowledged that the ‘weight of the duty [was] so great and the pressure of it so increasing, that it has only been borne by strong backs and by a monopoly—a monopoly that has been created.. .by paying the duty’.3 Opening the trade without dropping the duty would not therefore redress this situation completely. It would merely hit those suffering the conse¬ quent depreciation in public house valuations, the brewers (who could stand it) and independent publicans (who could not). Hence the demand from the trade for a quid pro quo. Much of the agitation against prevailing conditions was raised and led by John T. B. Beaumont, a J.P. for Middlesex and Westminster, who was described as the primum mobile of the Anti-Monopoly Committee.4 He had good reason to be, as a freeholder and speculative builder suffering under the licensing system. In the years just before 1817 he had built nearly 150 houses on land in Stepney and in Shepherd’s Bush, with a ‘superior public house on each estate for the necessary convenience of his tenants’. When he failed to get licences for them—they were free houses—he claimed £4000 had been lost on their erection.5 His accusation was that the licensing justices had been prejudiced in favour of brewers’ houses and, on the strength of this, Beaumont attacked the ‘licensing monopoly’. He now formed an ‘Anti-Monopoly Committee’, leading debates and publishing speeches on the public evil which enabled the brewers to ‘suck the vitals of the poorer classes’.6 The movement was favourably reported in the Monthly Magazine, the Edinburgh Review, The 1 Pari. Papers, 1830, x, pp. 13-17 (C. Barclay). 2 Ibid. p. 1; Hansard, xxxvm, 1196-1201. 3 Ibid. p. 15. 4 Brewers' Monopoly.. .(1818), p. 8. 5 g.H.C. lxxii, 325, 378 (6 and 20 June 1817); lxxiv, 400 (5 May 1819).

6

Monthly Mag. (1818), pt. I, pp. 154-6, 197.

238

m5~i83° Times, and even the Morning Advertiser, at various times.

It seems to have picked up momentum from all those with ‘advanced views’ and tendencies to radicalism or free trade—the economic protestants.1 Meetings of the Committee—combined with popular gatherings in support of the cause—were held at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand, a well-known rendezvous for radicals of all classes from Sir Francis Burdett to Samuel Bamford.2 The place had become prominent as a radical headquarters in 1807, when Burdett’s campaign for the Westminster election had been planned there and large meetings held in the hall which was attached to the building. In later years the main celebrations to commemorate his victory were held at the Crown and Anchor.3 This remained the meeting place of the Central Hampden Club, the plotting centre for free trade politics generally (in which the 1818 petition played a tactical part) and the appropriate site for gatherings of many different progressive movements.4 Great demonstrations were held there by the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union in 1834 to protest against the transportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.5 It proved to be the cradle of Chartism in 1837; for the political programme of the Working Men’s Association was decided on at a meeting at the Crown and Anchor, and eventually became the site of the meetings of the Metropolitan Branch of the Anti-Corn Law Association.6 The first gathering in support of the 1818 Committee to get wide notice (and possibly the first meeting of the group) was held at the Crown and Anchor on the 26—7 January 1818, with Sir Henry Wilson in the chair. Someone read a paper in defence of the brewers, to which Beaumont replied with a speech, subsequently published, reviewing malt prices and beer prices since 1798 215Johnson, Letters, H. L. Thrale to S. Johnson, 26 June 1779.

269

Finance and the Entrepreneur Johnson advised her not to take a house in the west end of the town, which would have kept her farther—and more often—away from Southwark. She, in turn, acknowledged her obligations to the ‘Golden Millstone ’ (as she called it) by moving into residence at Park Street by the brewery, which she disliked, from the house at Streatham in the spring of 1780. As a woman she had paid the penalty of playing an active part in management through two miscarriages brought on by her strenuous activity, one when rushing to Brighton to borrow money in 1772, and again in 1779 when called to settle a dispute amongst the workmen.1 It was unfortunate for her that the onset of a business crisis had the effect of producing apoplexy in her husband, who retired from the scene leaving his wife and subordinates to save his business. Largely for this reason, her writings give good descriptions of the effects of financial stringency upon a business in the eighteenth century. The effects of war now intensified the effects of commercial depression. Rising prices had cut into purchasing power and sales had been declining through the summer of 1779. Mrs Thrale found that the July collections from the ‘Town Trade’ alone were £1095 short on the previous year, and, in 1780, things got worse, this time from a lapse in demand rather than a shortage of credit at the brewery. From 86,000 barrels in 1777-8, production dropped to 76,000 barrels in 1778-9 and the winter brewings of 1779-80, Mrs Thrale thought, would scarcely turn 60,000—‘so horribly is the consumption lessened by the war’.2 The country reached the pit of depression just before Christmas, ‘All trade is dead’, wrote Johnson from London in November, ‘and pleasure is scarce alive. Nothing almost is purchased but such things as the buyer cannot be without, so that a general sluggishness and general discontent are spread over the town. All the trades of luxury and elegance are nearly at a stand.’3 Thrale remained prostrate and disordered through the spring and summer of 1780, quite withdrawn from business.4 Both he and Mrs Thrale were at Brighton in June (the trade going well) when Perkins saved the brewery from a more alarming fate than bankruptcy at the hands of the mob during the Gordon Riots. They had attacked the brewery, believing that its owner was a supporter of Popery. Perkins placated them with porter until Sir Philip Jennings Clerke (an old friend of the family) brought up troops and drove them away. The incident proved once more 1 Thraliana, vol. I, p. 311. 2 Ibid. pp. 395-6. 3 Letters, S. Johnson to Elizabeth Aston, 5 November 1779. 4 Ibid. S. Johnson to H. L. Thrale, 9 December 1779; to T. Lawrence, 18 August 1780; to J. Beattie, 21 August 1780. 270

Henry Thrale and John Perkins to Mrs Thrale how completely their safety lay in his hands, and she was not slow to acknowledge it.1 Her obligations to Perkins soon became inescapable. On 4 April 1781, Henry Thrale died without a son to succeed him. This, the ultimate crisis, fused conjointly the problem of finance and the problem of management which the loyalty and ability of John Perkins, for twenty years a salaried manager, had hitherto kept distinct. In the predicament facing Mrs Thrale and her husband’s Executors, in the subsequent purchase of the concern by new partners and the translation of John Perkins from ‘salaried servitude’ to the enjoyment of ownership and profits, the intimate ties which linked finance and management to the kinship nexus are revealed. One social world had died with Henry Thrale; with the new ownership a different business environment came into the trade, and it was fitting that John Perkins should be the man who engineered the crossing from the old to the new. In the contrast between the two, as in the contrast between Whitbread and the Quakers, the importance of kinship is in¬ escapable. It must be regarded as one of the most fundamental con¬ siderations in the study of entrepreneurship in industry in the eighteenth century. Cousinhood can give the clue to much success. The problems facing Mrs Thrale and her husband’s Executors, of running a family business without the head of the family, were in part caused by the particular situations of the actors, but were, more signifi¬ cantly, implicit in the actual structure of ownership under the legal conditions of partnership. Mrs Thrale’s and Dr Johnson’s endeavours to perform full-time what they had been forced by Thrale’s disorders to do part-time could not succeed. The Executors as a committee were divided amongst themselves, yet had an equal voice in business decisions. One of them, Cator, was a timber merchant and ‘afraid of implicating his own credit’. All the Executors, under conditions of unlimited liability, might be liable to answer for the debts of the firm with their personal estate, yet as Executors none might enjoy the profits.2 No wonder that another of them ‘ cursed the whole business and wondered what his relation Mr Thrale could mean by leaving him 200^, he said, and such a burden on his back to bear for it.’3 Only Johnson remained sanguine. When Thrale was stricken, but not dead, he encouraged Mrs Thrale to continue 1 Thraliana, vol. I, p. 437; Queeney Letters, cd. Lansdowne (1934), PP- 130-5; Clifford, op. cit. p. 186; Johnson, Letters, to J. Boswell, 21 August 1780. Mrs Thrale gave Perkins 200 guineas and a silver urn inscribed Mollis responsio ham avertit. 2 Thraliana, vol. I, p. 499, n. 1. Q 3 Hayward, Autobiography of Mrs Ptozzi, vol. 1, pp. 94^6, 293-5; Thraliana, vol. 1, p. 490. 271

Finance and the Entrepreneur in command and to repel Perkins’ attempts to work himself into a partner¬ ship.1 Now, after his death, as Executor he wished to try his hand at control. Mrs Thrale noticed that, ‘he found some odd delight in signing drafts for hundreds and for thousands, to him a new, and as it appeared delightful occupation’. ‘When all was nearly over’, she said, ‘I cured his honest heart of its incipient passion for trade by letting him into some and only some of its mysteries. ’2 These ‘ mysteries ’ were not particularly obscure. Brewing was a highly technical business, and upon the manager’s professional skill hung the fate of an immense capital. Efficiently run, the trade was lucrative, one year with another, but in bad hands disaster could swallow up the £149,000 capital revealed by the 1780 Rest Book within a few years. The Executors had to administer the estate (of which almost all the assets were in the trade) for the benefit of the daughters, but none of them had been trained to the business. Only two, Mrs Thrale and Dr Johnson, knew anything about the trade, and they knew only the problems of the counting house. The crux of the matter was that neither of them actually knew how to brew. For this, the hub of commercial success, all the Executors were in the hands of Perkins, and he was now threatening to hold out for a share of the profits. It was his chance to bid for a partnership. His first trump in the play, which started when Thrale was removed from the scene, was his technical ability. He had been at the centre of operations, the real architect of success, for a lifetime. The Executors could do nothing them¬ selves, and they were frightened that the immensity of the capital involved, combined with the technical problems of the business, would prevent other people from taking it over. The advice they received was to reduce the capital to £70,000-^80,000, confine the sales to London and its environs and abandon the export and country trade as ‘an uncertain business and not for an Executor or Trustee but only for a principal who can act as he wishes ’. Once the capital was reduced, they were to continue the trade until an opportune moment for sale, ‘ not in prospect so much of Gain as preservation’. With the more moderate capital involved they hoped that buyers would present themselves and enable the estate to be converted into government stock which they might then easily administer to the beneficiaries of the will.3 1 Thrahana, vol. I, pp. 461-2, 479. Mrs Thrale was now convinced that Perkins had ‘set his heart upon Power’. It was in an attempt to encourage her that Johnson made his celebrated remark, ‘Do not be frighted, Trade could not be managed by those who manage it, if it had much difficulty... ’ (Letters, 16 November 1779). 2 Hayward, loc. cit. 3 The document has been preserved in J. Rylands Library, English MS. 600, f. 33. 272

Henry Thrale and John Perkins Such a solution quite ignored the loss in value to the remaining capital, if the trade was dismembered. As there was no estate apart from the brewery, the Executors felt that they could not allow long-term loans to the purchaser on the security of the estate, which made it difficult for a buyer to pay for the brewery out of its profits over a considerable period of years, as Ralph Thrale had done. It was apparent that the difficulties of selling such a business played into Perkins’ hands once more. His second, and decisive, trump was that he had married, as his second wife, Amelia Bevan, widow of Timothy Paul Bevan, son of one of the richest Quaker bankers of Lombard Street and himself a wealthy druggist and merchant, whose extensive cousinhood stood ready to bring capital in plenty for the purchase, and able cadets for partners.1 When time had revealed these difficulties, Mrs Thrale became eager to persuade Perkins to bring forward his relatives, lending him the produce of £2000 she had in the stocks and getting Crutchley to offer him £1000 to enable him to take up his share of the new partnership, and virtually bribing Amelia Perkins with the gift of her house near the brewery with all its furniture.2 With only one serious contender at the sale, the price was, she felt, a ‘prodigious bargain’ at £135,000. But all the Executors were saved from brewing themselves into another bankruptcy and Mrs Thrale had at last slipped the golden millstone from her neck. ‘Well’, she wrote happily when all was over, here have I.. .completed—I really think very happily, the greatest Event of my life. I have sold my Brewhouse to Barclay the rich Quaker for i35,ooo£, to be in four years’ time paid. I have by this bargain purchased peace and a stable fortune. Restoration to my original Rank in Life and a Situation undisturbed by Commercial Jargon, undisgraced by Commercial Connexion.3

Johnson, the friend of Thrale, was, at last, the figure presiding, ‘bustling about with an ink-horn and pen in his button hole, like an excise man , when the Anchor Brewery passed into the new business world. He alone of the Executors had wanted to carry on the trade. Such a transference had as its origin, of course, the failure of the family to produce a healthy son. Successive pregnancies had found Mrs Thrale, no less than her husband, always ‘in hopes of a young brewer’. Two of her children were, indeed, boys but neither survived to manhood.4 Five 1 E. C. Cripps, Plough Court (1927), pp. 14-15,, _ _ 2 Thraliana, vol. 1, pp. 498-9, 5°i; Hayward, he. at.- D’Arblay, Diary of Fanny Burney, (1904), vol. 11, p. 18; Johnson, Letters, S. Johnson to H. L. Thrale, 7 April 1781.

3 4

Thraliana, loc. cit. , Johnson, Letters, S. Johnson to Boswell, 25 November 1777. The elder son died in 1776

aged nine, the other in 1775 aged two. 18

273

MBE

Finance and the Entrepreneur years before Johnson had commented on the importance of sons for such a family industry: ‘The desire of male heirs’, he remarked, ‘is not appendant only to feudal tenures. A son is almost necessary to the con¬ tinuance of Thrale’s fortune; for what can Misses do with a brewhouse. Lands are fitter for daughters than trade.n In June 1781, he could add that lands or stocks were fitter also for Executors. Such family hazards often ended the continuity of ownership in a prosperous business enterprise, just as surely as lavish personal expenditure might cripple it. The history of industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth century is at one with the history of land ownership in revealing the importance of these two factors in the economic fortunes of the business as much as the estate. The tradi¬ tional success story of those centuries, where the industrious apprentice or clerk married his master’s daughter (or sometimes, better still, his widow) to inherit the business, should more properly be regarded as a traditional tragedy—that of the master who had no son to succeed him. Sir Benjamin Truman had died over a year before Henry Thrale, leaving his Black Eagle brewery at Spitalfields also without an assured succession in the male line. Of his total estate of £180,688 no less than £162,316 were locked up in the trade; all his personal effects, real estate, house, furniture and holdings in Government Stock (worth £12,480) totalling under £18,500.2 The bulk of the estate could not easily be divided, yet it was difficult for his sons-in-law and grandsons to assume a partner¬ ship on the spot to receive the benefits of their legacy. The two boys were ‘to be bred up to the Business’ (as Truman called it) and at the end of his life the old man had deliberately enlarged and improved his house at the brewery, moving in his paintings from the country house in Hertfordshire, ‘to induce them to spend some part of their time in Spitalfields, especially in the winter season’.3 For ten years, Truman’s old house-clerk, James Grant, who had been to his master what John Perkins was to Henry Thrale, ran the brewery almost single-handed. He took over as Executor of the jf share of the trade possessed by Truman; with Truman’s grandson, William Truman Read, enjoying the single share he had accepted from his grandfather just before his death. In May 1788, Grant bought out Read’s share for £12,000 and continued alone, in a double capacity of sole Executor and partner.4 Then, at his death in 1789, Truman’s son-in-law, Henry Read (Sr), in turn became Grant’s Executor 1 Boswell, op. cit. vol. 11, p. 69. 2 Truman Records: Rest Book 1780. 3 Sir Benjamin Truman’s will (quoted Survey of London, xxvil (1957), ch. 9). 4 Ibid. Rest Book 1789-90; G.L.M.R. Series 5445, 8 June 1787, 12 May 1780, 8 April 1791. 274

Henry Thrale and John Perkins and Sampson Hanbury bought himself into the firm by taking over Grant’s own ^ share.1 In its own way, the entry of Sampson Hanbury to the partnership was as great a portent for the future development of the Black Eagle Brewery as the assumption of control at the Anchor Brewery by Robert Barclay and John Perkins. The great-grandsons of Sir Benjamin Truman, John Truman Villebois and Henry Villebois did, it is true, consolidate their shares of the joint capital after 1794 and 1799, and so provide a certain continuity of ownership into the new world, but the management was on Hanbury’s shoulders and, as a business man, it was he who took over after the interregnum of James Grant. Moreover, as later pages in this chapter will relate, he was himself within the same wide kinship group as the Barclays and Gurneys, while his fellow-members in the Hanbury family were as eminent in trade and finance in their own right as their Quaker cousins. In the lack of an assured succession to the management, when such large fixed capitals were involved in business (particularly a highly skilled one), there was a good opportunity for the senior salaried staff to be taken into partnership. The effect of this was that, as the barrier of high capital requirements for entry into the trade increased during the century, so the internal ladder of recruitment of entrepreneurs became more important. The rich men who brought much wealth into partnership were often too old, or too unwilling, to learn the details of brewing, having either only general business ability and inclinations for the trading side of management or, perhaps, the inclinations as well as the abilities of being only investors. In such circumstances, the clerk promoted to partner in the eighteenth century was really the ancestor of the salaried director of today. John Perkins is one example; James Grant and T. Butts Aveling (also of Tru¬ mans) are others; also the elder Whitbread’s senior clerks, Sangster and Yallowley. The clerks and salaried brewers themselves, even when they did not gain a partnership, became highly important as entrepreneurs as the unit of production became larger. Greater capital tended to bring more partners into ownership, and more articulated management in the opera¬ tion of the business, with a growing specialisation of function amongst the senior personnel between buying, brewing and accounting. Salaries of up to £1000 carried by these departmental managers (for such they 1 Truman Records: Letter Books, B. Cleypole to T. Truman, 12 March 1789; to J. Burn, 7 August 1789.

275

18-2

Finance and the Entrepreneur were) acknowledged their responsibilities, and there was sometimes attached an incremental scale, which varied with the profits, to provide an incentive akin to ownership even though without any stake in the capital or a formal share in the control. Johnson proposed such a scheme to the Executors for Perkins in 1781, whereby his salary was to be £200 for the first £4000 profits (‘which will come of itself’), £400 for the second £4000 profits; for the third £4000, ‘which will give a yet higher proof of good management’—£600. By this means he hoped to ‘connect his interest with ours’.1 Perkins, as partner, no doubt remembering his own career, brought the senior clerk at once into such a profit-sharing scheme in 1781. George Lester became a ‘nominal partner in consideration of his skill and experience’, with a salary of £500 annually (which was Perkins’ old income) and that reward which £4000 of the partnership capital would have given him.2 This profit-sharing did not allow him ever to have any ‘ capital of trade ’ in his own hands—he had no real capital to withdraw—nor could he nominate his son to his neo-partnership position, having no voice in official policy. The articles of agreement fortunately detail his responsibilities: he was to be ‘superintendent and manager of the Beer and store-cellars and see the whole business and Duty of the Storehouse clerk properly done and the superintendency, transaction, care and management of all other the affairs and concern of the said trade except the Counting House business and except the Business of the working brewer... ’.3 A similar scheme brought T. Butts Aveling a share of the profits of Trumans after 1814.4 These men, the salaried entre¬ preneurs, were little known in the brewing industry outside the capital in the eighteenth century; in London, developments were such that their significance steadily advanced. That they, and the managerial devices which came with them, should bear so much resemblance to the race of men who are so important in large-scale enterprise in our own day is but one more aspect of that precocity of development in porter brewing which gives a contemporary relevance to so much of its history. 1

Letters, S. Johnson to H. L. Thrale, 16 April 1781. 2 Barclay Records: Deed Book, Articles (1781). 3 Barclay Records, Deed Book, 1781-1831, 8 June 1782. 4 Truman Records: Rest Books, 1814-25. Aveling was credited with two shares out of forty-seven and looked after the property and loan side of the business. See above, pp. 132-3.

276

Whitbreads and Finance WHITBREADS AND FINANCE

In the last third of the century, Whitbread was proving his mettle as the leader in porter brewing through his unrivalled figures of annual produc¬ tion, and his innovations of the great cisterns and subsidiary uses for steam power. The visit of the King and Queen on 26 May 1787 gracefully acknowledged this pre-eminence.1 For most of this period, the trading accounts and balance-sheets of the firm do not survive, but the finance ledgers reveal their own aspect of the enterprise throughout it.2 In normal years the brewery was, by this time, producing enough income to enable its owner to build up his country estates and live the life of a wealthy gentleman at his house at Bedwell Park, Hertfordshire (acquired in 1765), and in London (first in St Albans Street, Westminster, then from 1778 onwards, in Portman Square). It also yielded enough cash in some seasons which might be put out to profit in the business account. At the same time, he was the recipient of large deposits (the brewery playing the role of a savings bank for many people in differing walks of life), so that it becomes difficult to see which loans were sought to help the brewery in times of strain, and which were there mainly to oblige their owners and thus had to be employed outside the brewing business to earn their keep. The strategy revealed by the ledgers concerns, first, these steady ‘ savings bank’ deposits; then, the employment of funds by the brewery in dis¬ counting and loans; finally, the concern’s reaction to financial stringency and years of dearth. The ‘ Club ’ accounts were much the most regular of the deposits, and we may surmise that their most welcome function for the brewer was in holding a regular clientele together at his public houses (the publican usually being the treasurer). While no great percentage of the total number of public houses served by the brewery had such clubs (it was under 10 per cent always with Whitbread, and seems not to have been more for Goodwyns3—where numbers rose from seventeen to twenty-five in 1784-8—Barclays or Trumans) the accounts reveal a fascinating glimpse of the world of social self-help which centred round the public house. 1 When Whitbread and his daughter were at Court earlier in the year the ‘King to Mr W. and the Queen to Miss W. both expressed their inclination in such terms that they were under necessity of saying they should be proud of receiving their Commands’ (Whitbread Records (Brewery): Joseph Delafield to John Delafield, 2 June 1787). The trouble taken over the visit was amply rewarded by the ensuing reputation of the business. 2 Significantly they are called ‘Private Ledgers’ and were evidently not kept in the counting house with the trading accounts. Whitbread often entered these books up himself. 3 Charrington Records: Goodwyn, Trade Ledger, 1784-8. 277

Finance and the Entrepreneur They are the direct ancestors of the working men’s clubs of our own day, their members depositing money so that they might withdraw the interest at Christmas or in sickness and their complete deposit in bad times. This is Peter Stubs’ ‘box’ on a larger scale.1

Naturally, the capital from

clubs deposited with Whitbread rose with his extending trade: from thirty-one such accounts with £3135 on deposit in 1770, they rose to fifty-one with £7686 invested in 1790, and forty-six had £9530 invested in 1796. Then, with the sapping of living standards by prices rising faster than wages in the war years, decline set in and the total had fallen (also with the trade) to £2945 in 1807 and £1848 in 1812, rising once more to £4530 in the first three years of peace. Some clubs are humble and ephemeral, depositing as little as £20 for a few brief months, but some remain and grow prosperous, ploughing back the interest in some years and adding to their capital. The club at the King’s Arms in Blackman Street, for example, had £275 invested in 1782, rising to £450 by 1796. At that date also a coopers’ club at the Hind’s Head in Chiswell Street (its members surely employees) had £350 on the books, and a women’s club opened its account in the same year at the Flying Horse in Grub Street (now Milton Street) with £225. No less than six out of thirty-seven clubs depositing money with Trumans in 1822 were for women.2 Almost all earned a regular 4 per cent on their deposits, year in year out, as did the humble personal investors on the ‘trade’ list. This was common to most breweries, it seems; equally traditional, the favoured ‘Private Accounts’ where the depositors had a personal link with the owner (or were his senior employees) earned an unvarying 5 per cent, as did the emergency deposits sought in the war-time crises. The usury laws, however, did not make this the maximum cost of credit, as we shall see. The Ledger Clerk has added a few words of explanation to the names listed in the Private Accounts which show the kind of people they were and their connexion with the firm. Many are poor and the presence of their money may indicate a conscientious employer or landlord trying to encourage thrift.

For those in such circumstances in the days before

public savings banks, such an opportunity might prove their only con¬ venient and safe means of saving. There are the many family retainers: the housekeepers and footmen in Portman Square and Bedwell Park; 1 T. S. Ashton, An Eighteenth-Century Industrialist (Manchester, 1939), pp. 84-5. 2 Their names were always the most patriotic things in the Ledgers, doubtless to avoid any taint of sedition. Trumans’ books contain ‘ United Britons ’, ‘ Royal British ’, ‘ Sick Mans Friend ’, ‘Thoughtful Sisters’, ‘Sons of Prudence’, ‘General Funeral’. There was one ‘Knave of Clubs ’’ Truman Records: Rest Books, passim. Cf. Johnson, Carrington Diary (1956), pp. 56-9.

278

Whitbreads and Finance Alice Gee ‘my nephew’s old servant’ whose £16 of 1770 grew slowly to £19 by 1776; George Stevens ‘the late footman’ £70 in 1770, £300 in 1776. The place that the brewery held as a savings bank in the lives of these humble people is made clear by the letters which have occasionally been left in the ledger. One such reads, ‘ Sir, i shall take it as a particular favour if you will lit me have my thirty pounds as Mr Bain is dead and laying ill so long that my money is intirely run out an it not being Propper to administer untill he is inter’d. From your Huble... Servant, Mary Bain’s Mark.’ This letter, at least, supports the contention that many of these clubs are aptly named as ‘Sons of Prudence’. Others, equally humble, are customers or friends and relatives of customers, poorer tenants on the Bedfordshire estates who are granted life annuities on obviously charitable terms, or journeymen linked to the brewery by employment in some indirect way.1 A few others, similarly connected with the brewery in some such personal way, are seeking insurance against old age on strictly commercial terms through life annuities, which Whitbread did not discourage.2 More significant deposits came from the senior employees, whose stake in the concern they served emphasises the importance of their position. Almost all the clerks were content to leave part of their salaries at interest with their employer. Boughton Maysey deposited £1200 in 1769, which he built up to £5000 by 1783 and maintained till his death. William Slater had £4000 on deposit, which he continued when he left in 1772; Molyneux ‘the late cooper’ maintained £2000 regularly, and Samuel Green the brewer had £1800 in the books in 1780. From these people, as with the more humble ones, a cobweb of kinship and friendship radiated which became the medium whereby funds found their way to Samuel Whitbread as deposit banker.

For example, Joseph Maysey, Boughton’s son, who

was the brewery’s malt factor at Ware, deposited £2500 in 1790; Margaret and Ann Maysey put in £500 each in 1794; and Sarah Maysey (daughter of Joseph) £500.

Clearly, personal connexion, even though without

a kinship link on Whitbread’s part, explains the presence of most of this money. The sum was far from insignificant, and provided the house with a very useful ‘float’ of capital. The numbers of private accounts ranged from thirty-eight to sixty-five (between 1770 and 1796); and the amounts deposited rose steadily from £21,460 in 1770 to £37>8o° in x796>the Year 1 Some entries are intriguing, e.g. a warder in the Tower deposited £790 for a year in 1792. 2 See also Whitbread Records (Southill): File S. Whitbread I. Letters to W. Hay ton (his father-in-law), 13 December 1770, 26 July 1776. There are eight annuity accounts running in the Private Ledgers from 1770. 279

Finance and the Entrepreneur of the elder Whitbread’s death. At that point financial emergencies had begun which brought new strains to the finances of the brewery and needed new drastic measures to counteract them. The first Samuel Whitbread had actively sought ‘external’ finance before the French wars, when expansion or a bad harvest temporarily straitened his liquidity. John Howard had lent him £1000 in 1752, which may have come into this category of loan (although it was not repaid until 1771). At this time, some larger loans are taken: £4000 from Arthur and Mrs Jennings1 of Cheapside in 1769 (cleared off in June 1771); £4000 from Ann Piggott in May 1770 (repaid in September 1774), and £1700 from a Henry Jacomb who took some of the deeds of the brewhouse as security. The crisis which brought Thrale close to disaster over these years was, however, mainly surmounted by Whitbread’s own efforts. He lent the trade over £3000 in 1771-2; cut down his withdrawals from the business (which were £24,450 in 1770; £8000 in 1771; £13,000 in 1772 and £20,800 again in 1773). Moreover, some concealed borrowing may have been going on, for almost £7000 went to pay off mortgages on the Portman Square house and the Warden and Harrowden estates in 1774-5.2 At other times, when things were going well, there was money to spare, although from the nature of the demands which might fall upon himself as brewer more than banker (and the banker was always at the service of the brewer) loans had to be kept ‘short’, and the large ‘savings-bank’ type of deposits from such as William Slater and Boughton Maysey had the conditions attached to them of being withdrawable only at six or twelve months’ notice. Such conditions did not apply to the ‘charity’ loans given by Whitbread, of which there are not a few, nor to the rising total of loans to publicans. These latter loans, which are more fully explained elsewhere, are often quasi-permanent and are entered in the Trade Ledgers, not these Private Ledgers, a difference which emphasises their distinctive function in the business. The ‘ surplus cash ’ lending was very different. Preschell and Brogden, merchants, for example, received £10,000 for six months (at 4 per cent) in October 1791; Whitbread lent money to William Hayton, his father-in-law; and in years such as 1776-7, 1780-2, 1783-6, there is a steady income from discounting (or rediscounting) bills at one, two or three months. Equally, at times within 1 These two people may be related to David Jennings, one of the brewers. 2 It is not clear if these payments were for mortgages taken out in the act of buying the property (i.e. the Portman Square house was bought in 1771 for £6000) or whether an unen¬ cumbered property was mortgaged in order to bring cash into the trade. In view of Whitbread’s principles, the latter is the most likely. See Appendix, Table 44.

280

Whitbreads and Finance a season when demands were heavy, the flow of credit was sharply reversed. The house borrowed £10,000 from Child’s Bank in February 1786, transferred £5000 of this to Down Thornton and Free in September 1787, and cleared the debt entirely in November. Understandably, the discounting which the brewery was doing itself fell off from £22,160 in the year from midsummer 1785-6, to £3000 in 1786-7. With the scale of production rising continuously until the end of the century, both the profits and the need for accommodation in the occasional year alike mounted, causing a concomitant increase in the fluctuations of credit going into the brewery and emerging from it. In a sense, the employ¬ ment of cash for profit in these various ways by the brewery was itself a mark of the increasing scale of the business and increasing standards of (and opportunities for) financial efficiency—one of the collateral benefits of increasing size. A large pool of credit needed to be kept mobilised in case of need (which might arise suddenly and demand accommodation within a few months), in particular for the months when malt and hop bills fell due. It was, at best, troublesome and, at worst, dangerous for the owner to disperse this pool of credit by withdrawing it from the firm for personal investment in the funds or in land (always assuming that it was not spent in ways which yielded no return). Such personal holdings were, of course, available in the last resort. But one might easily make a capital loss by switching out of the Funds in troubled times (when they were likely to be depressed), and the mortgage market might well be unfavourable just when cash was needed from the estates. Accepting long credit from tradesmen in normal times (whose bills were creating the problem of illiquidity) might have awkward commercial consequences of tying the brewer to them for future purchases—as Perkins was tied after the 1772 crisis. But, on the other hand, the amount of cash in some months was such that to allow it to lie sterile in bankers’ vaults or in the counting house was intolerable—hence the entry of breweries, so placed in such a fortunate liquidity position for much of an average trading season, into the short-term credit market. The factors which condition these loans are clearly revealed in a note Whitbread sent to William Hayton, for whom he had been discounting and lending short-term in May 1777: ‘Mr Maysey says his demands will be from this time so quick upon him that he cannot answer to.. .your Bills that are considerable untill we get into Cash again, which will be about Midsr.’ This formal business letter was followed by a private note on the following day to say ‘Mr Maysey insisted on my writing my letter of yesterday which you may take amiss, but he had bought more 281

Finance and the Entrepreneur malt than he has money to pay’.1 In 1773, he had been forced to cut back credit at the end of March for a similar reason explaining, ‘This is a bad time of year for money with us’.2 The difference in the timing of their receipts and outlays (the one being seasonal and the other regular) was common to all the brewers, and it meant that Barclays also had large sums of cash available for a few months in a good year, which were put out to profit. In 1782, came their first investment of £45,000 in Navy Bills bought in February and sold in March (for £73 profit). £2500 more passed through their hands between May and June, and in the following year £10,000 in 3 per cent Stock were bought for £5945 in October and sold at a profit of £65 in December. In the period when the great influx of credit comes from bankers and relatives little is available for such temporary investments, but, in common with Whitbreads, the return to normal conditions of liquidity revived the profits Barclays were making from short-term investments.3 As money became available, it was used as efficiently as possible. Nearly £2000 profit was made on £42,000 of Exchequer Bills between March and August 1812. £62,000 Exchequer Bills were on the books in the summer of 1817; £80,000 Consols (at 77J-) in 1818. In 1830, there was no less than £110,000 invested in 3^ per cent Stock and £16,000 of Exchequer Bills. Exchequer Bills and Consols (the latter bought with the hope of a capital gain as well as the interest) predominate in these transactions, with occasional ex¬ cursions into American Stocks. Such normal trading patterns were rudely shattered by the high war¬ time prices of raw materials, the increases in the duty on malt, hops and beer, and the lapse in the growth of demand. The increase in the loans to publicans and the necessary purchase of their leases in London to secure trade altered the permanent capital structure of the large breweries, demanding the entry of more wealthy partners to provide this extra cash— a need which did not grow less when peace had returned. The short-term financial problems of the business also changed as radically. The brewers were, as a whole, forced into the short-term credit market as buyers while the long-term strain lasted, becoming heavily dependent upon malt and hop merchants and upon their bankers.4 Moreover, the changing pattern of ownership, as more partners arrived to bring the 1 Whitbread Records (Southill); File S. Whitbread I. Letters, 9, 10 May 1777. 2 Ibid. S. Whitbread to W. Hayton, 30 March 1773. 3 The Private Ledgers do not survive after 1814. The only available records (the annual summer Rest Books) give the balance sheet at a single point in the year. 4 See below, pp. 528-9. 282

Whitbreads and Finance increased permanent capital, meant that it was not as feasible to retain as high a percentage of profits in the concerns as under the older regimes where a single owner (or fewer partners) were in control. Many of the new partners were investors rather than brewers, looking for as regular a return on their capital as possible, and therefore encouraging this com¬ mitment to the bill-market. In addition, where they were bankers them¬ selves, hence usually in business with the brewery of which they were also partners, the new pattern of financing became incorporated into the structure of management and ownership itself. The younger Whitbread’s hop-factors, Bolland and Prestwidge, Yeates and Brown, and Joseph Wilson, undertook heavy discounting for the house in 1797-1802, and granted short-term loans ‘on note’ with occasional revivals in bad years thereafter. His malt-factors and merchants John Roper, Byles Brown and Co., Charles Mohon, Randell and Sons, Nanson and Co. and Tomkins, similarly. Within these years, the brewery dis¬ counted nearly £200,000 with such merchants. At the same time, relation¬ ships with the banks became much closer.

Short-term credit, which

Whitbread II accepted from Down Thornton and Free after 1790 (between £5000-^18,000 being lent over the early summer months), was usually carried over for the rest of the year after 1796, supplemented by further short-term loans and discounting from Brown and Co. The balance of the short-term loans outstanding to the brewery from Down and Co. from April 1796 to October 1798 was usually between £10,000£15,000—the instrument being the two months’ bill but the technique of its use in successive renewals converting it into a means of semi¬ permanent investment as long as the banker had no need to recall it. The investments of the Quaker bankers in Barclay Perkins and Trumans took exactly this form. When the years of immediate panic had passed, although the chronic strain survived the acute ones, some reversal in the flow of funds took place between Whitbreads and Brown and Co. (Timothy Brown now being a partner).

From 1800-2, Brown accepted £10,000 on some

occasions from the brewery, and himself provided credit on others. It seems, too, that the brewery was lending to Bowles and Co. between August 1799 and May 1800. As a whole, discount payments by Whitbreads (as distinct from short¬ term loans) show the course of the new indebtedness. From being £830 in the year ending midsummer 1800 they rose to £2180 in 1802, and remained above £1000 until 1807. From this time forward income from 283

Finance and the Entrepreneur discounts begins to rise once more (surpassing the cost of discounting in 1810-11, 1813-14), until, despite considerable traffic in credits in both directions, the brewery begins once more to make regular profits on discounting after 1815. As a sign of the renewed liquidity, £23,200 was invested in the Funds for six months in August 1819. Short-term loans from Hoare and Co., however, grew in importance after 1820.1 They were £60,000 in 1821, and hit a peak of £100,000 in December 1824, continuing until after 1830 between £20,ooo-£55,ooo. Although many were being settled promptly within a few months, as before, the regularity of the transactions meant that there was substantial ‘carry-over’ of credit which ran continuously. One further important financial resource was exploited by Whitbread in the war years, which emphasised again how personal were the mechan¬ isms whereby credit was drawn in to sustain enterprise. The year ending midsummer 1796 saw the great feat of their annual barrelage surpass¬ ing 200,000—a climax to the business career of the elder man who had died on 11 June. It saw also a parallel strain on the firm’s financial liquidity, which was soon to be increased by the general financial stringency affecting the money markets as a whole.

In these years of distress and

uncertainty, there had been a run on Samuel Whitbread II as banker, as there had been on the banking system as a whole. Ordinary deposits on private account in 1798 were less than half what they had been in 1796 and such regular investors as Slater had pulled out his £4000 during the panic of 1797. The faithful servants rallied to the house, Robert Sangster building up his investments to £7000 rapidly after a deposit of £1600 in February 1797, and Jacob Yallowley, his fellow clerk, selling out £5000 in the Funds to put in £2568 in April 1797, and a further £500 from his salary in January 1798. They both withdrew their deposits only when the pressure slackened after 1798. Similar help came to Trumans from the deposits of many employees in the same years. In Whitbreads, the servants’ resources, however timely, were not enough, so that their old master had to launch himself into an expensive gamble to secure the rest. The instrument he adopted first appears in the accounts in 1795 when his brewer, David Jennings, pulled out £5561 from the Long Annuities to lend to the firm on the condition that he obtained the same annual returns from the money, and that enough capital should be eventually replaced in the Annuities to give him the same income from them as before the loans. In July 1796, the younger 1 Hoare’s loans to the Red Lion Brewery are mentioned on p. 304.

284

Whitbreads and Finance Whitbread mortgaged his Lushill estates to throw another £13,140 into the fight, and with it came £11,490 from James Brogden. This latter was another gamble, for it represented the produce of £20,000 in the Imperial Loan, Whitbread promising to pay both the amount of interest it would have earned and to replace the same amount of nominal capital in the Loan. Then, in February 1797, when his own Mortgage and Brogden’s loan were withdrawn, £27,900 came in under the same plan (apart from the deposits of the clerks). This large sum was entered under Whitbread’s own name but represented £53,960 of stock which his friends, General FitzPatrick, Lord Robert Spencer, Sir Culling Smith,1 Beauclerk and J. Hare had loaned to him under similar safeguards, all covering them¬ selves with the deeds of Whitbread’s freehold property, either in Chiswell Street or in the country.2 In a new bout of lending in 1801, Christopher Saville, the important grain merchant and navy contractor, lent £18,969 by selling £20,000 of stock, and George Grey, Whitbread’s brother-in-law, £5200 (from £8700 stock). It is a moot point whether these transactions were usurous at law, although it is certain that they cost the brewery more than 5 per cent on interest payments, apart from the capital loss which replacement in the Funds involved if they had risen in the meanwhile. Total outgoings on the transaction with Saville were £2570 (for a loan of £18,969 for nineteen months) which came to over 8 per cent. Grey wrote in December 1806, ‘Dear Sam, the times are so precarious and such extraordinary changes have lately taken place on the Continent that I have determined to vest all the Money I can in purchasing Land... ’—but delayed for another four years so that the loan eventually cost the brewery 6^ per cent.3 During the second bout of intense borrowing beginning in 1801, the house had the increased corporate strength of the new partnerships to draw on, and, in common with Barclays, the private accounts of the partners (for which they drew 5 per cent as any other creditors, such capital not being considered part of the joint capital in the accounts) begin to dominate the finance ledgers. Whitbread’s own account fluctuated widely, and in the last few years of his life he appears on his private account to be in debit to the business, as he was outside it, to several 1 Culling Smith bought Whitbread’s Bedwell Park estate from him in 1807 (A. A. Locke, The Hanbury Family (1916), vol. 11, p. 267 n. 2 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Private Ledgers', Bullock and Broadley Coll. S. Whitbread to M. Earnshaw, 11 April 1800; R. Spencer to Earnshaw (Whitbread’s solicitor), 14 April 1800. 3 Whitbread Records (Southill): MS. 898, Lord Grey to S. Whitbread, 15 December 1806. Whitbread himself had married Elizabeth Grey ; his half-sister married George Grey, thus establishing a double link between the two families (Gent. Mag. 1796 (1)).

285

Finance and the Entrepreneur different persons.1 The beginning of the partnerships in the business, and the growing eclipse of Samuel Whitbread II in its fortunes, mark both a managerial crisis in the concern and a fundamental change in the pattern of the London trade.

Both lie beyond the immediate scope of these

financial matters, but it is remarkable that no other member of the Whit¬ bread family found a place in these partnerships until 1819. Indeed, it might be said that, in contrast to breweries such as Barclays, Trumans and Calverts, the extensive partnerships outside the Whitbread family circle begin to provide the resources which were unavailable within it. The same comment may be made on the contrast between the younger Whitbread’s search for financial aid after 1796 and that of Barclays and Trumans. Sampson Hanbury, it is true, did borrow £11,000 of Stock in 1799 from General H. Read (who was probably the father of the partner, William Truman Read) and £3000 from a Mrs Houghton, who were outside the normal sources and methods of financing, but both were repaid in 1802-3 with thanks ‘for the confidence you have placed in me’. He declined to continue the loan from Mrs Houghton (who wished to increase her deposit) writing, ‘it is my partner’s desire to get rid of all demands against the Firm’.2 In the main, the financial resources of the Quaker families lay within the closer bonds of kinship rather than acquaintance, as did their partner¬ ships, and such being their kinship groups it is not surprising that they rode out the financial storms of the great wars without excessive strain, while the younger Samuel Whitbread was struggling to collect credit from a less resourceful—if a more dashing—social set. It was a further irony that Whitbread should be rescued, in 1797-9 and 1801, by his Whig friends and relatives (whose set he had entered at Cambridge and after his marriage to the sister of Charles Grey, later the 2nd Earl), for it was they who were seducing him away from Chiswell Street to a more exciting social and political career in Westminster. It instances clearly, nonetheless, how much the personal connexions of the entrepreneur, and the hours and money he did not spend at his business, counted both in his success and his failure.

Even when the brewers were rounding out their landed

1 Joseph Barnard, the Bedford banker, who was one of these personal creditors (for £10,000), lent £3000 to the brewery in July 1801 for six months, and Garfit and Clayton £6000 in 1801, and £8000 in 1803—both short-term. Banking wealth invested by partners who were bankers was much greater than ‘outside’ banking assistance, however, save in the case of Hoare’s loans after 1820. 2 Truman Records: S. Hanbury to Mrs Houghton, 21 December 1802; to General Read, 21 January 1803. 286

Whitbreads and Finance estates, the Hanbury family mainly in Hertfordshire and Essex, the Barclays in Norfolk, and the Whitbreads in Bedfordshire (£350,000 being invested in property between the elder Whitbread’s first purchase of 1761 and 1799), they knew that the freehold land, over which they so assiduously rode to hounds and met their friends, stood always ready for mortgage when the London business needed aid. To appreciate fully the importance of the ‘ social- ’ or ‘ kinship-environment ’ in which these eighteenth-century firms grew up, and which tempered their reactions in different ways to the economic and financial pressures which were common to them all, we must now turn to the contrasting experience of Barclay Perkins and Trumans in these same years. QUAKER FINANCE

When the new partners entered into possession of the Anchor Brewery in July 1781 they had agreed to pay £35,000 at once and the balance in four annual instalments of £25,000 (with 4 per cent interest). This arrangement did allow the profits of trade to ease, but not to solve, the problem of initial capital; but, with heavy outlays for malt and hops that following year, there was, inescapably, heavy reliance upon borrowed money. Thrale’s devisees received a bond under-written by four persons: Robert Barclay and John Perkins (the new heads of the brewery), John Barclay and John Gurney, the banker. The four new partners, Robert Barclay, David Barclay, Sylvanus Bevan (the latter two holding their shares through Robert Barclay until 1786) and John Perkins1 gave a counter-bond to John Barclay and Sylvanus Bevan, at the bank.

In

these bonds was symbolised the new world; through them the Quaker bankers, bringing with them the resources of a great kinship group, were written into the constitution of the firm. From both sides of the partner¬ ship, the same social world contributed its resources to the firm, and the intricate family tree itself now becomes an important economic (and financial) document for the history of the brewery.

In 1774, by

his marriage to Amelia Bevan, John Perkins had been accepted as a relative, from which event the origin of the new firm really dates. Timothy Bevan’s second wife was the former Hannah Gurney, daughter of Joseph Gurney and widow of Nathaniel Springall.2 Joseph Gurney s 1 Perkins had a quarter-share, to obtain which he had to borrow £5000 from his fellow partners as well as the £1650 from Mrs Thrale (Barclay Records: Deed Book, Bonds, Articles, Indentures ll* Springall also married Richenda Barclay, daughter of David Barclay of Cheapside by his second wife. 287

Finance and the Entrepreneur first wife had been a daughter of David Barclay of Cheapside, whose son John was banker with Bevan in Lombard Street, and whose grandson was Robert Barclay,1 partner in the brewery. David Barclay, the sleeping partner in the brewery (and also in the bank) was another son of David Barclay of Cheapside. Finally, the fourth partner in the brewery, Sylvanus Bevan, was the brother of Timothy Paul Bevan, therefore brother-in-law of Amelia Bevan, consequently indirectly related to John Perkins. Timothy Paul Bevan and his brother Sylvanus were together in the important family druggist business at Plough Court, Sylvanus Bevan entering the bank with his Barclay relatives in 1767 and ceasing to be an apothecary.2 In the next generation, apart from the sons of John Perkins, Robert Barclay and Sylvanus Bevan (H. and F. Perkins, Charles Barclay and Henry Bevan) who took up shares with their fathers in the brewery, Richard Gurney and Hudson Gurney joined the firm, assuming the share of David Barclay. Richard was the son-in-law of David Barclay through his marriage with Agatha Barclay, his heiress, and Hudson Gurney was their son.

Richard Gurney’s father was John

Gurney, who married Elizabeth Kett, daughter of Richard Kett of Norwich. The numerous relatives of the elder John Gurney of Norwich (d. 1721) and the elder David Barclay of Cheapside, and Timothy Bevan therefore embraced the brewery, as one of their many financial and business activities. David Barclay, one of the greatest merchants of his time, who was visited by George III in 1761, stood at the head of a vast clan. Through his second wife, Priscilla Freame (the daughter of John Freame, banker of Lombard Street), and through the marriages of his fourteen children, he was related to the Quaker merchant and banking families of Kett, Barclay, Freame, Gurney, Lloyd, Bevan, Willett. This whole extended kinship group was rapidly consolidating its wealth in banking circles in London, Norwich and the Midlands, and a comparison of their genealogi¬ cal tables with the ledgers of the brewery which list invested capital, shows at once the reliance of the enterprise upon the resources of this extraordinary group of relatives.3 It would be intricate and tedious to trace in detail the connexion with the brewery of each person appearing on the investment lists. In most 1 This Robert’s father was Alexander Barclay of Philadelphia (son of David Barclay of Cheapside). Robert was therefore nephew of the partner, David Barclay. 2 See genealogy of Bevan family and business in E. C. Cripps, Plough Court (1927), pp. 8-15. From ‘Plough Court’ sprang the Howards (Ilford) business and Allen and Hanbury Ltd. 3 Burke, Landed Gentry; Barclay Records: S. C. Barber, Perkins Family (MS.); H. F. Barclay and A. W. Fox, History of Barclay Family (1924), vol. ill, pp. 235-79; W. H. Bidwell, Annals of an East Anglian Bank (1900), pp. 400-1. 288

Quaker Finance cases, the source of the important investments is explained by the family link, and when wealth and enterprise flourished so abundantly within this family it is not surprising. On the whole, eighteenth-century business enterprise was as ‘ un-institutionalised ’ as eighteenth-century politics. Many economic forces operated through a social world which conditioned them according to its own relationships, as much as being itself con¬ ditioned by economic relationships. Within these families who were by origin Quaker (although by the end of the eighteenth century most had compromised the stricter tenets of that faith) all forces beyond the econo¬ mic worked to the advantage of the economic. Originally, by being excluded from participation in certain forms of public life, they had been saved from some temptations dangerous to successful enterprise. More important, their own ways of life, thought and faith instinctively brought them into community, so that it would be unusual for any one of them to marry out of that chosen circle of faith and kinship. In the great debate upon the impact of religious ideas in economic life, the individual religious consciousness of the Quaker and his fellows in other protestant nonconformist sects has been seen as the main spur to endeavour and profit, personal integrity and success in the business of the world. The twin ghosts of idleness and extravagance presided over both eternal damnation and worldly bankruptcy. While ‘spirit and application’, in Sir Benjamin Truman’s words, were certainly stressed by the new creeds—and the nonconformist groups proved to be bountifully endowed with both—the picture of a religious ethic acting directly upon the indi¬ vidual over-simplifies the direct impact of ideas upon events, by ignoring the opportunities and strength given by the fact of community amongst the faithful. When the study of the religious ethic is supported by in¬ vestigations on a less abstract level into the familial groupings of the sects concerned, the successes of these persons may be explained with greater cogency. For them, faith was nourished in a social context. Being consciously communities, the obligations of cohesion and the opportunities it offered, were equally experienced by their members. At the humblest level, this meant that no Quaker had need to accept public charity or poor relief outside his Meeting. In more fortunate circumstances, it implied that businesses owned within the kinship group were the most natural resting-places for capital held by the members of that group. The world of the religious-cum-kinship group provided an environment of mutual trust and confidence within which a private ‘ invisible hand ’ could accom¬ modate the advantages of each member with the benefit of all. 19

289

MBE

Finance and the Entrepreneur It has often been remarked that the legal disabilities applying to those Quakers who remained strict in their faith might also prove beneficial to a business career.1 Exclusion from civil and military office themselves closed certain routes by which a retreat from business might have occurred, while such formal barriers to full social and political commitment often implied a social situation in many localities in which Quaker capital like the Quakers themselves would tend to remain in trade or finance rather than flowing out of enterprise to the Funds or landed estates. This was by no means universally true and, in any case, great wealth induced many dissenting families in time to fall into the ‘establishment’ accepting new standards. Some said that no family rode in a coach as strict Quakers for more than two generations. To some extent undoubtedly, however, these factors did count. Equally, being denied access to the ancient universities often saved the cadets of prosperous dissenting business families from the inculcation of social and intellectual attitudes adverse to enterprise in trade or industry. In its turn, the social situation of these sectarian groups encouraged the development of private tutoring and the famous academies which together offered an education much more con¬ genial to the later needs of a business career. This was not all. In the days before commercial liability was limited, and when incorporation for manu¬ facturing concerns was rare, the personal ownership of firms kept partners’ meetings round private dinner tables, and a man’s credit rating was known only to his close friends. Beyond them all was rumour. The business world lived very much in a personal way, almost as a vast straggling club, some of its members always in the heart of things (as the informal club which exists inside most clubs); but most on the fringes of the group which ‘knew’. Given such a commercial environment, to be a member of a wide family group within the business world, with a personal chain of friendship, news and the ear of business centres from Norwich to Birmingham, from London to Philadelphia, meant a great deal. It was to be a member of the club within the club, and when finance and trade were so notably represented, one might expect that its members should do business where possible with other members, that sons should maintain the financial and business interests of their fathers.

Great resilience

naturally resulted from the inter-relationship—as it has done with similarly placed groups within several economies whether the Fuggers in the six¬ teenth century, or the little colonies of Sephardim in Spain, Holland and London since then. Where diligence and personal probity were further 1 See, for example, I. Grubb, Quakerism and Industry before 1800 (1930). 290

Quaker Finance nurtured by the active application of Quaker discipline to the frailer members of the Society in business, as Dr Presnell has remarked, ‘ What wonder can there be that, in such a school, the business virtues flourished’.1 Awareness of cohesion was encouraged by indefatigable letter-writing and visiting within this extended Quaker family. Within it, too, recruits were plentiful to continue enterprise from astonishingly fertile marriages and re-marriages. And in times of crisis, when the main evil was the destruc¬ tion of confidence, a bond of kinship might save the day. In the failure of institutional arrangements and conventions, or in an economic structure where they had not developed to a great degree (for example in recruit¬ ment to management or in the provision of finance) inevitably kinship becomes an important business nexus. Within this particular nonconformist community, one of the most eminent in the entire economy, the Anchor Brewery began to play a role which government stock did for general London society—that of being a repository for rentier capital, where people relying on income from a regular investment might enjoy a steady and safe return—in the case of the brewery at a constant 5 per cent. Moreover, this money gave the sort of mutual benefit which would remain undisturbed when panic hit the money markets, unlike the deposits of many clubs and merchants, as Whitbread found to his cost. As Mrs Thrale, a person outside the kin but within the group, remarked to Perkins when he had collected some of her rents from Welsh estates en route from Ireland, ‘ I had rather it lay at your House than in the Stocks, for I may then have it when I please without difficulty... you will give me better Interest and it may be con¬ venient to both you and myself’.2 A regular investment of £6000 stood in her name until 1796 and the last £25,000 of the purchase price, which was due to her and her daughters in 1785, lay at the brewery as an invest¬ ment until 1792 for the same reason.3 Many similar deposits of a few thousand pounds each, which run on regularly through the years, came from within the family: Priscilla Bevan and her sister Elizabeth (later Elizabeth Pirn) kept £4000 each invested until 1818 and 1821; Dr Benjamin Moseley, Amelia Perkins’ brother, invested regularly until 1826; Ambrose Benning, partner in the bank, kept £3000 in until 1819; Christiana Gurney £2000-£4000 after 1800; 1 L. S. Pressnell, Country Banking in the Industrial Revolution (1956), pp. 242-3. 2 Barclay Records: Letter Book, H. L. Thrale to J. Perkins, 21 July 1781. 3 Barclay Records: Rest Books 1782-96. In 1793 the £25,000 deposit was reduced to £12,300, to £6150 in 1794, and the account was closed by June 1795. See Appendix, Table 45. 29I

19-2

Finance and the Entrepreneur Rosa Perkins and the Trustees of Mrs Perkins began to invest in 1825 and 1827. Outside the family, other regular investors included George Lester the manager (with his trustees continuing the deposit until 1819), whose account paralleled those of the senior officials in other breweries. Simi¬ larly, on a separate ‘Trade Account’ came the Clubs and the publicans and many of the petty tradesmen who were content to let their deposits lie at 4 per cent profit in the firm which supported their business—all of which have a direct parallel in other breweries. Some of the more eminent malt and hop merchants appeared on the ‘Private Account’ list with the members of the family and their friends (who received an extra 1 per cent), but they provided credit only in the years of high prices. For example, Tompson and Co. had £32,000 at credit in the Rest Book of 1820; £60,000 in 1825 and £49,600 in 1826. As a whole the ‘tradesmen’ accounts became important absolutely only after the Napoleonic Wars, when the total capital had become completely dominated by the partner’s investments. As the raw material merchants, some of the family investors appeared only for a few years, probably to oblige the firm when they were in need of cash.

David Springall’s deposit of £5950 in 1793-4 is perhaps an

example of this; he being a relative of the Nathaniel Springall (husband to Richenda Barclay, daughter of the elder David Barclay) who was to be brought into the Cheapside business as a nominal partner in 1781. More hypothetically, Captain J. R. Watson of Dawlish, who invested in the brewery and used it as his private bank, may be a relation of the Sir W. Watson who married Christiana Gurney. These Quaker names come and go as the years pass, providing a float of capital which was never very extensive in relation to the total capital employed, and which declined in the years after 1815 when most of the accounts were closed. For the early years, however, and at times during the wars, these individual in¬ vestors were important, perhaps vital on occasion, and remained always a potential source of aid. Nor were they confined to England. Robert Barclay the senior partner had been born in Philadelphia, where his father had settled, so that there was always a connexion with Friends in America, and often American Quakers used the brewery as a means of holding their assets in England.1 Elizabeth Fox, Benjamin Chew, ‘Fox and Reynell’, Williamina Cadwallader, Phineas Bond, and Jasper Yeates all had Philadelphia addresses registered on the books of the brewery for 1 Alexander Barclay had sent his son to England for schooling in 1763, where he was brought up by his uncle, David Barclay, who was instrumental in the purchase of the brewery for his nephew. David Barclay seems to have remained a sleeping partner. See above, p. 288. 292

Quaker Finance their deposits. With most of them, their connexion with the firm was a passive one—in the sense that they left money invested for a few years and then withdrew it; but with Phineas Bond and R. Rundle there were more active operations on both sides. Bond was the Consul General in Philadelphia, and used to pay many of his English accounts through the balance he kept with the brewery (using the firm purely as a private bank as did Watson), while the partners in the brewery, for their part, bought American Stocks through him when there was cash available for temporary investment. One such account for £8500 (24,000$ in bonds) ran from 1806 until 1812, and £1984 was paid to Rundle for American stocks in 1801. Just as the brewery was providing banking services for some of the investors, both English and American (paying their bills, being drawn on by other creditors and so forth), similar services were being provided for the firm through its own account in the Norwich banks. The Gurney bank, in particular, acted on occasion as agent for paying suppliers of malt;1 2 and as intermediaries for other creditors.3 The accounts of the Quaker bankers were much more important for the brewery than those of the ordinary private depositors. Indeed, the change in the bankers of the firm from Boldero and Co.3 to ‘Barclay, Bevan, Barclay and Benning’ in 1781 inaugurated a time of much business between banks and the brewery. The Quaker bankers knew that the business was sound, and honestly run; that when money was sought it was for a crisis of liquidity only, not as a palliative for more deep-seated weakness. Both brewers and bankers belonged to the same sophisticated financial groups, and knew that expansion of business on borrowed money could be greatly advantageous to both industrialist and investor, provided due care was taken on both sides. Above all, there was the feeling that both brewery and banks were within the same family community, with all that feeling implied for the other business enterprise within the same group. In 1785, a £20,000 long-term loan on the partners’ joint bond was negotiated with Gurney and Bland to finance expansion, being re-payable over the years 1789-91; and a further £10,000 from John Gurney was planned to run for seven years from 1797.4 Here, as in the case of so 1 Barclay Records: Private Ledgers, e.g. 1801, when the brewery deposited £5000 at the bank to enable them to pay maltsters. 2 Lindoe’s loans to the brewery in 1784-5, 1793, were transacted through the Gurneys. 3 ‘Boldero, Barnstan, Carter and Snaith.’ 4 Barclay Records: Private Accounts 1781-98; Letter J. Gurney (Norwich) to R. Barclay, 6 April 1797.

293

Finance and the Entrepreneur many of the short-term loans, the balance ran over the stipulated time, in this case until 1803. From the bankers’ point of view, the brewery was useful. There were times when they wished to put surplus money out to earn and no suitable local opportunities were available,1 so they naturally looked with favour upon a profitable, secure concern able to take a round five-figure sum and pay the customary 5 per cent for it. Normally in such cases, they lent to the brewery upon the security of short-term notes from the firm (guaranteed by all the partners) which proved to be an efficient instrument of finance for both parties. In normal circumstances, as with Whitbread and Down and Co., they became the vehicle for long-term credit.2 Taylor and Lloyd’s let short-term notes for £10,000 succeed one another without interval between 1787 and 1793; then pulling back their cash to face their own creditors, but lending £5000 for a further six months when the stringency was over in 1794. Ketts and Back of Norwich, similarly, had very extensive short-term dealings with the brewery from 1806 to 1813 (£70,700 being transacted in the first year), with an occasional heavy balance being continued beyond the term of the original note. It was the same with the Barclay Bank in London, and ‘Robert Bartlett and John Gurney’ in Norwich: there was extensive traffic in short-term credit on notes usually of four to six months. In some years upwards of £30,000 was transacted with occasional balances of £10,000 or more being left to lie over. With such strong trading and kinship links between the two groups, it is not surprising that two Gurneys should take up partner¬ ships in the brewery in due course. Sampson Hanbury, from 1790 a partner in Trumans, had the good fortune to be related to this same Gurney clan, and the finances of this brewery received the same benefits from the connexion. He was the son of Osgood Hanbury and Mary Lloyd, the daughter of Sampson Lloyd, (banker of Birmingham).

His brother, Charles Hanbury, had married

a daughter of John Bland, a banker, and he himself had married Agatha Gurney, daughter of Richard Gurney and sister of Hudson Gurney, both partners in Barclays.3 Meanwhile, his sister, Rachel, had married his father-in-law Richard Gurney, and his brother, Osgood, Susannah Willett Barclay, daughter of John Barclay the London banker, which further tightened the links of kinship which bound him into the same 1 E.g. when Thomas Bland at Norwich asked Barclays in London to place £4000 for him in August 1772 (Pressnell, op. cit. p. 435). 2 See above, p. 283. 3 Burke, Landed Gentry; A. A. Locke, The Hanbury Family (1916), vol. 11, pp. 24967.

Quaker Finance circle as the Barclay Perkins brewery.1 Beginning exactly with Sampson Hanbury’s own entry into trade came the accounts of his banker relatives Taylor Lloyd’s and Co., in which firm his brother Osgood was a partner, who immediately began to sustain the brewery with short-term credit as the other Quaker bankers were doing for Barclay Perkins. The credit from the bank outstanding at the normal summer Rest in Trumans fluctuated between £2000 and £12,000 with the years, settling at £10,000 each year between 1806 and 1818.2 John Lloyd added £2000-£4000 of his own money in most years from 1794 to 1801. In 1801, the Norwich Quaker bank, led by John Gurney (Sampson Hanbury’s uncle), also began to supply credit, this being, in effect, long-term lending, as were their transactions with the Anchor Brewery. £5000 was the usual sum involved, and this appears on the books for 1801-2, 1806, 1808-22, 1823-30—evidence enough of its quasi-permanent nature.3 In 1814, the new bill-broking firm of‘Richardson Overend and Co.’ (to become the famous ‘Overend and Gurney’ in a few years) came in on an even larger scale. Apart from the years 1818-20, 1823-4, their credit stood between £10,000 and £30,000 annually at the summer Rest, representing a large yearly flow of short-term credit. In the letter-books surviving at the brewery, the three-monthly inquiries seeking to renew the £5000 on loan from the Norwich bank for a further term occurred regularly.

Usually it was a simple, routine

request, as on 24 September 1802: ‘ If perfectly agreeable to you we should wish to renew our Bill due on the first of October for three months longer. If not, please to inform us where we can take it up.’4 At least once, John Gurney offered more, to be met with the courteous ‘My dear Uncle, I am much obliged for your handsome offer of Money to our House and had we not been overfull at present I should have been glad in accepting of it. I am, with love to you all, your affc. and oblig’d nepw. Sampson Hanbury.’5 6 And in December 1802, the Gurneys pulled in their loan for three years, Hanbury ending his letter (which asked for advice on who could now take 1 In the next generation Osgood’s daughter, Rachel Hanbury, married Robert, the son of Charles Barclay. His brother, Arthur Kett Barclay (b. 1806) married Maria, daughter of Ichabod Wright, the famous Quaker banker of Nottingham, and their two sisters both married into the banking family of Hoare. 2 When the account lapsed, to revive at £20,000, 1825-7, and £10,000 in 1828. A Hanbury had 3 4 See 6

entered this bank before then. It was increased to £18,000 for the summer of 1827. Truman Records: Letter Books, S. Hanbury toR. B. J. and H. Gurney,24 September 1802. also similar notes 11 March 1802; n June, 23 December 1803; 15 June 1804. Ibid. 13 October 1802.

295

Finance and the Entrepreneur the loan up) with, ‘ we return you many thanks for the long accommoda¬ tion you have afforded us’.1 Here, as with Barclays, there was always time for the partners in the brewery to write round to their other relatives to get the rejected note accepted, and having these strong connexions in the provinces (with Gurneys, Ketts and Lloyds) which often lay outside the area affected by stringency in Lombard Street, it was seldom that a local run on the London money market caused a complete crisis in the two breweries—whereas Whitbread was affected much more completely. Here the wide geographical spread of the Quaker kinship groups was a great source of strength.2 In their turn, the brewers could lend to the bankers—as in the Norwich stringency of 1783. Robert Barclay and John Perkins had borrowed £5000 from Gurney and Bland in December 1782, to be repaid in the following March. In August 1783, they loaned the bank Pi 1,000, being repaid in December. In July 1784, the brewery took £5000 once more and the normal direction of the flow had been resumed. It is difficult to tell from most of the accounts how much of this large flow of mainly short-term credit was legally in the form of discounting trade bills—the bankers holding a portfolio of bills they received from the breweries—and how much was just cash loans on the security of a ‘note of hand’. The latter credit would doubtless be used by the brewery in the main for the identical purpose of paying its creditors’ bills for malt, hops and coals.

It seems that the latter predominated with Barclay

Perkins and Trumans, although often the interest payments involved are called ‘discounts’. The economic significance of the traffic in credit, of course, was the same, whether technically bill-discounting or not, and the link between London and East Anglia is particularly noteworthy. The steady flow of credit began with the inception of the 1781 partnerships in the Anchor Brewery and may be one of the early movements in coupling the London and provincial money markets for bill-discounting. Thomas Richardson, it will be remembered, began his career working for the Gurneys in London and Norwich, and made his fortune by specialising in the transfer of bills for discounting between Lancashire, London and East Anglia, whereby industry in need of short-term credit could receive the benefits of accumulating agricultural profits in country banks.3 The Gurneys had been in the business themselves for a generation, and their 1 Truman Records: Letter Books, 16 December 1802. 2 As it could be in relaying news—for example, that of Watt’s successful rotary-motion engine in 1782. See above, p. 83.

3 Pari- Papers, 1810, III, Evidence.. .to Bullion Report, by T. Richardson; W. T. C. King, Rise of the London Discount Market (1936), pp. 9-26. 296

Quaker Finance transactions with their cousins in Southwark were even more intimate than the financial nexus alone suggests. Barley played its part prominently in the process of creating much of the wealth which was now entering the Norwich banks, to be partly used in discounting trade bills originating beyond East Anglia. Much of that barley had been sold to the London breweries, as the raw material chapters of this book will describe. In the trade bills from the Quaker breweries in London the circle in grain and money was made complete. Moreover, it was completed within the same kinship group. In due course, at the Black Eagle Brewery in Spitalfields, Sampson Hanbury built up his own stake in the joint capital from yg to J, step by step between 1789 and 1805, borrowing heavily from the brewery at the times he increased his capital and thus paying off the debt from his share of the profits in the next year or two (both being book-keeping transactions innocent of external capital). Five years after William Truman Read had departed, John Truman Villebois, another great-grandson of Sir Ben¬ jamin Truman, took up one half of the inheritance which had been ad¬ ministered by Executors for fifteen years, and in 1799 Henry Villebois, his brother, took up the other half—the position by 1805 being that they, and Sampson Hanbury, held one-third of the capital each (Hanbury borrowing £22,000 from the firm in the Rest of 1808 to achieve this share).1 As business men, however, they appear to have been much less active and the name of Sampson Hanbury, alone of the partners, appears in the busi¬ ness letter books which survive. Eventually, Hanbury’s Quaker relatives strengthened the partnership in the brewery as much as they had helped to satisfy its short-term credit needs from the moment of his association with the partnership, in the summer of 1789. His sister, Anna Hanbury, had married Thomas Fowell Buxton (of Earl’s Colne, Essex) in 1782 and their eldest son, also Thomas Fowell Buxton (born in 1786), was welcomed into the partnership by his uncle in 1811 with a twelfth share of the capital. Buxton’s appearance at the brewery reinforced the links with Sampson’s own Gurney relatives in Norfolk in this next generation, for a few years before he had married Hannah Gurney, the fifth daughter of John Gurney of Earlham—head of the family at the bank. Hannah Gurney was the cousin of Sampson Hanbury’s wife, Agatha (nee Gurney).2 Clearly, as with the Barclay and Gurney partners in the Anchor Brewery 1 Details of changes in the partnerships appear in the Rest Books for the appropriate year. See also Admissions to the Brewers’ Company (G.L.M.R. Series 5445). 2 See genealogies in W. H. Bidwell, Annals of an East Anglian Bank (1900), pp. 400—1» A. A. Locke, Hanbury Family (1916), vol. ii, pp. 249, 255. 297

Finance and the Entrepreneur an intricate succession of interlocking family partnerships had begun. Thomas Fowell Buxton seems to have brought in some external capital to the trade in order to increase his shares from

in 1811 to 58T in 1814

(which involved an increase in the total capital in the joint-stock, from £318,000 in June 1811 to £368,000 in June 1814). Coming to the brewery (which was situated in the midst of a very crowded textile district of London) at the age of 25, Buxton began there what was to prove to be a lifetime’s devotion to philanthropic causes. He first sought to educate all the labourers at the brewery (the partners providing a teacher) and then extended his labours to the poor in the immediate neighbourhood of the brewery before broadening the range of his attentions to the prisons at home and the slaves abroad.1 The Buxton family continued in the partnerships of the brewery by direct descent from Thomas Fowell’s entry in 1811, and also the Hanbury family; but in their case not directly, for Sampson Hanbury’s marriage with Agatha Gurney did not produce any children. His nephew, Robert (second son of his brother Osgood Hanbury, the banker) took over one share of the partnership capital from his uncle in 1825, and in due course became senior partner, with his son after him. Robert Hanbury also lived to take over Sampson Hanbury’s estate at Poles, Essex, in 1847, as well as his place in the brewery.2 Before 1830, two other entries had come to the partnership. When Thomas M. and Robert Pryor, brewers of Shoreditch, joined their business to Truman’s in 1816, part of the agreement (as in the Whitbread and Martineau amalgamation of 1812) was that both the Pryors became partners, bringing in £47,350 and each taking three shares out of the new total of forty-seven.3 At a time of concentration and amalgamation in the London trade this was a natural way for partnerships to become enlarged— as it is for Boards of Directors in our own day. The other entrant was also typical of a different trend, as has been mentioned, for the two Villebois partners gave up two of their twenty-three shares to the head clerk, Thomas Butts Aveling, in 1825, who at last fully owned the fraction of the joint capital whose annual produce he had enjoyed since 1814, when he was first allowed to be £ interested in the profits and loss but not in the capital’ upon the two shares. The prominence of four eminent families of Quaker stock in two of the 1 See Barnard, op. cit. vol. i; M. Anderson, N. Buxton (1952), pp. 17-18. 2 A. A. Locke, op. at. pp. 249, 263. 3 Pryors’ average production was c. 17,000 brls. 4 He was legally reported to be a partner in 1814, and made free of the Brewers’ Company (G.L.M.R. Series 5445, 8 December 1815). See above, p. 276.

298

Quaker Finance larger London breweries—Hanbury, Buxton, Barclay and Gurneyprompts the question of the extent to which members of the Society of Friends had entered the industry. At this time, of course, brewing was not considered an improper trade for a Quaker, whereas there were very definite opinions on the sinfulness of making or selling weapons or spirits— and a Meeting might wish to disown any Friend in these trades. James Backhouse remarked in 1831 of the immorality of retailing ardent spirits that there could ‘ scarcely be a doubt in the mind of any person not blinded by their influence’,1 and he was voicing an assumption that had long been current. The Society set its face equally firmly against intemperance through any kind of liquor, but there was no thought of condemning or criticising the manufacture of beer as such.2 In this respect, its attitude mirrored faithfully the contemporary opinions of moralists and social reformers in society at large, which did not include total abstinence from alcoholic drink in their zeal for sobriety until after 1830. Quakers are to be found, therefore, in the brewing industry throughout the eighteenth century, flourishing in several different parts of the country, although they do not appear to have formed as powerful an interest in the trade as they did in banking, the iron industry, or—by repute—corn milling.3 Considering the large number of brewers in the country as a whole, the dozen or so known families of Quaker stock who were brewers would not appear to provide more than a very modest contribution to the industry. The following total is certainly not complete, but it includes (beyond London): Bowley of Cirencester, David Lloyd of Coventry,4 Simpson of Mayfield, Ashbourne, Sessions of Charlbury, Crowley of Alton and Croydon, Bush of Croydon, Allen of Wapping, Arthington of Leeds, Allen of Ratcliffe, Areskine of Edinburgh, Lucas of Hitchin, Gibson of Saffron Walden, Gretton of Burton.5 1 Friends House, Gurney MSS. I, no. 7. J. Backhouse to J. Cropper, 25 July 1831. 2 I. Grubb, Quakerism and Industry before 1800 (1930), pp. 101-2, 158; T. Clarkson, Portraiture of Quakerism (1807). 3 Grubb, op. cit. pp. 124-7; ‘E.T.’ J. Friends Hist. Soc. xxv, 42; R. Howard, A Few Words on Corn and the Quakers (1807). 4 See Truman Records: Letter Books, S. Hanbury to David Lloyd (Coventry), 27 April 1803; and p. 185. David Lloyd’s sister, Anne, married William P. Summerfield, his senior partner in the brewery (R. S. Sayers, Lloyds Bank in the History of English Banking (1957)5 PP- 65-6, 362). 6 Information from Friends House; Grubb, op. cit. p. 176 n.; W. F. Miller, J. J. Green, J.Friends Hist. Soc. 11 (1905), 65; v (1908), 32-3.

299

CHAPTER IX

FINANCE AND THE ENTREPRENEUR (II) NEW CAPITAL AND PARTNERSHIPS

Overshadowing the occasional war-time stringencies of credit, the in¬ creases in the rate of duty and the great lift in raw material prices lay the longer-term issue of securing trade through the control of public houses which has been described above in chapter iv. The financial implications of this movement had important effects upon the partnerships of the London porter brewers, and, doubtless, an equivalent impact upon lesser brewers whose capital requirements were similarly affected by the need to buy in leases and lend money to publicans. The race to tie the London trade began to absorb large amounts of capital at the turn of the century, being stimulated by the war-time factors causing the crisis in short-term credit, and abetted by the slight lapse in demand, the curtailing of building in London, and, especially, by the new attitude adopted by the Justices in restricting the licensing of new public houses in already built-up areas. When brewers in the home counties began to control public houses as a defence against the invasion of their marketing areas by the London porter brewers, an added pressure rebounded upon the London market. The speed with which such ‘tying’ developed and the extent of the capital absorbed is apparent from tables 5 and 11. Moreover, it will be observed that the increase was not covered in any way by equivalently increasing production. In 1790, the three major porter breweries for which the figures are given each had under £27,000 tied up in this way; by 1800, each had less than £50,000. But, by 1810, there was more than £100,000 involved (with over £200,000 in Meux Reid), and in 1830 more than £300,000. Such formidable amounts of extra capital, sunk almost as permanently in the business as the capital in the brewhouse buildings, were demanded so quickly that they could be brought into the trade only by extra partners. The porter brewers therefore welcomed into their firms merchants and bankers, who of necessity brought in the social and political consequences of vast wealth made in other fields of enterprise. Apart from the two clerks, Yallowley and Sangster, who became partners for managerial

3°o

New Capital and Partnerships table ii.

Partners and Capital

[source: Records at Breweries.] All figures rounded.

Year

Barrels brewed

Number of partners

Partners’ joint capital

Partners’ surplus capital

Total* invested capital

Total capital in leases, loans to publicans

GO

GO

GO

GO

— 16,500 56,000 309,000 556,000

1,205 167,740 417,300 702,865

7,800 26,570 39,180 114,280 356,050

— — 35,i65 40,200 124,000

2,135 5,850 51,050 90,720 288,925

18,810 19,570 37,970 121,670 345,590

?

p

?

75,450 66,080 297,200

11,860 45,060 114,500 355,600

Barclay Perkins w

O OO

1790 1800 1811 1830

1

65,460 126,725 105,905 264,165 23L340

4 4 8 8

149,205 135,000 160,000 200,000 200,000

2 2

171,865 225,090

3 4 6

227,045

139,150

Truman 1780 1790 1800 1810 1830

80,730 93,715 101,560 144,990

203,530

318,675 423,000 Whitbread

1790 1799 1810 1830

1

175,000 203,200 110,940 131,300

4 7 9

271,240 300,000 300,000 382,500

? p

Meux Reid 1797 1810 1820

95,375 211,010 159,385

5 20 16

217,355 530,000 480,000

? ? ?

?

?

166,340 177,190

266,440 294,370

• Includes banking capital.

reasons with shares of

£33,333 each (borrowing most of the money to

take them up) the first Whitbread partnership of 1799 brought in Timothy Brown the ‘radical banker’ with a share of £99,999.* Whitbread legally held

£133,333 of the total nominal capital of £300,000, but he sold out

£10,000 of this privately to William Wilshere the Hitchin banker and

£33,333 of it in 1802. Meanwhile, in 1800, Timothy Brown had sold £33,333 of his share to another banker, Sir Benjamin attorney in 1801, and Hobhouse of Bath.2

In 1812, when the partnership was once again

1 ‘Equality Brown’, as he was dubbed, was partner in the firm Bowles, Brown, Ogden, Cobb and Stokes. He added a postscript to a note to Whitbread about salaries in 1802, ‘Burdett will stand the poll and I hope turn out the Governt. of the Bastille’. Whitbread Records (Brewery): Bullock and Broadley Coll. See also W. H. Branch, Camberwell (1875), pp. 206,325; D. Allport, Camberwell and Neighbourhood (1841), p. 179. 2 Head of the firm Hobhouse, Clutterbuck, Phillott, and Lowden.

3OI

Finance and the Entrepreneur reconstituted to amalgamate John Martineau’s brewing business with Whitbreads, Daniel Clutterbuck (Hobhouse’s partner in the Bath bank) took up a £50,000 share to replace Brown. Michael Bland, who had been a partner with John Martineau for a year, was also a member of a banking family, so that with his £25,000 no less than £125,000 of the £375,000 total nominal capital was held through bankers from Bath, Hertford and London.1 When Sangster departed in 1815, the three active partners (John Martineau, his son Joseph and Michael Bland) held only £72,500 of the £370,000 nominal capital between them. The arrival of Richard and Hudson Gurney at Barclay Perkins in 1801 to take up a quarter share of the capital brought a similar sustaining addition to the strength of the house. Richard Gurney’s investments ‘ by note’ in the surplus capital rose steadily to £95,500 in 1811, as he let his profits lie with the firm. Barclays, however, were so well placed for new partnership investments by relatives and short-term credit from bankers that they did not need to bring in much permanent outside capital, and the further increase in the partnerships after the entry of the Gurneys came from the introduction of sons of existing partners rather than from men of independent wealth. The brewery which became most dominated by new and independent wealth was Meux Reid’s Griffin Brewery, of Liquorpond Street, one of the largest houses in London, although the new capitals here, as with Whitbreads, were associated with management as well as capital problems. East India profits, revenues from drug importing and from the ownership of Blackwall Docks came into the brewery on a large scale in 1798 with Sir Robert Wigram who ‘ had been proposed to bring a considerable sum of money into the said firm’, at the retirement of Richard Meux, Sr.2 He brought in an extra £30,000 to the existing capital of nearly £220,000, and added another £30,000 to it in the following year.3

Sir Robert

brought in his son William in 1801 to a portion of his holding, but from then on troubles broke out between the families which led to disaster. Richard Meux the elder had withdrawn in 1798, leaving his three sons heavily indebted to him for their shares in the firm. Then, apparently, 1 Michael Bland was not active in banking himself. The Martineau family had been in banking until 1793 (M. Phillips, A History of Banks... (1894), p. 60 (cited Pressnell, Country Banking in the Industrial Revolution (1956), p. 13)). 2 Wigram’s position in the East India Company is described in C. N. Parkinson, Trade in the Eastern Seas (1937), pp. 188-90; E. Cotton, East Indiamen (1949), pp. 194-6. 3 The nominal joint capital was £270,000 in 1798, £300,000 in 1799, £112,500 was held by the Meux family, £127,500 by the Reid family and £60,000 by the Wigrams (P.R.O. C. 13/2754. Partnership Articles of 15 December 1801). 302

New Capital and Partnerships there were disagreements amongst father and sons which were further complicated by Richard Meux Jr being declared a lunatic in 1806.1 The reconstituted partnership inherited the quarrel in its turn, and collapsed two years later when the Reid family accused Henry Meux of misappro¬ priating partnership capital. The dispute forced the business into Chancery in 1809 where it was sold up.2 The rump of the old partnership, led by the Reids and the Wigrams (and including Thomas Meux for seven years)3 bought it in; but the firm could only be successfully reconstructed by the accession of much new capital and many partners. By this time, over £250,000 was involved in tieing the trade, while the brewhouse and its fittings alone fetched £112,000 in the sale and the raw materials, fuel, hay, casks, horses and drays a further £230,425.4 The fifteen extra partners brought wealth from widely different sources, land, trade, law and ship¬ building (the latter from John and William Wells who purchased £20,000 shares, as well as the Wigrams).5 By 1816, the numbers had declined to 16 (at which number they remained until after 1830),6 but this was still enough to change radically the normal routine and structure of partner¬ ship control.7 The partnership running the Red Lion Brewery (the Hynde Cottons selling their share) underwent a parallel increase in numbers, almost certainly for the same reasons. Henry Goodwyn had two other partners in 1796 (William Skinner and Thomas Thornton).8 In 1802, George Matthew Hoare, a younger son of Henry Hoare of the bank, came into the concern and, in 1819, a fifth partner was added. The opportunities given by such a close personal relationship with Hoare’s Bank may be seen in the attempt to solve a trading crisis in the autumn of 1826, when malt prices had risen sharply in the previous season and some expenditure on drink 1 P.R.O. Ibid. Commission of Lunacy dated 4 November 1806; Order in Chancery 16 January 1807; Report 14 February 1807. He had retired from the management in 1802 (Watney Records: Meux Reid, Profit and Loss Statement, 1797-1805). 2 P.R.O. C. 13/2438. Bill of Complaint by A. Reid. Henry Meux was accused of trading in a distillery, with three of the brewery’s employees and then writing into agreements in the name of the brewery conditions to tie publicans over spirits where they were already tied by the brewery for sales of beer. He defended himself by claiming that competition from the Golden Lane Brewery forced the firm to ‘advance large sums of money by way of loan to their own customers’. . 3 Thomas Meux had been a plaintiff in one suit and a defendant in the other. 4 Watney Records: Meux Reid, Partnership Articles, 20 February 1809 (for summary of Chancery proceedings). 6 J. Farington, Diary (ed. J. Greig, 1922-8), vol. II, pp. 187-8; vol. IV, p. 55 > v°f v> PP- I3°> 279; vol. VI, p. 98. 6 Watney Records: Meux Reid, Partnership Articles 1816, 1823, 1830. 7 See below, pp. 316-17. 8 G.L.M.R. Hand in Hand Fire Office, Policies.

3°3

Finance and the Entrepreneur had been switched to gin, driving most large breweries to seek bank credit.1 Henry Hoare (father of the partner, and now retired from the bank) tried to raise £87,000 to save his son from impending bankruptcy caused by temporary illiquidity, writing to Charles Hoare at the bank that he was convinced that ‘ the concern is perfectly solvent and that no Risk can be run by making the advance now required’.2 Most of this money he was intending to raise personally amongst the family, but £21,000 of it had to come from the bank. The brewery was saved, but the bank found that it had made a longer-term investment than had been intended. Two years later, a letter from the partners in the brewery revealed the fate of the money. While admitting that the money had been advanced ‘as mere temporary loans at the Instance of the late Henry Hoare ’ they had to add: ‘These sums unfortunately are so mixed up as Capital in the Brewery that it would be impossible to disengage them at a short period without absolutely endangering the large advances, made us by others, particularly the late Mr Henry Hoare.’3 Such a reply acknowledged the traditional fate of bankers’ capital once it had come to rest in the hands of in¬ dustrialists. table

12. Capital position, 1830

[source: Rest Books at the Breweries.]

Brewery Barclay (1830) Truman (1830) Meux Reid (1826)

Total partners’ capital

Private in¬ vestors!

Publicans, clubs, etc.

£758,000

£4,500

£142,500

£575,000

£52,300

£112,600

£390,000*

£74,150

£88,700

* ‘Nominal partnership capital.’ f Banking capital included here for Barclay and Truman.

The incident is typical of the role which bankers’ capital played in the breweries once the strains of the extra capital needed for tying the trade had been relaxed by accumulating profits and the return of more prosperous peace-time conditions. The build-up of partnership capital then dominated all the investments in the breweries, as Table 12 indicates (although the trade investments by publicans and merchants had grown markedly in absolute terms). 1 See above, p. 242. A fall in production in many houses resulted. 2 Henry Hoare to Charles Hoare, 5 July 1826; H. Hoare to Messrs H. Hoare, Fleet Street, 20 July 1826. I saw these letters through the kindness of Mr D. M. Joslin. 3 G. M. Hoare and F. Woodbridge to Messrs H. Hoare, Fleet Street, 11 July 1828.

304

New Capital and Partnerships Short-term credit requirements continued to fluctuate very greatly between one season and another, and while, in an average year, some breweries might be making a profit on short-term lending (as were Whitbreads and Barclays) a lift in the price of malt or hops in a poor harvest would drive them into a search for bank capital. The Rest Books of Meux Reid show greatly varying liabilities as ‘Bankers’ acceptances’ each summer. They were as high as .£113,400 in the summer of 1816, and £ 112,600 in 1810, but nil in the balance sheets of 1809, 1812, 1822-4. The stringency affecting the Red Lion Brewery in the 1820’s is duplicated in Meux Reid, their bankers’ acceptances being as follows: 1824, nil; 1825, £16,250; 1826, £49,20°; 1827, £11,000; 1828, nil. Barclays’; summer balance sheets had no outstanding liabilities at all to bankers between 1814 and 1818; they had borrowed £30,000 in 1819 from Barclay and Gurney banks, £5000 of which was still on loan in 1820. A further loan of £10,000 was taken from Barclays again to tide them over the difficult 1825 season, £6000 of which was still outstanding in the summer of 1826. Trumans, too, went to their Quaker bankers Hanbury, Taylor and Co., Richardson, Overend and Co. and the Gurneys when they needed liquidity in a poor season.1

Apart from a permanent investment of

£5000 by Hanbury’s uncle, John Gurney, the fluctuations followed the same trend: £36,000 outstanding in the summer of 1816, £25,000 in 1817, then a lapse until 1821 (£25,000) and 1822 (£41,000), with the more serious crisis coming also in 1825-7. The total loans rose to £58,000 in the latter year.

In all these cases instanced only the annual summer

balance sheets survive, so other short-term loans taken and repaid at other times of the year may escape notice, but there is every reason to believe that the Rest Books show the pattern of lending accurately. It would be the traditional role of bank money servicing British industry at this time. In each case, short-term banking credit was apparently the marginal factor in the liquidity of the concern; not needed in normal years but indispensable in unfavourable seasons. The size of concerns by this time was such that, when short-term credit was needed, then it might have to come rapidly and in such vast quantities that only the institutional wealth of the banking system could satisfy the need, the scale of demand being quite beyond the scope of the old search for money amongst one’s family and friends which the typical years of stringency in the eighteenth century had produced.2 Even so, when the family relationships remained as close 1 Truman Records: Rest Books.

2 Cf. Mrs Thrale’s exertions, above, p. 267.

20

305

M BE

Finance and the Entrepreneur between brewers and bankers as they did among the partners of Trumans, Barclays, Whitbreads and Goodwyn-Hoares, to call this ‘institutional financing’ as such is perhaps more misleading than to see it still as capital from within the family circle, where the members of that circle happened to be bankers, with banking wealth at their disposal. Often, the kinship tie mainly accounts for the presence of such credit in the counting house of the brewery. In one instance, the addition of banking wealth in 1799-1800 added to the difficulties of the brewery concerned, for the irascible Timothy Brown became a managing partner of Whitbreads. Within two years, he was complaining about the inadequacy of his salary and perquisites, blaming his fellow managing partners, the ex-clerks Sangster and Yallowley, behind their backs, and writing petulant letters to Whitbread about his refusal to transfer the brewery’s cash account from Down and Free (of Bartholomew Lane) to his own bank in Lombard Street.1

‘I have it

loudly hinted’, he wrote, ‘how little influence I had in the Brewery, that it was my Money only was wanted, and now I feel it.’2 Things got still worse in the next four years, with Brown’s own abilities as a manager being questioned by the other partners, while outside the brewery his wild political opinions were making people murmur about his sense of responsi¬ bility in Lombard Street. On the first count, he had decided to withdraw in October 1806, when he wrote to Whitbread entreating him to ‘find some person to take my place in whom you have more confidence and of whom you have a better opinion, and permit me to retire in quietness... Let me have my money and such portion.. .as is my due.’3 An increase in the

rumours about the safety of his bank, however, abruptly reversed his attitude two years later, for his departure from the brewery then might confirm suspicions and add to the pressure on the bank. The attitude of his partners in the brewery changed equally. The £66,666 of the joint capital owned by Brown was vital to the business; but, had Brown’s banking house failed, his creditors would have pursued their claims into the brewery which might have had a disastrous effect. Sir Benjamin Hobhouse had caught the rumour in Bath that Brown’s credit was doubtful and wrote at once to Whitbread.4 As he bleakly remarked to Brown, who was furious that Hobhouse should spread the bad news, ‘ I judged it right to give a hint to Mr Whitbread of the general observations that had reached me, con1 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Bullock and Broadley Coll. (MS.) Letters, T. Brown to Whitbread, 1802. 2 25 October 1802. 3 Ibid. 20 October 1806 (Brown’s italics). 1 Ibid. Brown to B. Hobhouse (at Bath), 13 December 1809.

3°6

New Capital and Partnerships sidering that we were all engaged together in trade, but as to promulgating intelligences so unpleasing to me you may depend that no such thought ever occurred to my mind.’1 The partners in Chiswell Street tried to cut themselves free from Brown with all speed, Hobhouse’s partner in the Bath bank, Daniel Clutterbuck, being chosen to take up his share. But Brown refused to go: ‘ There was a time when I would have taken my capital out of the concern... and retired’, he replied to Sangster. ‘That time is past and however great the reluctance may be in any or all the partners to inform me my continuance is not agreeable, my explicit answer to the proposition made is NOP Both sides knew that to force the dispute into Chancery would be the worst possible event for everyone (the example of the Meux Reid disaster was at that moment before them), and Brown was in a delicate position, even about publicity.3 Negotiations continued through solicitors and eventually, after the final flourish of objecting to the 1810 Rest Book valuations (to increase the joint capital from which his share was to be with¬ drawn) Timothy Brown departed.4 On 16 July, Sangster wrote to Whitbread, Mr Clutterbuck kept his appointment and left a check upon Whitbreads for £20,000, promising to pay the remainder with Interest.. .Mr Free [i.e. of Down, Thornton & Free, the brewery’s bankers] was glad to receive it, and told me a person in Lombard Street is flourishing away with his money in a very ridiculous Manner. Mr Clutterbuck exactly answers your description of him and I hope you will have growing reason to rejoice in the exchange of persons.6 He added that Bowles, Ogden and Co. of Salisbury, with whom Brown’s partners in Lombard Street were connected, had already broken.6 Replacing an unreliable managing partner with a reliable inactive partner did not solve the problem of management which lay at the root of the problems which had afflicted the business since the elder Whitbread’s death in 1796. A business, like the family to which it is joined, will some¬ times pass through an unsettling time when one generation gives place to another. Samuel Whitbread I had appointed the servants who helped him to make his brewery the mightiest establishment of its kind in London, at the beginning of his independent career—Jacob Yallowley in 1760 and Robert Sangster in 1764—so that they were growing old with their master.7 1 2 3 4 6 6 7

Whitbread Records (Brewery): B. Hobhouse to Brown, 16 December 1809. Ibid. T. Brown to Sangster, 22 March 1810. Ibid. Brown to the partners, 13 May 1810. Ibid. Brown to the partners, 19 March; 18, 21 April; 3, 12, 13 May 1810; Rest Book 1810. Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4659. See Pressnell, op. cit. pp. 84, 467-8. Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4638, 4642.

307

20-2

Finance and the Entrepreneur The younger Samuel Whitbread took over the brewery at his father’s death, but was a man of a very different stamp. His father had been an M.P. since 1768, as well as accepting responsibilities for the direction of several charities and a hospital. But all his other activities had been very much subordinated to his main enterprise in Chiswell Street, and even the accumulation of a fortune of nearly £400,000 in landed estates had not been to the prejudice of the brewery. With his son, the roles of business and politics, of industrial entrepreneur and landed gentleman were reversed. He added a further £73,000 to the estates until 1808, when debts began to outrun income. The new family mansion at Southill Park and the many activities associated with life at Westminster also took up more of his interest, time, care and resources than the business which had been the support of them all. It was, in part, the result of his education. As with Henry Thrale at Oxford a generation previously, the father gave his son that education which had been denied himself, to launch him into the world of noble society and wealth with all the graces and contacts which a private tutor, an ancient university and a Continental tour might provide. The boy had been removed from Christ Church and sent over to St John’s at Cambridge because his father had doubts as to the effect of an Oxford education (amongst the fashionable set) upon an impression¬ able young brewer. But, at Cambridge, the son joined the cadets of the Whig aristocratic cousinhoods at Trinity and confirmed his entry into this new social world by marrying Mary Grey, whose brother Charles (the second Earl) was up at Trinity.1 The political consequences of this alliance meant that Whitbread grew more and more divorced from the active supervision of the brewery, relying for the day to day control upon Yallowley and Sangster. In the first partnership articles it was made explicit that he need not attend to the business, and by the second set of documents (of 1800) he agreed to lease the freehold and leasehold portions of the brewery estate to the firm of partners rather than hold them in his own name.2 This progress, en¬ couraged by his education and all the social factors associated with great wealth and landed property, led to greater things in Westminsternational fame, great political influence, and the expectation of being a Minister—but it was a position not backed by the personal wealth of land so much as business; and attaining such political and social eminence was a process seemingly more prejudicial to success in industry than in 1 See D.N.B.', Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses. 2 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Partnership Articles 1799, 1800.

308

Plate

7. Samuel Whitbread I,

by Sir William Reechey (,above); Samuel Whitbread II, by Gains¬ borough {below).

New Capital and Partnerships landownership. The ambitions in life of the landowners who were setting the pace socially were rather different from those of the wealthy self-made industrialist who gave his son the education of a gentleman. At worst, the standard of economic values they expressed collectively was positively prejudicial to remaining in business at all. The things in life which gave status and enjoyment were such endeavours as rounding out their landed estates (and accumulating more through purchase and marriage), the turf, gambling, running a pack of hounds, building splendidly in the country and maintaining a fashionable house in London. They sought magnificence in hospitality and entertainment, extensive foreign travel, perhaps a seat in Parliament and patronage in the arts. All these activities, with the brewers more than most of their fellowindustrialists, might successfully adorn a commercial career with civility; but, with the legal structure of enterprise linking ownership to control so intimately, the responsibilities for both did not tolerate easily too great a dissipation of time and wealth on other things. Retreat from business often began when individuals in this position pulled out their capital from enterprise as they became more fully committed to life on their estates, or in Westminster, and to income from rents and the Funds. For Whit¬ bread II (and certain other brewers before him like Robert Hucks), where industrial enterprise remained the prime source of their family fortune, the challenge of the non-business world ended in disaster.1 As a whole, brewing families, like the great banking dynasties, survived the tempta¬ tions of wealth and a liberal education as business men much better than most. Whitbread is scarcely a typical figure in the industry, although in the more general economic history of England he becomes a very significant one. His father evidently had some forebodings about the future, for he made his three chief clerks the Executors who were to carry on the business. ‘As you are a perfect stranger to the whole,’ he wrote to his son, ‘nobody can give you so good [advice] as them that understand it thoroughly, and these are your own Clerks.’2 Making Sangster and Yallowley managing partners (taking up their shares with money the first Whitbread had enabled them to borrow) was the only way in which the younger Whitbread could 1 Hucks was at Cambridge. He subsequently ‘spent his money on the turf and sold the brewery’, eventually becoming a lunatic (Notes and Queries, 12 Ser. 11, 93). With Sir Benjamin Truman and Sampson Hanbury, Harvey Combe was a notable sportsman as well as a successful brewer. His country seat was Cobham Park, Surrey; he owned a stud-farm, raised bloodstock and was Master of the Old Berkeley fox hounds. 2 Letter quoted, Whitbread's Brewery (1951), pp. 17-18.

309

Finance and the Entrepreneur hope to carry on as an absentee industrialist. In addition, his father had put certain restrictions on the estate whereby he could not dissipate too much of his capital in trade through partnerships, which explains the personal contract between himself and William Wilshere which ran until 1815, with Wilshere as his creditor receiving a share of the profits rather than as a partner. The management did not prosper. Timothy Brown was a failure. David Jennings the senior brewer left ‘in a very unhandsome manner’ in 1799, and his successor was dismissed two years later—both general indications rather than specific causes of the trouble the house was in. Then Yallowley (who had been in charge of the cash side of the management) died in 1802.

Sangster was old and could go on little

longer. New blood had to come in. The first proposal received came from the elder Richard Meux in August 1808, who proposed his son Henry as a partner after the dispute amongst the partners at the Meux Reid brewery in Liquorpond Street had been forced into Chancery. ‘His son was so well respected by his customers’, said the father, ‘that he was sure they would follow him whereever he went.n The prize was a barrelage in the town trade of Meux Reid alone of over 170,000 barrels but the Meux family record was a troubled one and nothing came of the proposal.1 2 Three years later, in August 1811, negotiations had begun with John Martineau about amalgamating the two businesses, Whitbread keeping the initiative in the discussions very much in his own hands. The Martineaus were a Norfolk family but had been in porter brewing in London since 1783, previously being in banking, first as ‘David, Peter and John Martineau’ until 1808, then as ‘Martineau, Son and Brent’. Michael Bland, also of a Norfolk banking family, had been a partner with them for the past year.3 John Martineau was well known in the trade, having spoken for the porter brewers before several Parliamentary Committees; he had also acted as an arbitrator for Whitbread in the dispute with Timothy Brown.4 Apart from his brewing, he was 1 Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4652. R. Sangster to S. Whitbread, 3 August 1808. 2 The Reid family were very worried indeed, nevertheless, when they heard a report of the approach (Whitbread Records: ibid. 4654. C. Bigbie to T. Brown, 14 August 1808). Eventually Henry Meux moved to the Horse Shoe Brewery, off Tottenham Court Road. 3 Michael Bland’s family were still partners in the second Gurney bank in Norwich, ‘Gurney and Bland’. He was also connected with a Fire Insurance Office in Norwich. See W. H. Bidwell, Annals of an East Anglian Bank (1900), pp. 15, 25, 38-40; Truman Records: Letter Books, S. Hanbury to M. Bland, 20 November 1802. 4 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Rest Book 1810; Whitbread's Brewery (1951), pp. 23-4; Pari. Papers, 1806,11, Report.. .on Malt Duty, pp. 42-4; 1806-7, u, Report.. .on Distillation from Sugar. He subsequently gave evidence to the Committees on Police (1817, vn); on Public Breweries (1819, v) and Distillation from Molasses (1831, vii).

310

New Capital and Partnerships a partner with his son John and Thomas Reid in a sugar-refining business.1 Their brewery, at King’s Arms Stairs on the Thames at Lambeth, was smaller than Whitbread’s but they brought thirty-eight tied public houses with them and after the union, when Martineau’s brewery had closed down, the number of London victuallers served by Whitbreads rose from 347 to 435. No less important, the Martineaus had their own makings established in Norfolk (their home county) and, most vital of all, John Martineau had a son to succeed him as an active manager of the brewery.2 Sangster was very clear upon the economic and the managerial advan¬ tages of the amalgamation: ‘The loss on his utensils [i.e. when sold]’, he reported to Whitbread, may amount to between £10,000 and £12,000, and.. .the probable profit for one year upon his trade when done without expence being joined to yours, would amount to near that sum... so that upon the face of it it appears to be mutually advantageous. M. and his two sons will bring about one sixth part of the Trade to yourself and four in point of number of persons,3 the disproportion is great, but perhaps in the present instance, that is of small consequence when it is considered that it is young blood that they bring into the Concern.4 After almost a year of discussion, the trades were joined in the summer of 1812 and Sangster’s last letter to Whitbread ended on the satisfactory note, ‘Martineaus have been round to all their customers, who all promised to continue and most of them express’d approbation of the junction’.5

In the new concern, the original Whitbread partners had

£300,000 of the nominal capital and the three Martineau managing partners £25,000 each. Sangster remained as a fourth managing partner from the other side, each of them receiving a salary of £500 p.a. The new arrangements were an immediate success, and efficiency in management at last returned with the entry of the new team. Philip Martineau had begun acting as the firm’s solicitor by 1819, and the private account of the partners was transferred to Martineau’s banker, Hoare. After the four-year gap without a Whitbread as a partner, between 1815 and 1819, the accession of the two sons of Samuel Whitbread to the partner¬ ship meant that the management became sustained by a double family 1 2 for 3 4

Whitbread Records (Brewery): Partnership Articles 1812. Whitbread Records (Brewery): Martineau Trade Ledger 1810-12. Whitbreads paid £18,360 the leases and freeholds of public houses and £1400 for the makings. Clutterbuck had not yet formally taken up the share of the departed Brown. Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4684. R. Sangster to S. Whitbread, 19 August

1811 (Sangster’s italics). 6 Ibid: Brewery 1676, 9 July 1812. See also Brewery 4662, 4665-8, 4670-4.

Finance and the Entrepreneur tradition which still survives.1 The growth of the brewery from 1749 had involved throwing together a mass of small properties, many of which Samuel Whitbread I had bought outright, but some remained on lease. These rights over the Chiswell Street property were the only major business assets which remained in the Whitbread family after the tragedy of July 1815 and it was the sale of these brewery freeholds and leaseholds to the partnership of 1819 by W. H. Whitbread (second son of S. Whit¬ bread II) for a personal share in the trade of £45,000 which brought the family back into active association with the enterprise. At the same time S. C. Whitbread bought a £10,000 share of the trade from William Wilshere, his father’s old creditor.2 CONTROL AND CONTINUITY

Where a brewery was not owned and controlled by a single person, the legal form under which business was conducted in almost every case was a partnership. The brewing industry was no different in this respect, of course, from most manufacturing enterprise in the economy, but, within the general framework of the partnership form of association, many im¬ portant differences existed which are not as well known. It might be anticipated that the growing scale of production, the greater numbers of partners involved, and the more complicated financial servicing which such a business demanded, should all combine to make the articles of association documents of growing intricacy as they became accommodated to increasingly complex conditions of management. Usually, this develop¬ ment remained a function of size, other things being equal. Where growth came gradually out of profits, of course, as with Whitbread up to 1799, a very large business could be built up under personal ownership and salaried staff, and where informal family agreements remained satisfactory there were sometimes no partnership articles between a father and his sons, as was the case with the Martineau family, whose capital in porter brewing at Lambeth was as large as £75,000 in 1812.3 Usually, however, a son seems to have come into the trade with at least some formal agree¬ ment about profit-sharing with his father, and where ‘outside’ capital or additional managers were needed, then articles had to be drawn up. 1 At the time of writing (1958) the Chairman of Whitbread and Co. Ltd. is Col. W. H. Whit¬ bread and Mr J. E. Martineau a Managing Director—both direct descendants of the founders of the two breweries. Samuel Whitbread II committed suicide on 6 July 1815. 2 See below, p. 441. Also Whitbread Records (Brewery): Articles 1819; Herts. C.R.O. Articles 1821. 3 Letter in Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4665, R. Sangster to S. Whitbread 23 August 1811. 312

Control and Continuity Some of the large breweries had quite extensive partnerships from the mid-century, of which the two controlled by the prolific Calvert family are examples. In 1760, Sir William Calvert’s Hour Glass Brewhouse, in Thames Street, had five partners (of whom three were Calverts), and the ‘Peacock Brewhouse’ of John Calvert in St Giles, Cripplegate, also had five (of whom four were Calverts).1 The general legal conditions imposed upon those associated with a joint capital as partners meant that all shared alike the liabilities of the enter¬ prise upon their personal estates, and none who were not partners could receive ‘profits’ from the concern for capital invested. Obviously, this did not mean, in practice, that capital could not be invested—the history of every large brewery as well as any other large enterprise shows great reliance at times on borrowed money—but that it had to be lent to the partners at a fixed rate of interest, not forming part of the joint fund which enjoyed the profits or sustained the liabilities. In normal circum¬ stances these regular investments at 5 per cent, covered by the ‘note of hand’ of the partners, or their bonds, were not much different in function or in form to the preference share capital of a modern company, save that the deposits were part of a private system of obligations and rewards, not a publicly advertised nexus. Certainly, the legal form under which these deposits had to be made does not seem to have hindered the flow of capital to the concerns. The same may be said about the partnership relations. The law did not allow limitation of liability for a sleeping partner whose investment did not carry responsibility of management with it. He was, formally, as liable as all the active partners, who were directly responsible for profits and losses through their management. As far as their ‘ external ’ obligations were concerned, as a firm, the partners were jointly responsible, despite certain precautions which could be taken.2 In the private world of obliga¬ tions between themselves, however, commercial relationships grew more 1 G.L.M.R. Ledgers of Hand in Hand Fire Office. In 1760, Sir William’s brewhouse (fourth in production in London with 51,785 barrels) had himself, Felix and William Calvert, Thomas Tash and John Abington as partners; the latter (first in size with 74,700 barrels) had John, Peter, Felix and Peter Calvert, and William Seward. The two firms amalgamated in 1810' when the Thames Street brewery was the only one continued (Barnard, vol. 11, p. 295). 2 Where debts were covered by the personal signatures of the managing partners only, there might be room for legal dispute. Personal (rather than joint) obligations might be made a con¬ dition of certain contracts; loans could be raised personally; certain assets might be administered by Trustees under a deed of Trust to remove them from the powers of the Common Law juris¬ diction to that of Equity; limitation of liability might be written into the contracts which a concern undertook. See C. A. Cooke, Corporation Trust and Company (Manchester, 1949), chs. vi and vii.

313

Finance and the Entrepreneur articulate during the century. The minimum conditions specified, related first to the sharing of profits and liabilities according to the proportions of the joint capital held by each party. This entailed regulations for the annual ‘Rest Book’ (or Balance Sheet) upon which such calculations could be based. Commonly, conditions about the withdrawal of money from the trade were also written into the articles. John Perkins and Robert Barclay, for example, bound themselves to draw only £4000 from the trade annually (that was, £1000 for each partner) until Thrale’s Executors had been paid off. When this had been done, there was to be a new agree¬ ment—as it proved an annual agreement at the time of the Rest—on the amount to be taken out, with the sole provisions that it be in proportion to their shares and ‘not Exceeding the Profits of the said Trade’.1 In later Articles, the partners agreed to retain a certain amount of the profits. From 1797, net capital stock was fixed at a certain figure in the Rests (£x 60,000 until 1804, and £200,000 thereafter) and the surplus from the year’s trade was placed in the partners’ surplus capital account. Previously, retained profits had been turned back into the joint partner¬ ship capital, which rose from £82,000 in 1782 to £169,000 in 1797 when the new book-keeping practice began. In the Rest Book of 1802, the partners agreed to keep at least £26,000 invested in the surplus capital account for each of the four shares of the partnership, and this was raised to a minimum figure of £30,000 per share in 1803, and £80,000 per share in 1813. Such agreements were matched in Whitbreads, where a similar change in accounting techniques occurred about the same time, with equivalent regulations to ensure an adequate growth of capital in the partners’ surplus capital. It is tempting to see in this book-keeping switch from ‘joint partnership capital’ to ‘surplus capital’ a device to limit the liability of the partners while not changing the legal form of association. Certainly, the accumula¬ tion of these very large capitals in trade must have made all the partners in such an enterprise look for some means of protecting their holdings, and several legal devices for so doing were being developed at the time. This may have been an attempt to allow the partners to create claims on the brewery as individual creditors in the case of bankruptcy. However, it would have been a difficult legal battle to reduce the liability of the personal estates of the partners to external creditors in this way, and their investments in the brewery on surplus capital account were personal assets just as much as money in the Funds. More probably, the move was an administrative 1

Barclay Records: Deed Book.

3M

Control and Continuity convenience in the relationship of the partners to one another.1 Indi¬ vidual investments in the surplus capital account were distinct from their joint fund, and withdrawals from the surplus capital were possible without any rearrangement of the shares of the partnership capital (which might have entailed drawing up new articles). Many of the new partners which were coming into London breweries at this time were men who were interested in several business ventures and would not wish all their accumulating surpluses to rest in the joint fund. This book-keeping device enabled the distinction to be made automatically between the permanent capital and the accruing annual surpluses, and allowed a simple annual decision to be taken on the minimum amount needed in the surplus account to guard against the effects of a bad trading season, or to ensure a minimum rate of growth. As an alternative protective device, the partners in Trumans, who did not adopt the technique of pegging their joint partnership capital at a fixed sum (although the deposits of certain partners did rise to large sums in the surplus capital account), set up a ‘Security Fund for con¬ tingencies’ which pigeon-holed some of the year’s surplus before the calculation of the profits. This account (upon which compound interest was paid) rose from £4360 in 1822 to £61,750 by 1830.2 Where inactive partners were brought in for the sake of their capital, the Articles needed to specify, in addition, the salaries of the managing partners and the various perquisites of ownership and management which they received, which complicate the exact calculation of profits for a busi¬ ness in the eighteenth century, just as the perquisites of employment complicate that of the total value of wages. In almost all such articles, provisions occur for free housing at the brewery (the responsible partner needed to be living on the spot unless he was deputing his duties to a manager). Thus, Perkins had the dwelling house from Mrs Thrale and its upkeep and Robert Barclay the rooms above the counting house, with an allowance of £1200 from the trade to build himself a house in front of the brewery.3 Timothy Brown, Sangster and Yallowley in Whitbreads had such dwelling rights from the trade in 1799, with Whitbread retaining certain rooms ‘for his exclusive use’ even though he was not active in the 1 5 per cent interest was normally paid on the joint capital before the calculation of profits, so there was no added interest payment to partners involved. Nor does it appear to me to have any benefits for income-tax payment. Even so, the innovation may be presumed to have had real advantages somewhere. 2 Truman Records: Rest Books 1822-30. 3 Barclay Records: Deed Book, Articles 1781-2.

315

Finance and the Entrepreneur trade.1 With these rights went traditional allowances for managing partners of expenses for entertaining clients, coals, candles, beer and the keep of horses. The management agreements of the three Meux partners in Meux Reid in 1797 allowed them 5 per cent of the gross gains as a salary instead of a fixed sum per week.2 The existence of sleeping partners not in close attendance upon the business involved a further limitation in the powers of discretion of the active partners being written into the articles—all bonds given in the name of the firm for debts incurred had to have agreed, mutual responsi¬ bility in writing among all the partners, and the power of the managing partners to undertake capital expenditure or to incur debts on their own responsibility was thereby checked. Other normal clauses in articles where there were more partners involved than father and son, provided an agreed procedure for the withdrawal of a partner, for the introduction of sons or nominees into subsequent partnerships, and—of great importance— a provision for arbitration in the case of any dispute between the partners. The settlement of disputes by the court of Chancery might mean disaster for a firm just as much as for an heir. The culmination of this gradual process of extension of controls over the managing partners, by the inactive partners holding capital in the concern, may be seen in the new articles for the Meux Reid ‘Griffin Brewery, which—as previous remarks have mentioned—had been sold in Chancery in 1808-9.3 No less than twenty partners were needed to put up the requisite capital of £530,000—many of them rich rentiers; others active in enterprise elsewhere; few of them related to, or close friends with, the others; so that the problems imposed by those dissociated from management became acute. For this brewery, the formal conditions of association in the partnership articles and the hope of gain were the only real bonds between the partners, whereas for most others a family relation¬ ship, or the intimate personal association of one or two friends, stood at the back of the formal agreements and the mutual economic interests. Written into the deeds of partnership, therefore, was a detailed series of procedures to regulate meticulously the relations between the managing partners and the investing partners. This institutionalised code, operable within the private world of the partners, corresponded exactly to the arrangements between the ordinary shareholders and the directors of 1 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Articles 1799. 2 Watney Records: Meux Reid: Profit and Loss Statement, 1797-1805. 3 Ibid: Articles 1809, 1816, 1823.

3l6

Control and Continuity a public company which became formalised, in public law, for manu¬ facturing industry during the nineteenth century. The procedures, the in¬ stitutions—even the terminology—are to be found functioning completely in private before they became transposed to the public world of incor¬ porated enterprise raising capital by open advertisement. The legal arrangements for the conduct of incorporated manufacturing enterprise, it would seem, derive as much from the eighteenth-century heritage of partnership devices in large-scale concerns as from the older, corporate concerns in foreign trade, mining and banking. The twenty partners of the reconstituted Griffin Brewery agreed, in their articles, to meet on i October each year to elect (or confirm) by ballot from amongst themselves the ‘ Directors of the trade and concerns of the said Co-Partnership ’ and three other auditors from amongst their number. The five directors elected in 1809 chose amongst themselves a Chairman and a Deputy Chairman. The Chairman and the Deputy Chairman (or both) had to attend daily at the Counting House; there had to be a general Directors’ Meeting at least once per week (at which each had one vote, and the Chairman a casting vote). Minutes had to be kept of these Directors’ meetings; no director could be active in any other brewery. All bills and drafts were to be signed by at least two directors in the name of‘Meux Reid and Co’ and no partners were allowed to draw on the bankers personally. A balance sheet was to be struck annually on 5 July and presented to the general Partners’ Meeting in the autumn. At that meeting, minutes were read and confirmed, the Chairman of the directors read a formal report to the assembled partners which was formally approved. The directors withdrew while the non-active partners discussed their ‘proper remuneration’.1 This is an institutional, impersonal world—or at least impersonal and institutionalised in comparison with the more intimate ‘Rest dinners’ which brought the few partners together annually in less sophisticated managements. It is, perhaps, closer in atmosphere as well as in procedure, to the annual general meetings of a public company, even though the firm faced the world behind the unchanged mask of a traditional form of association. Its members who owned a fairly small fraction of the joint capital in their hands, but enjoyed substantial stipends as managing partners thus, as entrepreneurs, approached in function the senior salaried 1 Ibid. Report of General Meeting, 15 November 1810. Sir Robert Wigram took the Chair for this discussion. The joint salaries were fixed at £2500 plus 10 per cent on the actual profits, ‘as an encouragement for their best exertions’.

317

Finance and the Entrepreneur clerks of other large breweries, who had a considerable stake in the surplus capital invested, and whose large salaries were often calculated, as we have seen, to benefit according to the profits. The process of evolution towards the separation of management from ownership leads eventually to the arrangement of publicly raised capital being administered by salaried managers. The size of plant in the porter brewing section of the market in London at the end of the eighteenth century was such as to invite this form of association, were it not for the secure position established by the existing breweries, and the barriers of skill erected against interlopers at such a scale of production—quite apart, that is, from the legal problems involved in such an attempt. The only serious attempt to crash the London porter market from outside the established firms and without the backing of great family wealth and influence came in 1804 with the Golden Lane Brewery. Its story more properly belongs amongst the details of competition and co-operation in the London industry (pp. 243-251) but its organisers did raise almost £300,000 in open market for a subscription company which they ad¬ ministered successfully for some years. A host of difficulties, not least the managerial, combined to destroy it. In its failure, an important generalisa¬ tion about the entry of entrepreneurs in the porter breweries became reinforced: fixed capitals were now so large, and control over local market¬ ing was becoming so complete, that existing breweries were absorbing new entrepreneurs from employees and rich partners, rather than new entrepreneurs establishing new concerns. The names of the breweries operating in London at the present day, and the families still controlling them, bear eloquent testimony to this fact (which the compiler of the General Description of All Trades noticed as a feature of London breweries as early as 1747).1 The original founder families, too, have shown an astonishingly sustained ability to produce not only sons, but sons who were able and willing to remain business men and brewers, so that the brewing dynasties forming round the development of large fixed capitals in the early eighteenth century have not uncommonly survived to our own day, their members remaining the active entrepreneurs in the industry. Some great names have gone—Thrale and Calvert, amongst the greatest of them—much ‘professional management’ without family continuity has come in. Watney reached the front rank in the nineteenth century, but Whitbread, Martineau, Bevan, Barclay, Perkins, Hanbury, Buxton, Pryor, 1 P. 34. See also M. Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1766, 3rd ed.), vol. 1.

318

Control and Continuity Courage, Combe, Charrington, Mann, Crossman are amongst those families who survive from before 1830 in London, and Guinness, Younger, Hodgson, Cobb, Cobbold, Simonds, Brickwood, Tomson, Tetley, Wells are amongst the many more whose ancestors entered the industry before 1830 elsewhere in the British Isles.1 Some now do not have a business in their own name; in other cases, as that of Meux in London or John Harvey in Lewes, the name has survived in the company longer than the family. In no industry was this family continuity in ownership and control more marked than in brewing; and in none has it been more tenacious, whether one looks at Great Britain, the continent of Europe, or North America.2 Much the same is true of distilling, and also wine merchanting, where continuity appears to be much greater than in other merchanting lines. There were few dynasties in trade in the eighteenth century com¬ parable to those in iron, textiles or brewing. Extensive fixed capitals did not provide an anchor in trade, as they did in industry, to hinder the family fortunes in a retreat from business. It is not accidental that the founding of the porter—and other brewing—dynasties coincided with the rise of such fixed capitals in the industry. The generalisation about the lack of continuity in family ventures in trade—or enterprise not involving extensive fixed capitals—does not apply so much to the Quaker com¬ munities, or, indeed, to banking as a whole, where a business tradition amongst certain families had proved as strong as in brewing. Economically, of course, the returns from brewing have been lucrative, once a business has become well established in a locality. Only in com¬ paratively recent times have new developments in road transport, in bottling techniques, advertising and social habits threatened provincial brewers with forcible amalgamation with the national concerns emerging from Burton-on-Trent and London. In the eighteenth century, high transport costs protected local monopolies, while demand was more stable and more widespread than for most other single products in mass 1 See list of directors in The Brewery Manual. Perhaps the most remarkable example of continuity of ownership and site is the business of Tomson and Wotton at Ramsgate. A bieweiy was operating on the site in 1634; it was bought by Thomas Thomson c. 1680; the present senior director of the firm is a descendant, Mr W. J. Martin-Tomson (information from Mr B. Spiller). 2 For North America see M. Denison, The Barley and the Stream (Montreal, 1955) lor Molson (Toronto) and T. C. Cochran, The Pabst Brewing Company (New York, 1948). The German names of many of the present leading brewers of the United States accurately signify the continuity in the industry there since its great developments in the hands of immigrants during the mid-decades of the nineteenth century.

319

Finance and the Entrepreneur consumption. As a commodity, beer has changed much less, for example, than types of cloth and, with rising numbers, consumption continued to grow throughout the nineteenth century. Through the legal limitations on the retail sale of beer, the marketing end of the industry has also remained more stable than that of many other products, and, despite the free trade in beer between 1830 and 1869, brewers still maintained great influence over many of their customers. Financially, too, brewing was one of the most ‘liquid’ of industries, so high a proportion of sales being over the counter for cash, and returning to the brewer regularly and rapidly. Bankruptcy (especially bankruptcy through illiquidity) was not a marked feature of the industry. Even so, wealth—even regular wealth—is not the complete answer to the question, for great profits could facilitate a retreat from business to the graces of a gentleman’s life on landed estates supported by an effortless rentier income. The estates and the investments came in due course to the brewers, but still the active link with the industry remained unbroken in a higher proportion of cases than in many other trades—an assertion which may be tolerable in the absence of statistical proof. In part, it was a family feat of producing successive generations of sons to be able to take on the trade; in part, it remained a social phenomenon of successive generations of sons wishing to remain as business men and brewers. This latter factor, in turn, relates to the social status possessed by an entre¬ preneur in brewing and the actual conditions of the occupation. When ownership involved responsibilities in management, brewing was a better industry than most for the successful entrepreneur who wished to lead part of his life at his country house, away from the scene of his business. There was the long intermission over the summer months. In the operations of the trade during the busy autumn, winter and spring months what was needed was the application of high skills when buying malt and hops, or when taking the decisions in the actual processes of brewing. Much of the time taken by those processes, once started, needed only general supervision. The business of distribution and collecting cash and accounting was a routine occupation which, if adequately supervised for efficiency, might be delegated to departmental managers. Provided the owners had the skills of buying and brewing themselves, even these functions could be delegated with safety once the development of the business had seen the emergence of able and loyal servants trained in these skills under the eyes of the owner or the managing partners. In the last few years of his career, the elder Whitbread had lived very handsomely 320

Control and Continuity at his country estate of Bedwell Park in Hertfordshire most of the time without prejudicing his London brewery in any way, either in efficiency of management or in retained profits for expansion. As he himself remarked: ‘ I have been my Self always at the head of it, and though not resident, yet frequently there to be consulted and advis’d with and always in my thoughts.’1 The careers of several of the leading entrepreneurs in the industry at widely different epochs exemplify this happy combination of continuing business success and leisured affluence. The reader of Bagehot’s eulogy2 on the life of a London banker in the nineteenth century will be im¬ mediately reminded of the good fortunes of a London brewer in the eighteenth—and other—centuries. Family continuity has been of similar consequence in both occupations. Transposing his comments into the terminology of the other mystery they read: The calling is hereditary; the credit of the brewery descends from father to son; this inherited wealth soon brings inherited refinement. Brewing is a watchful but not a laborious trade. A brewer, even in large business, can feel pretty sure that all his transactions are sound, and yet have much spare mind. A certain part of his time, and a considerable part of his thoughts he can readily devote to other pursuits. The brewer was not only joining the landed gentry and entering county society through his country estate, his pack of hounds and his social commitments—that is, through his profits—but was associated with the same society through his trade. His purchases of barley helped to support the agricultural rents upon which the prosperity of that society was mainly based. Undoubtedly, despite the social taint which was associated with wealth from trade and industry (which was less than is commonly supposed in the eighteenth century), the brewer’s social rating was higher than most of his fellow industrialists’. To some degree, this was for the reasons advanced above, that he was able to live the life of a landed gentleman more successfully than many men in business (particularly manufacturing business). But it was also not unconnected, one may presume, with the fact that his was a traditional trade, not a brash newcomer such as cotton¬ spinning. As an entrepreneur the brewer was part of the same world of agriculture, corn and harvests which the landed gentry knew so well, and upon which they themselves depended. Moreover, brewing was an industry of the home counties and the south as well as the north of England; 1 S. Whitbread, Sr, to his son. Letter quoted in Whitbread's Brewery (1951), p. 18. 2 W. Bagehot, Lombard Street (1873 ed.), pp. 268-9. 21

321

M BE

Finance and the Entrepreneur its greatest dynasties sprang from regions which were the traditional ‘heart-lands’ of English society. The leading brewers moved between country estates for the most part in the home counties and London, meeting in both places the social elite of the gentry, the professions and business. The association of John Bull and his pot of ale at the crudest level of national characterisation was, in some sense, mirrored in these more subtle gradations of status in the higher ranks of society. In the smaller towns, the social position of the brewer in local society was often even more assured. He was usually one of the richest men in the town; a fount of local patronage and influence; next to the larger landowner (if such there was), the leader in voluntary office and in social prestige. Where social status reinforced economic advantage in this way, family continuity in the same enterprise and the same industry may not appear surprising. BREWERS AND OTHER BUSINESS ACTIVITIES

The scale of enterprise in brewing was, as we have stressed, in the last resort limited by the extent of the local marketing area which could be exploited, and once the business had expanded to this limit (relative, of course, to the vagaries of competition within it), further increase was largely dependent upon the growth in size of the local community or some innovation in local transport. This often meant that profits accrued faster than they could be invested with advantage in the business, tempting the brewer and his family to set up another brewery at a distance (as did Cobb of Margate at Deal, and Cobbold of Ipswich at Colchester and Eye), or invest their profits in some other enterprise, if they did not pull them out of business altogether for investment in land, the Funds, turn¬ pike trusts, canal shares and so forth. Perhaps the most natural develop¬ ment was to move towards transactions which were associated with the brewing enterprise, which meant that a trading empire might develop almost unconsciously. In other cases, the same might be true of trading ventures which were protean enough in their own right to add brewing to other ventures. Often, the new function was added to a family’s activities as sons were set up in business for themselves, and interlocking partner¬ ships within the family make it difficult to disentangle the exact business relationships of the various projects. Often, this is the same path as that trodden by recruits to the industry (described above) but now taken in the reverse direction. With the Burton brewers, the case is fairly clear. Until the railway 322

Simpson’s Brewery, Baldock (above); Cobb’s Brewery, Margate (below).

Plate 8.

Other Business Activities opened up London and the national market to them for mass-distribution, little of their accumulating surpluses went into fixed capital for brewing but was put out in other ways to other enterprise. Although the greatest Burton brewers did not brew much more than 5000 barrels annually at this time, their initial purchases for brewing, and their final sales of beer thus formed the basis for a pyramid of transactions, with trading margins being taken at every stage to supplement already comfortable manufacturing profits. The shortness of their brewing season from November to April was useful, too, in giving them half the year to profit by other enterprise.1 In almost every case, these non-brewing ventures were amplifications and extensions by trade of the central business which remained the founda¬ tion for them all. The Cobbold family at Ipswich exemplified the same diversity, although their activities were conditioned in a different direction by their location at a port dominated by the coastal traffic to London. They became prominent on the East Coast as corn and malt merchants, then as shipowners, and then as merchants in foreign trade, while main¬ taining the brewery and makings at the Cliffe site as the hub of their wealth.2 Nathaniel, a younger son of John Chevallier Cobbold (17971882) established a brewery for himself at Colchester, and another sub¬ sidiary brewery was later founded at Eye. Following an almost traditional pattern of diversification in family business enterprise, in brewing, malting and trade, J. C. Cobbold became a partner in Bacon’s Bank at Ipswich, founding another dynastic interest which has continued in banking until our own day.3 The Lacon family at Yarmouth show a similar consolidation in brewing, malting, coastal trade, part-owning ships and banking.4 This is not to say, of course, that capital and enterprise always flowed into related channels when it spilled over from brewing and malting. In 1784, Benjamin Wilson became an active partner in a cotton mill at Alrewas near Lichfield, providing £1000 of capital and taking charge of raw-cotton buying. The capital, but not the direct experience, from his main business were applied to the new venture, in which he was not altogether happy. ‘ Nothing you can propose (in my present apprehension)’, 1 See pp. 178-82. 2 Cliffe Brewery, Ipswich, 1723-1923 (Ipswich, 1923); G. R. Clarke, History of Ipswich (1830) pp. 367-8. 3 The present Governor of the Bank of England is a member of the family. In the early nineteenth century the family extended its banking interests to Harwich (Cox, Cobbold and Co.), in which port tradition has it that Thomas Cobbold founded his first brewery in 1723, moving to Ipswich a generation later. 4 Also Cobb of Margate (Pressnell, Country Banking in the Industrial Revolution, p. 50).

323

21-2

Finance and the Entrepreneur he wrote to his partners in 1804, ‘will have the effect to induce my con¬ tinuance in a Concern which I don’t understand and can render you no personal Service or Assistance in’.1 Parallels to this situation may be seen in Samuel and John Palmer of Bath who developed two theatres, a tallow chandler’s business and a spermacetti factory in addition to their brewery.2 All such diverse enterprise on the part of brewers and maltsters lay apart from their investments in those fields where ‘ enterprise invest¬ ment’ merged into ‘status investment’ (if the terms may be coined) and the motives of rentier profits became dominant—that is, real estate, canal and turnpike shares, government stock. The move by brewers into banking may have been a similar entrepreneurial response to profit by the status wealth brought, and from the funds it was less profitable (or less possible) to reinvest in brewing, as well as being a useful adjunct to their breweries. All things considered, for such provincial brewers as were limited by the narrowness of their local markets for brewing (or for any one of their other activities), the distinguishing mark of the entrepreneur was non-brewing activity, only the unenterprising being content to slumber peacefully as brewers or rentiers in a traditional market in a traditional way. The broad contrast between the position of provincial brewers in such circumstances as this and entrepreneurs in the London market does not need to be stressed at length. Clearly, during the greater part of the eighteenth century that market was extensive enough to absorb all the capital and all the energy which the most aggressive and personally abstemious entrepreneur could hope to invest in its exploitation as a brewer. Such was the resulting wealth that the fortunate owners of the larger breweries might develop considerable interests in agriculture as farmers or as the owners of landed estates, and Whitbread, for example, was held in the partnership articles to be also a lime burner from the commercial interests he acquired with an estate at Purfleet in 1777, and a wharf which was involved in the exploitation of this raw material. In general, however, the pattern was that when non-brewing wealth and enterprise became associated with the London brewing industry on a large scale in partnerships at the end of the eighteenth century, it was exactly because the requirements of the brewing ventures were demanding more wealth at a more rapid rate than could be satisfied by the rate of accumulation of retained profits, thus forcing external capital to come in. 1 Allsopp Records: Letter Books. B. Wilson to F. and T. Dicken, 4 July 1804. Wilson was still buying cotton for the mill in February 1806. 2 D.N.B.; Gent. Mag. 11 (1818), 276; R. Warner, History of Bath (1801), pp. 364-5.

324

Other Business Activities The sequence of causation leading towards a differentiation of activities was thus precisely the reverse of the pattern common in the provinces. Most of these non-brewing activities by non-London brewers, often inextricably involved with brewing through interlocking family partner¬ ships, or through the same individual ownership and management, were extensions by trade of the central enterprise. The same relationship holds true, in part—but only in part—for the link between brewing and banking, which was, perhaps, more widespread than any other enterprise connected with brewing, always excepting the manufacture and sale of malt. It is not alone the number of instances in which brewing became associated with banking which is remarkable. The link between the two activities was not confined to any particular region of the country; there were great differences in the scale of enterprise at which it took place, and the junction came from the extension of banking to brewing as much as from brewing to banking.1 Several different incentives lie behind the trend, just as entry into brewing itself came from various sources and motives. As we have seen, the London porter brewers were drawn into informal deposit-banking as a virtually inevitable attribute of trade, by acting as the recipients for funds from publicans, friendly societies at public houses in their trade, raw material suppliers, tradesmen and employees. When they felt, in addition, an obligation to accommodate friends and relatives, who wanted to deposit savings at 5 per cent without risking any depreciation in capital value which investment in government stock might involve, they could recruit a large number of accounts. From their own point of view there were, of course, the advantages of the extra capital this gave, con¬ solidation of custom in the public houses and of loyalty in the enterprise; while it was often highly convenient to ‘fund’ debts for raw materials, and oblige one’s family in this way, in the anticipation of periods of stringency when obligations were reversed and the brewer was looking for cash. Equally naturally came the short-term investments from breweries when they were ‘in cash’ and needing to put temporarily surplus funds out to profit, whether by the purchase of stock and exchequer bills or through the offer of discounts for trade bills. On both sides, deposit and loan, they became drawn into dealing in money—semi-privately and informally, it is true—but none the less in ways which, in conception and in practice, were not very dissimilar to those of other, specifically banking 1 See R. S. Sayers, Lloyds Bank in the History of English Banking (1957), pp. 2-4, 65-6, 90, 124.

325

Finance and the Entrepreneur concerns. In this way, there was a very natural progress from trading in commodities to trading in money. The finances of the London breweries also show how commercial trends in the industry might lead, for other reasons, to the opposite form of association with bankers—when men who had become personally wealthy in banking brought that wealth, and their banking associations, into the partnerships of breweries. The families of Barclay, Bevan, Gurney, Hanbury, Brown, Hobhouse, Hoare, Wilshere, Clutterbuck are examples of this movement, which has been more fully described above. On the brewers’ side, the need was clear enough, but there was a mingling of motives on the part of the banking families who accepted the new associations. Often, established bankers would put a son or relative into brewing, rather than become involved himself (as with Robert Barclay, or George M. Hoare or Sampson Hanbury). In this case, there need be no more economic significance in the move than that fact that brewing was a highly prosperous and secure occupation in which a young man with capital might invest his money and energy with advantage. The same could be true of bankers themselves, as with Timothy Brown, Benjamin Hobhouse and Daniel Clutterbuck. There was a very good return on capital from profits (much better than the 5 per cent to which deposits were restricted); the great concerns were among the most stable units of enterprise in the country, and the only way of sharing fully in the profits was by becoming a partner. The presence of bankers, or the cadets of banking families, in breweries can therefore be just a natural association of the possessors of wealth seeking to perpetuate and augment their fortunes in a congenial and convenient trade—much as the first Samuel Whitbread, as a very rich brewer, was himself reputedly sought as a partner by several banking firms.1 Often, to this, was added the more active commercial motive of consolidating a position already established by business, for the brewers at this time were turning on an ever greater scale to the bankers for short-term credit in unfavourable years. The move of Richard and Hudson Gurney into Barclay Perkins may be seen in the same light as the partnership of their relative Samuel Gurney with Thomas Richardson who was providing so much business for the Gurney bank at Norwich. Timothy Brown’s entry to Whitbreads had a more active back¬ ground of financial transactions behind it than had that of Benjamin 1 Whitbread Records (Southill): Memoirs of Harriet Gordon (MS. 1825): ‘and he never had any partner after [i.e. after Thomas Shewed, his initial associate, had departed in 1761] or would engage in other trading concerns, tho’ often Solicited to take Shares in Banking Houses.... ’ He contemplated selling out to a banker in 1792.

326

Other Business Activities Hobhouse. William Wilshere’s formal entry to the same partnership in 1815 is the extreme case of an attorney and banker ‘capitalising’ a debt by converting a personal loan to the head of the firm into a permanent stake in the joint capital, almost as Rivers Dickinson the malt merchant had done a century earlier.1 Wilshere had been Whitbread’s attorney since 1780. In the provinces, much the same variety of motives existed. The more usual direction from which the link became established, it seems, was brewing, and this was to be expected. Brewing had had a traditional place in the local economy of market towns long before country banking had evolved as a specialised function (which was not until the mid-eighteenth century). The local brewer was, not uncommonly, one of the wealthiest tradesmen in the town, and certainly one of the most secure, for he was in a staple trade, marketing a basic necessity of life for even the poorest families, doing most of his business for cash returns. Moreover, there were few towns in the mid-century without at least one Common Brewer who had begun to supply publicans as well as private customers, thus laying the foundations for a potentially wealthy enterprise. Eventually, the scale of that enterprise was limited by the extent of the local market, inviting him to branch out from brewing into other activities, as has been explained. In such circumstances, it was almost as natural that the local brewer should begin trading in money and credit as in any of the other commodities which his brewing business had dealt in. It seems doubtful if brewers benefited very much as bankers from the operation of the duties on malt and beer—often they proved disadvantageous for their needs in working capital.2 Maltsters had a four or five month credit for the duty, it is true, if they could give the necessary security, but brewers were brought more strictly to account and paid every week or every month—one gain helping to balance the other loss in the case of brewers who made their own malt.3 On the other hand, the handful of important malt makers and malt merchants who moved eventually into banking (such families as Searle, Tomkins, and Fordham), may very well have profited greatly, as Dr Pressnell believes, from the malt duties.4 With the brewers, wealth resulting from business, without fiscal profits, was enough. Thus, Francis Cobb set 1 See above, p. 310. 2 Pace Pressnell, op. cit. p. 35. 3 The interval between making the malt and consuming the beer was in normal circumstances two months; often beer was kept longer before distribution. Brewers demanded credit from independent maltsters (see pp. 461-2). Private customers who bought by the cask would usually receive two or three months’ credit. 4 Pressnell, op. cit. p. 54.

327

Finance and the Entrepreneur up his bank at Margate in 1785 from being a brewer.1 The Ramsbottoms at Windsor and the Baverstocks at Alton moved from established interests in brewing to banking, as did Gibson at Saffron Walden, Simonds at Reading, Wells near Bedford, Cobbold at Ipswich, Tawney at Oxford, Clinch at Witney, and almost certainly John Crabb at Hitchin.2 Many others took the same road. On the twin assumptions that a man needed to be fairly wealthy to have sufficient initial capital to enter banking, and that there was that wealth to be obtained in brewing (with great family continuity in ownership) this is the most likely way for the development to arise, when coupled with the limits for reinvesting profits in brewing. Banking usually developed in localities out of the other business activities which accumulated much wealth and dominated commerce in the area. In many small towns, brewing was a natural focus for this development of transactions in money and credit—as was wholesale trade in Liverpool, the cattle trade in West Wales, mines in Cornwall, or the wool and cloth trade in Norwich. Dr Pressnell’s survey of the origins of country banks emphasises how often the dominant business in a region gave birth to banking; and in small towns like Alton, Windsor, Cheltenham, Mar¬ gate, Witney, Oxford, the brewer was usually one of the leading local business men. Where enterprise was more complicated and many trading interests were already associated with brewing, as with Cobbolds of Ipswich, and Lacons of Yarmouth, the general direction was the same. When the Searle family became brewers in 1824, from being bankers in Saffron Walden and Cambridge, both developments were made upon their main family heritage of malting and malt-merchanting.3 The complexity of the various commercial activities flourishing within such families as Taylor, Searle, Wilson and Allsopp, Barclay, Gurney, and the many more, defies any simple pattern of development. Often the development into another enterprise was no more than the solution forced upon a father with more than the one son he needed to take over his own business, and came with the establishment of the succeeding generation as independent of their families in the way of the world. Such fecundity was not the least of the advantages of the Quaker and nonconformist communities in business. In so far as banking developed from brewing for 1 Cobb’s shipping interests (cited by Pressnell, p. 50) were quite subsidiary to the brewery. 2 Pressnell, pp. 34-6, 50, for Tawney and Clinch. 3 Matthews and Tuke, Barclays Bank (1928), p. 174; Leekey, Stamp Office List of Country Banks (1813). I owe this reference to Dr Pressnell. For the Searle family in malting see below, pp. 458-9. 328

Other Business Activities table Name Angove Ashby Baldock and Rigden Barclay Baverstock Bevan Billingsly and Jillard Bircham and Fox Blandy Brenchley T. Brown Christie Clinch Clutterbuck Cobb Cobbold Crabb Cripps Dowden and Lee FanGar dner Gibson Greenall

13. Brewers and bankers

Place

Name

Falmouth Staines

Gurney Hanbury Hector Hoare Hobhouse Hollick Knight Lacon Lucas Mildred and Sampson Phipps Oakley Ramsbottom Searle Simonds Slocock Smith Stephens Tawney Tritton Wells Weston Wilshere Worthington

Canterbury (London) Alton (London, Barclay) Oakhill, Somerset Reepham, Norfolk Reading Maidstone (London, Whitbread) Hertford, Hoddesdon Witney (London, Whitbread) Margate Ipswich Hitchin Cirencester Alton Beccles Cheltenham Saffron Walden St Helens, Warrington

Place (London, Barclay) (London, Truman) Petersfield (London) (London, Whitbread) Cambridge Farnham, Hants. Yarmouth Hitchin Diss, Norfolk Northampton Deal Windsor, London Saffron Walden Reading Newbury Oundle Reading Oxford (London) Biggleswade (Beds.) Norwich (London, Whitbread) Burton

The list above is not complete but it is sufficient to show the widespread family connexions between brewing and banking. Other links, such as Threlfall (Liverpool), Tollemache (Ipswich), Luce (Malmesbury), Sutcliffe (Ilkley) occur after 1830. In addition, there is a possible—but as yet unproven—connexion between brewing and banking in the case of the following, whose names appear separately in directories as brewers and bankers: Drew (Chichester), Tylee and Gent (Devizes), Wakefield (Kendal), Woodcock (Halesworth), Burdon (Newcastle), Deane (Reading), Embury (Tewkesbury), Sanders (Witney), Dawes (Warwick). Some of this table has been composed from unpublished banking evidence for which I am indebted to Dr L. S. Pressnell and Mr C. N. Ward-Perkins. Banking famibes who were connected, as partners, in London breweries have been placed in itabcs.

more economic reasons, the employment of surplus wealth, and the in¬ centives for holding the deposits of those brought into contact with the entrepreneur through his brewing business, combined with his great seasonal demands for credit from raw-material suppliers, are probably the most important of them. Satisfying the latter was probably by far the greatest advantage which banking could bring to the brewer. One thing is certain: the brewer did not need to become a note issuer in order to pay his employees. Wages formed no high proportion of his total costs and his trade produced more than enough cash for wages at the worst of 329

Finance and the Entrepreneur times.

In entering banking, too, a brewer did not need to tread the

classic path from note-issue to deposit banking.1 He had no need to establish his credit or inculcate other people’s confidence through the growing familiarity they had with his notes before he became entrusted with their deposits. Just as, when other trade was being conducted in association with brewing, the brewery commonly was the linch-pin and foundation of the bank; so the customers of the brewer turned banker knew that their banker’s prosperity, his status in local society, alike with much of his liquidity, were already established through his activities as brewer. Where the bank was not sound, in opposite circumstances, its safety had usually been mortgaged for the benefit of the brewery. ACTIVITIES OTHER THAN BUSINESS

A further common factor about the brewers, as true for those leading the industry in growth of enterprise and innovation as for the conservatives in business, has an important entrepreneurial truth lurking behind it. It is that, as business men, they were usually remarkably active in non¬ business activities; sometimes, it is clear, to the prejudice of their enter¬ prise, but not so in the majority of cases. In London, the provincial towns and the counties alike, there are brewers everywhere as aldermen, sheriffs, mayors, J.P.s, Lords Lieutenant, governors of hospitals and trustees of schools, charities and almshouses. There were usually between six and a dozen brewer M.P.s, as this chapter relates. They were noted for philan¬ thropy, for their patronage and for the splendour of their hospitality. Whitbread and Harvey C. Combe entertained royalty with great pomp, there was a ‘Cabinet Dinner’ at Trumans in 1831, and 200 people celebrated the opening of Richard Meux’s new vat by dining inside the great vessel. To take but two of the less famous examples: in London, Humphrey Parsons inherited a landed estate at Reigate and a seat in Parliament from his father, who had been Lord Mayor of London in 1703. The son was a member of the Wax Chandlers’ Company, then the Grocers, then the Brewers. He was President of the Bridewell and the Bethlehem hospital, a City Alderman from 1720, Sheriff in 1722, Lord Mayor in 1730 and again in 1740, an M.P. continuously from 1722 until his death in 1741. He obtained a duty-free monopoly of beer imports to France, it is said, by presenting his horse to Louis XV at a hunting party.2 On the more modest 1 Bagehot, Lombard Street (1873 ed.), pp. 86-90. 2 D. Hughson, op. cit. vol. 11, p. 195. Parsons’ stable was brilliant (T. A. Cook, History of the Turf {1901), 1, p. 131). 330

Activities Other than Business provincial scale, three successive heads of the Cobb business, at Margate, were Consuls to several foreign courts, pier wardens, Lloyd’s agents and Deputy Magistrates to the Cinque Port of Dover.1 The presidency of institutions, of course, as Humphrey Parsons’ more explicit horse-trading, usually implied a direct business quid pro quo, but the main point is that, taken together, these other activities were no less importantly, if less directly, related to business success. Robert Barclay and John Perkins had to use all the political influence they could muster to continue serving the tap-house of the King’s Bench prison.2 The fortunes of the brewing industry, after all, were lapped about by non¬ economic (or at least non-business) considerations from the first sales of produce by the barley farmer and the hop-planter to the final sales of beer by the publican. Duty rates took up over 20 per cent of the wholesale price of beer in London in years of peace (rising to nearly 50 per cent eventually during the Napoleonic Wars after 1811) and taxation at the point of production implied an intricate official supervision, and legislative control, of all processes of manufacture—both these aspects of the excise system making brewer M.P.s and their allies in Parliament very useful individuals to the industry.

Locally, all facilities for retail sale were

annually subject to the scrutiny of the licensing justices (at whose brewster sessions no brewer-J.P. could sit after 1751),3 which meant that the status given by positions of general importance in local society could pay important dividends. All this was incidental to the informal advertisement given by fame and quite apart from the fact that acceptance of office became a natural consequence of property, wealth and social position in the normal processes of eighteenth-century society. The underlying point is the same: that the study of business enterprise in these conditions cannot be abstracted out as a purely economic or ‘entrepreneurial’ function. The business historian is much concerned with the economic consequences of non-economic factors, and has to relate the intimate springs of enterprise in individuals, if he can, to their differing business circumstances and their differing social circumstances. He must concern himself with the total relevant context within which enterprise is operating. Of these non-economic aspects of business, none is more important than the political. Any major industry has of necessity, of course, either 1 Information from the Company. 2 See below, p. 337. 3 24 Geo. II, c. 4; 31 Geo. II, c. 29. 331

Finance and the Entrepreneur more or less directly, important implications in the political world, and a political aspect, therefore, to its history. The brewing industry, however, was more directly concerned than most industries with taxation and control—hence with Parliament and legislation—so that it is not in¬ appropriate to consider directly here the activities and attitudes of those members of the brewing industry who found themselves in the House of Commons. Their presence there, no less than on the Common Council of London or in municipal office in provincial towns, might prove of great moment to their careers as industrial entrepreneurs. The small but influential group of brewers represented in the House of Commons in the eighteenth century composed in their own persons the main political interest of the industry in national affairs. Table 14 shows their numbers and provenance.1 They reached Westminster very much as a natural consequence of that combination of land and wealth which signified Sir Lewis Namier’s ‘inevitable Parliamentary men’. Such wealth and status were available mainly to those families profiting from the metropolitan market so that theirs were above all London names. Such men as Henry Thrale and Harvey Combe2 maintained their influence primarily in the place from which they made their fortunes, Southwark and the City. Others reached Parliament through building up landed estates and representing their counties or a borough in them, as did members of the Whitbread, Calvert,3 Parsons, Barclay4 and Gurney families. Being among the wealthiest industrialists in the land during the eighteenth century, with their incomes from business running up above £20,000 in many years during its last quarter, apart from returns on land and stock, some proved destined for Parliament by right of family succes¬ sion. With the elder Whitbread having £250,000 out of his landed fortune of almost £400,000 in Bedfordshire estates, and his son £280,000 in Bedfordshire estates by 1808, it was as natural for each of them and a Whitbread in the next generation to sit for Bedford as it was for R. H. Gurney to represent Norwich. Others, like Hudson Gurney or George Shum, just bought a rotten borough.5 Southwark, with brewing 1 R. Walcott, English Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century (1955), App. 1. Further descriptions of the individuals as brewers will be found in other places in this book, where references to original sources are to be found. 2 Gent. Mag. 1818 (11), 18; J. Farington, Diary, vol. II, pp. 187-8; vol. iv, p. 55 n. 3 Gent. Mag. 1832 (11), 267; L. B. Namier, Structure of Politics at Accession of George III (1929), vol. 1, p. 152; J. B. Owen, Rise of the Pelhams (1957), pp. 213, 217, 291. 4 Gent. Mag. 1854 (0, 320; 1856 (1), 189. 5 For H. Gurney see Gent. Mag. 1865 (1), 108-10. 332

Activities Other than Business table

14. Brewers and Parliament, 1700-1830

[source: The basis for the list is G. P. Judd, Members of Parliament, 1734-1832 (New Haven, Conn. 1955). Judd does not give details of which M.P.’s were brewers; consequently all these entries have been established from other evidence which gives details of business careers. I am grateful to Dr J. H. Plumb for correcting certain errors in this table.] Names of M.P.s are given with the first and last years of their tenure of a seat. Subsequent columns show their constituencies and the places at which they and their families were brewing. Gaps in their parliamentary careers are omitted, and the table minimises the brewers’ interest by ignoring the relatives, friends, Lords and M.P.s in such allied occupations as hop-planting and malting to whom the brewer-M.P.s might look for support.

Name

Dates in Parliament

C. Barclay

1815-37

D. Barclay T. Bliss Sir T. F. Buxton

1826-47 1698-1708 1818-37

C. Calvert J. Calvert J. Calvert

1812-32 1754-1802 1780-1831

N. Calvert N. Calvert W. Calvert J. Cholmeley H. C. Combe Sir C. Cox J. H. Cotton

1754-74

J. Cripps Sir T. Crosse H. Gurney R. H. Gurney E. Halsey W. Hammond Sir B. Hobhouse

1806-41 1700-22 1812-32 1818-32 1717-29 i754-6i 1797-1818

J. C. Hobhouse

1820-51

F. Hodgson W. Hucks R. Hucks H. Isherwood J. H. Kearsley Sir E. K. Lacon J. Lade Sir G. Meggott Sir G. Page J. Palmer J. Parsons H. Parsons J. Patteson J. Ramsbottom R. Ramsbottom Sir T. Ridge C. Shaw-Lefevre G. Shum H. Thrale R. Thrale S. Whitbread S. Whitbread S. C. Whitbread W. H. Whitbread Sir R. Wigram W. Wigram

1824-47 1709-40 1722-41 1796-7 1831-7 1812-18

1802-34 1742-61 1698-1711 1796-1817 1695-1713 1741-80

1713 1722-3 1708-20 1801-18 1685-1717 1722-41 1802-12 1810-45 1806-10 J 1830-57 1796-1805 1765-80 174i-7 1768-96 1790-1815 1820-30 1818-34 1802-7 1807-31

Brewery

Constituency Southwark, Dundalk, W. Surrey Penryn, Sunderland Maidstone Weymouth Southwark Hertford (B), Tamworth Malmesbury, Tamworth, St Albans, Huntingdon Tewkesbury Hertford (B and C) London, Old Sarum Southwark London Southwark St Germans, Cambridge, Marlborough Cirencester Westminster Shaftesbury, Newtown Norwich Buckingham, Southwark Southwark Bletchingley, Grampound, Hindon Westminster, Nottingham (B), Harwich Barnstaple Abingdon, Wallingford Abingdon Windsor Wigan Great Yarmouth Southwark Southwark Shoreham Bath Reigate Harwich, London Minehead, Norwich Windsor Windsor Portsmouth Downton, Hants. Honiton Southwark Southwark Bedford (B), Steyning Bedford (B) Middlesex Bedford (B) Fowey, Wexford New Ross, Wexford

London, Barclay Perkins London, Barclay Perkins Maidstone London, Truman, Hanbury and Buxton London, Calvert London, Calvert London, London, London, London, London, London, London,

Calvert Calvert Calvert Calvert Cholmeley Combe, Delafield Cox

London, ex. Parsons Cirencester London, Crosse London, Barclay Perkins London, Barclay Perkins London, Halsey (Thrale) London, Hammond London, Whitbread London, Whitbread London, Kingston, Hodgson London, Hucks London, Hucks Windsor Wigan Yarmouth London, Lade London, Meggott London, Page Bath London, Parsons London, Parsons Norwich Windsor Windsor Portsmouth London, Whitbread London, Combe, Delafield London, Thrale (Barclay) London, Thrale (Barclay) London, Whitbread London, Whitbread London, Whitbread London, Whitbread London, Meux Reid London, Meux Reid

Such men as J. Mangles or J. Wells (partners in Meux Reid after 1809), whose period in Parliament did not overlap with their connexion with the brewing industry, are not included.

333

Finance and the Entrepreneur as its major industry since the sixteenth century, was represented by a brewer-M.P. almost without interval throughout the period covered by this book. Sir Charles Cox, John Cholmeley, John Lade, Edmund Halsey, Sir George Meggott, Ralph Thrale, William Hammond, Henry Thrale, then Charles Barclay.1 Having a wide franchise, the ‘brewers’ borough’ enjoyed almost as turbulent an election history as Westminster itself. As Walcott remarks, ‘Wealthy beer barons with hireling armies of dray¬ men battled for the representation of Southwark’.2 Around this nucleus of direct representation of brewers, carried down from one generation to another, lay the wider circles of their kinship groups and their personal and business connexions. There were the noble relatives, like Lord Cobham, son-in-law of Edmund Halsey; Earl Grey, brother-in-law of the younger Whitbread; Lord Brougham, cousin to Henry Meux. There were direct allies like Sir James Sanderson and Matthew Wood, both hop-merchants of Southwark and the latter a Member for the City with Harvey Combe (the brewer); there was George Gipps, a hop-grower of Kent, Christopher Atkinson (later Saville), the malt and corn merchant. When partnerships developed on a large scale in the London trade at the end of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth, men of capital unconcerned with management, who were often already M.P.s entered the interest by adoption: such men as Sir Robert Wigram,3 William Wigram and Joseph Mangles (of Meux Reid) and Sir Benjamin Hobhouse4 the Bath banker and (much later) Charles ShawLefevre the London banker and son-in-law to Samuel Whitbread Jr (of Whitbreads) or George Shum (of Combe and Delafield). Beyond them lay, in more oblique ripples of loyalty, the circles of relatives, who might have a stake in the trade through temporarily invested capital or friends like Whitbread’s political ally and creditor, General FitzPatrick. There were three members of the Calvert family present in the 1750’s, another three in the 1820’s, two Whitbreads in the 1790’s, two more in the 1820’s. Beyond them, in turn, lay the interested support of landed proprietors who were jointly responsible with the trade interest for the place which malt and beer had amongst the corn laws. There was little trade opinion acting in an organised lobby for applying external pressure upon individuals and committees inside the Commons, while these tactical and temporary alliances of a loosely knit group of 1 Barclay Records: Pari. Representation of Southwark.. .to 1728. There were c. 4000 votes in the Borough in 1700, but Namier thinks usually c. 1500 by 1760 (Walcott, op. cit. p. 13; L. B. Namier, op. cit. vol. 1, p. 83). 2 Ibid. 3 Gent. Mag. 1830 (11), 563-4. 4 M. Joyce, My Friend H. (1948); D.N.B.

334

Activities Other than Business individuals within the House itself only formed when legislation was afoot which concerned their industry. They have their parallels in the East India Company interest voting against free trade, but not being united neces¬ sarily over everything else; or in the merchants of the West India interest. In no sense, therefore, did the brewing interest involve a national trade organisation in the country or any steady or united party allegiance within Parliament.1 Henry Thrale was a Ministry man completely (as was George Gipps), who got Johnson to draft his ingratiating letters to North in 1780 begging for a borough ‘through the influence of Government’ as he had begged himself from Newcastle in 1760.2 Sir John Parsons was known as the ‘Jacobite Brewer’ and his son Humphrey Parsons led the City opposition to Walpole.3 The younger Whitbread, on the other hand, marrying into one of the great Whiggeries, was opposed to all the political principles championed by his Tory father in the Commons, save in an undying hostility to slavery.4 Charles Barclay (in the House after 1815) usually voted against the Whigs, against the freeing of trade and against reform; his brother David normally voted for them. R. H. Gurney (sitting for Norwich) was a lifelong Whig, his brother Hudson was ‘neutral but conservative’. Sir Robert Wigram, and his son William, were leaders of the East India Company interest and Tory.5 On any numerical count the Whigs probably had a predominant, but much divided, share of the brewer M.P.s and more of them would support ‘liberal measures’ than would oppose them. The Ramsbottoms, uncle and nephew (Windsor 1 I have been content to rely upon traditional labels to describe the different allegiances of the brewer-M.P.s, conscious of their limitations when dealing with a long period of time. ‘Tory’ in obituary notices is equated usually with such expressions as ‘unalterably attached to the...established authorities of his country’ (Gent. Mag. 1800 (1), 190; 1865 (1), 108); and ‘Whig’ affiliations become ‘his conduct.. .was marked throughout by a steady opposition to Ministers’ (Gent. Mag. 1818 (11), 83; 1841 (1), 660). Successive years in which a different political issue divides allegiance may be seen in the Walpole v. Anti-Walpole struggle (cf. Sir John Parsons and Humphrey Parsons, 1720-41); Ministerial Support v. Anti-Administration (cf. Henry Thrale, 1770’s); Parliamentary Reform (cf. Charles and Nicholson Calvert, S. Whitbread 11). 2 S. Johnson, Letters (ed. Chapman, 1948), vol. II, no. 706.1; B.M. Add. MS. 32916, ff. 240, 242. Cf. Namier, loc. cit. 1, 83. 3 D.N.B.; London Mag. (1741), p. 152; Gent. Mag. (1741), PP- 162-4; A. B. Beaven, Aldermen of London (1908), vol. 11. Thrale’s brewery was attacked in the Gordon riots because he was thought to favour popery. Ralph Thrale and Calvert opposed Walpole (J. B. Owen, op. cit. pp. 59m, 213). 4 References in the following passage are taken mainly from Biographical Index to the present House of Commons (1808); Analysis of the British House of Commons (1823); The Assembled Commons (1836). Other individual references are Matthew Wood (Gent. Mag. 1800 (1), 190); Baker, a hop-merchant and banker (Gent. Mag. 1831 (1), 176); N. Calvert Sr (Gent. Mag. 1793 (1), 483). For Whitbread Sr’s support of North see I. R. Christie, North’s Ministry (1958), PP6 Wigram received his baronetcy from Pitt and christened one of his sons ‘William Pitt’.

335

Finance and the Entrepreneur brewers), Charles Calvert, Matthew Wood, Shaw-Lefevre, Harvey Christian Combe sided usually with the Whigs. Such a balance of party allegiance, of course, often reflected a religious faith to the left of the established church or on the left wing of the establishment, typical of so many eighteenth-century industrialists whose political allegiance was often given to the Whigs in the eighteenth century and to the Liberals in the nine¬ teenth. Some provincial brewers, particularly as they developed landed estates, like the Greenalls1 in St Helens, the Pattesons2 of Norwich and the Kearsleys3 of Wigan, tended to conservatism spontaneously.

In

Norwich, the brewers as a whole seem to have been predominantly Tory during the century: of the thirteen brewers who became Mayor between 1700 and 1830, eight were Tory, and five Whig.4 Others, like many members of the Barclay, the Gurney, the Hanbury and the Buxton families, carried more of their Quaker social and economic attitudes with them into the ‘ establishment ’. This typical aspect of an eighteenth-century industrial interest—its cutting across party—becomes abruptly changed in the i87o’s when an almost united allegiance became deployed on a single side of the House. In the eighteenth century they appear united only as far as their common, interests in the fortunes of the brewing industry were concerned. Brewers were not prominent in the House (except for the younger Whitbread) and, because their wealth did not depend upon office, were usually numbered among the independents. When changes in duty were so important in setting the retail price level (and where, until the 1760’s, permission was ostensibly needed for a rise in price—either from Parliament or from the local J.P.s), there was an explicit reason for the trade to speak with a united voice. Administrative control of production was, perhaps, an even more immediate reason for political pressure than the tax rate. As well as becoming more intricate, the excise survey was becoming more efficient as time went on, and for both malting and brewing in the provinces, hostility to new excise restric¬ tions in the early nineteenth century was responsible for the first permanent trade organisations.5 In general, the close attention paid by the govern¬ ment and the Excise authorities to the brewing industry provided the chief and continuing economic reason for the formation of the brewers’ interest in the House of Commons. 1 D. Pink and A. B. Beaven, Parliamentary Representation of Lancashire (1889), pp. 241-2; T. C. Barker and J. R. Harris, St Helens (1954), p. 472. 2 B. Cozens-Hardy and E. A. Kent, Mayors of Norwich (1938). John Patteson’s son turned Whig. 3 Pink and Beaven, op. cit. pp. 237-41; Gent. Mag. 1842 (11), 548. 4 Cozens-Hardy and Kent, op. cit. 6 See above, pp. 216-17.

336

Activities Other than Business One might even claim that the need to face political and fiscal issues with concerted opinion and an agreed plan was as great an influence in inducing co-operation amongst the brewers in this period as purely economic pressures. There were many such non-economic matters which had politi¬ cal implications for members of the Commons connected with the industry: the fiscal devices described in other chapters of this book were important in subtle ways for influencing business fortunes. For example, the London brewers preserved their favourable Excise allowances up to 1802—that is, until the issue had incensed the country brewers enough to induce effective combination and political lobbying on their own account (which they repeated in 1822 when the Country Brewers’ Association was formed to oppose the ‘Intermediate Brewers Bill’). Such ‘external organisation’ had been largely invoked

because,

at Westminster, the ‘voice’ of the trade in politics was primarily that of the handful of powerful porter brewers wealthy enough to be seated in the Commons in any case, with influential connexions such as few of the country brewers represented possessed. Their increasing share of the London market further increased their political influence. Of these few, Whitbread, Thrale and two members of the Calvert family were in the Commons in the 1770’s, and only Sir Benjamin Truman, of the wellknown names, had not acknowledged his status with a seat. Loyalty to the administration might merit certain claims. For example, Thrale enjoyed the custom of the tap at the King’s Bench prison, the gift being in the hands of the court. After his death the marshal of the prison had allowed the custom to go to Calvert, ‘a decided friend of the blue-andbuff interest’. Barclays then made a determined attempt to regain the prize in 1791, claiming that they were ‘the best friends that any govern¬ ment ever had’ while Calvert’s family were ‘inveterate enemies’ to the administration1. Only in such matters as import duties and export bounties did they automatically speak for the industry in the country as a whole. On more particular issues, such as the rate of excise duty, the trade interest itself was divided between the London and the provincial brewers, or between the powerful brewers and the lesser men.2 Acknowledging the power position in the trade, the Brewers’ Company in London sought to put the point of view of the general trade interest to the Ministers through the individual porter brewers in the Commons, who often had no touch with the Company at this time. In almost every case 1 Hist MSS. Comm. 14th Report, Appendix, pt. iv, pp. S32_32 See above, pp. 243-51. 22

337

M BE

Finance and the Entrepreneur the leading entrepreneurs who possessed seats in the Commons did the actual negotiations with the government, whether the plan was to use duty-free sugar or to suppress the attempted incorporation of a rival enterprise. As an efficiently represented business interest, they also saw that their own members appeared on the Parliamentary committees investigating their industry, and they prevented hostile interests from dominating the selection of witnesses, their examination, and the subsequent Report. The brewers’ efforts during the 1818-19 inquiry were much more effective than those of the East India Company in the 1820-21 report on foreign trade, or those of the employers in the Combination Law inquiry, while the tide was running just as strongly against government restriction and monopoly. When that pressure could no longer be resisted, by extreme activity and the efficient management of the Select Committee, the small group of brewers in Parliament were able to ensure that, in compensation for the abolition of restrictive licensing of public houses, the beer duties were removed simultaneously. No better instance can illustrate the effec¬ tiveness of the brewer-M.P.s. As a natural consequence to this situation, direct access to the seats of power came from personal rather than institutional contacts.

Crisp

Brown writing to Samuel Whitbread, ‘ I assure you it is of considerable importance to you that these alterations should take place... I have sent you the amended bill for Perusal.

I shall be anxious to know what

alterations the Ministers will agree to make V typified the way in which commercial pressures from the industry and its associated trades reached the political arena. Despite the common predicament in which brewers in London and the provinces were placed before the Excise authorities there were no continuous organised links between the provinces and London, and certainly no national organisations with a secretariat, pub¬ lishing journals, maintaining pressure, and possessing large funds. The junta of the porter brewers, so strongly represented in Parliament, is the nearest thing the industry possessed to an institutional pressure-group until the formation of the Country Brewers’ Society in 1822, while the Morning Advertiser was the only institutional ‘voice’ of a connected trade interest—that of the London victuallers. 1 Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4702, C. Brown to S. Whitbread 12 December 1812. Brown enclosed a note on the bill from John Patteson.

338

CHAPTER X

THE EXCISE SYSTEM AND THE BREWING INDUSTRY The brewing and distilling industries, as will be apparent from other chapters in this study, are in certain general aspects distinct from many others. Their technical processes, the minor role which labour costs played in their fortunes and the high liquidity resulting from cash sales dis¬ tinguish them in the purely economic sense; but, being the sponge whereby no inconsiderable proportion of the revenue from taxation was drawn into the exchequer, the problems imposed on them by public regulation—the dependence of the selling price upon tax rates as much as technical costs, and the restriction in public house licences—mean that considerations other than the economic had a high stake in their fortunes. As Adam Smith carefully calculated: ‘ In the year which ended on the 5th of July 1775, the gross produce of this branch of the excise amounted to £3,341,837.9*. 9d.’1 Drinking to the success of British armies and navies during the eighteenth century was thus a meaningful act quite apart from the ritual of salutation. Some mention is made elsewhere of the effect which this involvement with government and the legislature had in encouraging co-operation amongst brewers and maltsters to promote their common interests against the regulators of trade. There was undoubtedly, too, a higher incentive for the important brewers to concern themselves with parliamentary activity than that existing for many other industrialists. This chapter is concerned with the more direct consequences of public regulation upon economic success. On this point, as in the study of the brewing industry as a whole, there could be no better illustration of the fact that economic history has, of itself, no autonomous existence as an isolatable ‘aspect’ of history, being enmeshed at every point with the whole complex of human activities, political, social, intellectual. It is inevitable, in the end, to see total history impinging upon the one special aspect which economic historians expose for study. Brewing and malting were not alone, of course, in being subject to the close attentions of excisemen at the site of manufacture, or in having a tax as an important influence on their selling prices. The incidence of these 1 Wealth of Nations (1796 ed.), vol. in, p. 361.

339

22-2

The Excise System factors must apply even more to the legal manufacture of spirits, and in varying degrees to that of salt, soap, paper, glass, leather, bricks, and printed fabrics when they came in turn within the same system of control. For manufactures and processing industries dependent on imported raw materials and export markets, such as tobacco, the harassing regimen of the Customs could have similar effects, although without the precise regulation of domestic manufacture that the excise control entailed.

As these

excised industries become particular subjects of research, the general statement of Professor Ashton that ‘the reduction of the number, and the growth of size of undertakings... must have owed something to this [fiscal] influence’ will be elaborated.1

Here, the brewing industry is

taken in isolation, and it may appear that undue prominence is given to such non-economic factors.

Quantitative assessment of their effect is

impossible: but probably their relative effect on distilling, malting and brewing was more important than in other cases. The great dependence of the public revenue on them meant that the regulation of production and sale was complete and meticulous; the tax-rate was higher, relative to other costs, on the drink industries than upon others (when Adam Smith was writing, taxes on a barrel of strong beer were just over 50 per cent of all other elements in costs, apart from the charges of licensing). At some periods the restriction on the outlets of sale were more onerous. Con¬ temporaries, too, thought that the effect of the excise on the drink industries was more important than upon others, and the debate over it was more heated. All this does not, of course, deny the more general impact of regulation of all sorts upon the economy in the eighteenth century, which, with the effect of war on government contracts and the money market, is a theme of great significance. This chapter will try only to describe the effect of such regulation on one of the most widespread and most directly affected industries. THE EXCISE ESTABLISHMENT AND ITS EFFICIENCY

As the excise system or the customs regulations are relevant to this study only in their impact upon the industry they embraced, no treatment of the Boards’ establishments, their jurisdiction or evolution of methods is given, except in so far as they illuminate or affect the central theme.2 The first 1 T. S. Ashton, Economic History of England: the 18th Century (1955), p. 115. 2 The excise system is more fully discussed in E. Hughes, Studies in Administration and Finance (Manchester, 1934).

340

Its Efficiency question to be asked, upon which the results of all the others depend, is that prime but unresolvable issue of how far the excise system was effective over domestic industry, and how far the Customs accurately countenanced the trade flowing to and from our shores, or—in blunter words—how wide the gap remained between law and fact.

Upon the

answer hangs the validity of the national production figures arising from the tax returns, the level of reported exports and the whole matter of the conditioning effect of high taxation and tight regulation on economic life. The answer is one which cannot, in the nature of things, be definitive. Fraud was not unknown in any industry having its data recorded for purposes which usually involved the extraction of money from those who supplied the figures.

In some cases—such as the importation of silk,

tobacco or brandy—underestimation of the true traffic might be at such a level as to invalidate quite broad generalisations about demand. Where quantities were recorded for the purposes of fiscal gain—in the export bounties—fraud would be on the side of exaggeration, as when the Norfolk maltsters deliberately ‘ blew up ’ their long malt for export so that it should swell to the maximum bulk, the bounty being levied by a measure of volume. A ‘Customs House oath’ was a common euphemism for a lie.1 And when one is forced, by the nature of such evidence, away from absolute statements about the degree of fraud as a whole, variations between one part of the country and another limit even the qualifications possible. So far as the Customs were concerned, one may say with confidence that beer was not one of the commodities ‘run’ on a significant scale. All the factors limiting the overland economic marketing area of the brewers worked in favour of the revenue officers. Some fraud was possible in the ports, and profitable, too, no doubt, where untaxed naval beer could be got ashore or where that destined for export could be relanded after drawbacks had been paid. The brewers complained that their bona, fide exports were hindered by the regulations designed to prevent just this. Where the importing smugglers were driven away from the main ports by increasingly effective supervision on the jetties, then it became very difficult, and certainly stupid, to run beer overland from outlying entry points.

In 1785, the Excise Commissioners commented that the likely

degree of smuggling beer and malt was slight because ‘ the weight of the Commodity makes it too cumbrous to be landed clandestinely, and the Duty is too small in Proportion to the Value to compensate the Risque of 1 M. Decker, Considerations on High Duties (3rd ed. 1744).

341

The Excise System Illicit Dealing’.1 The larger frauds in Tong malt’ were against domestic excise regulations rather than running goods through the customs. It was the manner of its making, rather than falsity in measuring the resultant bulk which was the problem. In the country. For the excise authorities fraud was a more prevalent problem. The malting industry is described more fully in another chapter but, in broad contrast to urban brewing, by the technical nature of the processes and the scattered placing of many small makings, accurate supervision was difficult. One could add more barley to the ‘couch’ or the ‘ floor ’ after the excise gauge had been taken to bring the ungauged grain forward with the gauged parcel by judicious management. It was possible to compress the corn in the couch in order to minimise the measure, and— more simply—by forcing the pace, to get a quantity completely through the processes of manufacture in between the visits of the gaugers.2 Because the units of production were so numerous near centres like Ware and Hitchin, they could not be surveyed often enough to stop this; and the result was the occasional prosecution when an unexpected visit caught the maltster in flagrante delicto. That the rate of fraud was higher than in the brewing trade (pace Adam Smith) is indicated partly by the greater number of excise prosecutions in malting, but much more significantly by the unwillingness of the Excise Commissioners to increase the tax on malt, rather than increasing it on beer, despite the justice of so doing and the theoretical opportunities of augmenting the revenue more than by an equivalent tax on beer sold (by catching the home brewer who bought his malt).3 In daily contact with the Treasury about such policy decisions, the Commissioners were acutely aware of the differences between the efficiency of their large London staff and the more scattered officers in the provinces. As the malting industry supplying the well-regulated London brewing trade was located almost entirely in the country—in Hertfordshire, Norfolk or along the upper reaches of the Thames to Newbury—it came within the range of the less efficient part of the system, as did the country brewers and the Brewing Victuallers. The same reasoning applied to the efficiency of the provincial survey as between rural areas and the market 1 H. of C.: Abbotts Coll. 37, Reports, vn, 63, p. 9. 2 See below, p. 407. 3 I am very conscious that Adam Smith, a Commissioner of Customs in Scotland, thought evasion was easier in a brewery than in a malt-house. William Burton, a Commissioner of Excise in London, thought that fraud was more prevalent in malting; and this remained the predomi¬ nant opinion in England (Wealth of Nations (1796 ed.), vol. in, p. 363; B.M. Add. MS. 32,9H, f- 433> W. Burton to Newcastle, 20 November 1760).

342

Its Efficiency towns: in 1717 town maltsters at Bridport and Basingstoke were com¬ plaining bitterly that the officers were ‘ placed to survey them every day ’ while their more fortunate rivals in the country were not so constantly and carefully surveyed.1 For these reasons, the reported annual production of malt in the British Isles may underestimate the actual quantities produced and consumed by as much as a quarter, even at the end of the eighteenth century. Although efficiency of surveying undoubtedly rose with time, so too did the incentives for fraud through mounting duty rates, and the elaborate parliamentary inquiries in the early nineteenth century produced such a spate of evidence for fraud, which may be extrapolated back into the eighteenth century, that the position may then be judged to be fairly bad throughout England. In Scotland and, a fortiori, in Ireland, where the inclination and the opportunities for evasion were higher, the figures deserve even less credibility.2 The higher relative efficiency in gauging the brewing industry is well attested by literary evidence both inside the counsels of the Board of Excise and beyond. Even here, however, very different situations existed side by side over the country as a whole. In London, where the gaugers had primarily Common Brewers to deal with, whom a system of allowances encouraged at the expense of the Brewing Victuallers, a strong corps of officers had the job reduced to an adequate routine before the eighteenth century was very old. But as one moved away from London the demands on the excise establishment, imposed by the changed nature of the structure of the industry, increased for the same reasons as with malting, at the same time as its resources grew less. Brewing was a shorter process than malting, so that Brewing Victuallers out to evade the law had even less risk of being interrupted by a sudden visitation than the maltster. In the country as a whole there were almost 40,000 Brewing Victuallers in 1700, almost 50,000 in 1750, decreasing to 24,000 by 1800, which shows the broad scope of the difficulties facing the authorities. The number of officers overlooking these many scattered producer-retailers and lesser Common Brewers in provincial towns was relatively small. After certain increases during the previous years, in 1782 the establishment stood at fifty-four Collectors (at £180 p.a.), each in 1 Jf.H.C. xvin, 700, 707. 2 Pari. Papers, 1836, vil, Report on Ag. distress, Q_. 9234- W. Hetherington, speaking for the Excise, assumed a small degree of evasion in England and a large degree in Ireland. The same conclusion arises from the comment made in 1835: ‘In England a respectable man would consider his character blasted if he were detected in Smuggling, whereas in Ireland every man that can smuggles’ {Pari. Papers, 1835, xxxi, 15th Report... p. 197; also 1834, xxv, passim).

343

The Excise System charge of an administrative division which coincided roughly with the area of each county, fifty-five Clerks to Collectors (at £50 p.a.), 291 Supervisors (at £90 p.a.), 2891 Inferior Officers (at £50 p.a.) and fiftythree Supernumerary Officers (at £25 p.a.).1 Not all the lower grades were full-time officers, their efficiency varied greatly, and—of even greater importance—so did their distribution amongst districts of varying popula¬ tion and varying production of exciseable goods.

Instructions, which

expressed the height of official aspirations, suggested that Common Brewers in the country might be surveyed twice every day, or three times when guiles were ‘depending’, and once, at least, on Sundays—‘if your other business will permit you

The officer was to go round all the Brewing

Victuallers on his foot-walk (in the towns) each morning, or failing that, ‘as many as possible’. On the ‘rides’ into the rural areas, where the division could be covered in one day, it had to be surveyed at least four times a week—and irregularly.2 These printed instructions looked well enough on paper, and near London, perhaps, they even bore some semblance to current practice. As one moved away from the range of the central organisation, so the standards of conscientiousness and the bonds of discipline relaxed until the margins of both were reached in Wales and the counties adjacent to Scotland. In 1789, for example, a test case was made of a humble man, John Fox, because in the district where he lived between Chester and Flint, the Justices refused to charge and the excise laws consequently did not apply.3 Only thirteen years previously a newly appointed and zealous Supervisor found that most of the victuallers in Anglesey and North Wales had sold beer and ale for many years without a licence. After getting 126 people convicted for this he found that he could neither recover the fines nor imprison the offenders—and so wrote to the Commissioners asking for ‘a small military force’.4 A century earlier, in these wild areas, the system had not been accepted at all. To take one piece of evidence out of many: in 1686 the collector in Cumberland reported that whenever any endeavour is made to Gauge the drinke brewed.. .Ryotts are dayly committed on the officers by the inhabitants and encouraged by the Victuallers and Innkeepers and tho some informations have been brought agl1 P.R.O. T. 64/173. A map of the collection boundaries was sent to the Treasury by the Excise but does not seem to have survived. 2 Excise MS. 9693, Instructions for Gaugers of Excise in the Country (1775); MS. 985, Instructions for officers in the Country (1778). 3 Excise Trials, 541, 4 December 1789. 4 Excise (TLB), 1355, f. 229.

344

Its Efficiency some of the said inhabitants.. .in the Crown office, when processes of attach¬ ments are issued for their contempt in not appearing, the Sheriff’s officers refuse to execute the processes on pretence of feare of their lives... -1 One of the great initial difficulties, which helped to create a system of excise jurisdiction functioning alongside the regular courts of the land, was the refusal of the local Justices to prosecute. Their loyalties tended to be local rather than national, even when their natural hostility to profes¬ sional bureaucrats, paid from London and taking wealth out of the counties to London, was in abeyance.2 Sometimes, loyalties were even simpler when Justices were brewers, or the relatives and friends of brewers, as in the nature of the society of a small town they might well be, until prevented by statute from being directly judges in their own cause.3 In such circumstances as this, refusal to accept excise control at all was more important than the degree of fraud which took place within it. However, these untamed regions in distant counties were so isolated that their population and proportional use of exciseable goods did not always merit the attention of Collectors whose time could be more profitably spent elsewhere.

In the populous regions of the country, evasion, not

defiance, was the problem: pitched battles were more to the taste of smugglers. Unlike the refusal to tolerate excise supervision (which could at least be defined by area and time) here, by definition, the degree of evasion is unknown. Moreover, absence of prosecutions may be equally strong evidence for complete competence or complete corruption in the officials of any collection. In the country collections, the same general rule applied about efficiency declining with the distance from London and the larger towns, and again, the prolixity of evidence is the greatest hindrance to deciding what degree of fraud there was. In some places, as in the Sandwich—Dover—Deal area in 1710, collusion between brewers, maltsters and excise officers was prejudicing a large revenue;4 in countless other cases of small individual offences—failing to make entries in the books at the right time, altering the size of utensils without giving due notice, mixing beers, selling without a licence, and the like—the general harm was often small. One can con¬ clude only that the returns are probably less fallible than those of some other excised commodities, and are more reliable as a guide to actual production over a series of years than most other eighteenth-century statistics. 1 Excise (TLB), 1339, f. 297. 2 Excise (TLB), 1341, 5 September 1696; 12 Ch. 11, c. 24, s. 44; C.T.B. passim. 2 J.H.C. ix, 701; 24 Geo. II, c. 4; 31 Geo. II, c. 29. 4 C.T.B. xxiv, 227. 345

The Excise System In London. The excise administration of the London breweries became one of the most efficient pieces of public regulation known to eighteenthcentury England. At the opening of the century, admittedly, this was not yet the case, for accusations of frauds costing the revenue £300,000 annually (a great exaggeration) were given credence by the Commissioners and the Treasury Lords.1 In one later case, the accuser gained his ambition —profitable employment with the Excise at £200 p.a. to discover them.2 It was the custom to keep one’s accusations quite general until a substantial offer of this kind came from the Crown to encourage the placing of more specific charges.3 Frauds by the sale of beer to the public from the naval brewhouse on Tower Hill; illicit pipes secretly conveying ungauged liquor out of the backs; false and irregular bottoms to the utensils which would reduce any gauge taken with a dip-stick; many accusations of brewing over-strong beer and subsequently diluting it to normal strengths with untaxed water or slightly taxed small beer; secret brewings, adulterations and collusion between brewers and officials were all present in London, as in the country.4 The trick of altering strength after the duty had been paid was, in par¬ ticular, inherent within the regulations, when the duty was at one flat rate for strong beer sold above a certain price (conventionally 6s. per barrel) and at another flat rate for small beer below that price. Only when the hydrometer was used to calculate proof strength after 1880 could the duty be graduated smoothly with any such variation, and the temptation to mix beers be finally removed. With all malt liquors, an arbitrary price dis¬ tinction between strong, small and, after 1782, Intermediate Beer, was maintained until the duties were abolished in 1830.

Similar means of

fraud were prevalent in the excise and customs regulations applying to spirits. It was even reported from Nottingham in 1794 that unscrupulous brickmakers had begun to make their bricks of ‘an extraordinary size’ to defeat the revenue.5 The evidence for such devious means of evading the duty in London is more prevalent for the beginning than the later years of the century, it 1 Burnaby, Essay on Excising Malt (1696); C.T.B. xil, 20 (1697). 2 Excise (TLB), 1355, ff. 246-7 (January 1777). 3 C.T.B. xvi, Tr. Minute Book, xil, 193-4. 4 E.g. Excise (TLB), 1338, ff. 208-9; I34I> ff- 312^20; 1343, 9 February 1747. A long list of potential—and doubtless practised—ways of evasion is detailed in many statutes, and summed up in Ellis, Instructions for Collectors-(1716) and Hutcheson, Treatise on Excise... (Bristol, 1797). Both sources would be of great assistance to a brewer wishing to defraud the revenue. 5 Excise (TLB), 1367, ff. 23-4; 1363, ff. 1, 496.

346

Its Efficiency seems, and, where evasion did exist, it applied to the many small breweries rather than to the larger ones. When the industry was composed primarily of Brewing Victuallers, surveying meant a tedious and ineffectual circuit round producers so numerous that it was impossible to watch any of them all the time. And this was the predominant pattern of production in the brewing industry outside London in 1684, as we have stressed; a pattern which remained in many rural areas throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. As Common Brewers in the towns began to collect output into their fewer units of production and to supply increasing numbers of dependent publicans, so the possibility of efficient and regular surveying increased. In London, Brewing Victuallers had an insignificant proportion of trade in their hands when the century opened; and as it progressed and fewer single breweries became more important, their owners rose to positions of social respectability and possessed reputations in the world of high society, politics and business which would have tolerated the stain of such an excise conviction as little as their own sensibilities would have condoned it. Apart from this, as they well knew, efficient surveying, with certain other excise regulations and a moderate tax, had compensations for more substantial members of the trade, despite the unwelcome inter¬ ferences they entailed. Where the great brewers did find themselves in the courts or before the Excise Commissioners for excise offences, great stress was customarily laid on the fact that it was not their overt intention to deceive, and that no imputation should fall upon the honour of their names from the prosecu¬ tion. An adulteration charge, even though related only to a technical offence, could have a direct effect upon sales. When the form of words used by the authorities seemed to suggest that fraud was intended by Samuel Whitbread in 1780—a construction they hastened to deny—Lord Mansfield commented from the Bench: ‘ It is an extraordinary thing and highly wrong in the Commissioners because everybody knows Mr Whit¬ bread’s eminence, that he is one of the first men in the Trade and profes¬ sion. .

.1 am satisfied he abhors and has not a thought of any Fraud.’1

The Attorney General admitted ‘no intention to evade’ in all three cases concerning the Golden Lane Brewery, 1808-10, and it was the same with Barclays in 1811. The great brewers were absolved as a group by the Parliamentary Committee of 1818 (not a completely packed assembly) from any motivations against either excise law or excise administration. These considerations apply equally to other less eminent brewers who 1 Excise Trials, 522. In the King’s Bench, 10 November 1780. 347

The Excise System were none the less ‘established members’ of the trade—with all that eighteenth-century phrase implied in family continuity of ownership, and high position in local society—such families in London as Martineau, Charrington, Clowes, Biley, Cape, Courage and many others. The same was true for the established Common Brewers in country towns. For these reasons, one may claim on the brewers’ side that there was no great margin of error in the annual production figures calculated from the excise returns for brewers within the Bills of Mortality. six—Whitbread,

Thrale Barclay,

In the case of

Truman, Goodwyn, Meux

Reid,

Charrington—the fact is proved from their books at various times and the conclusion is one which is reinforced generally when one turns to consider the excise system for surveying the London brewers. At the opening of the century there were ten excise divisions within the Bills of Mortality. Sixty-four Gaugers were employed, supervised by one Surveyor in each district with two General Surveyors to carry out checks on all of them.1 Following a strike of the officers in 1695, efficiency in some districts was still low. In 1698, for example, the General Surveyors were reported more anxious about discovering frauds to reap the benefits of penalties, than to prevent them, and the recent fall in returns was considered to owe as much to inefficiency as to falling production.2 How¬ ever, the number of Gaugers had risen and the high level of outstanding debts owing from the trade, rising to £33,000 in 1697—one of the most accurate indications of inefficiency—was soon reduced.3

In addition,

it must be remembered that this supervising force was operating within a very limited geographical area (if a very difficult one), and was only concerned with the brewing trade.

In the larger country collections

a smaller staff had to supervise more than one trade, whereas efficiency in London was encouraged by higher concentration of officers and greater specialisation of function. The official instructions intimate how much more exacting were the standards of London surveying.4 The Gaugers worked in shifts of six hours, ideally with every officer going through his walk at least twice in that time, or thrice if ‘worts’ were ready to come down into the fer1 Excise (TLB), 1344, f. 95. An exact map of the divisions within the capital drawn up at the time does not seem to have survived (C.T.B. xxi, 402). 2 Hughes, op. cit. p. 205; C.T.B. vm, 132; ix, 610; xi, 88. 3 Excise (TLB), 1344, f. 54; 1341, 13 April, 5 August, 5 September 1696. 1692-3 was another particularly bad year for excise debts (C.T.B. x, passim). A complete list of all excise establishments in 1714 is given in Excise (TLB), 1343, ff. 134 et seq. 4 Instructions... (1724), pp. 4-19; Instructions... (1781) (Excise MS. 11,350).

348

Its Efficiency menting squares (at which point the gauge was normally taken). When going off duty, the officer cast up the gauges and delivered his ‘Inch Book’ to the Surveyor of his division, who issued it to the man who relieved him. Each Gauger had to attend the Surveyor on Saturdays with copies of the weekly return of gauges on each ‘wort’. In no case was a brewer’s word to be taken for the gauge, or a brewer’s rule or tables used to calculate it. Even though this remained only an ideal regimen (the last sentence, for example, hints at a common practice) and a great city then, as now, provided good cover for the lawless, the numbers of Gaugers employed and the various levels of supervision make it probable that efficiency of regulation reinforced efficiency proceeding from the changing structure of the trade. At least such was the claim of contemporaries. In 1705, in seven out of the ten London divisions, a staff of seven Surveyors, twentyseven Officers and sixteen Assistants had forty-eight brewhouses to survey within the city, sixty-six outside and ‘victuallers proportionate’.1 One general problem did affect London and the country alike—that there was a significant differential in pay between excise salaries and the level of remuneration possible for officers outside the service. This could tempt some to take up positions as ‘counter-gaugers’ or clerks for London brewers at salaries of £60 p.a. or more in 1708.2 As Revenue officers they received, when assistants, only £30 p.a., but could expect to become officers at £52 p.a. within two years. The Treasury then allowed £8 p.a. more for officers and £5 for assistants, because promotion from this rank was more difficult: there were sixty-nine officers but only eleven Surveyors (at £80 p.a.). Consequently, with the breweries expanding more rapidly than the excise staff surveying them, there were good chances for an intelligent gauger in the industry he had to know so well. In the country more than London, the differences led to inefficiency and corruption. The low permanent salaries of public officials were a standing temptation to collusion with the persons they were supposed to control. In 1782, the excise establishment in London stood as follows: at head¬ quarters, under the Commissioners and the specialised departments for auditing, appeals, correspondents, receiving and accounts—and such domestic staff as porters and firelighters—came two Accountants for the London Brewery (at £100 p.a.); one Accountant General (£250), eight Accountants (£8o-£go) and two Assistant Accountants (£70)—all for malt; and one Accountant (£90) for ‘Hops and Coaches’.3 Also on the 1 Excise (TLB), 1346, June 1705. 8 C.T.B. xxii, 261; Excise (TLB), 1338, 15 December 1690.

349

8 P.R.O. T. 64/173.

The Excise System headquarters staff was the Chief Brewery Examiner (£90) with five Assist¬ ants (£50-^60). In the field operated the Inspector General of the Brewery (£200) flanked by six General Surveyors (£145) twenty Surveyors (£80), thirty-two Principal Officers (£60), eighty-seven Officers (£52) and twentythree Assistants (£40). This formidable phalanx of officials had its feet of clay: at the central office there were no less than twenty-four Permit Writers (at £60) and twenty-four Assistant Permit Writers (at £50). The complications of the accounts in a single London brewery give graphic indication of the extent of trade, so that the clerical labour involved in surveying all of them is apparent. The extent of the operations, and the formidable complexity of calculation lying behind the simple annual figures listed in the Appendix on p. 542, are best revealed in a reply brought down upon the heads of the Treasury Lords, before the opening of the eighteenth century, when they asked the Excise Authorities to submit weekly returns for the London Brewery P there are eleven Leidgers of the London brewery to be cast up or adjusted, [complained the Commissioners] which are very large and require much time to bring to an exact ballance, the least whereof containing about 800 columns of pounds, shillings, pence and farthings and generally 26 lines in each column. One Leidger hath double the number and the rest of Leidgers from November 1690 to Midsummer 1695 have treble the Number of Columns besides the trouble ariseing by the mispostings of the Cash paid which in so great a work may be excuseable.... When four-fifths of London’s beer became brewed in half-a-dozen giant porter breweries towards the end of the eighteenth century, this clerical labour was simplified no less than the opportunity for an effective excise survey was improved. REGULATIONS AND JURISDICTION

The excise regulations were a jungle into which few Englishmen pene¬ trated very far. This ignorance did not stop anyone from heartily disliking what he did know about them. Johnson’s outspoken comment in his Dictionary on ‘the hateful tax’ and the ‘hired wretches’ who administered the impositions—given greater force, no doubt, when he became involved with the trade at the brewery of his friend Henry Thrale—threatened a libel action in which most public opinion would undoubtedly have been on Johnson’s side. It was not only the natural hostility of manufacturers and merchants curbed in their pursuit of gain, or even merely that of 1 Excise (TLB), 1341, f. 209.

350

Regulations and Jurisdiction articulate consumers facing higher prices as a result of taxed commodities. The Common Law itself, and eighteenth-century interpretations of con¬ stitutional liberties which had been successfully defended against royal prerogative in the previous century, now turned a jealous eye against the administrative jurisdiction of the Excise. ‘The rigour and arbitrary pro¬ ceedings of excise laws’, remarked Blackstone, ‘seem hardly compatible with the temper of a free nation.’1 Inevitably, taxation at the point of production led to a cycle of more and more intricate legislation to pursue the would-be miscreant through all the brewing processes with penalties against fraud and through all the possible ways of escape with regulations enforcing controls on these processes. As more recondite earths were stopped, so the honest manu¬ facturers, as well as the unscrupulous, became more and more tightly circumscribed when going about their daily business. Hence, it would be impossible, in a short space, to give an exact delineation of the regulations (and, more, the exceptions to the regulations) which governed brewers, maltsters and hop-planters during the eighteenth century. As a Bristol barrister stressed in his introduction to a detailed Treatise on Excise and Qui Tam Informations: ‘The Statutes are become very numerous and their connections too intricate to be understood without considerable study and great attention.’2 But as the specific legal framework within which entrepreneurs had to abide or risk prosecution became influential in affecting their economic fortunes, some brief attempt must be made to describe the process of control as well as the fiscal results of it. Before setting up in trade, any brewer for sale, whether publican himself or seller to publicans, had to lay open his place of manufacture, his utensils and his storehouses to inspection by the revenue officers.3 They could prevent pipes being placed in certain positions, object to utensils being partially sunk below the floor or abutting too closely against a wall (which might conceal an illegal pipe). None might be altered or enlarged without permission—or a prior declaration of intention. The first experiments with attemperators, which involved new coils of piping inside utensils, were intimidated by exactly this battery of statutes, as has been mentioned. When starting to brew or to make his malt, the manufacturer was under even more detailed supervision. The brewer had to declare the quantities he intended for each guile, the times of carrying out the beer, sending 1 Quoted Hughes, Studies in Administration and Finance (Manchester, 1934), P- 32$2 Hutcheson, Treatise... (Bristol, 1797). See also C. Leadbetter, Royal Gauger (1750). 3 15 Ch. II. c. 11; 1 W. and M. c. 24; 8 and 9 W. Ill, c. 19; 5 Geo. Ill, c. 43. An index of statutes is given in Hutcheson. For excise regulations in Malting see below, pp. 407-11.

351

The Excise System materials to distillers, and the times when the wort was likely to be trans¬ ferred to the fermenting squares.1 No brewer might cleanse or remove a guile of infected beer without due notice and explicit permission.2 He had also to keep a gauge book himself and make entry for the excise officers every week (or monthly in the case of the Brewing Victualler) while they surveyed him independently and compared results.3 The excise officer might take the gauge at almost any stage of brewing, having to make allowance for the increase in volume in the wort when he took the gauge just after boiling or mashing, and he had extensive rights of search and entry when fraud, concealment or adulteration were suspected.4 Officially no mixing of beers was allowed, on pain of the entire quantity brewed being charged as strong beer (plus a fine of £50) and no in¬ gredients other than malt and hops were to be used in brewing.5 In fact, isinglass became essential as a filtrate to clear the beer, and certain mixings had to take place to cure beer which had become sick. The statutes, how¬ ever, still spoke in absolute terms, with life breathed into them occasionally when the authorities thought an example had to be made against any re¬ suscitation of fraud or adulteration under a Tudor statute.6 With this the Coopers’ Company hoped to quicken the authority of their charter, the brewer not being allowed—officially—to cooper for himself. He could use only registered measures and quantities;7 his drays were limited in the hours they were free to pass through the busy streets of London, and when he had finally sold his beer to the publican, the law still watched (officially) over any mixing, adulteration, and false measuring on his part or—finally—at any over-indulgence by the customers.8 These laws became less honoured as they moved away from the brewer. As Sydney Smith saw Englishmen taxed from the cradle to the grave, so the brewer dealt with a commodity encompassed about with regulations from the farmer’s cart to the publican’s pot. Robert Burns, being an excise officer himself, knew just how meticulously the ceremonies of John Barleycorn’s death and resurrection about which he wrote were attended by official witnesses.

It is no wonder that brewers, maltsters and hop-planters

1 8 and 9 W. Ill, c. 19; 15 Ch. II, c. 11; 5 and 6 W. and M. c. 21; Geo. I (Session 2), c. 12; 5 W. and M. c. 3. 2 7 and 8 W. Ill, c. 30. 3 12 Ch. II, c. 24. 1 8 and 9 W. Ill, c. 19; 7 and 8 W. Ill, c. 30. 6 22 and 23 Ch. II, c. 5; 1 W. Ill, (Session 1) c. 24; 8 and 9 W. Ill, c. 1951 Anne (Session 2), c. 3; Anne, c. 12; 2 Geo. Ill, c. 14; 42 Geo. Ill, c. 38, s. 2. 6 23 Henry VIII, c. 4. See pp. 52-3 also Excise (TLB), 1370, ff. 345-72. 7 1 W. Ill (Session 1), c. 24; 24 Geo. Ill, c. 73; 32 Geo. Ill, c. 8 8 11 and 12 W. Ill, c. 15; 35 Geo. Ill, c. 73.

352

Regulations and Jurisdiction complained against vexatious daily interference in their business in the attempt to guard against fraud.1 This was the thread which drew the authorities ever deeper into a maze of legislation up to 1830 and beyond. As M. Dubois aptly commented in the case of the industry in Lille: ‘Evidemment, sous les debts reproches aux brasseurs, on trouvait les restes encore vivaces d’une organisation ancienne et particuliere, la contradiction complete avec le systeme de la liberte commerciale et industrielle.’2 The penalties for this intricate range of possible offences were usually a fine of from £10 to £50 and payment of double duties on the quantities involved. Omitting to declare, concealing, evading, making no entries, making false entries, keeping false measures, obstructing and bribing— all had their appropriate mulcts. Reliance on fines rather than imprison¬ ment—the offences being mainly of civil cognizance, not breaches of the peace, and hence acknowledging no ‘ liberties ’—enabled the Excise to run a traditional profit-sharing system for their officers as an incentive to conscientiousness. When prosecution was successful, the penalties were divided equally (in most cases after 1751) between the King and the informer.3 Allied to the cumulative burden of fines, when an indictment was for several offences, went power to distrain goods and utensils when duty or penalties were not paid within the statutory time. The statutory basis of excise jurisdiction went back to the year 1660, when the Restoration excise scheme for beer and malt was first delineated.4 Local offences were to be heard by any two or more Justices residing near the place where the information had been laid (not necessarily the two nearest J.P.s for Collectors often had to exercise discretion as to the magistrates they chose). In the case of disagreement between them, the prosecutor might choose two more before three months had elapsed, or where the Justices refused or omitted to act within fourteen days, the case 1 Interferences in manufacture by no means exhausted the list of petty inconveniences involved in the excise system. In 1749, for instance, all the London manufacturers concerned asked that the Excise Office be open 8 a.m.-2 p.m. instead of the existing hours 8 a.m-12 noon, 2 p.m.-5 p.m. The present hours meant that ‘They.. .or their Servants, after their Business is transacted at the Exchange, Markets and other Places of Resort are put to Expences and Loss of time till the said Head Office is open, to the great Detriment and hindrance in Business ’ (Excise (TLB), 1343, ff. 266-8). 2 Dubois, Le Regime de la Brasserie d Lille (Lille, 1912), p. ii. 3 24 Geo. II, c. 4, s. 29. Previously, in the country, for ‘non-entry’ offences, one-third penalties went to the Crown, one-third to the informer and one-third to the Poor of the Parish. In certain other cases the informer received only one-quarter (Ellis, op. cit.). Where officials were the informers, the collector received one-quarter of this part, and the rest was divided between supervisor and officers (Hughes, op. cit. p. 327). 4 12 Ch. II, c. 24, s. 45; 15 Ch. II, c. 11. 23

353

MBE

The Excise System could be tried by excise sub-commissioners themselves. This was a muchhated clause threatening a ‘Turk-like’ administrative tyranny.

Such

‘despotic rule’ was normal within the area directly administered by the head office.1 There, in 1727, the three Commissioners of Excise were given the right to hear cases and decide penalties, and in certain cases only appeals lay with sub-commissioners of appeals or the Justices in Quarter Sessions. Such appeals were only possible when the right was explicitly granted by act of Parliament—wherein lay some ground for misinter¬ pretation—and were not a Common Law right in the general case of excise jurisdiction.2 On the other hand, when excise officers went beyond the powers granted to them by statute they were arraignable. Ultimate decisions would normally find their way into the Court of Exchequer; occasionally into the King’s Bench, being tried there, as before the Commissioners or the Justices, without a jury. If the excise officer chose— as he frequently did in the case of seizures—he might take the case before a jury, and many other excise cases still did, in fact, rest on jury decisions.3 Even so, there were many objectionable aspects to the system. The decision of magistrates or Commissioners was often unchallengeable. They had power to compound at discretion the often high total of penalties—estimating the defendant’s power to pay or his wish to avoid publicity. The hearings could be in private, the onus probandi lay upon the subject, the Crown paid no costs when the subject won, whereas he paid triple costs if the Crown won. All these features of excise jurisdiction invoked the wrath of Johnson, Sheridan, Blackstone, Mansfield and others who spoke for the Common Law—themselves perhaps an ‘interest’ in the matter. In so far as the national uproar against the Excise Bill in 1733 was an expression of more than a simple vote against taxes, these things lay behind the hostility of the people as a whole. Despite it all, as Dr Hughes stresses, the excise administrative jurisdiction—given the necessity of the regulations with which it was concerned—had certain advantages which kept many of those entrepreneurs coming under its sway satisfied—as many have been in later times—that the system could be far worse. They liked the speed of decision, sometimes the privacy, often the reasonable¬ ness of the administering authority; the power to compound had advan¬ tages as against the high cost and long-delayed verdicts in other courts; 1 By 1 Geo. II (Session 2), c. 16. 2 See, for instance, Jf.H.C. xxxvm, 532, where brewers complain that in the ‘Chocolate and Cocoa Bill’ the wording made summary excise jurisdiction ‘as final as trial by jury or a verdict in the Court of Exchequer,’ and petitioned for a change in the clause. 3 See Hughes, op. cit. pp. 326-38.

354

Regulations and Jurisdiction and, not infrequently, they knew the cases were too technical to be success¬ fully tried by a jury. The scurrilous report of one excise case—written by a pamphleteer for whom an excise was as destructive of civil liberties as a standing army, with ‘ little difference between an Inquisition and a general excise office ’— shows how abuse could come. On one occasion early in the century Felix Feast (later knighted) ordered his servants to test the fire-engine he kept at his large brewery in Whitecross Street.1 Upon this [ran the report] the Mob coming into the Yard to see it play, it happened that, among the Crowd, the Exciseman was coming to his business... In playing the Engine, the Servant, turning the spout among the crowd, as in sport is frequently done, he chanced to wash his HONOUR, the Exciseman... and tho’ the Servants ask’d his Pardon and profess’d they did not see him (and the master not present) yet he could not be appeased; but goes the next Day to the Office; makes his Complaint to the Commissioners, and brings an Information against Mr Feast, for his Servants obstructing him in the Execution of his office. This comes to trial before the Commissioners who, notwithstanding the circumstances were proved as above, gave Judgment against Mr Feast for £20, and upon his Appeal, the Commissioners of Appeal confirm’d it and he paid £20 for wetting the sacred coat of a beggarly Rascal.2 THE DUTIES

The malt duty of 6|fi. per bushel was imposed upon England and Wales in April 1697, having been mooted as far back as 1619.3 Persons malting for their own family brewing (deemed not to be significant in the total trade) were allowed to compound at 55. per head of their family annually to avoid the difficulties of surveying private homes, and the outcry which the proposal to do so would have occasioned.4

After a hard-fought

delaying action the burden was imposed on Scotland seven years after the Union.5 The anticipated hardships to Scottish farmers, malt merchants and brewers materialised, such being the lower-quality barley that was to bear the same flat rate of tax as the English barley, and the difficulty of surveying remote and hostile regions,6 so that the duties were halved in 1725.7 1 The Peacock Brewhouse. 2 C. D’Anvers, Argument against Excises (1733), App. p. 7. 2 Hist. MSS. Comm. 4th Report, p. 305; 8 and 9 W. Ill, c. 22. For a general survey of the duties see J. Scarisbrick, Beer Manual.. .(Wolverhampton, 1892), pp. 12-36. 4 13 W. Ill, c. 5. This privilege was abolished in 1783 (J-H.C. xxxix, 475, 484)6 12 Anne, c. 2. See Hist. MSS. Comm. Mar and Kellie MSS. pp. 259, 333, 337, 348-9; C.T.B. xxi (1707), 477-9, 492-4; Excise (TLB), 1352, ff. 217-22; 1346, ff. 233-8. 6 J.H.C. xx (1724-5), 359, 594-5, 605. e . , . 7 11 Geo. I, c. 4; Pari. Papers, 1803-4, V, Report.. .on Barley and Bigg of Scotland, App. I.

355

23-2

The Excise System Despite general pleas that social justice should imply the raising of the malt tax and the lowering, or abolition of the beer tax (one of the main published arguments for the imposition of the malt tax in 1696),1 it was war-time necessity which forced increases in both duties, and the post-war necessities of peace which prevented all the war-time increments from being removed.

In February 1760, the malt duty went up by 3d. per

bushel, closely followed by beer.2 Further rises in malt duty took place in the stress of the American Wars, a very slight one in 1779, but a jump to 15. 4\d. per bushel in 1780 ;3 the worst Scottish grain being allowed half-duties as usual. In January 1791, the industry received a peace-time shock when yet another 3d. was imposed, but the increment was removed again in April 1792.4 Respite was short, however, for the most serious military struggle in which the nation had ever been engaged soon invoked the highest rates of taxation which the industry had ever known. The beer duty rose by an extra 2s. per barrel from its 1761 rate, to 105. in January 1802, and the malt tax jumped to 25. 5d. per bushel at the same time and to

45.

5Id. in 1803-4, these increases being applied fully to Scotland.5

At these levels the burden of extra capital involved in carrying such a weight of tax, which was now running between one-half and one-third of the selling price of malt, had a marked effect upon the structure of the industry, as has been mentioned elsewhere. Nor was the burden to be much lightened in the years of peace. The beer tax stayed at 105. per barrel until total abolition of the duty in 1830. The malt tax dropped back to 25. 5d. per bushel in July 1816, rose once more to 35. 7\d. between 1819 and 1820 and then settled back to 25. 7d.—slightly less than twice the rate it had been before the great wars. The yield of these two taxes was one of the pillars upon which the public finances of the country rested. Of almost equal moment to their general importance in the peace-time revenue from taxation was the fact that they tolerated increments in the rate of taxation more successfully than the excise on any other commodity. For this reason the war-time increments in the malt and beer tax played a central role in the financial buttressing of national expansion. In the mid-1730’s, the industries pro¬ vided Walpole with £1-5 million out of a total national revenue from taxation of about £6 million. In 1787-8, their contribution had risen to £4-5 million—out of a total excise revenue of £675. Of this the brewing 1 2 4 6

A. Burnaby, Essay on Excising Malt (1696), pp. 19-20. 33 Geo. II, c. 7. Duty was now gj + v\d. 3 19 Geo. Ill, c. 25; 20 Geo. Ill, c. 35. 31 Geo. Ill, c. 2; 32 Geo. Ill, c. 6. The last Act reduced the duty by 8d. bushel on ‘Scotch Beer or Bigg’.

356

The Duties industry provided £1-7 million, the malt industry £1-3 million; spirits £0-5 million and hops a mere £3i,ooo.1 During the Napoleonic Wars, because of the more effective system of direct taxation of incomes, the relative share of total revenue from taxation borne by excise revenue from the drink industries had fallen.

As a whole, gross receipts for Great

Britain from taxes were £51*2 million in 1805. Excise revenue provided £22-5

million of this, malt, beer and hop excises bringing in £9-8 million

and the spirits excise £5-1 million.2 This meant that revenue from the brewing industry totalled just over 18 per cent of the whole, and spirits exactly 10 per cent. Almost all the yield came from England: malt and beer revenue from Scotland was £0-22 million and spirits revenue £0-47 million. At no time did the hop excise become a money-raiser on a significant scale or compare in yield with the two main fiscal sponges, malt and beer. Taxation was initially imposed on the industry in June 1711 at a rate of id. per lb., and the rate rose gradually after 1778 to reach i-6d. per lb. in 1786. The further war-time rise to -i\d. per lb. in 1801 proved only temporary, and following much agitation from the hop-counties, duties were reduced to 2d. per lb. in 1806—but no further. This put almost

205.

on a hundredweight of hops, increasing the capital needed for those holding stocks, and making the tax take up a considerable proportion of the selling price in years of glut and low prices, which were exactly the adverse seasons for the planters. The increasing rates of taxation did not affect demand very much, for brewers’ requirements were conditioned pri¬ marily by costs other than hops, but demands for extra credit-time in paying the duty after 1800 were testimony to the serious effects which the duty had in augmenting the difficulties of the planters in unfavourable seasons. Yields from the hop-excise until 1779 averaged about £75,000 annually, although the extreme variations in the harvest produced by disease meant equally violent fluctuations in the excise. The 1765 season saw a remarkable peak of £118,500; the 1726 season a fall to £68oo.3 From the late seventeenth century there were many continuing pleas that the excise duty on beer and ale be replaced, in the interests of fiscal efficiency and social justice, by an equivalent duty on malt.4 The main 1 J. Sinclair, History of the Public Revenue of Great Britain (1790), pt. nr, p. 126. The mead and vinegar excise yielded only £17,700, and the cider and perry excise £12,500. 2 Pari. Papers, 1805, v, pp. 3-31. 3 J. Postlethwaite, History of Public Revenue (1759), p. 277; S. Dowell, op. cit. vol. IV, p. 134; J. Sinclair, op. cit. pt. Ill, App. xxvi. See Appendix, Table 41. 4 As in Murray, Reasons for Translating... (1696); Excise (TLB), 1351, 23 August 1758. Several previous authorities are quoted in W. Kennedy, English Taxation, i64g-ijgg (1913).

357

The Excise System argument was always that in the country, as occasionally in the town, there were a great number of superior households brewing their own beer, all of whom escaped the duty on beer brewed for sale.1 The tax, therefore, fell substantially on the poor who used the alehouses. Adam Smith calculated that a single tax of 2s. 3d. per bushel on malt would bring in over £280,000 more (£2-877 million against £2-596 million) than all the present taxes of 9d. per bushel on malt, 8s. per barrel on strong beer and is. 4d. per barrel on small beer—which totalled

24S.-25S.

on a quarter of malt. In so

far as the price of beer might be reduced through this change, and demand stimulated, he pointed out to a landed interest fearful lest such a heavy tax on a corn product might depress agricultural rents, that ‘Nothing could reduce the rent and profit of barley land which did not reduce the demand for barley’. The tax, in the end, had always fallen upon the consumer. Against this, those who followed Davenant in opposing such a change could have adduced, like the Commissioners of Excise, that maltster, corn-merchant and brewer would take their profit on the higher cost of malt and that a substantially higher rate of evasion was prevalent in malting than in brewing. This would increase further as fraud became more profitable, ‘whereas the Brewery is not so productive of Frauds by reason of the Greater Ease in securing that Duty arising from the nature of the Business’.2 How important the difference was in the relative degree of fraud affecting the two industries, and how far, in fact, it would have counterbalanced the great potential advantages shown by Adam Smith, cannot be deter¬ mined. The matter was more a conflict between economic and social morality and political principle. On the one hand, no one could deny that those classes of society which could best afford to pay the tax on beer and ale—the farmers, freeholders and all those living in substantial house¬ holds—were just those who escaped by brewing at home. On the other hand, it was to be expected that the representatives of those classes at West¬ minster should be more sensitive to the evils of government officers having rights of entry into private homes—‘ the odious visit and examination of the tax-gatherer’ of which Smith was aware. The sturdy defence of such important constitutional liberties as this was more a feature of eighteenthcentury England than fiscal niceties or social justice. As Smith remarked, ‘ It has probably been the interest of this superior order of people, however, which has hitherto prevented a change of system that could not fail both 1 The best argument is contained in Wealth of Nations (1796 ed.), vol. Ill, pp. 359-71. 2 B.M. Add. MS. 32,914, f. 433, W. Burton to Newcastle, 20 November 1760.

358

The Duties to increase the revenue and to relieve the people’.1 In the event, from 1702 onwards, the country had the worst of both worlds as malt and beer duties alike leap-frogged upwards in the wars, Smith’s principles being applied only during the Napoleonic Wars. The political and fiscal pressures which lay behind most of the increases in the malt and beer duty in the eighteenth century, and the negotiations between brewers, excise authorities, Treasury Lords and Parliament which they occasioned, are conveniently illustrated by the change in the duty imposed in July 1761. This caused the first rise in the retail price of strong beer in London within living memory.

It came as the eventual result of complicated

manoeuvres between Newcastle and the Treasury, the Excise and the brewers, which had lasted three years. The reason behind it was the increasing commitments which the Seven Years War had begun to pile upon the public revenue: as so often, the broad back of the general con¬ sumption of malt, hops and beer had to take much of the increased strain. Only a universally demanded necessity of diet (or, if Adam Smith be believed, a non-necessity which seems to have acted in almost all respects as though it were a necessity) could provide an augmentation of income on a sufficient scale without a decline in sales when its retail price rose under increasing tax. Beer, rather than bread, was the only commodity whose production made the imposition of such a system of fiscal admini¬ stration feasible and sufficiently lucrative. In August 1758, the Excise Commissioners had recommended an in¬ crease in the malt tax as a solution to the problem of supply.2 This, they hoped, would prevent the brewers from immediately raising their prices to the publicans ‘which a direct Duty on Beer and Ale would probably occasion’ (as they well knew from clear threats by the trade in London). It would also bear more evenly on the public by affecting the home brewer. This crisis passed over until the next summer, when credit fell so low that no one in the City advised a loan; while Sampson Gideon, determined to save the Bank, categorically refused to accommodate the government on credit of supply.3 Preparations were thereupon started once more to increase the revenue from taxation. The malt tax was increased by 3d. per bushel in February 1760,4 and the brewers again threatened to raise their prices from

225.-235.

to

295.

per barrel to the publican—but, again,

forbore because of fears for demand. Their plan at once suggested to the

1

Wealth of Nations (1796 ed.), p. 3713 P.R.O. T.48/73.

359

2 B-M- Add- MS- 32,883, f. 66. 4 33 Geo. II, c. 7.

The Excise System authorities that an increase of 35. per barrel in the tax might occasion an increase only of \d. per quart in the retail price to 3\d. (not the id. which they feared would be put on) with the brewer taking an extra 2s. and the publican an extra is.1 William Burton, one of the Commissioners, now wrote to Newcastle advising the Duke that the high rate of fraud in malting, the fact that the maltsters got five months, credit in some circumstances and the brewer only a fortnight or a month, should decide the issue for a higher beer duty, despite the injustice occasioned by home-brewing escaping it.2 This would prevent higher prices tracking back to the maltster, and perhaps the legal control of prices might be used if the brewers went too far in their own reactions to the increase in duty. The extra 3s., authorised in 1761, was aimed to bring another £400,000 p.a. into the Exchequer. Being the collecting agents of such national benefits, the brewers petitioned for a quid pro quo. First, they wished many tiresome regulations, designed to prevent the relanding of exported beer, to be relaxed; they demanded more rigid restrictions against mixing beers, which publicans were doing to their detriment, and some administrative favours in ‘passing on’ the increased duty to the public.3 The Excise authorities, on their part, refused to allow any change in measures, by which the victuallers hoped to conceal the rise in duty from their customers, and they would not consider the new malt tax as part of the new beer duty, demanding that the brewers bear this part of the burden as their contribution to the war effort. The publicans were the buffers between the increased price charged by the brewers (295. per barrel in place of 23s.) and an irate public. Without a compensating increase in price on their part, bankruptcy or adulteration were inevitable; so legal permission to raise prices was officially sought and obtained from the legislature (in general, subsequent to the event) in January 1762, thus freeing the industry for the first time—formally—from official price control.4 The Act increasing the penalty for mixing beers came at the particular request of the porter brewers who were the major pressure group concerned in the negotiations. Since the rise in duty, the increased prices of ‘Pale Beer’ and ‘Amber’ had not kept to the same margins above porter as before, being weakened a little, illegally, thus giving these brewers an ‘unfair’ advantage over porter. William Burton had calculated that porter 1 B.M. Add. MS. 32,914, f. 434. ‘Considerations on laying an Additional Duty on all Strong Beer and Ale.’ 2 B.M. Add. MS. 32,914, f. 4«. 3 Excise (TLB), 1352, ff. 334-8 (October 1761). 4 2 Geo. Ill, c. 14; Royal Assent, 24 March 1762.

360

The Duties paid a higher duty proportionate to its strength than amber which gave its brewers certain claims for consideration.1 He was willing to grant their unofficial request for an extra is. per barrel duty on all beer sold for more than 30s. per barrel (thus hitting the other brewers who sold at 30S.-35S. per barrel minimum). If this was unfair, he said, it was at least erring on the right side. The porter brewers wished this extra duty to apply only within the Bills of Mortality, which was the only region where competition really affected them. In the event nothing came of this supplementary duty, and the porter brewers capitulated, satisfied that the main loophole had been stopped against mixing. They had left off brewing meanwhile (having accumulated large stocks for the purpose), in order to put pressure on the revenue while bidding for the extra shilling. In January 1762, Burton commented ‘They forbear yet awhile in hopes of carrying the Point they have in view through the Fears that may be raised concerning the Revenue. But tho’ they should miscarry in this they will go to work again for their own sakes.’2 The incident, which has been mentioned in relation to prices in another chapter, is significant in revealing the state of relations between the power¬ ful brewers and the Excise, and similar occasions subsequently underlined the conclusions which may be drawn from it. In certain obvious ways their interests were antagonistic—each played his game hard from strength, keeping the cards well up and trumps concealed. But both sides knew there were only a certain number of plays in the pack, that each side was permanently in the game, dependent in important ways upon the other. Both could profit from a reluctant, littleadvertised, useful modus vivendi. The same guarded confidence and polite tolerance which existed between entrepreneurs and excise officers in the breweries characterised the more influential relationship between the leaders of the industry and the Board of Excise. As there could never be marriage or divorce between them, they remained in a permanent semi¬ detached state, a reluctant engagement. It was easy for puzzled or irate free-traders to condemn this as living in sin, threatening the moral founda¬ tions of society—as did J. R. McCulloch—particularly when they did not observe militant hostility between the two sides. 2 Ibid. See above, p. 115.

1 B.M. Add. MS. 32,933, f. 273.

361

The Excise System EXCISE ALLOWANCES

The conclusions which may appear to be inescapable from this description of the fiscal exploitation which brewing, hop-planting and malting ex¬ perienced at the hands of the excise system is that the industry was sorely harassed by the role it played in sustaining the public revenue. This is true, but more for the millions of consumers, who had few acceptable alternatives to beer and ale, than for producers who faced a resilient demand.

For the brewers, particularly the established interests in the

trade, there were certain mitigations which lightened the burden of the duties and affected developments in the structure of the industry. They may not have been full compensations, in the sense that they did not do very much to outweigh the burden which the duty undoubtedly placed on demand, but they did, at least, lighten its impact. The trade was not entirely united in its desire to abolish the duties and the licensing system in 1830, and to these more subtle considerations about the excise we must look for the reasons. The first and the most important of them was the system of allowances authorised by the excise regulations and the second, the fact that payment of duty increased the demand for working capital to carry on trade, which acted as a brake upon the entry of competitors. Brougham attacked excise taxation in malt for precisely this reason in 1822. Charles Barclay admitted that it had certain advantages to established interests (which he felt certain would be outweighed by the potential increase in sales for both existing brewers and newcomers if the duty were abolished and prices dropped).1 As Brougham wrote, ‘When a tax is raised the person who first pays it must increase his capital or diminish his transactions.... The consequence of this necessity—a consequence proved by experience—was the exclusion from the trade of the smaller capitalists by which the larger capitalists were better off.’2 When excise payments had to be made every fifth or eighth week after gauging at the time of production (i.e. before the long months of storage were over) the extra amount of capital tied up in the duty payments could be significant.3 On a stock of 50,000 barrels stored for twelve months the sum would be £11,000 in 1720, £17,600 in 1762 1 See above, p. 238. 2 Hansard, VI (2nd series), 239. 3 Up to 1761, payment was due within five weeks of the gauge in normal times, an extension of the time to eight weeks was allowed at 5 July 1761, inside the Bills of Mortality. Outside the Bills, excise was paid eight times per year on the rounds of the collector (Excise (TLB), 1352; 8 July 1761). The indulgence given to London brewers in 1761, on account of the rise in duty, was not statutory but an administrative act of grace (Excise (TLB), 1352,12 and 19 March 1761). 362

Excise Allowances and £22,000 in 1810. It was, in effect, no small factor in increasing the reliance of manufacturers upon banking credit and capital for short-term credit when the duty rate rose during the Napoleonic Wars at the same time as the great increase in raw material prices. If loss occurred through fire, disaster to a vat or to a ship carrying consignments away from London, there was, at best, the tedious business of petitioning the Treasury or Parliament, with often the expense of a Private Bill to recover the duty, and, at worst, outright loss—for the obligation of repayment in such cases was never exactly determined. The authorities maintained that such repay¬ ment on their part remained acts of grace, not of legal compulsion, because the normal excise allowances were designed to cover ‘wastage’ of all kinds in distribution as well as in manufacture. The disastrous bursting of Henry Meux’s vat in 1814 involved repayment of £7300 in total excise duties—a revelation of the day to day importance of the tax in absorbing working capital for stocks of beer which were not subject to any natural calamity.1 From the first the allowances were a means—how deliberate or not at their inception it is impossible to determine—whereby, as a later com¬ mentator claimed, the State sought to encourage the breweries as to their size but curb them as to their numbers. The initial difference in allowances free of duty for all ‘waste and ullage’ in brewing came with the Restoration Excise Acts, in 1672. Common Brewers were there encouraged at the expense of the Brewing Victuallers, receiving, when surveyed in vat rather than in cask, an allowance of three barrels in twenty-three free of duty for strong and small beer, and two barrels in twenty-two allowance for ale. In London, the barrel was reckoned at thirty-six gallons for strong and small beer, and thirty-two gallons for ale and thirty-four for vinegar.

In the ‘country’ (technically, that is, beyond the Bills of

Mortality which could include places within the orbit of metropolitan London) there was a flat rate of thirty-four gallons measure to a barrel for all malt liquors.2 The pretext for these allowances was not so much the fact that the Brewing Victuallers did not have the expenses of a large plant, or those of distribution, while taking the final profits of retail sale as well as the gains of manufacture, but that larger waste was involved with the larger pro¬ duction of Common Brewer. Actually, the technical advantages of their 1 Meux’s repayment was at a rate of 18s. 11 d. per barrel. This included the malt tax. See above, p. 62. 2 12 Ch. II, c. 23-4; 22-3 Ch. II, c. 5; J. Farthing, Excise Rectified (1695).

363

The Excise System larger-scale operations more than compensated for such factors, as every¬ one interested in the problem well knew, so that the allowances remained in result, and probably also in intention, an extra incentive for promoting the success of the Common Brewer, not merely an instrument for com¬ pensating his disadvantages. Where a brewer sold in quantities less than a gallon or a cask—or on the same terms as the Brewing Victualler—he was to forfeit all the allowances reserved for the Common Brewer. Less agitation resulted from the Brewing Victuallers than might have been expected from such discrimination against them. Those of Suffolk did, indeed, threaten to stop selling to the poor in 1683 because of the poverty to which it had—they claimed—reduced them; and the local Justices wrote hurriedly to the Excise for directions ‘fearing the Innkeepers will combine in complain[t] and the poor grow importunate as being so easily influenced by the sellers of drink’. They received a curt answer from a revenue-conscious Board that the real trouble came from their own refusal to license public houses.1 At this time, the Brewing Victuallers as a whole had not cohesion enough to make individual protests effective, being men and women of mainly humble station and little substance, viewed with suspicion by the local magistrates and clergy. A more bitter issue was raised by the 1689 excise statute which differentiated the allowances in favour of the London Common Brewers within the Bills of Mortality, a change which could not be justified according to the earlier principle. For the country brewers (or those technically outside the Bills) the new allowances were calculated on a basis of 2J barrels in twenty-three for ale and beer, with thirty-four gallons reckoned to the barrel as before.2 London brewers, however, were exempted from them and remained on the old terms of three barrels in twenty-three allowance for beer, with thirty-six gallons to the barrel. This gave them an advantage of nearly 4\d. per barrel before the rise in duty of 1761 and nearly 7d. per barrel between 1761 and 1802. The 1689 statute had, moreover, increased the general rate of allowance by granting a further one-tenth free of duty to all Common Brewers within the Bills by ullage when the gauge was taken on hot wort newly let out of the copper (‘loss by extraordinary heat’) and yet another one-tenth of the gauge when taken on hot worts in the backs, which applied to Common Brewers and Brewing Victuallers. The reason for beer being thus favoured at the 1 Excise (TLB), 1339, f. 243. 2 1 W. and M. c. 24; P.R.O. CO. 390/4. It was said that the reason for this change was that country brewers began to call their ale ‘ beer ’ to take advantage of the larger barrel. See 7.H.C. x, 86. 364

Excise Allowances expense of ale (which would have been a hopped malt liquor almost everywhere at this time) was that storage time for beer in London was now several months whereas country brewers normally sent out their malt liquor much ‘younger’ and hence did not suffer the burdens of excise payments locked up in their stocks of beer to the same extent. Naturally, as London production swung towards ‘mild beer’ and away from ale, making this fiscal difference noticeable, complaints began to come in from the rising numbers of Common Brewers in the country. Dublin brewers protested in 1709,1 and an anonymous complaint which received the backing of the Treasury in 1715 attacked the whole system of allowances.2 The accusations laid at its door are interesting. Apart from the general criticism that public revenue was diminished, the main charge was that the system encouraged the creation of a monopoly for the great brewers, who worked their strong beer ‘at home upon stillings which prevents the waste of either drink or yeast so that the waste is very in¬ considerable’.3 All the technical advantages open to the bigger brewer are ignored in favour of this fiscal explanation for the growth in scale of production, which in fact was an advantage applicable to all Common Brewers indiscriminately. The Excise Commissioners replied that the allowances were not only for waste but also ‘ to encourage the Brewers to make punctual Entries and weekly payments of the Duties (notwith¬ standing the great credit by them given)’. To drop the allowances, they claimed, would be in effect to increase the rate of duty, which was ‘already charged to what the Commodity can well bear’. The slight flexibility given to the tax-rate by the allowances was also a weapon used to encourage the Common Brewers not merely against the Brewing Victuallers, but even more against the home brewers, who were not taxed at all. The Excise Commissioners, knowing that the rate of tax was the great inducement to brewing at home, feared for the revenue if they abolished the allowances. The Treasury Lords remained more satisfied with these explanations than the country brewers. As Common Brewers grew to importance in provincial towns and learnt themselves the advantages of putting up a common front in their mutual interests, so the pressure intensified. In May 1767, the Norwich brewers petitioned as a body, asserting that they now brewed mainly beer which was kept as long as London porter, so that, if the original reason for the difference in allowances was that the country liquor was ale sold within two to four weeks of its brewing, while London 1 Excise (TLB), 1346, 17 and 31 August 1709. 2 Excise (TLB), 1343, 24 June 1715.

365

3 Ibid. Also Farthing, op. cit.

The Excise System brewers had the onus of heavy stocks, they were now morally entitled to be treated on the same terms by the Excise.1 Similar petitions followed in January and February of 1768 in an organised flood. First came the brewers of Middlesex, Essex, Surrey and Kent together, with identical submissions from fifteen other counties as far-flung as Cumberland, Northumberland, Staffordshire and Gloucestershire.

Such an event

implied at least some ad hoc organisation, much correspondence and con¬ siderable funds, for over 280 brewers were involved.2 The greatest stress in the petitions was placed on the economic dis¬ abilities affecting country brewers in comparison with those of London, their more scattered markets and smaller production entailing higher over¬ heads and lower returns. They claimed, too, that levelling up the allow¬ ance would mean a drop of only one sixty-fourth in the duties—so few in number were the provincial Common Brewers in the face of the thousands of Brewing Victuallers. The Excise admitted the facts of the case, which were attested in the examination of witnesses—even the justice of changing them—but would not forgo the £60,000 which the inequality brought in annually. The question of levelling down the allowances was, significantly, ignored, and the petitions were finally rejected by the Commons. The importance which the allowances had for a brewer’s rate of profit is more explicitly shown in a petition from George Hodgson and his partners at Bow, Middlesex. After twenty years of paying country duty rates as one of the de facto London brewers considered de lege as in the country, they discovered to their satisfaction that, all along, their brewhouse had been just within the crucial eastern boundary of the Bills of Mortality. They therefore promptly sued for repayment of the London allowances which had been denied them, and won a favourable verdict in the King’s Bench. From October 1752, when the partnership had been set up, to March 1769 £4363 excess duty, deriving from a production of 185,440 barrels, became returnable. After two successful court cases (the first to decide the point of principle on the two or three years’ production after 1769, the second to claim every penny they could) the firm’s main difficulty proved to lie in extracting the money from the coffers of the public revenue. In the end, an order from the House of Commons was needed before the Excise and the Treasury stopped referring the unwel¬ come decision back and forth between themselves.3 1 Excise (TLB), 1353, ff. 342-6. 2 Excise (TLB), 1353, ff. 397-400; J.H.C. xxxi, 505-6, 597-8. 3 J.H.C. xxxiv, 103 (7 February 1773).

366

Excise Allowances Certain extra allowances to brewers (is. 4d. per barrel on strong beer and ale in London and is. 8d. per barrel in the country) laid off some part of the increased duty on malt in 1780 for all brewers, and at the same time reduced the discrepancies between London and the country.1 The object of the move, which was continued in 1787 and increased temporarily in 1790, was to get at the home brewers, few of whom malted their own barley, without putting further burdens on the much-taxed brewers for sale.2 When, in 1802, these supplementary allowances were abolished in a further rise in the beer duty, exposing country brewers once more to their old disabilities relative to London, their collective strength had risen in the interval to such a degree that they were able to challenge the new position successfully.3 Led again by a committee of the more prominent Common Brewers in the home counties, Ramsbottom of Windsor, Stonard of Bromley and John Brookes of Stratford, Essex (the latter two by then virtually of London) identical petitions flooded in, as before, from the provinces.4 They asked the Treasury at first only for a return to the inter¬ mediate position (where London still had i\d. per barrel advantage) while putting pressure for absolute justice on the Commons. In reply to the consequent Treasury letter, the Excise Commissioners said that the whole matter was a ‘Consideration of Policy rather than of Revenue Management and accordingly we submit the same to your Lordships’ superior judgement’. For a few months (1 May 1802-5 July 1803) the extra allowance was fixed at 8d. per barrel (on the twenty and a half out of twenty-three barrels paying full duty) in the country and 6d. per barrel (on the twenty out of twenty-three) in London, but then, at long last, all Common Brewers were placed on the same footing with allowances of onetwelfth of the gauge free of duty.5 From 1785, these allowances had been forfeit if any Common Brewer sold beer in quantities less than four-and-a-half gallons together, which was the capacity of the smallest cask used by the trade.6 This clause was the basis of the unsuccessful attempt to deprive the Golden Lane Brewery of any rebate on the duty, as many of its legal co-partners were publicans. 1 Pari. Papers, 1819, v, p. 99 -,J.H.C. xxxvii, 748-9, 800 (March-May 1780). There were also allowances of 4d. per gallon on small beer, 10d. per gallon on Scottish strong beer, 4d. per gallon on ‘Twopenny’ and 2d. per gallon on Scottish small beer. 2 27 Geo. Ill, c. 13, Schedule Y\J.H.C. xlvi, 94. 3 42 Geo. Ill, c. 38. 4 Excise (TLB), 1370, ff. 372-46 43 Geo. Ill, c. 38; Excise (TLB), 1371, f. 323 et seq. A roughly similar scale of allowances continued until the duty was abolished in 1830. See 9 Geo. IV, c. 58; Pari. Papers, 1819, V, PP- 32, 995 1830, x, p. 34. 6 J.H.C. XL, 1058, 1167. 367

The Excise System In the legal argument, more fully described elsewhere, for the prize of 8d. per barrel—enough to convert an adequate annual profit into a net loss if the excise authorities won their case—the purpose of the allowances, and their importance as a factor reinforcing the other advantages which the Common Brewer had over the Brewing Victuallers, were once more made plain.1 Sjts. Vaughan and Nolan stated these ulterior motives behind the pretext of ‘ waste ’ succinctly. Their words well illustrate the devious¬ ness of the factors (and the complexity of causation) lying behind economic change in the brewing industry. The Legislature thought it was better for the Crown to have these breweries conducted on a more extensive scale, and that it was considered a great object to prevent as much as possible brewing privately and in small quantities.The Legislature felt perhaps that from the magnitude of the concern in the one case it would be easy to collect the duty and difficult to evade the payment of it; whereas in the other the collection of the duty would be troublesome and expensive and the revenue daily liable to be defrauded.2 Once Common Brewers had received the legal benefits accorded to their status, there were further minor advantages arising from larger production —quite apart from the economic gains (which remained on the whole more important than the fiscal benefits). From the first years of the century, as we have seen, excisemen were present for a long time each day, if not continuously, at the larger London breweries. The hindrances to produc¬ tion which arose from having to forewarn the Excise twelve hours in advance of brewing, so that a gauger might attend, did not apply here, while the rule might be harassing to a small brewer or Brewing Victualler. Licences supported this pressure on the brewer in a smaller way of trade, for a flat-rate fee favoured the great. After 1784, the licence fee varied with the number of barrels brewed annually: from £1. 10s. for any quantity under 1000 barrels to £50 for an output of more than 40,000 barrels.3 This discrimination became even more marked when the scale was changed in 1829.4 Then a licence to brew under twenty barrels annually cost 10.?.; twenty to fifty barrels, £1; fifty to a hundred barrels, £1.

ioj.;

100-1000 barrels, £2; and so up to £75 for a production of more

than 40,000 barrels. These features applied to the other industries under the excise system, but in the case of the drink industries the restrictions applied to their outlets for retail sale as well as to the units of production. The effects of restrictive licensing at the hands of the Justices of the Peace 1 See above, pp. 246-8. 3 24 Geo. Ill, c. 41.

2 Guildhall Pam. 3802 (1808); Excise Trials, 556, p. 27. 4 6 Geo. IV, c. 81. 368

Excise Allowances are considered in another chapter, for the Excise Commissioners had a natural wish to avoid all such restrictions on sale. However, publicans were burdened, like the brewers, with the cost of an annual licence. From a nominal rate of is. annually since 1710, this rose to a guinea in 1756, to £1. ns. in 1784, to two guineas during the subsequent wars, and to four guineas in 1815, at which level it remained until 1830.1 table [sources:

15. Gross rates of duty on beer and ale, 1660-1830

Statutes; Customs and Excise MS. 11,858,f. i;H. Aldous, The Beer Duty. ]

For legal definitions of strong beer (with costs above 6s. per barrel); small beer (with costs at or below 6s. per barrel); table beer (with costs 6s.-ns. per barrel) and intermediate beer see pp. 241, 346. For differences in allowances and in the size of barrels see pp. 363-7. All rates quoted per barrel Date of imposition of duty

Strong beer and ale

December 1660 June 1671 June 1680 July 1689 November 1690 November 1691 January 1692 July 1693 March 1710 January 1761 April 1779 April 1781 July 1782 May 1787

25. 6d.

May 1787

8s.

April 1802 July 1803 July 1823 October 1830

Table beer

Inter¬ mediate beer

6 d. 9 d. 6 d. 9 d.

—

—

— — — —

— — — —

15. 3 d.

—

—

15. 15. 15. 15. 15. 15. 15. 15.

—

—

■

—

—

—

—

— — —

—

Small beer

3s- 3d. 25. 6 d. 3s- 3d6s. 6 d. 45. 9d. 55. 6d. 45. 9 d. 5s8s. 8s. 8s. 8s. 8s.

15.

6d. 3 d. 4d. 4d. 4d. 4d. 4d. 4d.

3*-

3s-

15. 4d. v_x —

I OS.

25.

105.

25.

105.

3s-

Imports 65.

95. 6 5.

95. 185. 155. 185. 155.

15* 155. 155. — 165. — 175. — — (French 85. (other 175. 175.

9d. 6d. 3d. 3d. 3 d.

J

25. All duties on beer repealed

— —

405.

305. 2d.

55-

405.

EXCISE STATISTICS

Potentially, the annual production figures for malt and beer are of high value for historians interested in economic trends and fluctuations in the eighteenth century. The series is complete since 1684, the commodities in question were articles in steady demand, at the centre of a mass market. However, the statistics cannot be accepted without reserve and their utility for historians remains dependent upon the degree of validity which 1 For statutes see S. Dowell, op. cit. pp. 145-51- In 1830, the publican’s licence cost £2. 2s. and was issued by the excise authorities without regard to the magistrates.

24

369

M BE

The Excise System may be judged to survive their known weaknesses. The various changes in the rate of duty, for example, are important in raising the requirements of working capital for each brewer paying the increasing burden, while the increased prices depressed demand generally. They also raised the premium on evasion. Counterbalancing this latter trend was the efficiency of excise supervision which increased over the country as a whole during the course of the century—at least so far as England was concerned. Some discussion of the degree of evasion to which the regulations were subject has been made previously.

It was high in malting and fairly high in

country brewing. At the beginning of the century, perhaps as much as one-quarter of the malt produced in the country had not paid duty. Less beer escaped than malt but the leakage was still serious. By comparison, the London figures for beer production are probably fairly accurate. Both series, however, should be robust enough to bear the weight of broad con¬ clusions, and in the case of England and Wales even the malt figures are probably accurate enough to illustrate general trends by the mid-century. The government itself was relying on the statistics for this purpose during the century. It must be borne in mind, of course, that the total production of beer and malt for England excludes to some degree the consumption of the five ‘cider counties’ Worcester, Hereford, Gloucester, Somerset and Devon.

Ale did remain a staple drink throughout this region—

receipts from the cider duty were very small—but shared its pride of place in rural areas with cider; while in Scotland and Ireland malt liquor gave up hope of competition with spirits. Many of the doubts which are cast on the reliability of the quantities, by this undoubted degree of evasion, may be quietened on the assumption that its degree changed very slowly over the years and was subject to counteracting influences. This was certainly true in the long run, but in particular years there is still evidence that fraud increased greatly with a bad harvest, when the extra cost of raw materials (with a stable retail price for brewers for sale in London) raised the incentive to escape paying duty. This will certainly not deny the drop in production falling in these years following a bad harvest when brewers were short of money for buying raw material and there might be a lapse in demand, but it may exaggerate them somewhat. All figures for the annual production of beer and malt originate in the excise returns existing from 1684—the year in which the duties ceased to be farmed and became managed directly by the Commissioners of Excise.1

1

I first saw them in photostat through the kindness of Professor T. S. Ashton.

370

Excise Statistics Copies of the consolidated annual returns survive at both the head office of the Customs and Excise at King’s Beam House, London, and the Public Record Office, and some of them were published in Parliamentary Papers during the nineteenth century.1 Duplicates of the annual production of London brewers up to 1787 (which are also available at King’s Beam House) were discovered in manuscript at Barclay Perkins’ brewery, amongst numerous returns for individual breweries. These again were duplicates of contemporary accounts existing in public records.

In all

these series, discrepancies occur—sometimes up to 5 per cent, occasionally above this proportion—which cast doubt on each absolute figure involved in them, but reinforce conclusions about the sequence of change and the general magnitudes involved. Apart from the individual series, in order to plot the returns on the same scale, it was necessary to convert the beer quantities back into malt. This can only be done according to a ‘reasonable’ ratio which is inevitably arbitrary—in this case—four barrels of strong beer were deemed to have been brewed from one-quarter of malt, and'eight barrels of small beer from one-quarter. Such an interpolation invites obvious criticism; the number offfiarrels of porter drawn from a quarter of malt rose from twoand-a-half to three to four between the mid-years and the end of the eighteenth century, after which the length rose further for a time and then fell again. Certain strong ales and brown stout which were brewed for a ‘quality market’ were of a greater strength than porter, but many other beers were weaker. Strength varied greatly on each side of this mean, and to take four barrels as the average ‘length’ is perhaps to err on the side of pessimism. Small beer in London was brewed mainly by re-infusing the grains left over from brewing strong beer. Elsewhere it is impossible to discover how local tradition varies between the use of new malt, used malt or a proportion of each in brewing small beer. When a constant conver¬ sion rate from malt to beer is used, increasing extraction rates (being developed mainly in the larger breweries) will tend to maximise the extent to which brewers for sale were gaining on home brewers in the course of the century, and the extent to which all Common Brewers were absorbing 1 Printed Returns: (1) Beer brewed: Pari. Papers (House of Lords), cclxxvii, 1830, no. 183, PP 293 311 (for 1684-1829, with rates of duty). Other scattered figures are in S. Morewood, Philosophical and Statistical History... (Dublin, 1838), Appendix; Enquiry into Principles of Taxation (1790), Appendix (for 1684-1750). (n) Malt: Pari. Papers, 1835, xxxi, 15th Report of...Excise Enquiry, pp. 4“9 (for the period 1702-1834)- MSS. Auts:\(i) Excise, 1749, 3069, 3070, 3087 (for 1684-1828) (ii) P.R.O. T. 64/172 (for 1684-1764); CO. 390/4 fif. 45-56

(for 1684-1799). 371

24-2

The Excise System the trade of Brewing Victuallers. Hence the trends shown here by the figures will be exaggerated. No satisfactory way of weighting the indices to allow for such changes can decrease the fallibilities of the figures, but, as before, their broad movements and the broad conclusions dependent on them may be deemed uncompromised by the rate of error involved. When everything has been said about their statistical frailty it would be carrying scepticism too far to ignore them: one should rather emphasise their value. It is a very rare thing for annual production figures to exist in unbroken sequence after 1684. If there are doubts about the teeth in the mouths of these fiscal gift horses offered to the historian, they should be examined all the more closely for that. As will be seen in the graph printed 0241^.541 annual figures of malt production, directly linked to the barley harvest in the supply side of the industry, fluctuated greatly. This is to be expected. However, there are broader movements discernible from troughs in 1710-29, 1740, 1756, 1:762, 1772, 1783, 1800, 1810, 1812, 1817, and over the whole century there is no rising trend, as the ten-yearly averages of Table 16 show. table

16. Malt production

Average yearly malt product (million bushels)

Decade ^ 1710-19 1720-9 1730-9

25-28 27-41 27-30

x" 1740-9 * I75°-9 1760-9

25-93 25-41 25-85

Decade

Average yearly malt product (million bushels)

„ 1770-9 - 1780-9 1790-9 ^1800-9 1810-19 1820-6

25-69 25-94

27-18 23-64 23-75

26-99

Figures correct to o-oi million bushels.

The rate of production rose rapidly for a time after 1830 when the beer duty was abandoned. Not all the malt which paid duty became converted into beer, either that brewed for sale (and recorded in the excise totals) by Common Brewers and Brewing Victuallers or that brewed privately (and remaining unrecorded) for consumption in the households. The various other markets for malt must be considered before conclusions may be drawn about the meaning which the malt records have for the brewing industry. Important developments within the market for beer, which have been noted already,1 must be borne in mind in such discussions: the growing 1 Above, ch. in.

See also below, pp. 419—23. 372

Excise Statistics efficiency in the use of malt by brewers, the slowly rising technical standards in the malting process and the slowly rising quality of the barley being malted all allowed the brewer to draw an increasing volume of beer of comparable strength from the same quantity of raw material. Between the years 1720 and 1830 there is evidence to suggest that qualitative im¬ provements in these respects, initiated in certain areas and becoming more general over the country as time went on, could affect very consider¬ ably the conclusions to be drawn from the aggregate quantities involved. Perhaps, on the assumption that the strength of beer did not decline on trend very much, if at all, between 1720-1800, and that it recovered again after war-time lapses, the amount of malt being used annually in 1820 was ‘worth’ to the trade a fifth as much again as that of the 1720 level of technical efficiency. If we are to make the 1820 total of the weight of raw materials used truly comparable to that of 1720 (in kind as well as

quantity) we might therefore add 20 per cent to the 1820 total. This per¬ centage—an ‘efficiency increment’ coming from the combined efforts of farmer, maltster and brewer—is purely arbitrary.

It is not possible in

retrospect, of course, to make experiments to determine the exact degree of improvement proceeding during the period, or at what speed, but nevertheless the order of magnitude may not necessarily be any less than this.

If such an inference is correct, it is obvious that McCulloch was

wide of the mark in concluding that the roughly constant trend in the production of malt, being translated against a rising population, implied

to the same degree a steadily falling per capita consumption of beer.1 It was fallible reasoning in support tff the naive accusation that the falling per capita consumption of malt was all due to heavy taxation. The conclusion that the comparison of a constant trend in malt production with a rising trend of beer production reveals the degree to which beer was losing its traditional strength during the period would be equally fallible. The con¬ trast between the two series is sufficiently great to imply that some weaken¬ ing occurred, but its degree must remain unknown. The impact of changes in the use of malt ‘external’ to the brewing industry was probably of less weight than these"*internal ’ developments, but they worked in the same direction. Malt was used by distillers and vinegar makers, whose separate consumption does not appear to have been recorded during the eighteenth century. Within the totals of malt paying excise in England, or even that of Great Britain as a whole, these customers were not very significant in comparison with the brewers (although for the 1 J. R. McCulloch, Dictionary of Commerce (1832), Malt; S. Morewood, op. cit. p. 546. 373

The Excise System Scottish and Irish regional totals considered alone, they were predominant). Nevertheless, the steady movement of distillers in England out of the malt markets affected the trend of the excise figures in some degree, as it did the movement of barley prices in the short run. Following the imposition of the malt duty in 1697, distillers (who had previously used, it seems, only malted grain) began to circumvent the increased costs by adding an increasing proportion of unmalted barley to the mixture in their mash-tuns. This was noted in 1718 and had become general enough to deserve a parliamentary inquiry in 1745, when farmers and others interested in the barley markets opposed the attempt of maltsters (arguing, they altruistically maintained, only in the interests of the public revenue) to force distillers to use only malted grain.1 The investigations showed that distillers used a great deal of inferior barley (similar to that crudely malted for export to the Dutch distilleries) which was quite unsuitable for malting. One layman claimed that they also made use of high quality corn for this purpose and other witnesses argued at length to show how important had been the swing away from malt. The sur¬ viving account book of Cooke’s distillery, from 1765-6, shows the firm distilling from a mixture of rather more unmalted than malted grain (predominantly barley) and in later years the proportion of unmalted occasionally rose to two-thirds or four-fifths.2 In the years 1777-9, the Commissioners of Excise tried to calculate the importance of the various classes of malt users, with a view to a war-time increase in the malt tax. They presumed a ‘length’ of brew of five barrels of strong beer from sixteen bushels in London and four barrels from sixteen bushels in the country.3 This implied~tliat7^f-the_^5 million bushels ofjQaalL^aying^ d^uty on averagg-during the three years 1775-7, 15 million bushels were used.by.public brewers (i-i million barrels of beer being brewed within the Bills and 2-8 million barrels beyond them), leaving 11-5 million bushels of malt to be consumed by home brewers, distillers and vinegar makers. The corn distillers, furthermore, were thought to draw a tun of spirits from thirty-two bushels of malt (apart from their unmalted grain), and as they were distilling 16,000 tuns in an average year at this time, consequently used 480,000 bushels of malt. Vinegar makers almost certainly used less than this, leaving the bulk of the n*5 million for home brewing. By the 1820’s, the distillers were of 1 C.T.B.P. (1729-30), p. 16xxiv (1745), 833-7. 2 B.M. Add. MS. 39,683. 3 Excise (TLB), 1356, ff. 24, 39.

374

Excise Statistics even less significance in the English malt markets following their adoption of sugar and molasses to supplement unmalted grain as substitutes for the highly taxed commodity. In Scotland and Ireland, however, the English situation was reversed or seriously modified, as Table 17 indicates. table [source:

17. Malt used, 1823-g

Pari. Papers, 1829,

xvii,

129; 1826-7, Accts. no. 488.]

Figures in million bushels, annual average consumption between 10 October 1823 and 5 January 1829. Brewing Distilling England Scotland Ireland

21-32 063 131

0-29 2-80 o-86

This had followed the trend developing since the turn of the century through higher malt taxes and boosted when the ‘corn distillery’ was prohibited in the famine years: July 1795-1797; DecemberTSoo-June 1802; 1809-11 and in 1813.1 These observations must not, of course, mask the truth of an actual fall in per capita consumption of beer between 1730 and 1830, derived primarily from the substitution of non-alcoholic drinks, but merely weigh in the scale where the degree of that decline is under analysis. Cobbett’s hated tea and—to a much lesser extent—coffee were becoming more and more firmly rooted as daily beverages further and further down the social scale. The stimulation given to the demand for beer by the steady rise in population after 1750 was further increased by a switch in demand within the market for alcoholic drinks, as the gin duties at last began to be effective, cutting down the amount of spirits distilled legally but without leading to the orgy of illicit distilling which marked the previous genera¬ tion in London. The decline in the trend growth of beer production after 1800 must have owed something to a reversal of this demand towards spirits. Gin consumption in the early nineteenth century, particularly in the 1820’s, showed a marked increase. In so far as they can be known and trusted, the national figures were: Population

Beer totals

Spirit totals

1722

c. 6 million

1833

c. 14 million

6-i million barrels (1 barrel per head) 7-35 million barrels (0 5 barrel per head)

3 million gallons (0-5 gallon per head) 12-38 million gallons (0-9 gallon per head)

Date

Tea totals 0-37 million lb. (1 oz. per head) 31-83 million lb. (2-3 lb. per head)

1 Pari Papers, 1808, IV, Report.. .on Sugar in Distilleries, p. 84 (A. Young), App. 31; 1821, Report on Malt in Scotland, App. 12; 1831, VI, Report...on Molasses in Breweries p. 69 (A. Dunlop).

VIII,

375

The Excise System The prominent feature of the figures for total retail sales of beer in England is their steadiness when compared with the total quantity of malt manufactured. The excise gauge was taken after two stages of manu¬ facture had occurred to the raw grain, with the ‘cushion’ of a time-lag and the sets of stocks held by maltsters, grain merchants and brewers. On the demand side of the brewing industry there was probably more steadiness in the trade of brewers for sale than of maltsters—demand from home brewers tended to fluctuate more widely than beer sales of the publicans. These more peaceful fluctuations of beer production move steadily in cycles. Peaks and troughs occurred in the following years: Peak: 1705 Trough:

1724 1711-12

Peak: 1760 Trough:

1767

1732 1729

1775

1744 1741

1782 1774

1751 1746

1793 1783

1757 1799

1794

1815 1800-1

1817

From 1770, the curve begins to rise until 1800, being checked only in the bad years mentioned. After the unprecedented fall in 1800-1—when the incidence of two bad harvests destroyed this double cushion of stocks and forced brewers and bakers to bid in the markets for supplies to use immediately—sales did not renew their rising trend until after 1820. They climbed gradually until 1812, dipped to 1814, and after a brief recovery fell heavily again to the trough of 1817. These were, in the main, years of increased duty on both malt and beer, consequently years of higher retail prices. The levelling off of sales, with the decline in the total pro¬ duction of malt apparent in these decades from the first table, tallies in chronology—significantly so—with Professor T. S. Ashton’s account of standards of living, 1790-1830.1 Most of the elasticity in the production of malt was taken up by home brewing. As a whole the amount of beer sold did not increase at the expense of the amount brewed ‘ at home ’—the household production in homes, farms, country houses, colleges, hospitals and most institutions—until after 1770, and even in 1820 it was barely in the majority. The decline of the home brewer in country districts was primarily a feature of the nine¬ teenth century, but the dominance of the brewer for sale does begin in the eighteenth century, and the towns were the seats of his victory. Table 18 illustrates the movement, also the growing strength of Common Brewers.2 The movement was accelerated in a bad year. Quite apart from the increased incentive to evade the duties, this feature of the series might be 1 J. Econ. Hist. Supplement ix, 1949. Tasks of Economic History. 2 See Appendix, Table 36. 376

Excise Statistics table

18. Decline of home brewing; increase in wholesale brewing Figures in million bushels, correct to o-i million bushels. Common Brewers

1710-19 1720-9 1730-9 1740-9 1750-9 1760-9 1770-9 1780-9 1790-9 1800-9 1810-19 1820-5

Malt made into beer sold 88-91 95'90 93-31 90-64 94-21 94-51 95-oo 104-31 124-91 123-70 130-11 79-6i

Malt made into beer privately 163-91 178-21 179-71 16861 i59-9i 164-01 162-01 i55-2i 146-91 112-71 107-51 82-21

Percentage of Total malt beer used by sold C.B’s. 48-48 35-3 46-10 35-o 42-61 34-i 42-40 35-2 45-80 37'4 5i-52 36-4 37-o 56-38 40-2 61-89 p 46-0 ? 52-5 ? 54-6 49-4

52-52

% Beer sold brewed by C.B.’s 50-0 48-0 45-7 46-8 48-6 53'5 59-4 59-4 ? ? ? 660

anticipated on general grounds, for the Common Brewers stood the loss in a bad year as they took the gains in the good years, and for one bad harvest it was not customary for the retail price of beer to move. It was easier to pay a few coppers for drink than larger amounts of money at one time for malt in the case of poorer home brewers. This did not remain true after 1799, when the great fluctuations in grain prices and duty rates inevitably had their effect upon beer prices; but, before then, the profit margins of the brewers took up the main difference in prices in good and bad years. Profits as high as 30 per cent in a good year might be converted into a loss in a bad year. On the other side, in the case of those persons brewing privately, there was no intermediary to check the impact of scarcity upon prices, for malt prices did not mitigate the fluctuations in barley prices. The closing gap between total malt produced and the total quantity produced for sale to brewers is clearly seen in the successive bad harvest years of the eighteenth century. Table 19, showing this movement, also indicates the time-lag occurring in some years between the drop in malt figures and the consequent drop in beer production. The beer returns are calculated from 24 June to 24 June each year until 1752, when they change to the year ending 5 July. The malt returns remain for the years ending 24 June until 1820, when they also change to the same dating as the beer returns. The difference between the two dates is not important, since both malting and brewing ceased normally during the hot months of the year from early June, but it does explain the year’s lag in the returns in a bad year. The occasional appearance of such drops in the total production 377

The Excise System table

19. Malt production and consumption Figures in million bushels.

Year 1710-n 1728-9 1741 1757 1773-4

1783 1800-1 1812-3 1817

Total malt paid duty 20-29 21-61 20-78 18-20 22-14 17-24 14-49 18-66 1714

Malt made into beer sold

Gap

8-27 8-66 8-58 8-94 8-88 9-60 11-17 13-22

12-02

I1'93

5-21

n-95 12-10 9-26 1426 7-64 3-32 5'44

* The bad harvest effect on the industries 1773-4 was not as severe as in other bad years, particularly on malt production.

of malt and beer make it permissible, it is hoped, to compare the troughs in both industries when they appear in identical years or in successive years. It will be noticed that this time-lag does not occur inevitably. Many factors controlled the prices governing the grain markets—opinion as well as fact. Where the trough of malt and beer production both happened in the same year, it was generally the case that this was the year after a bad harvest had hit the crops. Much of the incidence of the shortage and the high price upon the production also depended upon the general state of the stocks in malting and brewing. For these reasons it is impossible to expect any universal rule about the coincidence of the trough in malting and brewing in the same year, or the inevitable existence of the year’s time-lag between the industries. The sales in the London area follow the graph of the total sales in England with great regularity. They were even steadier in most years, but they felt the effect of the bad years equally strongly. The most important general relation between them is that the London figures are about a quarter of the total sales, although London contained only about one-tenth of the country’s population. These sales will include the country trade of the London brewers, which will partly explain this, and they may contain the lesser sales to foreign markets.1 The problem of the relationship between the years of bad harvests and years of financial stringency is complicated, but the coincidence of the crises with the output figures of both malt and 1 It is difficult to be certain whether the export drawbacks have been subtracted before the totals were made up; being impossible to calculate from the rough difference in per capita consumption in London and in the country—because of home-brewing, which was predomi¬ nantly a country practice, and the great differences behind demand.

378

Excise Statistics beer falling in such years of bad harvests as 1773-4, 1782-3, 1793-4, is clearly shown by the figures. This is but one example of their importance. The impact of a bad harvest on the brewing trade, and the reaction of the brewers to it, are important enough for separate attention, for the in¬ dustry’s product was in universal consumption, and its raw materials were a direct, if processed, product of the harvest. The new grain would come through to the maltsters from midSeptember onwards, and they would normally take perhaps three weeks or a month in storing and malting before it was available for merchanting to the brewer. Stocks of barley were, of course, held by some farmers, barley merchants and maltsters, so that the flow of grain through the malting industry was not limited to the immediate deliveries after the new harvest but continued steadily through the winter and spring months. If the previous harvest had been plentiful, stocks might exist all along the line (except that it was not general for much grain to remain with the farmers) which would mitigate the high prices of the new grain in a short season. The brewer himself might be placed in a strong or weak position, depending upon his previous year’s policy of stockholding in beer or grain; although, however shrewd his forecasting, however insurance-minded he was about keeping his malt and hop stores full over the summer, two consecutive bad seasons would find him out; and, in the second season, he would either be searching for new grain at current high prices or using the previous season’s, also at a high price. Moreover, during the second season, stocks would have been drawn upon at each stage in the commercial chain and both merchant and maltster would be dependent upon the new harvest more completely than in an average season. How important forward-buying could be in these circumstances is made clear by the values involved—a major London brewery, which used £50,000 worth of malt on average in a season, might in a plentiful year have its costs as low as £30,000 or in a year of scarcity as high as £80,000. Working on a very much smaller scale, the same issue was clear to Ben¬ jamin Wilson. As he wrote to a customer in Prussia, ‘ It is always expedient for those who can afford it, to lay by every Spring a large Stock of Malt if it is good and sound, to begin the next year with as in the Event of a bad Harvest there would be great Danger of bad Ale or no ale at all. This I always do....n Obviously, when prices subsequently fell, as in the season 1802-3, he would be caught rather more than those who had not stocked up in the spring, but the practice was at least an insurance for 1 Allsopp Records: Letter Books, B. Wilson to F. Muhl and Co. 7 December 1803. 379

The Excise System quality as well as price.1 Apart from the possibility of ‘hedging’ in the spring and summer before the results of the new harvest could be forecast, brewers in London and in the country were differently placed when coping with a bad harvest. In the country, beer and ale prices usually varied directly with the price of grain each season (as did the price of bread). Benjamin Wilson, Samuel Allsopp and William Bass did not announce their prices to their Baltic friends until the new barley prices settled; and, although changing raw-material prices might be accommodated to some extent without changing beer prices (by varying the strength of beer and one’s rate of profit) in general, prices responded fairly rapidly each season to the harvest position. It was rare for Wilson, however, to vary his price without a variation in quality after he had announced it for the season. Once a decision had been made in October or November, a circular letter would go out to his customers announcing the season’s rate (with an explanation in terms of the price and quality of barley). From evidence of the Burton brewers certainly, and from implied evidence remaining in many other places outside London, it seems that there was not very much storage of beer (as opposed to malt) over the summer. That which was brewed in November would be sent out within a week or so, or earlier, perhaps with instructions to the customer to keep it for a few weeks longer till it reached ‘prime’ condition (which varied with taste). The shipping season from Burton to Hull, for example, was December to March, and it was the same season’s beer in the main. In so far as porter brewing developed in the provinces, however, beer stocks would have increased. This meant that the impact of higher prices in a bad harvest was passed on to customers directly for the product made from it; so that, taking the harvest year from September to September, it occurred largely in the same year, without much of a hang-over from time-lags or stocks of beer into the following year. The interval between purchase and sale within that time was burdensome on the manufacturer. When he was buying barley no credit was customary, farmers usually selling direct for cash, at least in Burton where brewers were buying direct from farmers on commission; yet, as a brewer, he had to give three months’ credit or more when selling beer through merchants. When buying malt there would be the advantage of three to six months’ credit (usual in both Burton and London); where selling to public houses, or retail from the brewery, money would return within a month. This meant an increased burden of circulating capital 1 The point being that a wet harvest put up the price but also reduced the quality. See below, p. 403. 380

Excise Statistics during a bad season, which would be worked off (in so far as returns came in their legal term) within the season. Brewer and customer shared the burden of a single bad harvest together. A drop in production meant as much a falling in demand from price elasticity as it did a brewer’s pro¬ duction being limited by a shortage of money for his operations, or by a lapse in general demand from the income-effects of a bad harvest. If there was a general decline in demand from the absorption of a higher proportion of incomes in purchasing food and the limitation of spending on drink to ‘necessitous’ drinking from ‘conspicuous’ or ‘pleasure’ drinking1 then it would be absorbed into the decline in demand resulting from the higher price, and impossible to distinguish from it. The smaller the ‘economic range’ of the brewer in purchase and in sales, the more rapidly he would tend to turn over his money and the more quickly would he pass on the increase in costs, or the decline in quality, to his customers. Peter Stubs or Thomas Greenall would find that their slackening pro¬ duction in a bad harvest year would come as much from the falling demand of their customers as from the pressure of liquidity upon themselves. The position in London was very different. There the porter brewers had to mature their beer between six months and a year in bulk before barrelling it and sending it out to customers. This entailed a large stock of beer being carried over the summer months and a considerable time-lag before brewings from new malt began to yield returns in cash. Indeed, where stocks of malt were large in the summer months to provide for the beginning of the season’s operations before the new malt began to come through, it might well mean that the impact of these prices took two years to work off. Certain innovations in the mixing of stale beer and fining were adopted to shorten the period in vat at the end of the century,2 but nonetheless the bad harvest effects took much longer to work off and were slower in their impact. Since most porter brewers depended on the malt markets for the greater proportion of their supplies rather than the barley markets, and both malt and hops depended upon very wealthy merchants and factors, they had the advantage both of six months’ credit for their raw materials and the possibility of converting some trade debts into long-term loans at 5 per cent once this trade credit period was over. Their burden of stocks commonly made the financial stringency of such years as 1772-3, 1782-3, 1793 important to them as well as the high price of grain in those years. 1 Drink had the peculiar commercial properties of being at the same time an item of staple consumption and a target for ‘surplus’ spending. 2 See above, pp. 77-8.

381

The Excise System Price policy was the other difference between the position of country brewers and London porter brewers (and so, by implication, the London ale brewers who kept a traditional margin between their more expensive article and the staple commodity which possessed the price initiative). From 1722 until 1799, the rigidly observed convention in London that prices did not vary because of the harvest meant that temporary increases in costs could not be passed on to the consumer,1 and that the impact of a bad harvest was absorbed completely by the brewer (and those who gave him temporary accommodation at a price). What curtailing of production there was in porter brewing therefore depended either upon the liquidity crisis affecting the manufacturer or on the general decline in demand—from purchasing power—but not from the effects of a higher price of porter. After 1799, prices varied more exactly in accor¬ dance with the state of the harvest as well as the changes in duty, making the London position similar to that in the provinces, with the added burden of a longer ‘period’ of manufacture. The crucial question, if the production figures are to be used for indicating the importance of the trade cycle in determining purchasing power and hence affecting all industries catering for non-farming demand, is to what degree the rhythmical slackening in production reflected the response of consumers to the bad harvests, to what extent the reaction of manufacturers to a liquidity crisis? Did the bad harvest primarily operate upon the level of production from the side of demand or from a factor affecting production—the difficulties of finance? Clearly, both were present and effective, but lack of precise evidence for policy decisions made articulate in the year of a bad harvest prevents any meticulous analysis of the degree involved. The trend in the porter breweries was one of steady expansion, fast enough in the case of the most ambitious to put pressure on liquidity in normal years by overcommitting the concern more than the ready money available from profits warranted. In a bad year, therefore, even with the acceptance of extra credit (which would put a 5 per cent burden on the brewery until it could be paid off from the profits in a few normal seasons), common prudence would force a halt in the policy of expansion in the crisis year. The great rise in debts which normally occurred in such a bad year in a porter brewery is never¬ theless evidence for a lack of contraction on the brewers’ part, and it seems doubtful if most of the leaders of the industry would have aimed at doing more than not increasing their previous year’s output, while running 1

See above, p. 112.

382

Excise Statistics down stocks, in a year of dearth. Optimism for the following season and in the ability to carry large debts successfully for a short time was securely grounded in past success. Mrs Thrale seems to complain more about problems of demand than problems of financing production in 1780-1 when she spoke of production declining from 96,000 barrels in 1778 to 65,000 in 1780.1 Again, when prices of beer in London had begun to vary, Sampson Hanbury complained more of the effect rising prices had upon his customers than upon himself: ‘I am not anxious about buying’, he wrote to Michael Houghton, a maltster, ‘ as we find the last Duty on Beer lessens out Sales beyond measure and entirely deprives us of all Spirit and Energy. I am fearful it will eventually injure the Maltster as well as us.... ’2 London production amounted to a third or less of the total production of publicly sold beer in England and Wales. The evidence of London brewers, who were harder hit than provincial brewers by not being able to pass on price increases in the eighteenth century but possibly in a better position for obtaining extra credit in a bad harvest, must therefore not be applied directly to the national figures. But it seems probable that the national figures do reflect in great measure the stagnation in demand for commodities other than food resulting from the redeployment of mass spending in a season of bad harvest. In this the movement can be seen as a barometer of conditions affecting industry more generally in the economy during the eighteenth century. The other factor, which cannot be ignored, is that the setback to production (and these are production rather than consumption figures) was in a lesser degree provoked by the reaction of manufacturers rather than consumers to the bad harvest, to which, of course, the bankruptcy of some of them under its pressure is testimony. The variations in the short run need not bepurely derivations from demand. But this again is a condition affecting the interpretation of all excise records of production; bricks and paper no less than those of commodities more responsive to everyday expenditure. 1 See above, p. 270. 2 Truman Records: Letter Books, S. Hanbury to M. Houghton, 26 January 1804.

383

PART THREE

RAW MATERIALS

25

MBE

CHAPTER XI

BARLEY AND MALT NATIONAL AND REGIONAL BARLEY FARMING

In an age when most of the national wealth came, directly or indirectly, from the land, the central importance of the brewing industry in the economy is most clearly revealed by a study of its raw materials. Indeed, looking at barley cultivation in the arable production of the country as a whole, and at hop-production in the regional farming pattern of a few counties from the point of view of the manufacturer and merchant ultimately handling the harvest, is to see agricultural development itself in a different light from most histories of farming. Agricultural history has naturally concentrated on the analysis of technical changes for their own sakes, and has given special reference to the changing status of those earning their living on the land. The effects of changing demand upon these developments has not been studied in more than a general way.1 In the following chapters, on the contrary, almost all other factors in agricultural developments except those which were connected with the requirements of the brewer have been ignored. Wheat, the queen of cereals, has exercised a far wider dominion over the text-books of farming history than she has ever enjoyed in the fields. Her more plebeian sisters have remained, in comparison with the prominence given to wheat, largely inarticulate, disproportionately so when their relative acreages and yields are compared. Nor is it only the assumption that the bread-corn was intrinsically more important than the drink-corn, for non-wheaten bread was an important staple for many regions of the country and barley, no less than oats, was a regular feed for stock and horses. Perhaps a little of the neglect shown by historians to the parent industries has been reflected back to the grain they mainly used. Any attempt to investigate agriculture with a view to assessing its exact importance within the pattern of the national income is, of course, crippled or complicated—depending upon the temerity of the historian— by the lack of accurate statistics, not least those of agricultural production itself. None the less, the views of intelligent contemporaries, even when 1 From the market end rather than the agricultural end of transactions very many of the conclusions drawn here are to be found in the seminal article by Professor F. J. Fisher, ‘The Development of the London Food Market’, Econ. Hist. Rev. v (1935), 46-64.

387

25-2

Barley and Malt table 20.

Agricultural yields, 1688

Bushels (m.) Wheat Rye Oats Pease \ BeansJ Vetches

Price per bushel

Value of crop jfm.

3 s. 6 d. 6d. 15. 6d.

2'I 1*0 1-2

12 8 16

25.

11

25.

6 d.

1

25.

0d.

01

25. 0d.

2-5

Barley

25

Total

73

1-375

£8-275

as challengeable as McCulloch’s, are worthy of remark, if not for their quantitative exactness—some can be, at most, intelligent guesses—then for their general indications of the orders of magnitude involved. With the estimates of barley, too, there can be some rough cross-checking against recorded figures; the bulk of that harvest was made into an exciseable product, malt (and some fraction of the remainder recorded as exports). Those figures in their turn are suspect, of course, and are dis¬ cussed elsewhere,1 but they leave no doubt as to the general nature of the totals involved. The best of the early estimates of the national income and production of England and Wales, without doubt, is that by Gregory King for 1688,2 whose skill in political arithmetic was acknowledged by all in London. Rightly, it is the one which is now most famous. Being intimate with all the national tax returns and Customs House entries, which provided what statistical information there was at the time, and possessed of a singularly clear mind as to the concepts and categories into which this mass of information had to be deployed, he yet had to supplement it, of necessity, with much speculation. This means that, while the pattern of his calcula¬ tions does not differ in any serious respect from that used in present-day calculations, the reliability of the pattern of consumption, in particular, must be suspect. He estimated the total acreage of arable land at 11 million, of which the gross barley land was 3-2 million. Of this, 2-2 million acres were sown each year, the rest being in a fallow or root rotation, so that, with an average yield, he calculates the yearly product to be 25 million bushels. The relative yields and income from other grains are shown in Table 20. 1 See above, pp. 341-50. 2 G. King, Two Tracts, ed. J. H. Hollander (Baltimore, 1936), especially Tables 7, 8, 12. 388

National and Regional Barley Farming table 21.

King's estimates for beer consumption, 1688 National total

Food made from corn Meat Butter, milk, cheese Fish, fowl, eggs Wine, spirits Rest

Beer, ale Total

4‘3 3'3 2-3 i-7 i-3

2-3 5-8 £21 m.

Per head (for a population of 5- 5 million) 155. 12 s. 8r. 6s. 45. 8r. 21s.

8d. 0 d. sd. 2d. 8 d. 5d. id.

£3. 16s. sd.

All these estimates were exclusive of seed corn, and it will be seen that King estimated that barley in both yield of grain and income was the most important of all. Table 21 carries the process of analysis of these agricultural estimates a stage further.

He takes here an increased average yield per acre of

15 bushels, so that, from the 2-2 million acres sown each year, he gets an average yield of barley of 33 million bushels.

Of this national total,

21-2- million bushels were made into malt for beer, 1 million bushels into malt for spirits and the rest consumed as food for man and beast. The 22^ million bushels malted (which corresponds well with the Excise figures after 1700) he thought would swell to 24 million bushels in the process of manufacture and 23 million bushels would eventually be used by the brewing trade. He then completes his calculation by converting this into beer at the rate of three bushels for each barrel of strong beer, and one bushel for each barrel of small beer—5'3 rnillion bushels strong and 7*i million small. Having dealt thus with production he proceeds more speculatively with consumption. The purpose of this section of his work1 is to compare the expenditures of England, France and Holland on diet. National expen¬ diture figures he puts at £21 million for England, £38 million for France and £6-2 million for Holland, but his estimate of the relative wealth of England in comparison with her continental rivals is shown by the break¬ down of these totals into consumption per head—England £3. 16s. 5d., France £2. i6j. 2d., Holland £2. 16s. 5d. The figures given which concern the consumption of beer and ale in England in relation to other expenditure are shown in Table 21. These appear satisfyingly final, but can be, in fact, little more than 1 Ibid. Table 12. 389

Barley and Malt a pleasing essay in method and patriotism. The production estimates, on the other hand, may well have a more serious basis in calculation, for the yearly receipts of the excise taxation existed for beer and malt after 1684 and 1697. Gregory King’s average tallies with them—he probably calculated from them—but even so there is the whole question of fraud, which makes the quantitative estimates doubtful before the mid-eighteenth century. The point stressed here, however, does not need to be laboured statistically, for it is the more general one of assessing the broad importance of the industry for agriculture, and emphasising that barley has been a Cinderella of English cereals and farming—hard working but little noticed. There are few other reliable estimates of acreage or yield for barley during the eighteenth century and all at most are the surmises of intel¬ ligent, practical men.

Charles Smith thought the average amount of

barley produced in the country about 1766 was 36-82 million bushels, of which 8-14 million were for bread, 26-4 million made into malt for drink, 1-36 million exported, and 0-936 million used for other purposes. This he compared with 4-24 million bushels of oats produced, 1-06 million of rye and 4-05 million of wheat—barley still just having the precedence. And from the total (at King’s yield of 15 bushels per acre) of 2-45 million acres of barley sown, malt accounts for 1-76 million.1 In the next century Arthur Young estimated 38-4 million bushels of barley as the total production, with 24 million of malt for brewing only, and 2-4 million of malt and barley for distilling.2 John Middleton, in 1813, thought 30-6 million bushels of barley were used in the brewing and distilling industries (but through his more optimistic estimate of yield per acre, his estimate of acreage to produce this amount is only 1-275 million).3 Others thought the barley acreage was under 1 million acres after 18004 in England and Wales. Beeke does not differentiate between the produce of the various crops on arable land in his estimates of national income, and Colquhoun gives a figure which is probably too high—yearly produce of barley at 50-68 million bushels of which 34 million went into drink and 13-4 million into bread.5 By this time, most commentators agree that barley had been far surpassed by wheat in acreage and yield. 1 C. Smith, Tracts on the Corn Laws and the Corn Trade (1766), pp. 141, 144, 185, 199-201. 2 Pari. Papers, 1808, IV, p. 84. 3 J. Middleton, General View of the Agriculture of Middlesex (1813), pp. 638-9. 4 W. T. Comber, State of National Subsistence (1808), App. xxv. Barley o-86 million acres; wheat 3-16 m.; oats, beans 2-87 m. See also L. Drescher, Manchester School, xxm (1955), p. 167. 5 P. Colquhoun, Treatise on the Wealth.. .of the British Empire (1815), pp. 66, 80. 390

National and Regional Barley Farming These figures may be thought to give reasonable estimates for the general extent of barley cultivation and the high proportion of that crop being used in the malting and brewing industries. In itself this is important, for it implies that changes or developments in these industries must have had a widespread and intimate connexion with the agriculture of the country as a whole. And during the eighteenth century, common opinion was that the production of barley as a whole had increased, despite the lesser quantities being made into bread for human consumption as the white wheaten bread of the south-eastern side of the country spread to the north and west. Such a conclusion may well appear very doubtful in the light of the excise figures for recorded malt production. These do not show any trend increase between 1684 and 1830, a fact which was often remarked on by contemporaries in view of the known rise in beer production and the accompanying rise in population, so clear to commentators in the early nineteenth century. At the same time, almost certainly there was a trend increase in the efficiency of the excise survey, particularly so in England, to a lesser degree in Scotland and Ireland, which leads to the conclusion that the later figures relate more exactly to the total malt manufacture and barley production than the earlier; hence to the inference that more barley was actually being made into malt in 1700 than in 1800. Clearly, this trend supports that of the decreasing use of barley for bread in suggesting that total production of barley was declining, given the roughly constant excise figures for malt, and the decline commentators thought had come to barley acreage. Against this, is the known change in the proportion of malt to barley used by distillers. By switching increasingly to barley, and avoiding the duty on malt, they helped to offset the two trends noted above, but the acreage of barley destined for the distillers’ mash-tuns (for England and Wales) was certainly not enough to out¬ weigh them. The trends undoubtedly occurring in the qualitative improve¬ ments in barley, malt-making and beer-brewing (which are discussed elsewhere) do not affect these calculations to any extent, as they lie only between known malt production totals and presumed barley production, whereas the pay-off from the qualitative improvements affects only the relationship between the malt production figures and the beer production figures. The other variable, use of barley for non-human consumption, is an unknown; although one might presume that it is unlikely to have diminished with an increasing population of animals. Commentators in the century and a half after Gregory King certainly assumed that non¬ malting uses of barley had increased since the 1688 estimates. However 391

Barley and Malt this may be, some of the other trends were working in a direction to minimise the effects of this. Overall, it seems doubtful whether production of barley rose significantly: while it might be argued that the balance of evidence suggests a slightly falling total. It must be virtually certain that barley production per head of the population fell. As against this, there is certain evidence that the period saw the great development of barley cultivation in some regions of the country, notably on the lighter sandy soils, some being developed for the first time in regular cropping on a Norfolk rotation. The eastern counties saw expan¬ sion, as did similar soils in other widely scattered areas of England and Scotland, such as Aberdeenshire and the light lands of Nottinghamshire. This implies that a regional specialisation was developing slowly, for cultivators in other areas must have been reducing their average acreages of barley somewhat if the total production was not to enlarge itself con¬ comitantly with the regional increments. It is difficult to see how such a suggestion could ever be proved with the evidence available, but it would not be an unlikely trend. Localisation upon favoured sites developed in many industries as national markets became consolidated under condi¬ tions of improved transport and more sophisticated merchanting. It is not hard to imagine such a process applying to the production of cereals. In comparison with hop-planting, however, the fact remains that barley is conspicuous by its universality, having a traditional role in most crop rotations, adapted more or less to a great variety of soils, situations and climatic conditions and supplying the hundreds of local markets which allowed rural England in a normal season to provide its own staples of bread, cheese and beer from within a very narrow radius of cultivated land. There was always local demand of a sort for local barleys, however poor their quality, and few soils could not produce the crop. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, as for so many centuries before, in these widespread regions of the country, local brewers and local maltsters flourished upon their local barleys, being driven further afield only in the occasional years of shortage affecting these traditional and natural sources of supply. John Bull, pewter pot in his hand and barley ears in his hat, stood for all the shires of England, whereas Hop Queens were crowned only in the most gentle of them. Above this local ‘sub¬ sistence’ level, however, the regional importance of some areas more than others as ‘barley lands’ lies first in the production of high-quality malting barleys in excess of local demand supplying the national (or more distant) markets; and, secondly, in allowing the working of land which was un392

National and Regional Barley Farming profitable for arable farming without such non-local demand for barley. These regions have a special significance as ‘barley lands’—barley being the most important cash-crop amongst the cereals, and part of a rotation which enjoyed sheep-production as the other pillar of a farmer’s income. In this sense, beyond the main areas of England already mentioned, the combination of soil and climate gave barley an equal importance in the arable economy of such special spots as the Sussex Downs1 and parts of Wiltshire. Much poor light land of Scotland, too, was made profitable for arable crops only by barley. Its profitable culture as a cash-crop in Ireland was confined to the midland and southern counties for the same reasons. The flow of barley from these most favoured regions, which is described subsequently, indicated their more specialised dependence upon the alcohol industries.

For them, barley had become a cash-crop in

a sense different from that of the older and more widespread pattern of local relationships, and their development owed much to the growth of urban populations. The map on p. 539 showing the malt surveyed in each county during 1801-2 emphasises the contrast between the local and the regional, or national dependence. That it was emphasised but not created by agricultural developments in East Anglia may be seen from the aggre¬ gates of malt duty from each collection for the year 1741 and for average of three years 1760-2. Admittedly, however, precise conclusions are im¬ possible, for much barley was not malted at its place of growth. The boundaries of these excise collections are not exactly known either, and they suffer from the same drawback as a count by counties in not being of the same size. But nonetheless the general significance is inescapable. Total receipts of duty were £534,695 in 1741 and £710,144 (a three-year average) for 1760-2.2 The ten highest and lowest collections are shown in Table 22. This leaves the other thirty collections to divide the odd £288,275 in 1741 and £305,820 in 1760-2 between them. The table indicates how important was the relative weighting of a few collections in the national total, and how small that of many other areas, in particular the metropolis. But no county was without significant amounts of malt paying duty, and, equally, no county would have had barley as an insignificant part of its cereal production. It is impossible to translate these money totals back into quantities because of the different rates of excise rebates allowed to the maltster when 1 ‘The greatest part of the said Downs which are in Tillage are annually sowed with Barley. ’ Petition from the yeomen and farmers on the South Downs, jf.H.C. xxxn (1770), 755. 2 Excise (TLB), 1758-64, P- 372-

393

Barley and Malt table 22.

Duty from malt, 1741-62

[sources: Excise (TLB), 1758-64, p. 372 (for 1760-2 figures); Harrowby Trust MSS. no. 525, pp. 51-2 (for 1741 figures). I saw the 1741 transcripts through the kindness of Professor T. S. Ashton.]

Years ending June 23-5. Gross rates of duty: 1741:

6if 43> 493 j. P. Dodd, ‘State of Agriculture in Shropshire, 1775-1825’, Trans. Shrop. Arch. Soc. LV (1) (1954), 26-94 See below, pp. 416-19, 468.

395

Barley and Malt table

23. Malt prices

Brewery Records: Rest Book Valuations. The books are missing for the decades 1760-80.] Figures in shillings per quarter, average price per decade.

[source:

Barclay Norfolk Hertfordshire Pale Brown

— — 33-6 41-2 64-0 717

10 *0

t

1750-9 1760-9 1770-9 1780-9 1790-9 1800-9 1810-19

60

Decade

Truman Norfolk Hertfordshire Pale Brown A ( 23-8 20*9 27-6 27-8

22*2 — —

31-7 327 396

34’ 1 40-9 716

6i*5 69-3

79'4

29'5 33-8 4°'3 69-5 82-9

This is a pattern of prices common to the other large breweries, and it evidences the general rise in demand which lay at the back of the rise in price over the entire period, showing also the growing differences in price between Hertford Brown and Norfolk Pale. The best Hertford Pale remained always comparable in price to Norfolk Pale but was less signifi¬ cant, one may judge, in quantity, because of the great Hertfordshire specialisation in brown malts. The eighteenth century showed a progressive closing of the price-gap between the barleys of Hertfordshire and other regions, quality for quality, as the standards of grain improved over the country as a whole. For the farmer, and the prospective improver of land in light soils in East Anglia, therefore, the extension of barley cultivation was increasingly profitable; while on much of the light land improvement was only possible with a turnip and barley rotation as the basis of regular cropping. Wheat would have robbed the soil too much to allow quality to be maintained. This is not to say, of course, that barley was the sole, or even the main prize in the minds of such people, but it was undoubtedly one such prize, and one very much ignored by modern writers on the agricultural development of this region. Turnips have been stressed to the exclusion of their main partner in the traditional Norfolk rotation. Turnips gave the winter feed needed to advance the quantity of stock, particularly sheep, reared.

But they were also most suitable as a preparation for

a barley crop, cleaning the ground, and no grain went so well after turnips as barley. It did not exhaust the soil, it was the quickest grower of all, and the regular cropping of barley with turnips allowed a wheat crop to be taken in a four- or six-year rotation—sometimes more frequently—which would have been impossible in any other way. In fact, it might be arguable that barley was the main pivot of the Norfolk system, which allowed these 396

National and Regional Barley Farming lands to be profitably worked for a regular arable cultivation for the first time; while, in its turn, the barley was dependent upon the prior crop of turnips. Agricultural development under a Norfolk rotation cannot therefore be dissociated from the growing needs of London brewers and distillers.

It was emphasised by implication, whenever a drop in wheat

prices brought disaster to the ‘ heavy clays ’ (upon which barley could not be grown successfully) but left the light lands less seriously affected— whether it was between 1813-40, after 1870, or after 1921—and it was laboured explicitly in evidence before many parliamentary committees. Admittedly the evidence from the latter source is seeking to establish a case on the part of interested parties; but, in the world of agricultural markets and prices, opinion could itself be a factor of some importance, while there was abundant proof that the broad facts of the case were not disputed.

In the controversies current before the abolition of the beer

duty and the restrictive licensing for selling beer, R. A. Slaney, the wellknown philanthropist and reformer, emphasised the point. ‘These light lands are naturally the least productive’, he remarked, ‘although, through the application of capital and industry, they have been made to yield excellent crops. But had it not been for the demand for barley in the malting trade, there would have been comparatively little motive to cultivate light lands.n The dependence is also brought out clearly on the occasion of the parliamentary inquiry into distilling from sugar. In 1808, the lack of demand for low sugars and molasses (partly through the closure of continental markets under Napoleon’s attempt to exclude British goods) with the prospects of a poor domestic harvest, increased the agitation for the prohibition of distilling from corn, in order to force distillers to turn to sugars. All the farmer and landowner witnesses testified to the dire effect this would have upon the barley lands which could not profit under any other crop-rotation. Arthur Young patiently explained what weight the distillers had in the London and Bristol markets, and drew attention to the slump which hit barley prices under the fear about demand oc¬ casioned by the increase in the malt duties in 1802. It was even asserted that Norfolk farmers imported oats for their horses rather than spare their ground from barley.2

1 Edin. Rev. xcvm (1829), 362-3. Slaney and the Edinburgh Review were supporting free trade in beer, and interested in stressing the advantages which would come from an increase in consumption. See above, pp. 242-3. 2 Pari. Papers, 1808, IV, Farmers in Essex, p. 11; Sussex, p. 153; Herts., pp. 96-8; Dorset, p. 129; Arthur Young, pp. 801-4. See also, J. Bannister, Synopsis of Husbandry (1799), p. 89; T. Comber, Real Improvements in Agriculture... (i772)> PP- 48-9; N. Kent, General View of Agriculture of Norfolk (1795),

pp.

I3_I5-

397

Barley and Malt William Marshall, perhaps the most responsible of the commentators upon agriculture at the time, considered that this county was by far the best in the land for barley, its soil ‘ peculiarly well adapted ’ for the crop and its seed-corn prized throughout the country. Always barley would succeed wheat and turnips in the new rotation while on the very light lands it stood actually in place of wheat, so that, in all, nearly a third of the arable in the region was under barley annually.1 Demand was partly local, of course, but, taken in conjunction with the known quantities of barley and malt recorded for export and shipment coastwise to London and Lancashire, and the unknown quantities from the more inland parts moving overland to the Hertfordshire malting areas, and thence to London, these general opinions underline the important role which barley played in the agriculture of the region. One might speculate a little further: much of the credit moving into East Anglian banks (prominent amongst which were the Gurneys’ centred in Norwich, and Lacon’s at Yarmouth, both families themselves involved actively in brewing), came from the trade in barley and malt—with that of wheat—or was directly or indirectly from farming flourishing in part on barley. So, together with wheat and wool prosperity, if these banks made credit available for the industrial regions of the country by discounting Lancashire and London bills of exchange broked by Thomas Richardson and his fellows, that capital itself had been partly made by London and Lancashire demands for grain, these being the two main markets for Norfolk farmers. The wheel turns completely.

If the Corn Laws were

helping to finance the Industrial Revolution, the demand created by urban, non-agricultural employment in Lancashire and London was itself stimulating agricultural progress in East Anglia, a region unsullied by coal and iron and innocent of the more obvious contact with the indus¬ trial or the urban revolutions. In Scotland, in districts where soils were thin and poor, but light as in parts of Norfolk, rather than wet, ‘heavy’ and ‘lumpy’, barley again provided a main incentive to arable cultivation. The story of the demand encouraging this agricultural development rests primarily upon the national drink, whisky, and, as such, lies beyond the limits of the present inquiry. But the growing breweries of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and other 1 W. Marshall, Rural Economy of Norfolk (1795), vol. I, pp. 235-6; N. Kent, Annals of Ag. 41. It is unfortunate that the East Anglian counties have not yet been studied from the crop returns of 1801. XXii,

398

National and Regional Barley Farming towns (brewing in Scotland being above all an urban industry) did con¬ tribute to this process, and the evidence supports the thesis suggested in regard to Norfolk.1

One piece of evidence given to a parliamentary

committee in 1804, mirrored much other comment: Before the introduction of the Turnip Husbandry in this County [Aberdeen¬ shire] [wrote a witness] which cannot be traced back farther than forty years, and was not general till twenty years ago—we had probably 14,000 or 15,000 Scots acres of what were termed our infield lands, annually sown with Bear or Big... .Ten years ago, when there was a liberal competition between the Brewers in the Towns and the numerous licensed distillers who were scattered over the County (which occasioned a great demand for Bear or Bigg) the great wide balks or Pieces of barren land, between the ridges of our Infield... were ploughed up, the distinction between the Infield and the Outfield ground was gradually abolished, and a great proportion of the latter was limed, and manured for a Crop of Turnips, and then laid down with Bear and Grass Seeds. Our agriculture at this time was rapidly advancing towards Perfection.2 For the same reasons as applied to English soils, but with the added disadvantage of a more rigorous climate, much of the Scottish barley grown was too poor to malt successfully, at least for breweries, and little of it could bear comparison in quality with the best English grain of the eastern counties. This meant that as powerful brewers and distillers, with cost¬ cutting ambitions, appeared in Scotland, they tended to rely increasingly for at least a part of their raw material on English supplies—as, of course, they did completely for hops. When the units of production were small, and the outlook of their owners parochial, the many small independent manufacturers stuck to the local market. It was only when the producers themselves, rather than the merchant intermediaries, were powerful people (as individuals) influencing their raw material markets that they were able to implement their desires for a new kind of grain. This is exemplified in English developments, but it is equally noticeable that the Scottish importers tended to be the large-scale manufacturers.3 Their evidence before parliamentary committees in the early nineteenth century suggests that the increasing attention being paid by Scottish distillers and brewers to the high-quality Norfolk and Lincolnshire barleys is one feature of the development of the Scottish brewing and distilling industries, just at this 1 E. Robertson, Rural Reminiscences (Irvine, 1829), p. 283. 2 Pari. Papers, 1803-4, v> Barley and Bigg of Scotland, App. 2, pp. 15-19. The same points are made repeatedly in the evidence given during the inquiry into malt duties in Scotland (Pari. Papers, 1821, vm), by Munro (p. 19), Sir H. Lumsden (p. 36), W. Proctor (p. 52), and E. Thompson, ‘a professional improver’ (p. 69). 3 Pari. Papers, 1808, iv, pp. 123-7; 1821, vm, Report... on Malt Duties m Scotland, Evidence of Berwick, Jopland, Micklejohn, Dunlop; 1803-4, V, pp. 787, et seq.

399

Barley and Malt time evolving large-scale (and well-known) units of production. It was, in fact, a mark of developing industrial maturity, as in England.1 As malting in Scotland was usually combined with brewing or distilling, much grain was bought direct by the manufacturers from English factors in London and Norfolk. Others imported through the merchants and factors at Leith. In 1808, these coasting imports of barley to Scotland were thought to be about 100,000 qtr. a year, three-quarters for the distillers; one-quarter for the brewers. Very little malt was brought from England.2 In all probability traffic of this extent had not been of very long duration, and one increasing incentive for it—apart from the natural economic motives—lay in the fiscal advantage during a period of rising malt duties. The duties fell alike on malt of all qualities, so that the flat rate of incidence increased the marginal utility of using the best. Some allowance was made for the lower average quality of Scottish grain by a differential between the English and the Scottish rate of duty, but the degree of this difference was not maintained as rates rose higher and the quality of English barley improved. table

24. Rates of malt tax, England and Scotland, per bushel England 1697 1713 1725 1760 1780 1802 1803 1817 1819 1822

15. 25.

4s. 2s. 3s. 2 s.

Scotland

6Md. 6Md. 6Ud. _1 . 2 7 9^ + 2 1U. 4~±d. $d. 5id. 5 d. 7id. id.

Barley 6¥U. 3-fid. .1 , 12 J 42 "T 2 1U. 8 id. is. Sid. 3s. 9id. is. SU 3 s. lid. 2s. id.

Bigg (as barley) 55 55 55 55

3s. \\d. is. 8id. 35. lid. 2s. 0d.

The increments imposed to defeat Napoleon, coupled with a probably increasingly efficient excise survey, had a marked effect upon the demand for inferior grain, particularly bigg.3 While this main flow of high-quality East Anglian barley was continuing to Scotland, a smaller but definite flow of Scottish barley came south to London. The double traffic in barley paralleled the double flows of beer. Although from the bare figures in customs statistics little of the economic sense of the opposite journeyings can be grasped, in fact there was a true 1 For example, A. Dunlop, the Haddington distiller, had calculated that English barley went ‘one quarter further’ in malting {Pari. Papers, 1821, VIII, pp. 31-3). 2 See below, p. 434; Pari. Papers, 1808, iv, pp. 81,173-4. English barley was used to make the proportion of malt needed for Scotch whisky; local barleys usually provided the lower proportion of unmalted grain used (for these proportions see Pari. Papers, 1823, xm, p. 523). 3 Pari. Papers, 1803-4, v> Appendices 7-8.

400

National and Regional Barley Farming commercial reciprocity between the two trades. London porter went to Scotland: a very different kind of malt liquor, strong Scotch ale, came south to London.1 In the raw materials of the trade, differences between the state of the harvest in the two countries, or price differentials changing within a single year, could give obvious reasons for a double flow of the same commodity —but often the basis of the trade was exactly the difference between the two sorts of barley. Scottish barley, for reasons of soil and climate, was of a lower quality on average than the East Anglian and most which came to Mark Lane was said to have been sold for ‘grinding barley’.2 BARLEY VARIETIES, CLIMATE AND SOIL

As with hops, several varieties of barley had been known from earlier centuries, distinguishable by the nature of each plant, its grain and its suitability for a particular soil and climate.3 Fitzherbert in the sixteenth century had recognised Spratt (or ‘Sprot’) as the finest of all, suitable, in particular, for good strong soils rich in organic matter.4 Other varieties were ‘large-eare’ and ‘beare’ (or bigg), inferior in quality but tolerating a more severe climate and thinner soils. By the eighteenth century, ‘ Spratt ’ had been outclassed by others more suitable for lighter soils; their rise in all probability being coincident with the growing arable cultivation of light sandy soils, which were intrinsically the best for barley when an appropriate rotation had been established. By the mid-eighteenth century, Edward Lisle described three main kinds, all of ‘ unselected narrow-eared barleys’.5 ‘Rath ripe’ (the early ripener) has been identified with still existing primitive strains such as ‘Old Irish’, ‘Old Wiltshire Archer’, ‘Nottinghamshire Long Ear’.

Its only advantage was that of early

ripening, which meant that it needed a shorter growing season and hence could stand a more rigorous climate and a heavier, wetter soil. Sometimes it was planted as late as April or May6, thus avoiding the worst of the winter and early spring, and harvested by late August in a normal year, escaping the hazards of the autumn. When climate and soil forced farmers towards the early ripening

1 2

Pari. Papers, 1821, vin, p. 61. Evidence of A. Dunlop, the Scottish distiller.

Ibid. pp. 50-1. 3 For a general discussion of barleys see H. Hunter, The Barley Crop (1926) and E. S. Beaven, Barley (1947), with the authorities cited therein. The main eighteenth-century writer quoted is E. Lisle, Observations on Husbandry (1757), vol. II. 4 Bake of Husbandrye (1523); Lisle, loc. cit. p. 278. 5 Ibid. See also London and Country Brewer (1742), p. 1; G. Watkins, Complete English Brewer (1768), p. n. 6 J. Bannister, Synopsis of Husbandry (1799), p. 89. 26

401

MBE

Barley and Malt varieties (as towards ‘bear’ and ‘bigge’ in Scotland, for example), quality in the grain usually suffered, together with yield per acre.

Attempts

to introduce Siberian barley for these reasons, with an even shorter growing season than the ‘common barley’, although much publicised, apparently met with little success.1 ‘Middle-Ripe’, Lisle’s next strain, held a medial position on all these counts, and was probably the origin for the Chevallier variety.2 This is a good example of the typical ‘ pre-scientific ’ means of improving the quality of grain. Instead of deliberate cross-fertilisation to breed towards a desired combination of characteristics, there was just the isolation of high-quality individual plants for use as seed-corn.

In 1826, a Suffolk

labourer named Andrews planted a few ears of barley which he had taken from a field and which eventually grew in his garden.

His landlord,

the Revd. John Chevallier, noticed that they were unusually fine specimens and cultivated them. These were then again subjected to selection in the remarkably rapid spread of the new variety, which had become widely known in England within a few years.3 Chevallier was of higher quality and yield than its forebears, with better malting qualities.

Its main drawback was a slightly lengthened season

(which made it only suitable for the better range of soils and climates), and, in this, it approximated to the third variety mentioned by Lisle, the ‘late-ripe’.

From this latter type was to emerge ‘Archer’, one of the

important stocks for all subsequent British malting barleys of importance. This ‘late-ripe’ was the antithesis of the ‘rath-ripe’—better in quality and yield, but more discriminating in soil and climate. Its demands limited success to the lighter soils—gravels, chalks, light loams, and those with freely draining sub-soils—where the climate was not too wet. Above all, it was the amount of moisture which limited the success of the barley harvest, conditioned by whether the kind of soil or the drainage held the water and how long the growing season of the variety was so that, for barley more than for oats, wheat or rye, there was truth in the proverb ‘Drought never caused dearth in England’. The combination of soil and climate needed before this highest quality

1 Monthly Rev. (1771), 396; lvi (1777), 561; lxiv (1781), 417-26. These entries quote an extensive list of books, lectures and experiments on the new barley. Such widely disseminated ‘popular’ magazines probably spread more information amongst farmers than Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society—which were also much concerned with such experiments. 2 J. H. M. Munroe and E. S. Beaven in J. Roy. Agric. Soc. 3rd series xi (1900), 185 et seq. 3 P. Lawson, Vegetable Products of Scotland (1836) [quoted Hunter], A farmer in the same year called it a ‘superior stout barley’ fetching a higher price than other fine malting barleys. Pari. Papers, 1836, VIII, Report.. .on Agricultural Distress, Q_. 17144. Evidence of R. Ruding. 402

Barley Varieties strain could flourish, explained the precedence of the regions around Hertfordshire and East Anglia as barley lands, which remains as true today as it was in the eighteenth century.

As we have mentioned, it had

a peculiarly important role for those areas of Norfolk enjoying the innova¬ tions known collectively as the ‘agricultural revolution’; but, more generally, it was still the lighter, well-drained lands which produced the short, plump, thin-skinned barley which every maltster wanted, and the strong, wet, and heavy soils which produced the coarse, hard (‘flinty’ or ‘steely’) thick-skinned grain of lesser value.1 Hertfordshire, Bedford¬ shire, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincolnshire had the main regions enjoying these optimum conditions. The most profitable use to which barley could be put was malting; and it was to its malting qualities, therefore, that farmers, encouraged by brewers anxious to maximise the efficiency of their raw materials, turned their attention. Only the best barley, from the best barley-growing regions, would make good beer malt, although malt of a sort could be made from lesser quality barley and distiller’s ‘ long malt ’ might come from the poorest grains. Its quality varied as much with the season,2 as it did with the soil and general climate, so that the choice of locality for buying was of the highest importance to every maltster and brewer at the beginning of each season; and the price for particular seasons bore little necessary relation to the quality. This variation in quality usually exaggerated the effects of a bad harvest on the brewer, although it was not advertised very much outside the trade. The obvious public issue was that a bad harvest raised prices by shortening the quantity of barley coming on to the markets: the concealed issue that the wetness which usually lay at the root of shortness of quantity caused also a deterioration in quality (sometimes to a very marked degree) which made the more expensive grain less suitable for malting, less efficient (and perhaps more dangerous) for use by the brewer. The quality of barley and malt is not a matter that any history of the brewing industry can ignore, a minimum level of quality being a pre¬ condition for the manufacture of beer in a large-scale brewery at this time, and a technological basis, perhaps, of the developments which occurred in London. At the time, the criteria for judging quality were limited to certain rules of thumb, such as whether, when nipped between thumb 1 J. Bannister, op. cit. p. 89; London and Country Brewer, ibid. See below, pp. 408-9. 2 Cf. ‘ It is not in the Power of Men to make Malt Liquor always equal because so much depends on Supernatural Cause. You cannot make perfect malt without perfect Barley and the latter you cannot have without a good harvest ’ (Allsopp Records: B. Wilson to J. Kabuun, 5 July, 1807).

4°3

26-2

Barley and Malt and finger nails, a grain would leave a white mark when drawn across a board. Yet here, as so often, the empirical tests of a pre-scientific age touched on the heart of the matter. Good malting barley, as has been stressed, was thin-skinned, plump and ‘mealy’—the opposite of the flinty, thick-skinned product of less favoured regions. The thinner the skin, the greater the volume of the interior, valuable portions of the grain, in relation to the husk. The more ‘mealy’ it was the more starchy, the more starchy the more material there was available for ‘modification’ (by the enzymes developed in malting) and the less nitrogenous substances were produced. It seems that the degree of nitrogen was the crucial factor: the heavier and wetter the soil, the wetter the season, the shorter the hours of sunshine, the rainier the harvesting, the thinner the grain (or the larger the husk in relation to the weight), the poorer the type of grain—then, in all these instances, the greater was the amount of nitrogen produced in the barley and the less the amount of starch, all being summed up in the contrast between ‘mealy’ and ‘flinty’, which it was the object of the crude tests to determine. Flinty barleys took more time in being ‘modified’ on the floor of the makings, using up in the process much of the starch and carbohydrates which they did contain: they did not ‘modify’ as easily as the ‘mealy’ grains so that a poorer extract resulted—hence the drop in quality occa¬ sioned by a bad harvest. More subtly even than this, many of the nitro¬ genous elements were left in the malt made from ‘ flinty ’ barley and many albuminoids (remaining in insoluble forms in ‘mealy’ varieties) became soluble, thus entering into the extract when the malt was used in brewing. As Hunter concludes: ‘A liquor of this character forms a good medium for bacterial development and the resulting activity may seriously impair the stability of keeping qualities of the final beer.’1 Thus, quite apart from the special advantages of porter malt, in general, the grain from the best barley regions in the country was both economically more advantageous to the brewer, in that he could draw a larger extract from malt made with ‘mealy’ barleys, and technically a more reliable raw material upon which to base his manufacture. It was upon this firm basis of relatively higher quality (in an average or good year) that the pre¬ eminence of the eastern counties’ barley was maintained and the London brewing industry enabled to bid up the price of the malt it sought, above all, from these sources of supply and yet maintain that the dearest malt was the most economical. 1 Op. cit. p. 44. Hunter’s discussion, pp. 35-57, is of the highest relevance to this problem.

404

Malting MALTING

The link between barley and beer is malt. Hence, to show in more detail the interaction between the changing patterns of both barley agriculture and the brewing industry during the eighteenth century, the nature of the malting process, the structure of the industry with the movements of malt towards its markets, and the nature of the markets which the brewer faced, must all be discussed. At each point the similarities and differences between the malt and the hop industries are instructive. Malt is artificially germinated barley, with the germination arrested at a certain point in order to conserve the saccharine or farinaceous matter in the budding grain which, in brewing, is turned into alcohol under the action of yeast in fermentation. In the wet harvest of 1800 farmers were collecting barley which was sprouting in the ear—still stooked in their fields—drying it in their ovens and using it as makeshift malt to the bewilderment of the local excise collectors.1 This was malt at its crudest, even a stage below the primitive manipula¬ tion of inferior barleys to gain the export bounty which was a feature of malting in some East Anglian ports. At its best, however, the process called forth a very subtle skill in the maltster. At the opening of the eighteenth century this was born almost solely of experience but became tempered by scientific knowledge increasingly as the century progressed. The largely inarticulate progress of rising skills, in malting no less than in brewing, was of major importance to the brewer in the eighteenth century even if, from the nature of the case, largely undocumented. However skilled, the maltster was dependent upon the quality of the barley, for only the better grain could be malted economically. The brewer as well as the maltster knew that one parcel might yield him malt with almost double the intrinsic value of another, so wide was the premium given by quality and skill. Little could be done with grain which had been ill-formed, badly bruised or wet-harvested. In the eighteenth century, with the price reflecting this opinion, the top barleys of Hertfordshire long possessed a premium, in the latter decades shared with the best of Norfolk, and the centre of malting skills undoubtedly was the area around Ware, the shipping point and the collecting point for the pick of the Hertfordshire barleys. Any description of malting must be prefaced with the truism that in a largely pre-scientific age, a nation-wide industry, with predominantly 1 Whitbread Records (Southill): MSS. 242-3; Excise (TLB), 1368, f. 306; 1639, ff. 196-7 and 22 November 1800; Carrington Diary (ed. W. B. Johnson) (1956), p. 25.

405

Barley and Malt local markets, employed many small differences in technique. When the government tried to make certain methods of malting obligatory, in order to safeguard the revenue of the malt excise from evasion, thus straitjacketing the industry according to the Hertfordshire practice, the storm of protest aroused in other parts of the country showed how much malting depended on local methods, suited to local types of barley produced from different soils, varying according to the season. In particular, there was no general rule about the timing of the various processes. The maltster suited them all to each parcel of barley and each season. Parcels of barley from different soils and localities also had to be kept separate. As one commentator in Whitbread’s brewery wrote: the maltster ‘has in truth his business to learn at the beginning of each malting season’.1 The need for regular germination of the whole ‘floor’ of grain being malted meant that the best season for manufacture was during the cooler months from October to May. This was exactly suited to the annual rhythm of the harvest and fitted equally into the seasonal pattern enforced on the brewer and distiller alike by the need for coolness in fermentation. Not quite the same degree of hazard attended malting in hot weather as brewing, and in exceptional years (such as 1830-1 when the demand for duty-free beer increased mightily) the maltsters might be kept at work throughout the summer.2 In normal seasons, however, both sides of the industry were limited to the three seasons of the year, with additional interruptions when the winter weather proved exceptionally severe. Together, this suited the similar pattern imposed upon inland water carriage, which was also liable to be interrupted by ice and flood in the winter, or drought in the summer. The barley harvest was usually in by the second week in September (sometimes, of course, long before) but the maltster allowed his grain to lie in heaps for some time in an average year to let it sweat; if the harvest had been a wet one, the grain was put in the kiln to hasten the process. The first stage in malting was the steeping of the barley in water, in the cistern, to begin germination. In this process as in the others, however, there were always the great differences in scale which mean so much. Innkeepers malting and brewing for themselves might use quite small utensils which they managed single-handed. On the other hand, in some of the Hertfordshire makings many quarters of barley would be run into 1 Whitbread Records (Brewery): MS. on Malting (c. 1830). 2 Pari. Papers, 1831, VII, p. 34.

406

Malting the cisterns from a barley loft above, and the malt house was designed for working large quantities of grains at one time in several cisterns, possessing several ‘couches’, and several growing ‘floors’. For his modest brewery at Burton-on-Trent, in 1798, Benjamin Wilson had several small malt offices designed so that each could work at maximum capacity, one being at work when demand was slack at each end of the brewing season and the others coming in when the full spate of production was upon him. The ‘New Malt House’ was designed to cope with 12 qtr. of grain at a time. It had a cistern measuring 112x60x35 inches, a growing floor 90 x 20 feet; a kiln 30 x 18 feet, with the distance from the kiln tiles (on which the malt was laid) to the floor below the furnace, 9 feet. This was an average, fairly large unit in the industry. When the barley had been immersed, the light grains would be left floating on the water, to be skimmed off for use as animal food—escaping the duty which was laid on the volume of grain in the next stage of manufacture. Certain minimum times were enforced by law for steeping in the cistern to enforce the swelling of the grain at the stage before the duty was taken rather than subsequently. After the requisite time (usually three days, or four days and three nights) the water was drained off and the barley left in the cistern for half a day to raise a little heat in the grain. It was then placed in a square wooden receptacle—the ‘couch’—for twenty or thirty hours, at which stage it was customarily measured by the excise officers being at the point where maximum swelling of the grain was achieved. If they measured it in the cistern it had not fully swollen, and the volume taxed would be much less: to measure it when spread out over a large area on the growing floor was more difficult in practice, and the excise allowances given maltsters at this stage more than covered the extra volume. From the couch, the grain was spread out more thinly upon the ‘floor’, the layer being less than a foot deep on average but thickening at the edges where most draught occurred.

Here the grain lay while

germination proceeded regularly, being turned with wide shovels to prevent the sprouting rootlets from matting together and allowing all parts of the ‘floor’ to profit equally from exposure to air. The manipulation of the ventilators to keep the floor ‘coming on’ in a smooth regular progress was one of the maltster’s most subtle arts. The whole process took from twelve to fifteen days, and needed to be carefully regulated with just the right amount of air, heat and light to encourage the best growth, yet prevent mould. The London porter brewers wished the shoot—the acrospire—to proceed nearly along to the end of the grain, just without penetrating 4°7

Barley and Malt beyond it. They considered the maximum saccharine content to be obtained if the germination was halted by drying out the malt when it had proceeded just this far, and are explicit in print about this by 1740.1 Maltsters malting for brewers in most other parts of the country, how¬ ever, and those malting ‘long’ malt for distillers, wished the shoot to protrude beyond the end of the grain, and the malt customarily had to be sprinkled on the floor to achieve this. The foundation of the different practice is in part that the barleys grown on heavier and wetter soils than those of the most favoured regions of Hertfordshire and East Anglia needed more forcible treatment with water to ensure enough germination; although this natural distinction was reinforced by differences in the re¬ quirements of ale by brewers and differences in taste among their customers which consolidated all the others.2 Certainly, too, there were good fiscal reasons to encourage sprinkling (which the excise authorities were deter¬ mined to outlaw) and the production of ‘long malt’ as it was called, was technically necessary for distillers. From the inferior grain germinated by violent methods into inferior malt (hence the grain it was easiest to grow on poor soils and that demanding the least skill in processing) the distiller got the high enzymic content necessary to break down the large additions of unmalted grain which he was now putting into his mash-tun.3 The long technical controversy in the eighteenth century about the need for ‘sprinkling’ became a serious dispute only when a law forbade the practice in 1802. Without any doubt at all, in the north and west of the country, in particular, some sprinkling was a necessary technical device for the production of malt best suited to the brewer. The fine ales of the Trent Valley were all produced by this method, which was not favoured by brewers just because of the excise. Benjamin Wilson, in a meticulous description of malting and brewing he sent to a friend in America in 1799 (out of the clutches of any British excise gauging)4, ordered that after seven days on the floor the grain had to be given a fresh supply of moisture by extensive sprinkling. However, just after the imposition of the first malttax at the beginning of the century, the Commissioners of Excise had

1 London and Country Brewer (1738), pp. 5-7. It was still true in 1806. See Pari. Papers, 1806, II, Report.. .on Sprinkling of Malt on the Floor, p. 40, Evidence of J. Delafield, a London brewer. 2 Pari. Papers, 1806, II, pp. 46-63, evidence of J. Reynoldson. See below, p. 436. 3 My attention was drawn to this technical point by Mr L. E. Hudson. The accident that it is the poor grain easiest to grow in thin soils in more rigorous climates which is that worst suited to the brewer and best suited to the distiller is one technical factor behind the dominance of spirits production in Scotland and Scandinavia. 4 Allsopp Records: B. Wilson to W. L. Bakewell, 2 February 1799. 408

Malting noticed an increase in the practice of sprinkling which they were anxious to forbid.1 The incident illustrates clearly how a tax upon domestic manu¬ facture at the point of production inevitably involved the taxation authority in increasing control of the manufacturing process to prevent evasion. If the barley had been gauged in the couch extra barley might be steeped in the absence of the officers, thrown on to the floor and brought into line with the legally gauged grain through sprinkling. Barley could also be steeped for a limited time, measured in the couch, when less swollen than would be the case with grain steeped for a normal length of time, and hence the duty paid on a lesser quantity. The malting could then recover its normal pace by the addition of extra moisture on the floor.

Such

opportunities were enhanced by the small and scattered nature of the units of production. Even when more than one malting was owned or controlled by the same person there was still the same problem of the excise men being able to visit each set of makings (as they could visit each small Brewing Victualler) only occasionally. It was never possible to have an officer on duty the whole time, as it was in a large London brewery in the eighteenth century. The chances of evasion meant that maltsters had to be forced by law to steep for a minimum length of time (even when sprinkling was not forbidden), yet had to have certain allowances for subsequent shrinkage in the kiln.2 Compressing the grain in the cistern had to be forbidden, with sprinkling, if the House of Commons could be persuaded into passing the bills.3 Throughout the century, the Excise waged a fight on two fronts: the major battle against ever more subtle means of evasion, legal and extralegal, and a minor skirmishing against a Parliament and a Treasury un¬ willing to let the manufacturers be harried too much.

Notice about

steeping needed to be given at least a day beforehand, to ensure that an officer could be present. The King’s locks were wanted on all the store¬ houses and cooling rooms, if not upon the cistern and the couch.4 In 1812, the Excise were even complaining that maltsters were busy installing extremely narrow pipes to lengthen the time taken to drain their cisterns, against which they proposed laying down the minimum size of bungholes.5 The resulting structure of regulations weighed as heavily upon the malting industry as it did upon brewing and those trades concerned 1 Excise (TLB), 1343, f. 3°7- See above, ch. x, pp. 350-5. . 2 See lists of regulations and the explanation for their necessity in Excise (1LU), 1343, ff. 307 et seq. 3 Excise (TLB), 1346, 31 October 1704, 24 February 1706; 1349, January 1730. « Excise (TLB), 1351, ff. 162-78. 8 Excise (TLB), 1395, ff. 272-80.

409

Barley and Malt with other excised goods. So complex were they that very few contem¬ poraries could find their way through them with certainty.1 Hence, it would be over-tedious to analyse them all in retrospect, and in any case the major question of the degree of their enforcement would still remain. On the whole it seems that, as in the brewery excise, the efficiency of the survey improved as the eighteenth century progressed but was never as reliable as the brewery gauge. In particular, Scotland and Ireland and the more remote parts of England remained regions enjoying a major degree of evasion in the Malt excise as well as in the Beer excise. Judging from the outcry at the outright prohibition of sprinkling in 18022 (which was an attempt to reverse a trend being encouraged by the rise in rates of taxation) it does seem that the regulations were thought to be effective in controlling maltsters, just as the Excise authorities thought sprinkling to be an effective way of evading tax. The question brought up in an inescapable form the problem of general nation-wide regulations having to apply to regional products and manufacturing techniques differing widely, and of necessity, from each other. Moreover, the law was clearly in the interests of the Hertfordshire maltsters (who did not sprinkle) and the London brewers, who were enabled to force all their competitors to compete with them on their own terms of manufacture without their advantages of developed skill. The fact that the government of the day customarily consulted the ‘ gentlemen of the London brewery ’—meaning the few great porter brewers—before proposing malt and beer bills, and admitted doing so in this case, suggests that the prohibition was not solely in the interests of the revenue. Following the prolonged uproar3 from maltsters and brewers in every other part of the country except London and Hertfordshire (so sustained that a permanent committee of maltsters4 was set up to face the authorities as spokesmen for the trade) the treasury first overrode the Excise authorities5 while a later Parliamentary investiga¬ tion sustained the opposition, despite the efforts of witnesses from the Excise, Cambridgeshire, Essex and Hertfordshire maltsters and factors and London brewers to defend the prohibition.6 From 1806, sprinkling on the floor was permitted after a certain number of days had elapsed. 1 See H. Stopes, Malt and Malting (1885), vol. 11, ch. 3. 2 42 Geo. Ill, c. 38, s. 30. 3 See the flood of petitions in theJ.H.C. in these years and those reported in Excise (TLB), I374> i376, passim. 4 Excise (TLB), 1376, f. 255. 6 Excise (TLB), 1375, 2, 3, 30 May, 3 June 1806. 6 The Cambridgeshire and Essex malt industry was orientated mainly towards the Hertford¬ shire marketing structure.

410

Malting In the four years of illegality some of the most respectable maltsters and brewers in the country had been prosecuted (including Sir Edmund Lacon at Yarmouth) and much malting curtailed.1 All maltsters and brewers depending on barley from lands wetter and heavier than the East Anglian had been prejudiced to some degree; and even some Norfolk maltsters had found themselves inconvenienced when working for the London porter brewers who had originally supported the prohibition.2 The final process of malting was drying the germinated grain upon the kiln—the stage of manufacture at which most of the differences were given to the various types of malt. The pale malts kept the colour of the grain because they were dried slowly over a gentle heat. For others, the colour might be graded from pale to amber to brown by varying the degree of heat involved. The tapering flues of the malt kilns at the end of the makings gave as characteristic an appearance to the little Hertfordshire malting towns as did the oasts to a Kentish hop-village. Their general similarity in appearance reflected a similarity of function. At the base was the furnace, above it, very often, a ‘spark’ stone designed to spread the heat evenly and keep sparks from the floor, upon which the malt was laid.3 For the delicate heats sometimes a hair-cloth was used4 (as in the floor of an oast); but, by the end of the seventeenth century, Mortimer noted that wire-frames or pierced cast-iron plates were becoming traditional, being intrinsically more suitable for the higher temperatures needed for ambers and browns.5 However, when Benjamin Wilson began to work a new malt-house in 1771 hair cloth and ‘cowkes’ were purchased for it, its product being pale malt.6 With the growth in the scale of production and efficiency in large makings, several floors were planned to be one above the other in the kiln to take maximum advantage of the single fire.7

In 1812, Whitbread s

maltster, Crisp Brown, was even complaining that the law did not allow him to use more than five floors for growing.8 1 Pari. Papers, 1806, 11; Excise Trials, 576, 29 May 1806; Excise (TLB), 1387, f. 27; 1379 f. 48; Allsopp Records: S. Allsopp to Board of Excise, 7 November 1809. 2 As was Crisp Brown of Norwich who was malting for Whitbreads. See above, p. 338. The leading London ale brewers, John Charrington, Joseph Kirkman and John Cowell, also peti¬ tioned against sprinkling in 1802 (Excise (TLB), 1371, ff- i70-1)3 I.e. [Patents]: Abridgement of Specifications, 1634-1866 (1881), no. 2116 of 9 June 1796. The malt kiln described by B. Wilson (above, p. 407) in 1789 had such a spark stone. 4 Abridgement of Specifications, 1634-1866 (1881), no. 612 of 18 April 17455 J. Mortimer, Art of Husbandry (1707), pp. 257 et seq.; T. Tryon, New Art... (1691), p. 60; T. Hale, Compleat Body of Husbandry (1758), PP- 3l6 et se98 Allsopp Records: Journal 1771, May-December. 7 Abridgement of Specifications, 1634-1866 (1881), no. 612 of 18 April 1745. 8 Excise (TLB), 1393, f. 105; Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4702, C. Brown to S.Whitbread, 12 December 1812.

Barley and Malt During the eighteenth century, a series of patents emphasised how much of the equipment in a malt-kiln (and a malt-mill in a brewery) could be made efficiently out of cast iron.1 The main theme of malting patents in the seventeenth century, on the other hand, dealt with the other main innovation: that of mineral fuel. Apart from the growing shortage and consequent rising expense of suitable wood-fuel during that century, which was affecting the maltster in common with other wood and charcoal users, the use of mineral ‘coakes’ gave a cleaner fire than wood. The maltster’s enemy was smoke which imparted an unwanted taste to clear ale; conse¬ quently the early patents for ‘ seacoal, turf or anie the cheapest and meanest fewell’ emphasise that any ‘unsavory and unwholesome taste’ in the drink from smoky fuel could be avoided.2 One of 1713 contained a device specifically to draw off smoke from the kiln in order to get a good pale sweet malt.3 Houghton had remarked that, as early as 1693, Derby-made malts depended for their superiority in clear taste upon the use of‘coaks’ (made from coal) and urged the spread of the practice. ‘Tis not above half a century of years ’, he wrote, ‘ since they dryed their malt with straw (as other places now do) before they used cowkes, which has made that alteration since that all England admires.’4 Mineral fuel had in fact been coming into use for malt furnaces since the mid-century.5 Abraham Darby, apprenticed in the malt trade, was introduced to the advantages of coke as a fuel supposedly from a malt furnace,6 and the innovation, together with that of coal carefully handled, soon became widespread. Hale still recorded straw, wood, dry fern or ‘brakes’ in use as well as coke and culm (‘welch coal’) at the mid-century,7 but this may have been for the express purpose of giving a burnt flavour and a dark colour. Certainly, in the Hertfordshire area, which was now dominated by the specialised London black-beer market, these non-mineral fuels remained in use for many years, and brown malts may even now be kilned over wood in some cases. So sophisticated an owner of makings as William

1 Abridgement of Specs. Ibid. nos. 358 of 28 November 1698; 594 of 17 November 1743; 1395 of 14 November 1783; 2152 of 13 December 1796. The latter patent of Lloyd advocated a 17 foot square floor supported by cast-iron beams and bearers—an early structural use of the material. 2 Ibid. e.g. no. 71B of 10 July 1634; 75 of 19 November 1634. 3 Ibid. no. 394 of 1 December 1713. 4 J. Houghton, Husbandry and Trade improved (2nd ed. 1728), vol. 1, no. 44. 5 J. U. Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry (1932), vol. 1, p. 216. 0 A. Raistrick, Dynasty of Ironfounders (1953), p. 23; T. S. Ashton, Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution (1924), pp. 244-52. 7 T. Hale, ibid. 412

Malting Wilshere, the Hitchin attorney, was still valuing ‘Faggets, stack wood, cinders and dust’ as well as ‘Welch coal at 50s. per ton’ in 1771-2 at his makings.1 CHANGES IN MALTING AND MALT

The innovation of porter brewing brings the question of specialised malting techniques into prominence for the first time, and these complicate the story of the innovation.2 The change was evidently as much one of malting as of brewing, yet the traditional story has it that a London brewer ‘invented’ porter. About this person, Harwood, nothing of significance for his presumed achievement is known. If he bought the new sort of high-dried dark brown malt, then porter owed its origin, in all probability, to an unknown maltster—probably in Hertfordshire, which remained the main home of porter malt. In any event, the theory of brewing a new kind of beer which had the virtues of a mixture of three or four separate varieties does not touch the root of the problem, which rests upon the fact that London porter was described as a thicker, blacker, more bitter and stronger beer (for its price) than any other which had been known (of any variety), and, therefore, must have relied in turn upon a new kind of malt which gave it such qualities. Who the innovator of this was, no source gives even a hint. The change could have arrived by accident or negligence, being the result of a parcel of normal brown malt fired to excess, which seems the most probable explanation in times when the chemistry of the process (as that of‘long malt’ for distillers) remained unknown and where no one could have had any knowledge of the potential advantages which a high-dried malt would have in brewing.

Even now, the chemical

mysteries which gave the porter brewers such advantages are not fully revealed. It would be wrong, therefore, to imply that there was a con¬ scious ‘search’ for a new malt which would give characteristics known a priori in brewing; or an inventor setting out to solve a problem in organic chemistry. The mysteries of brewing were considered as part of the nature of things long after the eighteenth century had closed, with certain known limitations about what would and would not work, about what one could and could not do with safety when brewing from malt. If malt to any degree changed its nature as far as the brewer was concerned —as porter malt did—then this was an improvement which was beyond the scope of his means of analysis and owed nothing to a search conducted methodically to implement known principles. Accident and chance are 1 Herts. C.R.O. no. 61122, Wilshere: Cash Book 1760-96.

413

2 See above, p. 15.

Barley and Malt thus enthroned in a place of honour at the origin of the great eighteenthcentury development of porter brewing. Once a parcel of burnt malt— over-brown Hertfordshire malt in comparison with anything which had then been malted deliberately—existed, shrewd men could see its advan¬ tages and repeat them, but this is an achievement of lesser moment. It was not even the result, apparently, of any deliberate search to avoid a growing problem, as was Darby’s innovation in coke-smelting. Beers had always been mixed in public houses; they had always been too unstable to brew safely on a very large scale. With the growth of marketing opportunities on an unparalleled scale—with the growth of London—there was an increasing incentive for the brewer to possess that stability of product needed-for large-scale production, but this could be as valid for 1620 as 1720. The growing market is one thing, which certainly explains the rapid development of porter brewing once porter malt was available, but until more evidence comes to light about the process of this innovation (which seems a doubtful chance) there does not appear to be enough justification for assuming that this incentive was enough to break through the barrier of complete scientific ignorance and set maltsters experimenting with their brown malts. The new porter malts, being more violently dried than others on the kiln, gave the distinctive colour and taste on which the literary evidence relating to the beer is explicit, and which must relate to the malt used. The hidden qualities which accompanied these appreciable ones were both good and bad. The good quality was that it improved stability in the beer, an advantage of incalculable value, far outweighing the bad quality, which was that brown malt made from an equivalent quality barley did not give as much strength to the beer as pale malt. Being stronger per unit of raw material, pale malts always had the premium on price, a shilling or two per quarter only in the first half of the century, but with a lead of perhaps 10 per cent to 20 per cent over the browns, grade for grade, by 1800.1 The gap widened as more accurate measurement enabled it to be appreciated more generally and more exactly; but for the porter brewer, brown malt had another compensating factor with regard to strength. Only the finest grain could make the best pale malt, the delicacy of the manufacture exposing all the natural inadequacies in the raw grain. The more strongly a malt was dried, however, the darker its colour and the 1 J- Mortimer, op. cit. p. 267; T. Hale, ibid.' London and Country Brewer (1738), p. 12. Contract prices from 1752 to 1818 (quoted in Pari. Papers, 1819, v, pp. 10, 28) taken from the books of Clough and Taylor, two of the largest factors, are verified by records in the breweries. 4r4

Changes in Malting and Malt more burnt its taste, so the more adequately did it cope with barleys less good than the best. For the middle grades of barley, brown malt was a much better brewing material than the pale which might be made from it; and for the London porter brewers this meant the ability to go for the middling barleys and leave the very highly priced pales to the ale brewer who could not do without them if he wanted to produce the best brew.1 The three kinds of malt (pale, amber and brown) in their various degrees had been known throughout the eighteenth century, and before. The London and Country Brewer of the late 1730’s had the remark: ‘It is a common saying that there is brought to London the worst of brown malt and the best of Pale.’ Pale malt, it was well known, ‘produced the most wort’, and brown malt ‘had its strength destroyed by heat’. Equally, the brewer had known for long that, when buying by volume measure, weight was a good test of quality.

Benjamin Wilson never failed to give his

correspondents instructions to seek the heaviest barley. One calculation made by the Excise had shown exactly how weights varied (Table 25), and it is unlikely that the brewers had not made these simple calculations for themselves, and seen how these results corresponded with known truths about variations in quality. table

25. Malt weights per bushel

[source: Excise 3069/E600.] Weights per bushel lb.

lb. Best Pale Kingston Good Pale Kingston Best Brown Abingdon

Best Brown Hertford Best Brown Norfolk ‘Long Tail’ Norfolk

39i 381 34

35i 34i 27f

All this was without exact measurement. The beginnings of systematic testing came with the general adoption of the hydrometer in the brewing industry which, besides enabling the brewer to conduct his processes accurately, in conjunction with the thermometer, enabled him also to ‘weigh’ the amount of extractable or ‘farinaceous matter’ in his malt. The adoption of the instrument had, in fact, received its most powerful incentive in large breweries, from the growing pressure put on profit margins by rising barley costs and stable beer prices. Although the yield of fermentable matter varied with each season in every district and ac¬ cording to the local mode of malting, Richardson and Accum were proving conclusively that, taking one year with another, Ware-made brown malt 1 G. Watkins, Complete English Bremer {1768), pp. 7-8; W. Reddington, Practical Treatise... (1760), p. 25.

M5

Barley and Malt was significantly less efficient as a raw material (as regards strength) than well-made ambers and pales, although Hertfordshire pale still kept its pride of place.1 It was the size of this gap which was surprising and, on occasion, when Ware brown malt might be 54-6 lb. per quarter, the best pale was perhaps 82-4 lb.—leaving a difference which no porter brewer could contemplate with equanimity when he saw the much smaller rate of difference between their prices. Here was a challenge to make a traditional product from a new mixture of raw materials in order to enjoy the advan¬ tages offered by the pale malts, and a new kind of specialisation began to develop in the demand of the porter brewers. Other sections of this chapter have described the role which barley cultivation had in the agrarian developments of East Anglia during these years. With the porter brewers looking with increasing favour on the pale malts, so the price differential between them and the brown widened. With increasing barley cultivation in East Anglia, quality was improving and the London brewer turned increasingly to the ‘ship malts’ for their supplies of pale. The interaction of increasing specialist demand and greater facilities of supply formed a happy circle of progress for this East Anglian trade. It is significant that when Barclay, Martineau, Whitbread and others moved into malting themselves it was to Norfolk rather than to Hertford that they turned. The Hertfordshire marketing organisation was already highly articulate, and brewers’ demands for brown malt were well met by commissioning malting there or by the native factors. Norfolk was the more rapidly developing region where prices were lower and skills not so highly developed, but where the quality of the raw materials was basically good and quantity was improving. Hence, much commissioning developed in the new region, for good barley was not enough without good malting, and the required standards had to be set by the brewers themselves. Rising standard of skills in the Norfolk industry associated closely with rising demand for Norfolk barleys, was partly a response to direct interven¬ tion by London manufacturers. The correspondence between Sampson Hanbury and his maltster John Kemp shows this process at work; equally that between Whitbread and Crisp Brown of Norwich. To get what they wanted, they had to fashion their own commercial links with the producers, and penetrate new areas with the spearheads of direct demand.2 As Crisp 1 J. Richardson, Philosophical Principles..., pp. 240-1, 271; F. A. Accum, Art of Brewing, pp. 43-6. 2 For further discussion of the acquisition of makings by London brewers, see below, pp. 469-70.

416

Changes in Malting and Malt Brown, a well-known Norwich maltster and merchant in his own right, wrote to Whitbread, his employer, in 1812: I find so much competition in our Market for fine barley that I have this week hired a Premises at Ranworth, where I shall meet the farmers every Monday, it is an excellent district for quality and quantity, and I expect frequently to purchase a good deal, the delivery being so very convenient for the Farmers in the neighbourhood of Blofield and South Walsham. I assure you I think myself very fortunate in serving such an excellent situation... A By such means did the development of urban demand and industrial efficiency in the brewing industry make themselves felt in the agricultural counties of East Anglia. Of the improvement in the quality of malt coming to the London brewers between 1770 and 1830 there seems little doubt. Both better barley and more skilled malting techniques lay at the back of it, while Charles Calvert in 1830 even thought to give a share of the credit to the higher war-time and post-war duties which, for English no less than Scottish manufacturers, increased the economic advantages of the better grade of malt. He noted that the large differences in price between good ‘West Country’ and Hertfordshire malt (still as much as

155.

per qtr. at

the end of the eighteenth century) had closed to ‘within a shilling or two’; and a similar process had been apparent with the East Anglian ‘ship malt’.2 A contemporary manuscript in Whitbreads made the same point, and Sampson Hanbury was able to mention in a letter to his factor William Adams in 1804: ‘ I am really pleased to observe the great improve¬ ment you have made in Norfolk malt. I really think the Pale equal to any Hertfordshire.... ’3 These differences in quality had, of course, long since been subject to accurate measurement by the hydrometer. One of Henry Thrale’s first 1 Whitbread Records (Southill): 4702-3, 12 December 1812. Brown was one of the leading figures in the Norfolk malt trade. He was the son of a brewer and vintner, and a coal merchant as well as a corn merchant and maltster. Apart from managing Martineau’s and Whitbread’s makings he was malting 200 qtr. per week in the season for himself in 1806, merchanting extensively to Liverpool and London, but latterly concentrating on the Lancashire market. He was leader of the Tories in Norwich, becoming Mayor in 1817, and had great plans for making Norwich an important port for ocean-going ships. He was a member of the Committee of Maltsters formed in 1827 to negotiate with the government, but failed in business (see above, p. 338 and Pari. Papers, 1806, 11, Report.. .on Malt Duties, pp. 7^_9> B- Cozens-Hardy and E. A. Kent, Mayors of Norwich (Norwich, 1938), pp. 151-2; W. Ford, Malt Trade and Malt Laws (1849), p. 14). 2 Pari. Papers, 1830, X, p. 25. 3 Whitbread Records (Brewery):

MS.

on Malt;

Truman Records:

Letter Books,

3 February 1804. 27

4W

MBE

Barley and Malt tests with Baverstock’s instrument had been to prove the high quality of some ‘Burlington’ and Norfolk malt,1 although it does not seem to have much affected his pattern of purchasing. Indeed, the swing of the London brewers towards Norfolk, as has been stressed, owed much to the keener discrimination of quality given by the hydrometer as well as the growing facilities of supply. As late as 1806, however, Crisp Brown told a Parliamentary Committee that in his own dealings in malt at Norwich he had recently switched from the London market to Lancashire because he found the London brewers still prejudiced in favour of Ware malt—to the disadvantage of Norfolk prices. This helped to explain the journey overland which Suffolk, and even Norfolk barley (and malt), sometimes experienced to Hertfordshire in order to receive the cachet of‘Ware’.2 At the Anchor Brewery, Southwark, the date of the swing to Norfolk barleys is noteworthy. Ralph and Henry Thrale had relied almost com¬ pletely on Hertfordshire Brown and West Country Brown and Amber Malt (if their summer stock-taking gives an indication of purchases), bringing in a little pale malt from both areas and occasionally from Hunting¬ don. Missing records may mask a move towards Norfolk in the 1770’s; but when the new series of Rest Books began in 1781 under Barclay and Perkins, ‘Ship Pale’ and ‘Ship Amber’ shared the major place with Hertfordshire Brown. The new partners were Norfolk men, and the economic trends which were inducing such a move to East Anglian supplies upon the London brewing trade as a whole, were reinforced, in their case, with the individual advantages of local knowledge and personal contacts. From this date, the quantities of pale and amber malts in their summer stocks were greater than Hertfordshire brown; by the turn of the century they were twice as great and still increasing; in the 1820’s every summer saw above 20,000 qtr. of‘Ship Pale’ in store, 5000-10,000 qtr. of Hert¬ fordshire Pale, and under 5000 qtr. of Hertfordshire Brown. Such had been the dimensions of the change within forty years.3 Other breweries do not exhibit quite the same precision. Whitbread’s trade ledger, 1746-52, shows him buying mainly from Ware, Hitchin (where he rented a malt house in some years), Bedfordshire, Harlow and the Queenhithe Market (to which some malt came round the coast). Accounts were being balanced quickly in these early days (usually ‘ paid in cash ’ appears within the month 1 J. Baverstock, Treatises on Brewing (1824), App. 1, p. 299. H. Thrale to J. Baverstock, 13 February 1770. Thrale had also been testing the feasibility of brewing with raw barley and wheat. 2 Pari. Papers, 1806, II, pp. 76-9. 3 All figures taken from the Rest Books at the breweries.

418

Changes in Malting and Malt direct to the ‘sundry maltsters’), only a few of the larger merchants he dealt with in London, such as William Thomas, having large accounts where the balances ran on over the year to be settled periodically by drafts on Hoare’s bank. By 1799, there is great reliance on Kingston Pale and Amber and then ‘Ship Pale’ (from 1809), as well as the usual Hertford Brown in the summer stocks. Only with the entry of Martineaus, in 1812, who were much more committed to Norfolk buying, did the entry ‘Norwich Pale’ begin, but these stocks, in common with other brewers, grew steadily more important in the 1820’s as they extended their com¬ mitments in owning makings. Benjamin Truman’s malt stocks showed an even greater variation, and his policy of keeping all raw material stocks very low over the summer months while he was in control perhaps prevents any valid conclusions from being drawn about the relative importance of his purchasing regions. However, in the early 1740’s there is, surprisingly, more pale than brown in stock (mainly Essex, and Huntingdon Pale and Hertfordshire and West Country Brown—although he drew pale also regularly from Hertford¬ shire). After 1745, the brown malts swamped the pales in the traditional picture of the porter brewing pattern; but pales never disappeared and from 1765 to 1774 large quantities of Norfolk Pale malt appeared.1 ‘Bear Key’ pale malt continued after 1774, most probably originating from Norfolk, and, with some more pale coming in from Hertfordshire, the pale malts thereafter dominated the browns. During the wars, total summer malt stocks were almost invariably under 10,000 qtr., but from 1814 onwards the stocks of pale malt rose to 10,000-20,000 qtr., leaving brown malt under 5000 qtr. annually. In comparison with stock movements in other breweries, therefore, Trumans seem to have bought a higher pro¬ portion of pale malt rather earlier than their rivals.2 Under the economic pressures on the brewing industry at the end of the eighteenth century, as the proportion of pale used grew larger, so the smaller quantities of brown had to be more highly scorched to bring both colour and taste back to that standard given previously by the use of a single grade of porter malt. While this remained only a question of degree, it was a private matter between the brewer, his maltsters and his customers, but ultimately the situation arose where pale malt might be used alone, with 1 In 1769 Truman had 5240 qtr. of Norfolk Pale in stock, a greater quantity than all stocks of brown malt. 2 It happens that no complete or easily interpretable records for malt purchasing have survived in any of the large London breweries whose records I have seen. Trends have therefore to be sought from oblique evidence of stocks. There is no reason to believe that this is fallible.

4W

27 2

Barley and Malt colour and taste given by burnt malt or barley, burnt sugars, or even drugs—at which point a formidable battery of statutes against the use of any substitutes for malt and hops came into operation.1 It was found, even before this, that scorched malt (when used in mashing as normal malt) did not keep its colour well during the final stage of fermentation in vat, needing to be reinforced by colouring added subsequently.2 This again raised the question of innovation. Following the new trends, Barclays, Trumans and doubtless the other porter brewers, began to rely more heavily upon Norfolk pale malts which were mixed in roughly equal proportions, it seems, with traditional supplies of brown malts from Hertfordshire—but brown malt evidently dried more violently than before. More radical change followed in the desperate years at the turn of the century.3 Shannon, in 1805, noticed the inevitable need for colouring matter, if an extract was to be drawn from ‘ all pale or nearly all pale’.4 From 1802, this was provided legally by Matthew Wood, who began a large specialised sub-trade by evaporating wort until it had the colour and consistency of treacle.5 Since it was made of malt and water only, he could claim that it did not violate a law, and being an influential man on the Common Council, he got private word from Vansittart, as a minister, that his trade in any harm¬ less colouring would be unmolested. He had invested £2000 in equipment before the general reaction against adulteration caught up with him, and all non-malt colouring was banned.6 Then, as a member of the firm of Wood Wigan and Company, of Falcon Square, hop merchants, dry salters and wholesale druggists, Wood became peculiarly vulnerable to informations and prosecutions for having forbidden drugs about his premises.7 By this time, the price of malt and hops had risen so far that it became profitable to simulate taste, colour, and strength itself with drugs, whereas before and after, malt and hops were the best materials for both quality and costs, particularly when the profit from yeast and grains was discounted.8 Rising imports of quassia and cocculus indicus were reported 1 E.g. 1 W. Ill (Sess. I) c. 24; io-ii W. Ill, c. 4, 21, s. 17, 34; 9 Anne, c. 12, s. 24-6; 12 Anne (Sess. I), c. 2. s. 32; 2 Geo. Ill, c. 14; 42 Geo. Ill, c. 38, s. 20-1. 2 Excise (TLB), 1376 f. 51. 3 Sampson Hanbury had told his malt-factor John Taylor, ‘DON’T send any more of the burnt stuff... ’ in August 1802 (Truman Records: Letter Books, 6 August 1802). 4 Op. cit. pp. 6, 234; McCulloch, Dictionary of Commerce (1832); Rees, Cyclopaedia (1819), Porter. 5 Patent Office: no. 2625 of 31 May 1802; Baverstock, Practical Observations (1811), p. 26; Excise (TLB), 1370, f. 432. 6 42 Geo. Ill, c. 38. 7 Excise (TLB), 1376, f. 449. 8 There were obviously no grains from a sugar-extract and the yeast yielded was poor (Excise (TLB), 1395, f. 246). See above, p. 235. 420

Changes in Malting and Malt destined for porter in order to give the bitterness and keeping qualities hitherto exclusive to the hop.

Salts of steel, or copperas, could throw

a ‘cauliflower’ head on porter, which was a mark of quality; grains of paradise, Spanish liquorice, capsicum, and many other more recondite and pernicious preparations might add pungency and heat.1 The same Humphrey Jackson, ‘of notorious memory’ (who urged Henry Thrale to try to brew without malt or hops), was the precursor of the ‘ beer doctors ’ and brewers’ druggists who now doctored ordinary beer, and manufactured artificial beer, sometimes with the benefit of the grounds from breweries, sometimes without.2 So profitable was the new trade that the Edinburgh Review found brewers’ druggists sending their travellers over the country with price lists, samples and instruction sheets to exploit the major market for adulterated beer—small country brewers and Brewing Victuallers.3 Some of these substitutes were not injurious, of course, particularly when used to get a head on the beer rather than to form an essential ingredient in making it, but undoubtedly amongst the smaller brewers and publicans, though not to any significant extent among the great London brewers, there was extensive and iniquitous doctoring.4 The smaller brewers—even more the Brewing Victuallers—were more hard-pressed than the great brewers, yet could not hope to raise their prices. Adulteration for them could be a desperate remedy against bank¬ ruptcy. Profit margins of publicans declined step by step as prices rose, and where adulteration became widespread many were not averse to making illegal gains by weakening and doctoring the porter of capital houses. For some years there was, it seems certain, a general breakdown in quality, as well as a universally admitted decline in strength, which enabled provincial porter brewers for the first time to claim metropolitan standards, and ensured the success of porter brewing in Ireland.5 The excise authorities became intractable in their attempts to stem adulteration, which prejudiced the revenue as well as public health, and 1 A large literature exists on adulteration. Lists of ingredients appear in Tryon, New Art of Brewing (1691), p. 38; Morewood, op. cit. p. 538; P. Boyle, Publican’s Daily Companion (1795), p. 17 (giving instructions for their use); London and Country Brewer (1742), pp. 31, 37, 56; Flower, Observations... (1802), pp. 22-3; Baverstock, Practical Observations... (1811), p. 486; Malcolm, Agriculture of Surrey (1805), 1, 292-7; Monthly Mag. xxiv (pt. 11), 346-8, 453-6; F. A. Accum, Treatise... (1821), p. 245. Also Pari. Papers, 1819, v, passim] 1830, x, passim. 2 Excise (TLB), 1366, f. 275. 3 Vol. xxxm, pp. 131 et seq. 4 Pari. Papers, 1819, V, pp. 16, 82; 1830, x, 22-7, 30-1, 69, 105; 1831, VII, pp. 57-8; Observations.. .to Grand Jury of Somerset (1821). 5 As Sheridan unfairly guyed his benefactor, Whitbread: ‘The tax on malt’s the cause I fear But what has that to do with beer?’ 42I

Barley and Malt after some brewers were prosecuted for using Wood’s colouring (which he had started making also from molasses) the battle began.1 Meux and Ramsbottom led a concerted move from the lesser London and country brewers for the use of Wood’s substitutes, which was opposed by Whit¬ bread, Barclay, Felix Calvert and Martineau.2 They used a wort-extract by this time themselves, it seems, and felt that a trade in sugar and malt colouring would prove disadvantageous both through increasing adultera¬ tion generally, and reducing the economic pressure on their smaller com¬ petitors. The Excise Commissioners staved off petitions and pressure from Wood and many smaller brewers, who began to force the issue in Parlia¬ ment after 1807. From the first, Wood himself was out for the monopoly of sugar-colouring (altruistically, of course, to prevent the chance of fraud by less responsible competitors) and added the momentum of the West India interest to his cause in Parliament. Only the large porter brewers, also represented in the Commons, stood against this rising pressure. ‘We have no doubt’, he wrote to Whitbread in 1807, ‘if all the London porter brewers would encourage it, that it would be immediately granted.’3 To Whitbread, as to other M.P.s, he proposed ensuring ‘respectability’ in the new trade by an annual licence of £200 and a duty of 9s. per barrel. With mounting pressure from the sugar merchants and planters (in what was a minor aspect of their primary goal to get malt distilling stopped and sugar distilling allowed), in 1810 the threat of renewed price rises in malt caused the porter brewers in Parliament to relax their pressure. Colouring made only from West Indian muscovados was authorised for use in porter breweries after June 1811—against which the excluded ale and table beer brewers petitioned unsuccessfully, demanding admission to equal privi¬ leges.4 Immediately a profitable side-trade sprang up round the sugar refineries, which had paid £82,000 to the revenue for licences and duty by the time the bill was repealed in 1816.5 The excise authorities then refused all demands for compensation by those mushroom firms whose lives depended purely on this temporary legislative fiat.6 Wood continued through these years making his malt-colouring; and, following the renewed prohibition of sugar-colouring, he was joined by 1 Excise (TLB), 1370, ff. 432, 436. 2 Excise (TLB), 1373, ff. 408-9; 1376, ff. 35, 51, 449. 3 Whitbread Records (Southill): 4650. Messrs Wood, Wigan to S. Whitbread, i7March 1807. 4 Jf.H.C. lxv, 383, 444; lxvi, 353, 453; 51 Geo. Ill c. 87; Excise (TLB), 1390, ff. 967, 256-7; 1396, f. 304. 6 56 Geo. Ill, c. 58. The annual licence was £5 and the duty iot. per gallon (Jf.H.C. lxv, 444). 6 Excise (TLB), 1405, f. 321. 422

Changes in Malting and Malt several other projectors who applied coffee-roasting techniques to supply porter breweries with the essential means of darkening beer, now brewed primarily from amber and pale malts.1 These burnt or black roasted malts did not add any strength to the beer (not having the function of malt at all),2 unlike a newly patented ‘ highly torrified ’ malt made by Daniel Wheeler in 1817.3 This was also roasted in a cylinder, but slowly enough to retain some strength as well as giving the correct taste and colour. Two parts of this patent malt could be used with three parts of pale, on the late eight¬ eenth-century plan. Most brewers turned to the roasted malts eventually: Barclays first valued stocks of Patent Malt in June 1820, Whitbreads in 1817, and Trumans ‘Black Malt’ in 1826.4 Under strict legal control, having to be made at least one mile from ordinary makings, rough-dried and roasted on the same premises, and paying both a stiff duty and a licence fee (all at the suggestion of the few roasters in London), this branch of the trade settled down to a comfortable monopoly existence in the hands of half a dozen firms.5 Despite changes in the structure of malt marketing during the eighteenth century, which the main sections of chapter xm will describe, relatively little change in the scale of production came to individual makings. The town of Ware alone contained thirty-three makings in 1788 (making 1370 qtr. per week in the season), while at the beginning of the century Derby had seventy-six malt-houses (many of them working for the Lanca¬ shire and Cheshire market).6 Although it has been mentioned that, as the century progressed, the size of individual makings (as evidenced by the number of floors in a single plant) increased, and the unit of ownership grew, with individuals enlarging the number of makings under their control up to a dozen or more, nevertheless the structure of production in the industry remained very different from that of brewing. Only in the nineteenth century did revolutionary changes in methods of production lead to the great increase in the size and productivity of individual makings. Just how humble (and local) so much of the making industry could be is 1 Pari. Papers, 1831, VII, pp. 40, 85; Accum, Art of Brewing (1821), pp. 26-7; Patent Office, Spec. no. 4254 of 5 May 1818; 4907 of 28 February 1824. 2 Pari. Papers, 1835, xxxi, 15th Report... App. 59, pp. 46-73 Patent Office, no. 4112 of 28 March 1817; Pari. Papers, 1831, VII, p. 22; 1819, V, pp. 82-3 (evidence of Wheeler). Wheeler had previously made sugar-colouring at Charles Street, Drury Lane (Excise (TLB), 1405, p. 321). 4 Rest Books at the Breweries. These summer stock valuations do not necessarily give the date of the innovation, of course. 6 W. Ford, Malt Trade and Malt Laws (1849), pp. 68-70. 6 Excise (TLB), 1360, f. 15; J. Houghton, Husbandry and Trade Improved, vol. 1, no.37.

423

Barley and Malt instanced by the surviving account book (1821-30) of Ralph Thrale at Hertford.1 For such as he it is difficult to speak of‘history’ in the sense of development at all. A centuries-old skill would be passed to the rising generation without change of technique or market or scale of production. Thrale worked but one floor, he sold small parcels of malt to local farmers (often he was merely malting their own barley for them) and a few pounds of hops. He profited by an occasional pig which he was able to rear (like the miller) on the ‘ offal ’ of his trade—the light grains skimmed from the cistern and the dust and ‘coombs’ screened from the finished malt. He bought as locally as he sold; the London market had no direct interest for him, and even the rising local brewers (who malted for themselves) might be hostile forces diminishing the home-brewers he looked to for custom. For Thrale, even Peter Stubs would be in a large way of trade. Yet in those areas where home-brewing was the rule the Ralph Thrales were the typical figures, and even in 1830 numerically (though not commerically in the proportion of production they controlled) the small men were dominant (Table 26). table

26. Number of malting licences, 1831-2

[source: McCulloch, Dictionary... (1832).]

Qtr. Those malting up to „ „ between 5) ,,

5? ,,

5° 50-250

250-500 500

>> above

1 Herts. C.R.O. MS. no. 66,913.

424

No. 2,339 4,449 2,304 1,423

CHAPTER XII

THE TRADE IN GRAIN IMPORTS AND EXPORTS

The recorded figures for the imports of raw materials for brewing are overwhelmed by the export totals for barley, malt, hops, and beer in all except the occasional year of scarcity. The farmers’ toast to the brewer as a champion of tillage equal to the miller is fully borne out: in no year in the entire period was any significant proportion of beer or spirits brewed from foreign corn. Malt imports were ^prohibited in normal years by the Corn Laws, in any event, and barley imports remained small in comparison with those of wheat and oats. In only eighteen years between 1765 and 1830 did barley imports rise above 100,000 qtr. and in only three of these years were they above 300,000 qtr. (1818, 696,300 qtr.; 1819, 373,400 qtr.; 1825,425,900 qtr.).1 The relative positions of the various grains in the last quarter of the eighteenth century is shown in Table 27. TABLE

27. Imports of barley, wheat, oats into Great Britain, 1775-1810 [source: Pari. Papers, 1812, x, 13.]

Figures in million qtr. Totals for twelve-year periods. Year 1775-86 1787-98 1799-1810

Barley

Wheat

Oats

o-57 079 0-46

2-15

3-39 7'97 7-27

3-89 8-23

Equally, imports from Ireland after 1800, which no longer appear in the foreign trade totals, never grew to great proportions and were usually overbalanced by British exports of malt to Ireland. The largest shipments inward in a single year reached 165,000 qtr. (in the year ending 5 January 1826), but the average for the decade 1820-30 was less than half that quantity, and had been under 20,000 qtr. annually for the war years. When this level of shipment of barley from Ireland is compared with the remark¬ able increase in the flow of oats (rising from an average of 200,000 qtr. a year at the turn of the century, to above a million qtr. after 1820 and 1 Pari. Papers, 1826-7, XVI, 496-7, 498, 505; P.R.O. T. 64/274/90-5.

425

The Trade in Grain above 2 million after 1835), or even wheat, its relative insignificance is apparent.1 In the previous century, Ireland had been, with Holland, Denmark, and the countries along the south shore oT the Britiey-the source of the main barley imports, and^lo~fh”ey‘re'mained in the early.mineteenth century, despite the flows of malt and barley in the reverse direction as the dictates of the season (and sometimes the changes in international demand within a season) varied.2 The barley from northern Europe went, above all, to London; that from Ireland, above all, to Glasgow, with smaller quantities to Liverpool and Bristol and only a trickle flowing occasionally round to the South Coast and London. However, London’s horses provided the great market for Irish oats.3 The general position of the malt and barley exports from Great Britain (including, that is, shipments to Ireland) throughout the eighteenth century was that the outflow of barley in a normal season balanced, or topped the inflow; and that, even in a short harvest when higher prices attracted more barley into the country than went out of it, the debit balance on barley was more than counterbalanced by the steady exports of malt. When to this is added the export of beer—or these grains in a processed form—and that of hops, it will be seen that Britain exported a surplus to her neigh¬ bours as regards the raw materials, the intermediary products and final product of the brewing industry. This position (in corn products) was only reversed for spirits.4 Barley exports—like barley imports—were the marginal factors in this flow of grain. A short harvest at home would attract up to 100,000 qtr. or more into the country, an insignificant quantity compared with the total consumed in the land, but often enough to break prices somewhat at the ports, particularly London. Equally, it would cut off exports, except of the worst grain (which had its steadiest market in foreign distilleries) and of 1 Pari. Papers, 1826-7, xvi, S°6; 1843, Lin, 78. Wheat imports in the late 1820’s were between 300,000-400,000 qtr. annually. Virtually no malt was imported from Ireland until 1824, and very small quantities thereafter. 2 Lists of countries of origin of barley imports are given in P.R.O. T. 64/274/86-95. 3 Pari. Papers, 1826-7, XVI, 498; 1839, xlvi, 83. 4 The general sources for export and import figures are Select Essays in Husbandry [extracted from Museum Rusticum] (Edinburgh, 1767); Combrune, Enquiry into Price of Wheat, Malt... (1768), giving annual totals of malt and barley exports 1696-1764. These figures derive from the official statistics, being supported by Cholomdeley (Houghton) MSS. in the University Library Cambridge (Bundle 34/22), which reference I owe to Dr J. H. Plumb. Other figures for many scattered years in the century are to be found in P.R.O. T. 64/274 (imports and exports). Barley imports 1775-1830 are printed in Pari. Papers, 1812, x, 13; 1849, L, 393; and malt exports after 1770 in Pari. Papers, 1803-4, VII, 491-9. 426

Imports and Exports shipments abroad from a part of the country less affected by shortage. Correspondingly, barley exports expanded in the years of abundance, but never to rival the outflow of malt, which was commercially and fiscally more profitable. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the recorded figures for barley exports rose above 40,000 qtr. only four times (to 71,500 qtr. in 1703; 52,500 in 1713; 71,100 in 1718 and 45,800 in 1723). In the second quarter, fluctuations were a little greater, and in particular, during the latter stages of the burst of agricultural production and low prices between 1730-50, exports reached 158,700 qtr. in 1746, and 224,500 in 1750—the highest ever recorded to that date. They did not touch 100,000 qtr. again until 1762. Thereafter, with the steady rise in numbers at home stimulating beer consumption and barley prices, exports of both malt and barley declined in trend—although beer exports continued to rise for another generation.1 If barley exports and imports showed the greatest fluctuations, dying away to zero in some seasons (such as 1699, 1728, or 1758 for exports and 1769-71 for imports), malt remained a much .more important, and much steadier export. Indeed, the flow of malt outweighed that of any other grain, including wheat, for most of the eighteenth century—a fact which has been masked by the easily accessible aggregate figures of all grain exported and the greater publicity given to wheat exports. Naturally, the trade fluctuated with the state of the home demand in relation to supply and the incentives given in years when the bounty of is. 6d. per qtr. applied, but there was scarcely a year when the total fell below 100,000 qtr. and not a few when it was above 300,000. TABLE

28. Malt exports from England, ij 00-1800

Figures in 1000 quarters

Annual average per decade

Year

Quantity

Year

Quantity

1700-9 1710-9 1720-9 1720-9

101-4 209-1 245-2 245-2 185-1 236-5*

1750-9 — 1770-9 1780-9 1790-9

229-0* — 67-6 96-8 13-1

1730-9 1740-9

# The annual average for the decade 1746-55 was 315,700 qtr.

Certain of the sudden slumps in the trade owed their existence to war abroad as much as scarcity at home. For example, the decline to 10,700 qtr. in 1758 from the level of 300,000 running in the decade up to 1756, as 1 See above, pp. 153, 172. 427

The Trade in Grain that to under iCLQoe-qtrrTirthe, years after 17Q2 may be explained by hostile fleets in the Channel or hostile armies in Holland—the destina¬ tion for so many of the shipments. In other years, such as 1773-4, it was more probably the harvest. After Holland, by far the greatest foreign market for British malt, came Ireland—and both were served principally from East Anglian ports. In some years, such as 1757-8, 1774-5, a^ exports were swallowed up by the mash-tuns of Dutch distillers; in others, as 1769-70, Ireland received the most (i.e. 60,700 qtr.; Holland, 59,300 qtr.; total exported—125,500 qtr.). Literary evidence from East Anglia certainly suggests that the staple trade was across the North Sea, and this had such a special place in the whole that it deserves a separate mention. It was itself a central feature of the hegemony which the East Anglian ports preserved in the national export trade in grain. EAST ANGLIA AND THE TRADE IN BARLEY AND MALT

Despite all the known statistical frailties of totals entered for export and coastwise trade, the figures of East Anglian trade show, unmistakably, how important this region was in relation to the whole national commerce in corn. Certainly, the orders of magnitude which they reveal support to the full the comments of observers such as William Marshall and Nathaniel Kent upon the place which barley enjoyed in the agricultural fortunes of these parts. Equally, these figures of the flow of barley and malt through East Anglian—in particular the Norfolk—ports show the importance which these counties assumed as a source of raw materials for the brewing and distilling industries. No series could stand as better evidence for the partnership of urban industry and agriculture. The quantities themselves must be judged in the light of certain truths. The totals were subject to several motives inducing exaggeration; above all, where fiscal advantages might be anticipated from drawbacks and bounties. More generally, the trade between Norfolk, Suffolk and London flowed naturally coastwise through the little ports which sheltered in the creeks and river estuaries of that region. Relatively little trade in these bulky products passed overland and thence down-river to London—as did that of Hertfordshire, and the other lands lying round the river systems of the Thames and the Lea. Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire lay across that economic watershed which divided the littoral traffic from the inland traffic to London, the southern regions of these counties seeing laden waggons moving towards the head waters of the Stort and the Lea, or 428

East Anglia direct to the capital overland, while their northern regions lay astride the river system which flowed into the Wash.1 The unrecorded cargoes of the inland trade to London and elsewhere cannot be compared with the known (if suspect) totals of trade passing round the coasts; and hence the latter may be given undue prominence, and, with them, the relative agricultural positions of the counties which supplied the recorded trade. Clearly, immense and perhaps rising quanti¬ ties of malt and barley were passing down the Thames about which little is known, and certainly down the Lea, where the tolls of an improved navigation provide indirect evidence of quantities. When considering East Anglia as an exporting region, the distinction provided by the Customs entries between shipments abroad and coastwise has little meaning. However, because, in malt, the greatest trade of Yar¬ mouth lay abroad, to Holland, and because almost all the barley went coastwise rather than abroad, it is convenient to separate the two flows in this way. This has the added advantage of singling out the trade which supplied the brewing industry at home. table

29. Malt exported, 1728-50

[sources: P.R.O. T. 64/274/58-9; T. 38/364; Museum Rusticum.\

Place Norfolk Ports Yarmouth Lynn Wells Blakeney, Cley Total Norfolk malt Total England and Wales

1728

1734

1749

1750

103,100 20,950 55,300 5,900

96,300 22,300 00 cn O

Figures in quarters. Years ending at Christmas.

164,550 35,620 92,100 22,890

118,430 24,730 106,960 22,530

185,050

183,450 233,120

315,160 355,470

272,650 330,750

53,000

193,680

It is apparent from the beginning of the century, despite the very incomplete records of individual ports, how great the weight of Norfolk malt exports were in the national totals: nine-tenths of the drawbacks usually went to the county. In 1716 and 1717 the entire drawback totals of £44,007 and £50,481 were claimed to belong to Norfolk; while £54,022 went to the county from the £63,681 for England and Wales as a whole in 1718, and £64,710 out of £73,883 in 1719.2 The direct figures for the next quarter of a century, given in Table 29, show the same story; and, in 1780, 69,500 qtr. were entered in the Port Books of Yarmouth, from a national total of 136,200 qtr—a general 1 See below, p. 498, for Defoe’s comments. 429

2 Excise (TLB), 1343, 8 December 1719.

The Trade in Grain indication that the position had not changed. The incomplete survival of the East Anglian port books at the end of the century does not allow similar calculations to be made, and neither the estimates of N. Kent nor Erskine separated the totals of grain going abroad and coastwise in 1790-3. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the absence of port records is almost total, the darkness growing most complete just in the period when the London brewing industry was developing more intimate connexions with Norfolk agriculture. The swing in the trade to the paler malts—part cause, part effect of the East Anglian developments outlined in this chapter—would have brought, one may logically presume, an even greater traffic to these little ports. Of the export trade in malt, the largest branch was the ‘long-malt’ sales to the Dutch distillers, a particular market which instances very well the specialisations which flourished within national aggregates. The bulk of the malt which left British shores annually, as we have stressed, was shipped from the single port of Yarmouth. Lynn was the only other East Anglian port to send malt to foreign parts regularly (in contrast to the several creek-villages along that coast which played an active part in shipping coastwise) and Lynn had less than a tithe of Yarmouth’s exports. For both ports, the pattern of their shipments of barley and malt was sharply contrasting when the export trade is compared with the coastwise. Much less barley than malt was sent abroad despite its greater relative bulk; much less malt than barley was shipped to other British ports. The fact that it was usual for brewers and distillers outside London to be their own maltsters, combined with the greater economy in transport from shipping barley, explains the latter position. The predominance of malt over barley in the export trade, on the other hand, is conditioned by fiscal as much as natural advantages: when barley was at 245. per quarter or less (22s. after 1773) there was a bounty of 2s. 6d. per quarter on exported malt.1 As with other grains, it was levied by measure rather than weight—hence the larger the bulk which could be created by the malting process the more profitable the export operation. Certain technical advantages were ob¬ tained, too, by this process, given that the malt was destined for distilleries. The poorer barleys were relatively the best for distilling (and those least suited for the brewer) and forcing out a long ‘ acrospire ’ in ‘ blowing up ’ the grain during malting produced the enzyme combinations needed for ‘Geneva’ distilling. These two features of the trade in ‘long-malt’ invited controversy 1 1 W. and M. c. 12; 13 Geo. Ill, c. 43.

430

East Anglia once an excise and an export bounty both applied, and in due course ‘long-malt’ became one of the traditional squabbles between East Anglian merchants and maltsters and the revenue authorities. In 1715, the Excise Commissioners asked the Treasury Lords for legislation to prevent Berwick and Norfolk merchants from obtaining a ‘fraudulently large drawback’ and a bounty in these exports of crudely malted ‘bigg’.1 This, claimed the Excise, anxious to protect their revenues, had enabled merchants to sell malt to the Dutch for half the price they paid for the barley, and created a great incentive to ‘run’ spirits to England, as well as giving an unnatural advantage to foreign manufacturers. British brewers and distillers supported the Excise case for their own ends with similar mercantilist arguments.2 England, the critics asserted, was being kept in thrall to Holland by the bounties which made her farmers mere ploughmen for the Dutch.3 In their turn, the exporting maltsters also answered in terms of the national advantage, with arguments very similar in principle to those of the Merchant Venturer Company exporting unfinished cloth to the same market over a century before, when they opposed Alderman Cockayne’s attempt to prohibit the trade. In 1770, when the trade in malt had been temporarily suspended the merchants complained that ‘the Dutch for want of their usual Supply from Great Britain, have established a correspondence with Hamburgh, Dantzig and other countries for Barley and... they do now make it into Malt in Holland; and... the total Loss of this very valuable Branch of Trade is to be feared.. .’.4 The large sums gained in drawbacks were only possible by ‘ blowing up ’ 20 bushels of barley into 30 bushels of malt; the Excise had sought to check the practice by enforcing certain times for steeping and drying the grain.5 This was done in 1730.6 Some even claimed that it became profit¬ able to enlarge the cheapest barley seven or eight times into bogus malt, and dump it at sea to gain the bounty and the 3^. per quarter premium on malting for export granted in 1726.7 Against these stock accusations, in 1715-19, 1758-9, 1767, 1770-1, 1790-1, and in later times whenever the same quarrel recurred—the maltsters and merchants had their stock rebuttals. The grain in question 1 Excise (TLB), 1343, f. 296, 26 January 1715. 2 Combrune, Enquiry into Price of Wheat, Malt... pp. 68, 83. 3 E.g. Considerations on the effects which the Bounties.. .on exported Corn, Malt and Flour have on the Manufactures of the Kingdom (1768). 4 J.H.C. xxxii, 640 (February 1770). 6 Excise (TLB), 1343, ff. 406-14, 5 January 1719. 6 W. T. Comber, State of National Subsistence (1808), pp. I42_37 Combrune, loc. cit. and p. 108.

431

The Trade in Grain was ‘ long malt of an inferior quality and proper only for the market for which it was intended’.1 In 1767, John Hill, merchant and maltster of Wells, Norfolk, complained that his malt was ‘of no use in England or Ireland but will be entirely spoiled and probably be eaten up by Vermin unless they can be permitted to export it, it being proper only for the Dutch distillers’.2 Such wails were heard whenever domestic scarcity had induced a pro¬ hibition of export (as had been announced in January 1767), catching maltsters and dealers with stocks unmarketable at home. In pleading for permission to export malt made before the prohibition, no doubt excessive claims about the trade were made. In 1770, a general petition from ‘ owners, occupiers of lands... merchants, maltsters and shipowners in the county of Norfolk’ (which shows how far back the effects of such a ban might reach) claimed that 250 sail at Great Yarmouth had been employed in the trade. The petitioners admitted that the trade had been made profitable largely by the bounty when barley was below 245. per quarter.3 Michael Combrune, as a brewer competing in the malt markets, saw these attempts to open the ports as special pleading. They were equally opposed, in 1770, by the Mayor and J.P.s of Norwich who feared the social repercussions of a rise in prices.4 Such argument was a well-worn feature of petitions to Parliament and to the Excise Commissioners throughout the century.5 The ministerial lobbying involved a four-cornered tussle which would be set off whenever a poor harvest raised prices and the chance of a temporary change in the corn laws. The West India merchants worked to ban corn-distilling, in¬ tending thereby to force the distillers into the markets for sugar. The London brewers were slightly favoured by this, but fought also to get a ban on the export of grain (on this point with the distillers’ support), knowing that it would bring the Norfolk surplus round the coast into Bear Quay and Mark Lane lowering their prices. The merchants and maltsters did not wish to have any profitable market at home or abroad closed by law against them. Because the price of raw materials was the most important factor in the brewer’s total costs (and variations in their prices the main deter1 J.H.C. xxviii, 83 (11 February 1758) and Excise (TLB), 1351, f. 429. Petition of maltsters of Norfolk, Norwich, Great Yarmouth exporting to Holland. Also J.H.C. xxxi, 213 (1767). 2 Excise (TLB), 1353, ff. 384-6. 3 J.H.C. xxxii, 413 (10 January 1770). 4 Combrune, loc. cit. 6 See, for example, Excise (TLB), 1357, f. 28 (1783); B.M. Add. MSS. 38,392, flf. 79, 166, 174; 38,393 (C. on Trade and Plantations, Minutes, September-December 1790, April 1791).

432

East Anglia minant of his profits in the short run) the chase was worth pursuing into very subtle realms indeed. When this factor was combined with the rising trend of grain prices in the second half of the eighteenth century even the administrative details of the export regulations assumed a new significance. One plea from Thrale and Company and Gyffords (both porter brewers) to the Committee on Trade and the Plantations illustrates this.1 In 1781, London prices had been combined with Kent and Essex prices to calculate the point at which exports were allowed (to prevent artificial movements organised by powerful London corn merchants), and the official prices had been changed again to the average of all inland prices and not only the average of prices at the ports. The London brewers had found that this regulation was having unfortunate effects upon their raw material markets. Inland prices were lower than coastal prices; a calculation of the national average price therefore depressed the price at which grain in the ports tended to flow abroad, or was not prevented from so doing. To remedy this they wished the ‘export price’ to be calculated upon the average of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and London only.2 THE COASTING TRADE

Shipments of malt and barley coastwise, from these same East Anglian ports show almost as great a market specialisation as do the exports. Tabulations from sample years3 (which involve the summation of each individual parcel of grain entered for shipment in the Port Books) reveal that barley was everywhere flowing round the coasts on a greater scale than malt during the eighteenth century, in contrast to the position in the export trade. For example, 54,800 qtr. of barley left Yarmouth coastwise in the year ending Christmas 1742 and 8800 qtr. of malt (whereas her barley exports were 9900 qtr. in the same year and malt exports 105,900 qtr.).4 In 1744-5, the total barley sent coastwise from the port (only 10,000 qtr.) was more than double the quantity of malt, whereas in 1779-80, 58,590 qtr. of barley were almost rivalled by 47,800 qtr. of malt.5 At both these periods no other grains shipped approached these two in quantity. Lack of later figures, and wide gaps in the records before 1780, make it difficult to guess whether these isolated changes marked 1 B.M. Add. MS. 38,344, f. 282. See also 38,225, f. 143. (S. Whitbread to Lord Hawkesbury, 5 April 1790). 2 In 1773, Whitbread complained that the Corn Register of 1771 (which enabled barley prices to be calculated on prices other than those of the London market) was having an adverse effect upon the official prices upon which the beer bounty was based (Excise (TLB), 1354, ff. 390-3). 3 Only broken series survive for the East Anglian port books (P.R.O. E.190). 4 P.R.O. E.190/556/13, 17. 6 P.R.O. E. 190/585/2, 24. 28

433

MBE

The Trade in Grain a trend. From the evidence of the brewing industry, on the other hand, there are indications that, after 1770, malting was commissioned more and more in the barley country of East Anglia, as it had long been in Hertfordshire. No great London brewery is known to have malted on its premises in the capital, so that with the increase of purchasing in East Anglia, it might be anticipated that malt shipments would rise in relation to barley cargoes. Such an argument suggests that convenience for the industrial arrange¬ ments at the destination of the raw materials might well by itself condition the location of the intermediary processing of barley. It is probable, for instance, that the very high proportion of barley to malt leaving Lynn coastwise in the two years 1791-31 (155,000-15,200 qtr.) was explained to a large extent by its main coastal markets for grain lying northward along the East Coast to Hull, Sunderland and Newcastle (with scattered cargoes going to London, and a wide range of other ports both south and north from Colchester to Bristol, Liverpool and Alloa). These were regions where malting and brewing were usually done on the same premises (that is at the market) by Common Brewers, or where the initiative in the local markets lay with the local merchants and maltsters who distributed malt to Brewing Victuallers. Virtually no malt was sent to Scotland at this time (and in Scotland there was very little public trade in malt at all), so completely was the intermediate processing done by brewers and dis¬ tillers, who faced the barley markets locally and in East Anglia, and so completely absent was the English practice of home brewing (which induced an independent malting trade).2 A generation before, the Lynn shipments fall into the same pattern: for example, in 1742,3 London took 4700 qtr. of malt but only 1100 qtr. of barley—other outports (predomi¬ nantly Newcastle) 200 qtr. barley but 4200 qtr. malt. The sway of London held, as it had held since Tudor times, right round the coast to Lynn. Even Blakeney and Wells, which might have been expected to face north commercially as did Lynn, were almost completely within the metropolitan market; while for Yarmouth, Aldeburgh, Dunwich, Walberswick, Southwold and Woodbridge,4 in a normal season scarcely a ship cleared with grain save to head south for Bear Quay and Mark Lane.5 Observing the barley and malt trade from London in the early 1 P-R-0; E.190/470/1, 3, 7, 8. 2 On this point, see Pari. Papers, 1808, IV, pp. 81, 126; 1835, xxxi, 15th Report of.. .Excise Enquiry, App. 67, p. 176. 3 P.R.O. E. 190/456/6-8. 1 P.R.O. E.190/556/3, 6, 13-17; 557/2, 5, 13; 585/3, 10, 13, 15-16, 18, 22-3, 25, 27. 6 From these latter four Suffolk villages as much wheat as barley and malt was being sent coastwise, in contrast to the Norfolk shipments. 434

The Coasting Trade nineteenth century, these coastal shipments can be seen, within the patterns of total imports to the metropolitan market, to be its staple trade.1 On average, between 1825 and 1841 350,000 qtr. of barley and 250,000 qtr. of malt flowed in by sea each year—the malt almost entirely English, and from East Anglia, and between 200,000 and 300,000 qtr. of the barley also British, and mainly from the same regions. Small quantities of poor Irish barley (always under 10,000 qtr. until after 1834) came to London; with a modest back-flow of barley from Scotland (always under 50,000 qtr.) conditioned partly by the relative fortunes of the harvests, partly by the shipping space which was set by other trades, partly by the different quality barleys available from each country. The foreign barley was the marginal factor which always suffered the greatest fluctuations in quantity: nil imported in 1823, 165,000 qtr. in 1826, 152,700 qtr. in 1831, 9300 in 1833. Such was the dominance in quality which the native English barleys held in the London market (from the counties Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Sussex, Hampshire, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire in particular)—even greater than their precedence in quantity—that those from further afield (Wales, Scotland and Ireland as well as foreign countries) were seldom destined for malting.2 Perhaps the best comments on the general position which Norfolk held in the barley and malt trade are those of Nathaniel Kent. Following his calculations that the five ports averaged annually for three years, 1790-3, a total outflow by sea of 360,400 qtr. of barley and 80,300 qtr. of malt, (out of a total for all grains of under 570,000 qtr.) he wrote: ‘ Government must certainly draw from this county a much greater portion of revenue than from any other... the return which it [barley] must make when traced through the malthouse, brewhouse and distillery, will be found to amount to a sum almost incredible.’3 The main regional flows of barley and malt from East Anglia to London, with Liverpool as a lesser market, should not, of course, mask the existence of a near-universal local trade in these commodities—as with hops and beer and barley production—which flourished through the length and 1 Pari. Papers, 1843, Lin, pp. 79-80. 2 Pari. Papers, 1821, VIII, King (pp. 14-16), T. Begbie (pp. 50-1) both corn-factors; 1831, VII, p. 62. 3 N. Kent, Annals ofAg. xxii, 37-41; General View of Agriculture of Norfolk (1794), pp. 49-51. The slight emendations to these figures which Miss Riches states (Agricultural Revolution in Norfolk, pp. 149-50) came from J. F. Erskine (Annals of Ag. XL, 453, 460) derive from J. Holt, General View of Agriculture of Lancaster (1794), pp. 199-207. Both Kent and Holt make very arbitrary assumptions about the proportion of Norfolk exports which originated from inland counties and which they deducted from their totals. 435

28-2

The Trade in Grain breadth of the country. But this very universality of movement, once acknowledged, becomes too intricate to describe; nor would lengthy description change the conclusions which may be drawn from the general pattern without it. The dominance of London in the trade along the coasts from Portsmouth to Lynn; up the Thames to Oxford and Newbury, up the Lea and across land to Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire, itself exemplifies the principle which inspires the general movement: urban demand, or demand from growing non-agricultural communities even when they might still be more properly called industrial villages, was pulling in the raw materials for a basic foodstuff from the areas of agri¬ cultural surplus. Bristol was the magnet for consignments of barley and malt passing in the little ships up both shores of the Severn estuary which embraced this metropolitan market of the west from Pembrokeshire to Cornwall, and from Ireland. Bath and Bristol drew in supplies equally from South Wiltshire and Somerset where land and water-carriage lay beyond the economic watershed of the Thames basin.1 In 1830, War¬ minster malt normally went to Bath unless scarcity drove London dealers beyond their normal frontiers. Salisbury faced Southampton.2 Such was the continuity of economic watersheds in England before the railway age, that nearly a century previously Edward Lisle noticed that sometimes 35.

per quarter difference lay between the barley prices of Devizes and

Salisbury and those of Newbury and Reading, the latter being frontier posts of the Queenhithe and Bear Quay markets.3 At the end of the century, the pull of the fast-rising numbers of Yorkshire and Lancashire was greater than the older towns of the south-west. Yorkshire maltsters had traditionally looked to Lincolnshire.4 In turn Liverpool and Manchester were markets for Leeds maltsters.5 No Hertfordshire (‘Ware’) malt was reported to go there, being completely within the orbit of London, but Lincolnshire and Norfolk shipments went round the coast and across by canal (Liverpool was importing on average 80,000 qtr. of malt and barley in the early 1790’s) and the demand of Lancashire brewers for special ‘sprinkled’ malt reached down through Nottinghamshire and Oxford¬ shire.6 Peter Stubs’ letters mention barley consignments from almost 1 B.P.R.L., Lading Lists; T. Davis, General View of Agriculture of Wiltshire (1794). 2 Pari. Papers, 1835, xxxi, App. 63, p. 151; 1808, iv, p. 149. 3 E. Lisle, Observations in Husbandry (2nd ed. 1757), vol. 11, p. 368; Defoe, Journal of a Tour... (Everyman ed. 1948), vol. 1, p. 345. 4 J. Thirsk, ‘Farming in Kesteven, 1540-1640’, Lines. Archit. Arch. Soc. vi (1) (1955), 43,49. 5 Pari. Papers, 1835, xxxi, p. 30. 6 Ibid. App. 62, p. 158; J. Holt, op. cit. 436

The Coasting Trade every quarter of the kingdom—although the ‘round land barley’, which took seven weeks on its passage from Lincolnshire and Norfolk, seems to have predominated amongst those of his purchases which involved correspondence.1 THE TRAFFIC BY RIVER TO LONDON

It is, however, upon London, as by far the greatest urban centre of con¬ sumption and the seat of the developments in the brewing industry which this book mainly describes, that any study of the malt market must concentrate. As Professor Fisher has said of the home county and East Anglian corn merchants in the sixteenth century: ‘all looked to the London market as the hub of their economic universe’.2 These developments may only be explained by the interacting influences of the changing demands of the brewing industry and the varying response possible from its markets.

Here, the discussion centres upon the supply side of the

trade which must be seen in relation to that devoted to the brewers in the raw material market. Supplementing seaborne cargoes, the Thames and the Lea provided the two main inland routes down which barley and malt flowed into London. The greater river played the more modest role, for the Lea, although navigable a bare thirty miles as the crow flies from London, tapped some of the richest barley country in Hertfordshire, curling north and west to the town of Hertford and joined at Hoddesdon by the Stort flowing south-west from Bishop’s Stortford. The region centring upon Ware, Hoddesdon and Stanstead Abbots was the oldest and the most mature malting area in the country. By the eighteenth century it was in this locality that malting skills had developed most and that commercial organisation had become the most sophisticated. To this region had the growing London market for malt brought most prosperity.

Norfolk pale malts rose to challenge

the eminence of Hertfordshire malts (in particular the brown) after that time, but even today the gentle valley of the Lea and the Stort may be seen as the cradle of the industry in Britain.3 1 See below, pp. 451-2. Letters, e.g. 31 November 1798. The unrecorded local, verbal bargains in Warrington may, of course, have been more important than all these put together—although I feel it is unlikely. Between 1791-1801, even though Stubs was working for a local market, he received offers of barley from Carlisle, Chester, Worcester, Plymouth, Banbury, Oxford, Polesworth, Dorset, Norwich, Lynn, Lincoln, Newark, Ireland, Scotland, Prussia and Pomerania. Most of them came via Liverpool merchants. 2 Econ. Hist. Rev. v (1935), 57. 3 The several extant branches of the firm H. A. and D. Taylor, at Sawbridgeworth, Ware, Bishop’s Stortford, Cambridge, Newmarket and Bury St Edmunds, which developed from the eighteenth-century business of John Taylor of Ware, is a mark of this.

437

The Trade in Grain Because trade down the Thames was less, and played, relatively, a much smaller part in the economic development of that river basin, little need be said of it here. Its marketing area was, of course, much larger than the Lea. John Houghton had heard of no malt which came from Reading, Newbury, Abingdon and Oxford except by water (in contrast to the wagon-trains which went from Ware to the northern parts of the city) remarking ‘ they will bring that for iod. 300 miles down the river Thames, which will cost 3$. to bring by cart from Hitchin which is but 30 miles’.1 Contrary to the practice on the Lea, much barley was carried down¬ stream for malting (and much malt was brewed) at the towns above the capital, like Kingston and Windsor, more especially when well-known breweries had become established there which prospered by sending strong ale the rest of the journey into London.2 ‘West Country Amber’ appeared in the books of most London porter breweries throughout the century, having a regular but modest place in the blending of brown malts they preferred for porter, but in no sense was it their primary source of supply and none, to my knowledge, sent either commissioned agents through the West Country barley country or established makings there. It was up-river (the Lea entering the Thames below the city, at Blackwall) that the malt and barley mainly went.3 The Lea provided the means of transport for much of London’s malt and the little towns within fifty miles of the metropolis in the broad arc of country north and east of the Thames to the coast had long had malting (and brewing) as one of their most prosperous local industries. Hatfield, Watford, St Albans, Aldenham, Hitchin, Baldock, Ashwell, Saffron Walden, quite apart from the more famous malt centres, have left many legal records of disputes over malt-making and malt-trading from the fifteenth century onwards, the trade remaining a natural aspect of the rural economy of these areas in relation to the London market.4 Indeed, as Marshall remarked, ‘ all the commerce of Hertfordshire was the produce of its soil ’— even the famous straw manufacturing of Dunstable and Luton.5 Since Ware was both the terminal for malt barges loading for London 1 Husbandry and Trade Improved (2nd ed. 1728), vol. II, p. 284; Excise (TLB), 1346, ff. 258-9 (1708). See also W. Pearce, General View of Agriculture of Berks. (1794), quoted in Marshall, Reports... (1817), pp. 48, 66. 2 See above, p. 150. 3 Pari. Papers, 1821, vm, C. on Malt Duties in Scotland, pp. 151-6. J. King, an important London malt-factor, stated that barley and malt no longer came down the Thames to London from the inland counties ‘in any quantities’. 4 V.C.H. Herts, vol. in, pp. 68, 200, 239, 383; vol. IV, p. 242; F. J. Fisher, loc. cit. p. 60. W. Marshall, loc. cit. 6 The same is true of Berkshire {V.C.H. Berks.), vol. 1, pp. 404-11.

438

River Transport to London and a market town in the midst of good barley country, it was to be ex¬ pected that malting skills should become localised in the neighbourhood, adding to the centripetal pull which the town exerted in the industry. The carts of maltsters formed the bulk of the heavy land traffic between Royston and Ware in the mid-seventeenth century, and became the source of much complaint (just as brewers’ drays usually had the blame for bad road conditions in the towns). Weekly teams headed for the town from as far off as Norwich, Bury St Edmunds and Cambridge, the overland journey balancing higher costs with greater certainty and speed when conditions were bad for the passage by sea or river.1 So great an attraction could the malting skills of Ware have for London brewers that it was not unknown for ‘ ship ’ barley from Norfolk to be sent in the malt-barges up to Ware as ‘ back carriage ’, evidence enough in days of high transport costs of the premium given by quality.2

Moreover, the commercial

organisation which embraced these natural and man-made advantages itself tended to preserve the localising forces they exerted: the rise of the malt-factors based on Ware, financing malt-makers, giving long credits to the brewers and owning the barges in which the product was shipped con¬ solidated the entire marketing structure. Even for the prosperous commercial, professional and landed families in this locality, distinct from those such as Proctor, Hankin, Dickinson, King, Leak, Searle and Taylor whose main business was in the commodity, there was often involvement with malt either more or less directly, so close was the trade in malt to the heart of the local economy. In the hop country south of the Thames, a similar intimacy of connexion existed between local society and the product which was the economic linch-pin of the region. Many of these economic commitments could scarcely be termed ‘invest¬ ment’ in the formal sense, being indirect or concerned with auxiliary functions (such as banking or transport). But none the less, failing to notice how it was that the parson, the squire and the attorney in Hertford¬ shire or Norfolk were all concerned about the price of malt, would be to miss an important feature of the economy of these localities. Of course, in their turn, the labourer, the bargeman, the blacksmith and the shop¬ keeper, at only one stage removed from the maltsters and malt-merchants themselves, were equally affected.

Nor must it be supposed that the

humbler ranks of society were only concerned from the employment 1 V.C.H. Herts, vol. IV, pp. 243, 384. 2 Pari. Papers, 1806, 11, p. 41; 1831, just to break prices.

VII,

p. 36. Sometimes, of course, this might be done

439

The Trade in Grain aspect of their commitment to the industry.

Petitions to the Excise

authorities make it plain that petty speculation from owning stocks was widespread. Anyone in the trade at whatever level—as well as many people outside it—might be hoping that a parcel of malt in some warehouse was appreciating in value. Where agricultural produce formed the basis of local trade, and ‘investment’ in it could be of any amount, this might be anticipated. Nor is it surprising that when new Excise supervisors threatened to obstruct the trade of Ware in 1788, by insisting overexactly upon the letter of the law—and brought in two troops of horse to strengthen their authority—virtually every prominent citizen in the town, including the vicar and the three dissenting ministers, petitioned against the ‘Maltsters and Inhabitants being thus injured and obstructed in their trade and awed by the Military’.1 Equally significantly an increase in the malt duties in 1819 brought a united protest from the ‘Bankers, Brewers, Merchants, Farmers and other inhabitants.. .of Ipswich’.2 The Wilshere family, attorneys and later bankers at Hitchin,3 illustrated very well the links that a family so placed might develop with the malt trade. In 1790, William Wilshere Sr was getting malt made, stored and sold for him by William Leak, a well-known maltster at Ware.

His sons

William and John also conducted similar business on their own accounts through Leak as a side-line to their main profession.4 In addition, a cash book suggests that there had been malting continuously on their joint account since 1760 (with some flour-milling in 1766-70). It was not a large venture: the amounts of barley involved were seldom over 1000 qtr. in any one year, and the returns fluctuated wildly, from a profit of £338 in the best year (1761-2) to a loss of £58 in the worst (1775-6). In the early years, William Wilshere Sr was in charge of the venture himself; but, after 1782, it appears that John Wilshere was doing the malting, with his father putting up £440 of the capital and sharing profit or loss equally. In 1786, there is a similar settlement between the father and his other son, William —in which the father was holding the joint capital of £uoo.5 The family accounts, as the family’s business activities, are as intertwined as those of 1 They admitted that the practices in question were ‘illegal perhaps, but not frauding’. See Hist. MSS. Comm. Verulam MSS. i, 136-41 for correspondence on the incident and Excise (TLB), 1360, f. 15 (2 December 1788) for the petition (which is mentioned in V.C.H. Herts, vol. Ill, p. 383). 2 J.H.C. lxxvi, 163. 3 L. S. Pressnell, Country Banking in the Industrial Revolution (1956), pp. 43, 227. 4 Herts. C.R.O. 61083-4 (W. Leak to W. Wilshere Sr, 22 January 1790; to W. Wilshere, 22 April 1786). 6 Herts. C.R.O. 61122. W. Wilshere, Cash Book 1760-96 [accounts obscure after 1786]. The volume also includes farm accounts and the rent account of a flour-mill.

44O

River Transport to London Benjamin Wilson’s family, brewing and trading at Burton-on-Trent.1 In the next generation, the Wilsheres’ great wealth led them into a less indirect connexion with the brewing industry. William Wilshere Jr (the attorney turned banker) became a creditor of Samuel Whitbread Jr (living not far away from Hitchin at Southill, Bedfordshire) and had to realise his capital by becoming a formal partner in the brewery on Whitbread’s suicide in 1815. He advanced

£10,000

in 1801, extended

it to ^33,333* 6s. 8d. by 1806, and took up £35,000 in the new partnership of 1815. Moreover, he supplied Whitbread with large loans in addition to this lien on his share of the joint capital which were recouped eventually from the estate.2 Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Wilshere family is that they do

not

appear to have been trustees of the Lea navigation, the list of whom

reads like a directory of the county families. So important a place did this navigation assume as the channel by which the malt was marketed, and upon which the position of the malt-factors as barge owners became based, that it must receive special mention. Houghton was told that 300,000 qtr. of grain destined for London mash-tuns sometimes lay at Ware, and that twenty-four barges (each of nearly 150 qtr. capacity) plied weekly between the town and Blackwall, besides the large quantities ‘overlanded’ to brewers to the north of the City, who found that the transhipment at the wharf in London and its carriage ‘ home ’ by cart was expensive and trouble¬ some enough to make it worth their while to bring it all the way by cart from Ware, thus avoiding some of the uncertainties of timing in the passage by water.3 The great improvement to navigation on the Lea after 1766 probably moved some of this traffic back to the barges: 5000 qtr. per week were reported coming down by barge nearer the end of the century.4 The actual freight charge borne by the London brewers from Hertford¬ shire appears to have remained constant at ir. per quarter from 1746 to 1791,5 when it rose to ir. 6d. per quarter. Overland carriage from Bed¬ fordshire was costing Whitbread 35.

bd.-y.

9d. per quarter in the mid¬

century, although this saved him the 3d. per quarter cartage and the

id.

per

quarter ‘ shooting ’ charges, which applied both to the ‘ barge-malt ’ from 1 See above, pp. 180-2. 2 Herts. C.R.O. 61085-7, 61132-8, 61142, 61144/2-6; Whitbread Records (Brewery): Rest Books 1815-30. Wilshere was appointed one of Whitbread’s Executors. Amongst Whit¬ bread’s great debts recorded in 1818 (Herts. C.R.O. 61138) was, it seems, one for no less than £32,000 to W. Wilshere. This may be covered by his share in the partnership. See above, pp. 310-12. 3 J. Houghton, op. cit. vol. II, p. 284. 4 V.C.H. Herts, vol. IV, p. 243. 6 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Trade Ledger 1746-52; Truman Records: Rest Books, passim.

441

The Trade in Grain the Lea to Truman in Spitalfields and to his purchases at Bear Quay. Lighterage charges rose to 4d. per quarter in 1801; but cartage costs rose steadily during the war to 4\d. in 1797, 5d. in 1800, 8d. in 1810 and

xod.

in 1811. They had fallen again to 6d. per quarter by 1820 but the maltfactors’ freight charge remained at is. 6d.1 THE LEA

The Lea had been a highway from early times, possessing a long pedigree of commissions and statutes for improving its navigation, but at the opening of the eighteenth century it still remained in a state of medieval inefficiency, as did so many of England’s commercial arteries, innocent of much capital investment.2 It was more efficient as a source of power. There was no efficient tow-path for horse-drawn barges; each miller or weir-owner along the route had to be paid for a ‘flash’ of water to get a boat past the obstruction, and the barge masters complained regularly of the hazards to traffic. The roots of the problem lay in the failure to get united jurisdiction over the route, with the resulting absence of any toll¬ raising authority administering its income regularly for the maintenance of an efficient navigation. Occasional efforts to scour the river and remove ‘shelves’ were no substitute for this.3 Even the Statute of 1739, which gave the first semblance of a continuous administration by establishing a body of Trustees, did not amount to much, for their income was limited to a single £3250 grant and £350 p.a. received from the New River Company as a rent for the water they now drew from the Lea.4 However, this was a beginning. The annual meetings of Trustees from the various riparian counties brought together the local interests most able to project, finance, and profit from a really improved waterway, and until this came to pass, their resources were now at least adequate for scouring the river regularly. A surveyor, Richard Whitten1 This did not include the commission charge by factors to maltsters. This rose to is. per quarter in December 1772 (Gent. Mag. xlii (1772), 596). The cartage of hops from the Southwark warehouses was traditionally 6d. per bag, but rose under war-time conditions to 9d. in 1813. 2 In 1190, the Bishop of Ely gave a licence to the Abbot at Waltham for improving navigation on the river, and there had been several Tudor and Stuart statutes. See E. M. Hunt, History of Ware (Hertford, 1946), ch. 2, for authorities. There is a review of the statutes in Guildhall Library (MS. 3699, Report of C. for Thames and Canal Navigation, 17 April 1779). The best short account of the navigation remains that in Railway and Canal Traffic Act (1888): Hearing of Objections (H.M.S.O. 1894), PP- 1838 et seq. 3 G.L.M.R. City Records: Book of Grants, vm, 18 (2 October 1696); xvi, 178; J. Priestley, Historical Account of Navigable Rivers... (1831), pp. 412-15. 4 12 Geo. II, c. 32. The Minute Books of the meetings of Trustees are preserved in the British Transport Commission Archives (Lee 1 ff.). Most of the evidence for the following section is drawn from this source. 442

The Lea bury, was appointed, and a Clerk. A Commission of Sewers was taken out to authorise improvements, and with their modest capital and income, a few properties hampering the navigation were bought in and locks furnished at Ware, Broxbourne and Stanstead. After twenty-six years of similar small advances, always threatened by the Trustees’ doubtful authority over toll levying and raising capital, radical change came in 1765 under pressure of the trade interests using the river, who had always been the effective voices at the meetings. Smeaton undertook the new survey; one thousand copies of his plan were printed in September 1766 in pre¬ paration for the campaign to organise all possible support for the proposed Act of Parliament. Long straight cuts were envisaged to by-pass meanders in the river; docks and wing-wharves were to be erected at a new outfall into the Thames at Limehouse. Efficient locks and towing paths had to be laid down throughout its length (all under the direct management of the Trustees) and all owners of private weirs and locks paid off. Only from this date did the Lea become an efficient artery of commerce. The Trustees had always been a very representative selection of the ‘county aristocracy’. Three London brewers, Felix and Peter Calvert and Rivers Dickinson, appeared among the original group of 1739, and they were joined by others in brewing and malting in the next few years: Andrew Searle, John Kemp, Ralph Harwood, Andrew Hope, Ambrose Proctor, Daniel Adams. William Calvert sometimes attended a meeting as a repre¬ sentative of the Aldermen of London, and in the great activity of 1765-7 John Calvert, M.P. for Hertford, was a central figure in the negotiations with landowners along the route and in the subsequent preparations for the act of Parliament. Throughout, he had been on the executive Com¬ mittee organising the project, and was supported by his fellow M.P. for Hertford, Timothy Caswall, and Jacob Houblon, M.P. for the shire. Just as the body of Trustees as a whole reflected the general range of influence in the three counties, so the active members, (which few alone attended the meetings, formed the committees, conducted the annual survey and took all the decisions affecting the running of the concern), represented the trade interests using the canal. Their custom gave it prosperity; improvements to the navigation aided their business. Of the London brewers residing in the counties, the Calvert and Dickinson families had the longest record of active direction in the trust, both before 1766 and afterwards, with Sampson Hanbury after his election in 1800.1 1 B.T.C.A. Lee 1/2 gives the lists of Trustees, whose numbers were doubled to c. 200 by the 1766 Act.

443

The Trade in Grain Both Samuel Whitbread the elder and his son were Trustees (from 1794) but within two years the father was dead and the son did not involve himself in the administration. The brewery had been actively represented since 1787, however, by Joseph Maysey (the son of a senior clerk, Boughton Maysey) whom Whitbread had sent to Ware as his malt-factor; and, until his death in 1802, Maysey was an active Trustee. Other London brewers, or their close relatives, on the trust after 1767 were: George and Mark Hodgson of Bow, John Cowell, Sylvanus Bevan and David Barclay, William Prior (of Meux’s, St Giles) and Robert Pryor (of Trumans, Spitalfields). With the brewers came in strength the malt merchants and barge owners, their sons being elected successively to the trust as surely as they inherited (and sustained) their fathers’ trade: Hankin, Popper, Kemp, Searle, Proctor, King, Clough, Adams, Taylor. These family names appear throughout these pages, and as regularly through the malt books of every London porter brewery. Thomas Dimsdale, who was as interested in the canal as a banker as were the others as brewers and merchants, also remained an assiduous Trustee. In the latter quarter of the eighteenth century the meetings were dominated by the brewing families Calvert and Dickinson (joined after 1800 by Sampson Hanbury), with the malt-factors King, Proctor, Leake, and Adams. A typical Trustee meeting is that of 11 April 1787, when there met Nicolson Calvert, John B. Dickinson, David Barclay, Thomas Adams, William King, William Leake, and three others —a veritable junta of the trade operating a brewers’ highway. The most important of the new cuts made after 1765 was that from Bromley-by-Bow to Limehouse, which cut off a loop of the Thames above the natural outfall at Blackwall, but the journey was further shortened by a new channel at Cheshunt, Hackney and Old Ford. By October 1769, these improvements on the Lea up to Ware and Hert¬ ford had been extended north-eastwards to Bishop’s Stortford by canalising the Stort efficiently for navigation. As the main shipping-point for grain from the north-western barley areas of Essex and south-western Suffolk, the latter town now began to develop more rapidly as a malting centre than it had in the first half of the century.1 Between 1788 and 1811, the annual output of malt at Saffron Walden consigned to Stortford was said to have risen from 30,000 qtr. to 60,000 qtr.2 Had Rennie’s survey of 1788 for an extension of this navigation north from the Stort to the Little Ouse 1 F. H. Maud, The Hockerill Highway (Colchester, 1957), pp. 23-4. 2 Information from Mr F. H. Maud.

444

The Lea at Brandon resulted in an effective canal, much wider areas might have been drawn into the malting and marketing orbit of Hertfordshire whose barley continued to flow down the rivers to the Wash. Parallel to the river, that stretch of the Norwich Road which passed through this region of north-eastern Hertfordshire had been turnpiked and administered by Trustees, like the Lea navigation, in the years immediately after 1744. The composition of the Trust, and its active members, appear to show much the same pattern as the administration of the navigation.

A few

brewers and maltsters, who were prominent figures in the locality, became Trustees, but none of them was subsequently very active in its administration.1 When the Trustees borrowed £500 in 1809-10, two of the four securities for the loan came from the Stortford maltsters, William Plumer and Thomas Clough.

James Searle, banker, maltster and malt-factor of

Saffron Walden and Stortford, became treasurer to the trust in 1825 (just before his bankruptcy in the crash of December) and its account was guaranteed also by two malt merchants of his own standing, Joseph Taylor and Joseph Fairman,2 who paid with the profits of malting for his misfortunes as a banker. The river remained more important than the road for the transit of malt, and by imposing this artificial course and efficiently locking it throughout its length, the new navigation was able to respond adequately to the great expansion of the brewing industry in London which was under way from 1750. Being primarily an expansion of porter brewing which relied very heavily on Hertfordshire brown malts, there was a direct relationship between beer production within the area of the metropolis and the traffic on the Lea. No difficulty arose over the initial capital. When John Calvert arranged to float a loan of £35,000 on the security of future toll receipts in October 1767,

£161,500 was offered, a flood of credit appearing from the Trustees,

their friends and relatives, and many wealthy Londoners who responded to the newspaper advertisements. Applications were drawn by ballot and individuals rationed. Banking capital was prominent in the original offer— £15,500 coming from Martins (Joseph Martin was Treasurer to the Trustees), Thornton, Goslings and ‘Reynolds of Lombard St.’—and within three years extra capital also came in from banks. Joseph Martin 1 Ibid. Appendix B. They included Sir J. H. Cotton (who had inherited Parsons’ Red Lion Brewery), Felix and Peter Calvert, John Prior, Robert and Richard King and Samuel Sheppard. 2 Ibid. pp. 36, 46-7. For Searle, see below, pp. 458-9.

445

The Trade in Grain himself lent £11,500 in February 1769; and a further £6500 at the end of the year, being repaid as the instalments of the £35,500 loan came in. The extent of the ‘improvements’ was such that, despite this, the contractors were paid a proportion of their bills in bonds; and, when Martin refused to extend his loan by £5000 in May 1770, Thomas Dimsdale (a prominent Trustee) brought his banking partners into the game and at once won the prize of being appointed banker to the trust in return for the loan, ousting Martin from the treasurership in 1778. Raising life annuities was the next, and more dangerous expedient. The Trustees put a stop to this at £22,566 in September 1771, but gave permission for bankers to extend the sum by £5000 in March 1773 and then found to their anger in 1778 that an unauthorised £17,740 had been raised, which heavily mortgaged the income from tolls. At this point angry (and unusually crowded) general meetings of the Trustees established a watchdog finance committee to put things right. After discussions with the ‘principal traders’ on the river, a successful application was made to Parliament for tolls to be increased, one-quarter of the receipts being put aside for redeeming the annuity debts.1 From a gradual rise from £3300 p.a. in 1771 to £4100 p.a. in 1777-8, income jumped to

£F]S00~L^S00

annually in 1780-4, and then rose to £9000-

£10,000 in 1785-1804 (by which time the debts had been wiped out) and to above £12,000 p.a. after 1816.2 The basis of this prosperity came from malt. For the malt-factors, a trip from Ware to the Thames cost them 15.

5d. per ton in tolls for malt from 1767-79, with an extra

15.

3d. per ton

from 1779-1807, when half this increment was abolished.3 Of course, their total costs and profits varied very much with the price of malt (as factors they received a percentage return), their own speculations in the trade, and the chance of return freights. The other canal project directly affecting certain London brewers for their ‘country trade’ and raw material carriage was the Regent’s Park Canal undertaken in 1812. Here, too, the brewers took a prominent part with other city merchants and financiers in the projection and manage1 19 Geo. Ill, c. 58. 2 No breakdown of these toll receipts between commodities is given in the records which survive at Paddington. See Railway and Canal Traffic Act (1888), op. cit. p. 1847. 3 The 1778 Act had distinguished between malt and other cargoes as malt was the chief trade from Ware to London. Total tolls for malt were further lowered to iy. 8fi. per ton in 1827. Coal tolls were iy. nd. per chaldron 1767-79, plus iy. id. 1779-1807. Manure carried back from London was, as usual, free of toll (ibid. pp. 1840-2). 446

The Lea ment of the venture. Joseph Delafield, Harvey Combe, Vickeris Taylor and Robert Barclay took out shares, and the first two became directors of the company and active members of its General Committee and the subsequent Committee of Accounts.1 After long delays, the canal was accepting traffic by June 1820 and was soon making twice the receipts in tolls of the Lea navigation. In 1824 the two navigations were linked at Bethnal Green by Sir G. Duckett’s Lea Union Canal, enabling some brewers on the north side of the river to bring their malt nearer home by water without the extra circuit to the Thames at Limehouse.2 It was at the western end of the junction in the City Road basin that Whitbreads established a large wharf and malt store in 1826.3 1 B.T.C.A. R.P.C/1/1. In 1818 Harvey Combe had £6800 invested, H. C. Combe £1500, J. Delafield £5000. 2 J. Priestly, loc. cit. 3 Freehold value of the store was £7000 (Whitbread Records (Brewery): Rest Books 1826-30; Deed Book, 15 June 1826).

447

CHAPTER XIII

THE BREWER AND THE MARKETS THE SEARCH FOR QUALITY

The entrepreneurs of the brewing industry, both porter brewers and fine ale brewers, had, collectively, it has been suggested, an important effect upon the barley cultivation of the kingdom. Many aspects of this intimate relationship between industry and agriculture—an indissoluble marriage until a later age brought the potentiality of annual supplies of cheaper foreign grain on a vast scale—can be discussed.

Amongst them, the

search for quality was not the least important, supplementing the search for quantity. Brewers of fine ale in London and the provinces, although they did not play any important part in the revolution of mass-production which the brewing industry experienced in the eighteenth century, were rightly jealous of their reputations and were known above all for the quality of their product. The markets that they were developing were not the mass urban markets upon which porter brewers were thriving, and in the midst of which their breweries were sited, but the specialised high-quality trade which was scattered over a wide area. Distant markets demanded quality in any case to allow an increased value to bear the high transport charges involved; but the nature of the demand—the social standards of the market as much as its economic characteristics—demanded high quality. This was the feature upon which Scottish and English provincial ales became famous in London, in India or in the Baltic, and this was the aspect of competition which their brewers stressed. To achieve the best results, nothing but the best barley could be used, because of the sheer intrinsic technology of brewing, quite apart from the economic arguments involved (stressed more by the large-scale London producers than the ‘speciality market’ brewers). Selling in small parcels across the country as a whole, and beyond it, these small brewers (who had not in some cases a tithe of a tithe of the annual production of a porter brewery) had in no sense the parochial attitude of small brewers in the middle of good barley country, such as John Smith of Oundle, Adnams of Southwold or Christie of Hoddesdon. This was as true for their raw material supplies as for their ale consignments: the search was a national one and their quest was for 448

The Search for Quality quality barley.

Benjamin Wilson’s correspondence stands for all the

brewers in his marketing position. From the stream of letters he dispatched to all districts of the ‘ barley country ’ (as well as in his refusals to accept parcels of grain when they were below his standards) one may plot the influence of brewers over farmers. Even though to the south of Burton there was very good barley grown, it had always to stand the test of com¬ parison. When Wilson travelled across to Harrogate, for example, and met there an acquaintance from York, he wrote that he was ‘.. .obliged to have recourse to distant markets for a Part of what I use... I am of the Opinion that the Crop of Barley for many miles about York was distinguishably and obviously the best of them all, and better even than the Crop of the same corn in this Country’.1 Hence he asked to be recom¬ mended to a prudent correspondent—‘ the most distinguished for his care judgment and integrity’—to arrange purchasing. Here, as always, there comes the remark, ‘The barley I use is of the first and choicest Quality, being for the purpose of Strong Ale to go abroad ’. Characteristically, he reminded an old correspondent at the beginning of the same season ‘ none you know but the most surpassing Quality will please me, you have had sufficient experience of me to render anything more on this subject unnecessary’.2 Being so concerned to buy the best, at any season he might be ‘compelled to fly to distant countries for it’,3 and hence, once moving out of local supplies, the opportunity for com¬ parative testing for price and quality was thrust before him. Newark and Grantham, Lynn, Lincoln were the usual areas of choice—itself significant evidence for the localisation of the best barleys in the 1790’s (excluding, that is, the Hertfordshire barleys best suited for brown malts in which the Burton brewers were not interested). In 1801, he refused to take more than a small quantity of the ‘Flower of the Markett’ from P. and J. Denton, of Lynn, saying that the samples from Suffolk that year were proving better and cheaper.4 In another season, 1809, when the Newark and Grantham grain was clearly superior, people began sending it to Burton on their own initiative and offering it for public sale there—‘quite a novel practice’.

In that

year, quality for quality, Lincoln barley was priced above the Newark and Grantham by the higher freight and commission costs, so Samuel Allsopp (successor to Benjamin Wilson, his uncle) quickly switched his buying to 1 Allsopp Records: Letter Books, B. Wilson to Stevenson, 1 October 1791. 2 Ibid, to ‘Jackson’, 30 September 1791. 3 Ibid, to J. Kabuun, 5 September 1801. 4 Ibid. 15, 25 October 1801.

29

449

M B E

The Brewer and the Markets the latter, but still giving small orders to his usual suppliers at the former to maintain their connexions (always an important consideration).1 Another device which Benjamin Wilson sometimes used in the interests of quality was to order an agent to buy 50 or 60 qtr. weekly for him over a period, rather than a large consignment at once, taking only the pick of the market over the period when farmers were sending in the new barleys.2 In this case he would take small consignments from each area at the beginning of each season to see which malted best. All consignments had to be well ‘ screened ’ and bagged, not shipped loose in the barges. Bagging saved the need for remeasuring when it arrived at Horninglow (the un¬ loading point on the canal near Burton) and reduced the risk of deterioration.3 The network of communication enabling the Burton brewers to main¬ tain the highest quality in their barley, while ensuring the keenest prices over the good barley areas as a whole, was similar to that of any eighteenthcentury

merchant-industrialist

involved with

the

national

market.

Having a national range of choice was important for their success; it also gave a stimulation to grain markets a long way from Burton. This initiative in choice—plus expansion in the range of choice open to them—clearly came from the brewers themselves in the main rather than from merchant intermediaries, and it is important to see that this had come when their level of production was very small. It was not forced on them at all by the problem of size, or the needful regularity of supply when large-scale production was involved, or when expensive fixed assets had to earn the keep of their overhead costs. Quality lay at the centre of the problem of raw materials; just as it lay at the centre of their market for beer. The solution was partly one of obtaining reliable and up-to-date infor¬ mation; and here there came, first of all, the personal observations of the people themselves. In talking in the markets, in writing to friends, rela¬ tions and business acquaintances over a wide area on a variety of topics, came the questions about the state of the harvest. This is as true for Peter Briggins and William Tiby, anxious always to know current hop prices and yields everywhere, or Samuel Johnson telling the Thrales in London the state of the barley during his journeys to Lichfield and Ashbourne, as it was for any brewer or maltster with more than parochial horizons. In business as much as in politics, eighteenth-century society was a personally working 1 Allsopp Records: Letter Books, S. Allsopp to W. Dawber (Lincoln), 22, 27 November 1809. 2 E.g. to Jackson, 19 October 1791. 3 Ibid. S. Allsopp to J. Parnell (Newark), 7 November 1809; T. Kirby (Appletree, near Banbury), 10 January, 13 February 1809.

450

The Search for Quality world, its bonds those of cousinhood and interest more than principle except in the case of the protestant dissenting groups when kinship and profits alike grew out of communities founded upon a common faith. Information no less than capital moved freely amongst these extended ‘skeins’ of relationships—the important point being that confidence and trust were current within them rather than in any institutional shells which allowed anticipation in business decisions with the possibility of reliable forward planning. Hence the fact that personal correspondence, visiting, the annual holiday, the weekly congregation at meeting-house or chapel—and at the parish church no less, although less noticed by historians—often took primacy over newspapers and other—specifically business—institutions, as the channels of communication and control. Benjamin Wilson’s trips to Harrogate and York were taken at a time of year crucial for the barley harvest, just as John Taylor’s annual holiday at Cromer from Hertford¬ shire. Pleasure here remained at the service of enterprise.

It was the

slack time of the year, before the harvest. They could get away without leaving the work to go on unsupervised. At Cromer, as no doubt at Harrogate and York, there were the acquaintances and the customers who were also awaiting the product of the harvest in readiness to broach orders from Gurneys and Barclays and Hanburys. Above all, en route lay the ripening barley in the fields where quality might be tested at any point in standing grain, and the market towns where perhaps quotations from early parcels were already beginning to appear.

Never was a holiday more

shrewdly integrated into a business year. Apart from this personal world of the brewer and maltster, specifically trade channels were developing a flow of information.

By the 1790’s,

Peter Stubs at Warrington, certainly without a wide marketing area in his role as innkeeper, brewer and maltster (in contrast to himself qua filemaker) was receiving regular reports from several Liverpool merchants from whom he took most of the consignments he was unable to obtain locally. Beyond this, he received news directly from Worcester (Joseph Barber), Newark (J. Newton and W. Hare), Lincoln (John Blundell and T. Browne), Carlisle (G. Lawther and Son), Lynn (A. and J. Butler), Norwich (H. Gardner), Banbury (W. Pratt), Polesworth and Oxford. Most appear to be regular printed circulars sometimes stating.

Please

inform your fellow maltsters.’1 Supplementing the wide collecting area 1 Stubs Letter Books, 1790-1802, passim. Professor T. S. Ashton kindly allowed me to see his transcripts of these records.

451

29-2

The Brewer and the Markets based on Liverpool merchants, this is evidence enough of the national market—although it is another question to what extent the maltster would rely on public information distributed in this way through the trade when not supplemented by more personal recommendations. The Burton brewers certainly had an equal spate of information, but unfortunately it is not possible from surviving records to see at what time the practice of sending regular public circulars developed.

More im¬

portant, at least from Benjamin Wilson’s standpoint—and in this he is probably typical of his rivals—were the agents or factors he invited to act for him in the barley country. He is buying almost completely on com¬ mission, and not in the open market, when the records begin in 1789.1 To these agents, such men as W. Dawber of Lincoln, J. Parnell of Newark, P. and J. Denton of King’s Lynn, once they had proved worthy of trust, great discretion might be given. Usually they received is. per quarter commission and had to follow orders strictly, sending samples ahead to Burton, while enforcing all Benjamin Wilson’s rules about screening and bagging the parcels he chose from them.2 Occasionally, they might be given a price and a quantity (the price which was current in another region) and told to go ahead choosing the ‘best’ available if they thought that good enough. More rarely, they were just given a quantity and told to match quality to price themselves without sample, or even ordered to get it malted on the spot to the specifications they knew were needed for Burton ale, and to send in the finished product to Horninglow.3 But always they had to anticipate the order to stop buying when the brewer found that another region was offering more favourable terms or had a hunch about the market. The brief note, ‘ Expecting that Barley will be lower I think it more prudent to hold off buying’4 appears continually in all the correspondence existing from brewers to their suppliers of each raw material. It signifies both their explicit control of purchasing in often distant markets, and that the initiative was the manufacturer’s rather than the independent merchant’s.

Hence the importance which the purely

mercantile function had for the industrialist. The records extant in Burtonon-Trent show conclusively that almost all barley was bought, rather than malts, and as close to the original source of supply as possible. 1 Allsopp Records: Day Book 1789. It may well be, of course, that this was a standard practice from the seventeenth century or earlier. Further research is needed to answer these problems in internal trade. 2 Cf. B. Wilson to T. Kirby (Appletree), 20 December 1802. 3 E.g. S. Allsopp to J. Parnell, 21 October 1809. 4 E.g. B. Wilson to S. Saunders (Gainsborough), 27 November 1802.

452

The Search for Quality Entries which record the purchase of manufactured malt in an ‘open’ malt market are prominent merely because of their rarity.1 Doubtless, they came because of an unexpected demand which needed to be satisfied quickly. In London a specialised Hertfordshire malting industry meant that, despite the development of malting on their own account, in any normal season the great brewers would not actively supervise the purchase of much of the barley which went into their beer. In their case, rather than the Burton brewers, a problem of quantity had been added to that of quality. It is to this that we must now turn. Until the porter brewers began to move towards the paler malts in the i77o’s, they did not have the same exclusive search for quality as did the fine ale brewers. To them quality was always relative to price, one of the great practical advantages of porter being exactly that it did not depend for its success upon malts of the highest intrinsic quality as did ale. The brown malts which gave it its peculiar chemical advantages had in their turn, as has been stressed, the economic advantage that they could be made as well from good barleys not of the first class as from the finest.2 Indeed, it was known early in the century that ‘high-drying’ malt in the kiln robbed it of some strength, making brown malt economically wasteful for the top-weight grain which deserved to maintain all its price potentiality by a very delicate processing into the best of pale malts. In the grade of brown malts they were seeking, of course, the porter brewers had every bit as much concern with quality as the Burton men, and were keener in their demands on price. Theirs was the greatest mass market in the country, with level prices until 1799 whatever the harvest. Competition was thus entirely in the relative strengths which could be maintained at the uniform price, and the raw material markets in turn reflected the joint quest of economy in price at a consistent level of high average quality. In short, they wanted the best of the brown malts, and being the same stamp of men as Bass or Wilson in Burton they had the will to enforce their particular kind of demand upon the malt markets. In their case, too, very rapidly the scale of demand became so great that they were, as individuals, influences of great moment in the malt markets and everyone knew it. The immense demand—there was nearly a quarter of a million quarters of malt moving into the capital annually in the mid-century and nearly half 1 Allsopp Records: Day Book 1789, e.g. 400 Strike of Malt was bought from D. Giles and Co. Birmingham, 14 October 1790. 2 See above, pp. 16, 414-15.

453

The Brewer and the Markets a million quarters by 1820—raised its own difficulties. First, the scale itself precluded reliance on the finest barley: there would not have been enough of the best to go round. For this reason alone, Burton ale, as the eighteenthcentury market knew it, could not have become the mass drink of the nation under the technical circumstances of barley growing and malting. Porter was the drink best adapted to the good average barleys available within suitable economic range of London upon the necessary scale. Secondly, the brewers could not have malted enough for their own needs upon their premises in London. The problem of buying up neighbouring properties in order to expand their brewing and storage capacity to keep pace with demand, was sufficient problem on its own, without their beginning to look for extra space for malting. In contrast to brewing, the scale of individual makings did not undergo any drastic, revolutionary expansion during the eighteenth century which raised the awkward problem of management if the brewer was to attempt to make all his own malt—perforce, that was, in very many establishments scattered a long way from London. As Robert Sangster, then one of the managers of Whit¬ bread’s brewery, wrote to his master when Samuel Wells, a maltster of Biggleswade and an acquaintance of Whitbread at Southill, submitted samples: I have no hesitation in admitting Mr Wells’ sample of malt is superior to King’s: nor can there be any doubt that making a small quantity upon his own premises will generally, if not always, produce a better sample than one making a quantity at different Houses, situated at a distance from each other, because of that close attention so necessary in the manufacture of malt....1 This ‘ close attention ’ had to be given to each separate parcel of barley being malted (when they came from farms on different soils, with different situations), an added reason for makings to be fairly small, and located in the middle of the barley country. It was the technology of production, and these technical skills which needed to be so intimately associated with different qualities in the raw material, which kept making for London located away from the market for which the barley was destined. The pure economics of location would have worked against this: malt gained in volume during processing, which meant that a slightly greater bulk of malt than barley had to be transported, while, for Hertfordshire rather than the east coast making towns, most mineral fuel had to be brought up from the Thames, an added economic burden. 1 Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4646-8.

454

The Malt-Factors THE MALT-FACTORS AND THE BREWERS

When the eighteenth century opened, these general problems had already led to the specialisation of function between the two industries in London: the developments involved in the rise of porter brewing, in particular the burden of organising a stream of consignments constantly increasing with their individual annual productions, forced the porter brewers to depend upon specialised intermediaries, the malt-factors.

Only through this

specialised factoring, supplemented at a later stage with a more direct approach to malt-making, was the dual problem of quality and extent of supply solved. With the brewing trade in London steadily expanding on trend with the expansion of the town, there was room enough for every variety of com¬ mercial relationship in the main raw material market for the industry in the capital.

Factors there had been organising the supply of malt to

London at least since the sixteenth century, and doubtless previously.1 Doubtless, too, some of them owned barges. All London brewers in 1830 were still attending the public malt-markets at Queenhithe, Bear Quay and Mark Lane for a proportion of their supplies, and some independent maltsters (such as the Samuel Wells of Biggleswade mentioned above) and some independent malt-merchants selling on their own account still flourished in the London trade.

Furthermore, almost all the larger

brewers were now making malt for themselves and all of them were commissioning malt-houses or malt-makers by the season.

Perhaps

individual examples of each sort of transaction might also be found well before 1700. Nor are there the means of distinguishing quantitatively changes in the proportions of malt being supplied by any one means between 1700 and 1830. Price series, not quantities, survive from the markets; to my knowledge, none of the books of the great factors are known to exist, while in the brewers’ malt-books there is usually no means of distinguishing accurately the lots (given under the name of the maltster) which have been bought on sample through a factor.

Quite a small

proportion of their annual supplies seems to have come from the private makings owned by porter brewers; and a greatly varying proportion of the rest was made on commission. The advantages of switching from the malt market to the barley market had to be reassessed with every turn of the relative prices, and was.2 From less exact evidence than the unknown quantities involved, 1 F. J. Fisher, loc. cit. p. 60.

2 See below, pp. 469-70.

455

The Brewer and the Markets however, it is abundantly clear that the major developments in the com¬ mercial organisation were the extension of commissioning and ownership of makings by the brewers and the rise of the few important malt-factors, both being mainly consequences of industrial developments in the parent industry. When John Taylor could assert in 1818 that up to 100,000 qtr. of malt passed annually through his hands to London brewers and that he had taken £60,000 from Trumans, and £60,000 from Barclays in a single season, the scale of these changes in malt-factoring may be gauged.1 The ledgers of the porter breweries give ample confirmation that little malt went through the public markets to the mash-tuns of those who produced most of London’s beer. It was equally true of barley. The great flow of grain into the London industry by-passed the markets, and, through various commercial methods, became purchased on private contracts of one sort or another. This is not to say that the public prices of grain did not influence the prices being quoted privately; nor that, when bargains were struck, both parties did not have an eye on the movements in the markets. They were still the commercial barometers registering trends. But the fact remained that the public prices were not the same as those current between the malt-factors and porter brewers. Their elaborate marketing organisation had been developed to ensure good quality malt and the prices they paid for it were on average higher than those at Bear Quay. Malt-factors and brewers united in establishing this fact during the 1818 investigation (where the brewer had been accused by J. T. B. Beaumont of keeping the price of porter unduly high, through calculations which he based upon public corn prices). They admitted, in turn, that it was worth their while to pay the extra cost of the better grain—but no hostile witnesses explored the implications of this statement.2 It will be apparent both from the business needs generated by progress in the London brewing industry and from the nature of the malting industry in Hertfordshire that the key persons in the supply system for this major raw material were the new malt-factors.

For the brewer

needing vast supplies at assured quality, they collected samples from many makings, delivered the parcels which the brewers chose, and distributed payment, strengthening their position on this side of the business by their skilled advice over quality, and by granting long credit. Over the depen¬ dent maltsters, relying on a distant market, similarly, they developed 1 Pari. Papers, 1819, V, evidence of J. Taylor. He was then said to be the largest factor in the trade. 2 Pari. Papers, ibid. Evidence of Clough, Taylor, passim, C. Barclay (p. 87), C. Calvert (p. 99I.

456

The Malt-Factors much influence through credit, but their marketing contacts with all the great brewers thirty miles away were a prize any small maltster would be glad to share. And above all, they owned the means of transport. Uniting the functions of factor and barge-owner was the prime characteristic of these few Hertfordshire dynasties who became so powerful in the trade after 1760. Their rise must be seen always in relation to the rise of the porter brewing dynasties which they served. Complaints to the Court of Sewers in the i74o’s about impediments to the navigation show the names of many barge-masters and maltsters of Ware and Hertford, which can be checked in similar petitions to the Trustees of the Lea, in those instances where occupations are recorded. No less than ten appear to be in both businesses: Thomas Darra, Thomas Scott, Thomas Hankin, John Taylor, Ambrose and George Proctor, John Adams, James Ffordham and Waite Hampson.1 Scarth Wyatt is men¬ tioned as both a barge-master and a malt-factor.2 Almost certainly, some of the other fifteen or so barge-masters mentioned in the i74o’s were already malting. William Leak was both maltster and barge-owner by 1772; William and Henry Page by 1767. The Dickinson and Cobham families were certainly barge-owners; Dickinsons certainly were also in malting.3 Once a family was established in such a region, owning capital in commerce, it was to be expected that, within a genera¬ tion or two, members of it would find themselves in both occupations, and sometimes also in brewing. Without private records and detailed research, however, little can be known of these several family chronicles which together compose so much of the economic history of Ware, Hertford and Bishop’s Stortford. The analysis of the shift from the many prosperous barge-owners-cum-maltsters to the seemingly fewer bargeowners-cum-malt-factors still awaits its historian. Even so, some part of that development, perhaps typical of the whole, may be glimpsed through the fortunes of the Taylors.4 The John Taylor who appeared as a ‘barge owner or barge occupier’ on the Lea in a petition of November 1748 may well have been related to the Samuel Taylor (d. 1807) with whom the family business is considered to begin.5

In 1771-2, both a John Taylor and a Samuel Taylor are

B.T.C.A. Lee 1/1-3; Court of Sewers Session Book. 2 Ibid. 17 October 1748. 3 See above, pp. 256-7. 4 I am indebted for much of the family evidence which follows to the kindness of the late Mr C. Tuke-Taylor of Hoddesdon. No business records are known to have survived from the eighteenth century at the present firm of H. A. and D. Taylor. 6 H. A. and D. Taylor Ltd. 200 Years of Malting (n.d.).

457

The Brewer and the Markets mentioned as steersmen of barges, the latter ‘steersman to Mr Atkinson’. If Samuel Taylor did begin his career as servant to another merchant he was soon in business for himself, being recorded as a barge-owner in 1772, and presumably also a malt-factor, setting the business pattern and found¬ ing the business fortune for his sons.1 He bought a small estate on the river at Ware bridge from the Trustees in 1786.2 His son John (1763-1826) joined him in partnership at Ware but supposedly left to become a malt¬ ster and malt-factor at Stortford in 1784, when that town’s malting industry had begun to expand rapidly following the improved navigation of the Stort in 1779. Here he certainly maintained a joint account with his father until at least 1796, apart from his own business. From the books of Trumans it appears that both are supplying malt on their individual accounts, as well as acting as factors and shippers for other maltsters. Individually, however, the sums outstanding to their credit in the annual balance sheets (that is uncleared trade debts) are modest in relation to other maltsters and are usually under £1000 until 1794. Similar accounts appeared in the books of Whitbreads and Barclays, but they give no indication of the annual turn-over which father and sons had with these breweries, and the quantities are in a different scale altogether from those reported by John Taylor to Parliament in 1818. The malt-ledger of Trumans shows the true picture: they there appear receiving the payment for many small maltsters whose parcels they shipped.3 Their own dealings seem in these years to be marginal to their main transactions as factors (which was presumably the capacity in which John Taylor took his £60,000 from Trumans).

In the summer of 1795, Samuel Taylor had

a trade debt outstanding to himself of £3423—30 unusually large sum for him. From 1809, ‘Taylor and Son’s’ account moved upwards and often stood at £6000^7000; for, by 1813-14, Sampson Hanbury had altered his plan of buying in favour of the few larger dealers. Searle, for example, was credited with £20,924 in the balance sheet of June 1812; Taylor with £21,000 in 1819; and of the few dealers, Taylor’s account was usually dominant in these years. Even so, merely from the entries in the malt books or the Rests it remains doubtful what these large sums actually mean. In some cases, some portion of them undoubtedly represented a loan, or a protracted trade debt from previous years which had been funded 1 B.T.C.A. Lee 1/4, 29 August 1771, 16 September 1772. 2 Ibid. 11 June 1786. 1 Truman Records: Rest Books; Malt Book 1790-7. I do not know if the‘Taylor and Cole’, Allen Taylor, William Taylor, ‘A. and J. V. Taylor’ also appearing in these accounts were related to John and Samuel Taylor.

458

The Malt-Factors in this way as an investment. For example, in 1812 James Searle’s great credit of £20,924 carried an interest payment of £1313; John Taylor lent £10,000 to the brewery in 1812, £2430 in 1815 and £12,000 in 1816. A John Taylor (perhaps his son) borrowed £2500 from the brewery in 1824-30, and when Searle was pressed in April 1804 Sampson Hanbury accepted bills worth £5000 from him ‘under a firm conviction you will give me the money at the end of the season’.1 Vickris Prior, also linked to the house by malt transactions, had £5000 invested in the capital account in 1819, and then in 1821 established a stake of £10,000 which ran on permanently until after 1830.2 As with the hop-merchants’ transactions described in another chapter, dealings with these tradesmen in malt were on such a large scale, and because of wide price fluctuations between the seasons the bills were so great and so variable, that temporary investment of his credit at 5 per cent in the brewery was often the simplest way for a malt-merchant to await his returns when the usual six months of trade credit had elapsed. Often, too, it was much the most convenient respite for the brewer. Both parties had become very dependent upon each other : in a year of dearth, and at a time of rising duty rates on malt, the brewers felt a great pressure on liquidity because of the rise in raw material costs; but, unless the house was weak for other causes, there was no danger of bankruptcy and the malt and hop creditors knew that it was foolish to increase the risk of it. One other useful function which the malt- (and hop-) factors assumed for their customers was the provision of storage space—always a problem in the congested site of the brewery in London, where expansion of pro¬ duction put great pressure on the storage space needed inevitably for beer and, therefore, even greater pressure relatively on that for its raw materials. Certain stocks for immediate use had, of course, to be kept on the spot but much of the season’s purchases would lie for several months in warehouses owned by the factors and merchants near the place of malting. John Taylor held most of the Hertfordshire stocks for Trumans, and John Kemp much of their pale malt in Essex, both sending it in as ordered by the brewer. Adams of Ware was the main factor for the new Meux Reid house after 1809. When they had laid in stocks in the early summer of 1814 to tide them over the beginning of the following season he was holding malt worth over £22,000 at Ware.3 1 Truman Records: Letter Books. S. Hanbury to J. Searle, 28 April 1804. 2 Ibid. Rest Book. V. Prior may have been related to the brewers T. M. and R. Pryor who amalgamated with Trumans in 1816. 3 Watney Records: Meux Reid, Rest Books 1809-16.

459

The Brewer and the Markets At the close of a normal season, such summer stock-holding was an important insurance policy against the chance of a bad harvest and could reach vast proportions. Reid’s malt stocks totalled £76,500 in their 1816 Rest Book; Whitbread’s £79,000 (they were £82,200 in 1801) and Barclay’s malt, hops and coal stocks reached £280,800 in 1825. Besides absorbing much capital, the sheer bulk of these quantities made the ware¬ houses of their suppliers an important asset in the services they offered. The commercial relationships developed between brewer and maltfactor underlined the general truth which emerges at several points in this study—that commercial success in the industry depended very much upon the joint efficiency of merchanting (particularly in the raw material markets) and manufacture. In any one season the main determinant of the profits was the price of malt and hops; on trend, the mark of the successful brewer was matching quality and price to his best advantage in the malt market. Insisting upon efficiently bought high-quality grain in the mash-tun, therefore, proved to be the beginning of both technological and economic wisdom.

For these reasons, the correspondence surviving between

Sampson Hanbury of Trumans and John Taylor of Stortford offers a glimpse into the secrets of entrepreneurial success.1 Even the complaints which Hanbury hurled at Taylor’s head in angry letters are witness to the great reliance the brewer placed upon him. The malt-factor’s responsibility began when he recommended client maltsters to fulfil the brewer’s orders. Occasionally, Hanbury would send off a demand for a few thousand quarters of malt at a certain price— leaving quality to Taylor’s discretion—although this was unusual.2 Such a general order would still involve rebuke if Taylor’s discretion did not live up to Hanbury’s standards. ‘ I wish you to load... with Brown Malt not Malt Dust...,’ he wrote on one occasion, ‘if you cannot get a few Screens in your Country I will send some down.’3 Hanbury’s strictures over bad quality were always peremptory and without compromise, calling forth his most caustic remarks: I have sent you by the Coach a sample of the last pale Malt you sent in, it is so infamously bad that I am surprized you could even let me have it. However, to prevent any further trouble I beg to inform you I will not receive another sack of it into my Brewhouse... should I have occasion ever to write such another letter I shall entirely alter my plan of buying.4 1 Truman Records: Letter Books, 1789-98; 1802-4. 2 E.g. 4 November 1789. These letters are copies of those from Hanbury to John Taylor. Taylor’s replies have not survived at the brewery. 3 23 March 1803. 4 13 September 1803.

460

The Malt-Factors More usually, Taylor was the guarantor only for the initial recommenda¬ tions of maltsters whose parcels Hanbury then chose himself by the samples Taylor collected and sent down to him.

Hanbury would be

always in close touch with markets in London, even if he seldom bought much there, knowing how prices were moving, and would then tell Taylor the rates at which he would accept offers of pale and brown. ‘When at these Prices ’, he would often conclude, ‘ I will trouble you for a Letter.’1 He relied on Taylor to check that the consignment matched the sample when he took it into store at Stortford or shipped it direct to London, and refused the parcel automatically if Taylor was not satisfied.2

Like

Benjamin Wilson, Hanbury kept the initiative of price and timing firmly in his own hands, while maintaining an absolute veto on quality if the parcels did not live up to the samples, or if his trust in the factor’s judgment was not vindicated. Here, as in his dealings with John Kemp over com¬ missioned malting, he was firm.3 In practice, very much of the quality he depended on in the malt, as well as so much of the business routine of contact with the maltsters, came from Taylor’s efforts; but recognition of his dependence is seldom to be found in the letters. Once it does emerge.

In January 1803, Hanbury was caught with forward pur¬

chasing on a falling market.

He asked John Taylor to try and get his

maltsters to take 15. per quarter off their prices, remembering his own compromises on agreed prices to their benefit in opposite circumstances. ‘Do the best you can for me’, he wrote, ‘and for once learn to be the Brewer's not the Maltster's Factor.’4 In the business of paying the many maltsters on his books, Hanbury was equally dependent on Searle and Taylor. When the first surviving maltbook begins, in 1790, most of these payments were already by ‘check’, or drafts on the local banks sent by letter post to the factor, who would then distribute them. The careful instructions which are given on the procedure necessary for cheque transactions suggest that it was a recent innovation on Hanbury’s part. One of Taylor’s chief responsibilities (and Hanbury’s anxieties) was to prevent the maltsters from drawing on the brewery too soon, or without warning, for the malt they had sold. When such large credits were involved from many different persons, lack of discipline in drawing bills might bring a liquidity problem very quickly. It was always a sensitive point with the brewers. For example, on 14 January 1802 a Stortford maltster, Thomas Debenham, sold a barge-load of brown malt 1 22 March 1802. 3 See below, pp. 469-70.

2 E.g. S. Hanbury to Lamprell, 12 June, 5 July 1798. 4 11 January 1803.

461

The Brewer and the Markets to Hanbury through Taylor for £800. He wrote to Hanbury on 14 April, when the malt had just arrived at the brewery, saying that he had drawn a bill at ten days for this amount through John Mortlock’s bank. Taylor at once received a letter from Hanbury about it: ‘You have introduced me to a pretty Connection,’ he stormed. ‘I think he had better in future sleep in town overnight when any money is due the next day and be with me as soon as it is light. I will not buy a sack more of his malt and I wish you to send his others directly or he will come for the money before I get the malt....’ When another of Taylor’s clients did the same thing, Hanbury commented, ‘I beg you will let him sell to the Factors to try whether they will accomodate him so quick’.1 Sampson Hanbury and John Taylor were close personal friends— a fact which the letter-books do not directly reveal. They lived not far away from each other, the one at Poles, the other at Stortford. They were both Trustees of the Lea navigation. They met occasionally on holiday, and John Taylor knew all Hanbury’s Buxton and Gurney relatives in Norfolk quite well. Hanbury would get John Taylor to take his coal from London to Poles for him; John Taylor bought most of his beer from Trumans. Finally, at John Taylor’s death in July 1827, Sampson Hanbury became Executor and administrator of his estate, with the two sons Joseph and William Taylor, as a mark of their friendship. The brief holiday diaries left by John Taylor show, again, how intimately the web of his personal relationships was woven into his business life. It was a world of cousins, and cousins’ friends. Of his regular journeys to Cromer at the time of the barley harvest—from Stortford the route lay over some of the finest barley country in the land—mention is made elsewhere.2 He inspected the crops, called on his acquaintances in the market towns on the way to ask them the state of the barley, and bought occasional parcels which might be on offer. Hedingham, Bury, Newmarket, Thetford, were his usual stopping places. At Norwich he would call at the Gurney bank (31 August 1824, ‘We saw Mr H. Gurney who was very chatty. Mr R. G. was at Northrops [sic] with Osgood Hanbury’), then to Cromer (‘very full and Genteel’). Here a round of visiting began, to the Buxtons, at Cromer Hall, to Lord Suffield’s estate, to the Barclays, to the Gurneys. Round the dinner table and at breakfast in the country houses, in the market, at the evening promenade along the sands and on the jetty, at the parish church and the meeting-house (both of which John Taylor attended im1 13 May 1802. See also, 8 June 1803, 4 June 1804. 2 See above, p. 451. There are brief MS. diaries for the five years 1821-5.

462

The Malt-Factors partially) he mingled with the families who were to be his main customers in the ensuing year, once the barley had been gathered and malted which was ripening in the fields around Cromer while they chatted, entertained and worshipped. Mr Green, ‘the brewer at Reid’s House and his sons’, Mr Prior, ‘brewing at Islington’, Mr Hardy, brewing at Holt, were there. He met Mr McLunn, a Cambridge curate who was at Cromer with his students and noted that he was a ‘ friend of Mr Charles Barclay and knows Mr Fredk. Perkins...’.

At different times he met Crisp Brown, Samuel Searle,

Fison (of Thetford and Norwich), and W. Clough—all in his own trade. And most of the brief entries mentioning the people he met include also their comments on the barley. Evidently, Cromer at holiday in July and August became an informal congress of brewers, bankers, landowners and malt merchants, many of them linked by ties of kinship, and all by a common concern with the barley harvest. At John Taylor’s death, his sons Joseph and William carried on the busi¬ ness of ‘ maltsters, malt-factors and malt-masters ’ which they had inherited jointly. A younger John Taylor had been established in malting at Sible Hedingham and Castle Hedingham, Essex.1 Joseph Taylor (1785-1864) then branched out into brewing at Saffron Walden, in partnership with his son Henry and a brother, and at some unspecified time dropped the old busi¬ ness of barge-master and factor. In their connexion with malting, however, the family showed a continuity rivalling that of the brewers they supplied. Taylors shared the hegemony of the Hertfordshire trade with the Clough, the Searle and the King families, although the latter three families were more firmly entrenched in the manufacture of malt than was John Taylor. They bought barley from counties as far afield as Huntingdon and Northampton and when either quality or quantity were inadequate in the ring of counties adjacent to Hertford, they would bring in supplies from the London market. James King made about 600 qtr. a week in the season, and Thomas Clough of Stortford up to 400 qtr., the former using twelve makings scattered between Ware, Hertford, Barkway, Royston and Baldock in the best districts.2 This wide quest for barley on the part of the maltstermerchants would be reinforced in some years by the brewers sending barley 1 From John Taylor’s probate (19 November 1826) the younger John Taylor is not recorded as a son. John Taylor Sr had certainly set him up in business (the will discharges him from any repayment of capital ‘it being considered by me for his advancement in the world’). He was probably a nephew (S. Hanbury wrote on 10 and 18 February 1803 to a ‘John Taylor, Maltster, of Ware,’ speaking of his ‘uncle’s barge’ and‘John Taylor of Stortford in the letters). 2 He made 8000-10,000 qtr. in the bad year of 1800.

463

The Brewer and the Markets up to Ware and Hertford to be malted in the particular way they desired, for which the skill of the Hertfordshire maltsters alone would suffice.1 It was commercially almost inescapable that factors should deal on their own account as merchants, even if they stopped short of manufacturing for themselves as merchants. They needed buffer stocks to prevent them¬ selves being caught out by sudden demands from brewers, and as they became wealthy as factors, and saw the prospect of a rise in price, their own commodity became as profitable an object for the investment of profits as any other. Malt- and hop-factors followed the same traditions in these respects as factors in any other commodity. Where factoring involved control of shipment, as it did on the Lea and with the Kent hoymen, there was the added incentive of using one’s shipping space to capacity.2 The maltsters had to pay their duty every month or six weeks unless they could provide sufficient security to ‘cover’ it completely, in which case they were allowed credit for five to six months. This meant that those with capital might receive the returns from the sale of malt before they paid the duty, and this duty money could be kept at profit in the mean¬ while.3 For the more insecure manufacturers the duty payments every month could be a heavy burden. In these circumstances they would turn to the merchants and factors for temporary loans to tide them over the gap between the payment of duty and the returns from sales. Increases in the duty had to be paid on stocks, an added burden; while they had to maintain their long credits to the brewers, a further incentive driving them into sales to merchants and factors who offered credit.4 There is every indication that this was happening on an increasing scale and that those small maltsters who did not resort to such dependence were finding business more and more difficult as the rate of duty more than tripled to 4.?. 5f d. per bushel during the French wars. After 1804, in fact, almost half the cost of malt was tax. The important traders, on the other hand, thought that the duties performed a ‘useful service’ by keeping insubstantial men without capital out of the trade.5 It is difficult to gauge the effect which 1 Pari. Papers, 1806, 11, Report...on Malt Duty, 1819, v, ibid.; 1831, vil, evidence of Clough, Taylor, King. 2 Pari. Papers, 1801, 11, yth Report.. .on High Price of Provisions, App. 15-17, evidence of C. Saville.

3 For the implications of this fiscal profit in banking see above, p.327 and Pressnell, op. cit. p. 38. 4 J.H.C. xxxvii, 838; Pari. Papers, 1821, vm, Report.. .on Malt Duty, App. (for stocks on which duty was levied). Sampson Hanbury offered to pay part of this increase for his maltsters, even when the malt was not legally in his name (Truman Records: Letter Books). 5 Pari. Papers, 1831, vn, p. 86 (J. Downs). When prices fell the burden became particularly heavy. Some statutes gave temporary credit to ease this burden (See Pari. Papers, 1835, xxxi, 15th Report... pp. 11, 42-5; Apps. 49, 52, 65,91,97; 7 and 8 Geo. IV, c. 52; n Geo. IV, c. 17). 464

The Malt-Factors the pressure of legislation like this had upon the structure of the industry, but there is no doubt that all the maltsters regarded it as important— both as favouring or discriminating against themselves, depending upon which category they thought they were in. Certainly, it is a feature of the rise of the powerful malt-factors at the end of the century. In a similar way fiscal regulations favouring the Common Brewer against the Brewing Victualler were encouraging the rise of the larger breweries at the expense of the smaller.1 MALTING AND BREWING

Unlike the hop industry, malting was beckoning brewers back to the more direct control of their main raw material. The development is neither clear-cut nor universal; indeed, it concerned only the small but powerful minority in London who had cut their links with the preparatory pro¬ cessing, but the individual cases in which it occurred were of such collec¬ tive weight in the industry that it makes the movement one of great economic significance. In it, one may see a cycle of industrial develop¬ ment coming full circle, paralleling the equally significant move of brewers towards control of public houses which has been discussed in chapter iv. In the least differentiated position were the small ‘handicraft’ producers whose markets were too narrow to encourage a large division of labour— corn buyer, maltster, brewer and innkeeper personified in the single entrepreneur. Even more commercially primitive, of course, were the household brewers who might malt their own, although this became less common during the century, and there had never been absolute freedom from tax. ‘ Compounding’ for the duty with a fixed sum, as a householder might do, could be fiscally advantageous, but scarcely to the extent of making the trouble of malting on a household scale worth while. However, many of the writers catering for the ‘cottage-economy’ in the eighteenth century included chapters on malting for home brewers, even though by 1821 the most famous of them all is assuming that the home brewer will buy his malt.2 Once the retail link had been dropped by those aspiring to the excise category of Common Brewers, in almost all cases except London, malting remained allied with brewing under the same management and at the 1 See above, pp. 362-9. 2 W. Cobbett, Cottage Economy (1823) (ed. G. K. Chesterton, 1926), pp. 24-b. Cf. E. Lisle, Observations on Husbandry (i757)> v°l- n> P30

465

MBE

The Brewer and the Markets same site. The pattern of identity was not, of course, clear-cut either. Independent maltsters flourished by supplying many different customers who did not make enough for their own requirements as brewers or the thousands of home brewers who did not malt at all. In rural areas of the Midlands, still innocent of many Common Brewers, the maltsters (who were also malt merchants) might be the most powerful men in the commer¬ cial chain and hold the initiative to the extent of buying up public houses run by Brewing Victuallers to secure their markets for malt. In such widespread industries as brewing and malting, in an age where no systematic statistical analysis of this issue is possible, very many instances can be quoted for each type of independence and alliance of function in brewing and malting. Broadly speaking—again, apart from London—the larger the urban market inviting exploitation by large-scale brewers, the more likelihood there was that the entrepreneurs would concentrate on brewing. This saved them trouble; it saved them space or gave them space for enlarging the brewery in an intensely built-up area; it allowed them to put all their capital into expanding the final manufacture. The Bristol Porter Brewery, founded for large production in 1788, never had sufficient space on their river site for makings. It is unlikely that Guinness’ capacity for malting in the period of their great expansion in Dublin ever kept pace with their capacity for brewing.

Malting they did, as Arthur Guinness explained

when his competitors were profiting unfairly by buying illegally made malt,1 but by then the significant point was the degree of commitment to malting by a Dublin metropolitan brewer of his eminence. In Scotland it seems that it was traditional for brewers to provide most of their own malt, being predominantly in the barley markets (as were the distillers). Indeed, so much was malt manufacture dominated by makers of final products that there seems to have been little offered for public sale at all.2 In Burton-on-Trent, Benjamin Wilson normally bought only an occasional parcel of malt when caught short of barley for some reason— and usually he sold more malt than he bought. He would aim to malt com¬ pletely for himself, and in this he was probably typical of his neighbours.3 In malting on his own account, however, there could be several variations —but all within the range of possibilities which preserved the brewer’s control of the process. The firm were working several offices themselves 1 Pari. Papers, 1835, xxxi, 15th Report... Appendices, 91, 97-8. Guinness had been ‘one of the first maltsters in the Kingdom’. 2 Pari. Papers, 1821, VIII, pp. 211 et seq. 3 Allsopp Records: Letter Books, passim.

466

Malting and Brewing (from the turn of the century at least, but there is nothing to suggest it was an innovation), and standing the loss when they remained idle.1 In 1771, on the other hand, they were commissioning a man to work their three malt-houses at id. per strike throughout the next season: ‘we engage to furnish him with barley or pay him for the vacant Time and he engages to steep no more than once in five Days and to turn us off a pale well-worked and thoroughly dried Malt’.

In October 1771, Wilson rented a fourth

malting.2 There is enough scattered evidence at the beginning of the nineteenth century to suggest that the identity of maltster and brewer— with the qualifications mentioned above—was still almost universal, being maintained in quite large towns. Newark,

Bristol,

Plymouth,

Amongst the places identified are

Newcastle-under-Lyme,

Birmingham,

Windsor.3 Sometimes, with brewers sited on the coast in good barley districts, as the Lacons and Cobbolds, malting and corn merchanting might be as important in their fortunes as brewing. In London, throughout the eighteenth century and apparently long before,4 there had always been specialisation between brewer and maltster. Malting was scarcely a London industry at all, at least in relation to brewing, and here, as in so many other ways, London was an important exception to the national pattern. The London brewers only moved back into malting when their trade as porter brewers was finally established, and then they were too cramped for space to do it upon their brewery premises. Not one major London brewer is known to have malted ‘at home’ in the eighteenth century, and the books of the Hand in Hand Fire Office, which acted for almost everyone, do not show a single policy covering a malt-house.5 The quest of these brewers for good-quality raw material, when coupled with the great extent of their demand, had developed the sophisticated marketing structure based primarily upon Hertfordshire which became supplemented by their own appearance in malting country. Whitbread was hiring his own makings at Hitchin for individual years as early as 1748, before he moved to his large brewery, commissioning a maltster, Charles Brown (who appears in other years as one of the independent maltsters and merchants supplying the brewery), to buy barley and make malt for him.6 In 17835 he sent the son of one of his principal clerks, Boughton Masey, to Ware as a factor. As Whitbread 1 B. Wilson to W. L. Bakewell, 2 February 1799; ibid, to T. G. Niihtler, 10 March 1802. 2 Allsopp Records: Journal, 2 May and 7 December 1771. 3 See Pari. Papers quoted. 4 F- J- fisher, loc. cit. p. 60. B G.L.M.R. Hand in Hand Insurance Company, Policies, 1760-1830. 6 Whitbread Records: Trade Ledger 1746-52.

467

30-2

The Brewer and the Markets commented himself: ‘Joseph Masey. Novr 19, 1783. He became Factor for the Brewse at Ware, and to make malt for the same and has been a very beneficial Trade to him—rather Great.’1 Employing a factor to buy from independent makers, or an agent to make malt himself, were other intermediary stages between reliance upon independent factors and maltsters (itself a development from buying on the market in London) and the absolute ownership of makings. This latter stage came for Whitbreads with their amalgamation with the Martineau family in 1812, for the other brewery had possessed a malthouse of their own at Norwich at least since 1794. Two malt-houses were valued in their last independent balance-sheet in 1812, held on a lease which was valued at £1400. By 1826, both their number and value had risen. There were makings valued at South Town (near Yarmouth), at Yarmouth itself, and Whittington (at Stoke Ferry)—all now held by freehold and worth the surprisingly high value of -£18,800 on the books.2 Combe and Delafield had also acquired makings at Yarmouth.3 Barclay Perkins seem to have first bought their own barley to be made into malt under their direction in December 1784, when they paid an agent, John Smith, to malt it. Consolidation followed in the usual way: in February 1787 came the first rent payments for a making office, while in subsequent years two were rented regularly at Norwich for £25 and £93. 15s. per annum, the same John Smith becoming their regular maltster.4 This did not appear to result in outright purchase of makings before 1830.

In 1784, also, Henry Goodwyn, of the Red Lion porter

brewery, had his own malt-house, but, in common with the others, it would not have provided for more than a small proportion of their needs.5 Charles Calvert was making for himself in 1818, but Trumans only went so far as commissioning maltmaking.6 In all these cases, the porter brewers had gone to East Anglia in pre¬ ference to Hertfordshire, their move into making coinciding with the increasing reliance upon pale malts. The lack of maltsters and merchants as reliable and highly skilled as the Hertfordshire factors and the Ware makers doubtless encouraged them to take a more direct part in making in East Anglia. 1 Whitbread Records (Southill): Brewery 4638. 2 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Rest Books 1812-30; Deed Book (some had been bought for £35°° from Sir E. Lacon); Pari. Papers, 1819, v, pp. 43, 77. 3 Serocold, op. cit. p. 33. 4 Barclay Records: Cash Books 1776-1809. Charles Barclay said in 1818 that they no longer made their own malt. Pari. Papers, 1819, v, p. 45. 6 Charrington Records: Goodwyn Trade Ledger 1784-8. 6 Pari. Papers, 1819, v. No makings are valued in Trumans’ Rest Books. 468

Malting and Brewing Such integration towards securing a more direct stake over their raw materials by London brewers was almost certainly on a wider scale than presented evidence shows. Few trading records and virtually no corre¬ spondence are known to survive in London for the period prior to 1790, while they are scattered after that date. Moreover, valuation figures in Rest Books, which are the main records extant, would show only malthouses owned outright or leased, and mask the many lesser degrees of commitment to malting.

If full records existed, perhaps the general

picture of the nearly complete differentiation between the porter brewing and the malting industry would need to be modified. All extant evidence, however, does point to the fact that the movement towards malting gained strength in the two decades prior to the end of the century. This would correlate with the developing structure of the brewing industry in the capital and the trend rise in malt prices during these times—both of which would urge brewers to face the barley markets rather than the malt markets. Clearly, this was the object of the move and it explains the advantages of having both permanent commitments (in the shape of fixed capital, permanent agents or long contracts) in malting and a more temporary stake in addition. When malt prices were rising under hardening demand, the profit margins of makers and merchants would widen and the brewer could offset this portion of his increasing raw material costs by getting malt made on commission (at more fixed costs) and penetrating back through malt purchasing to the barley market, in which the fluctuations in prices were commonly not as great. In such a season, or when the trend of prices was developing this way over the years, it would pay to lease or buy makings and use them at full capacity. But when the malt markets slumped the fixed costs of malting rose above the difference between the price of barley and malt, and it paid the brewer to profit by the loss of the maltster and the merchant and buy malt rather than barley.

In such seasons as this,

makings would not be hired on commission and the brewer’s own plant would not be likely to run at full capacity. Nothing could illuminate the careful calculations of the porter brewers more clearly than the corres¬ pondence which passed between Sampson Hanbury of Trumans (who do not appear to have owned makings) and John Kemp his maltster (who also malted on his own account) at Colchester.1 There were several dis¬ advantages in being tied to the trade. Hanbury occasionally had to insist that Kemp should not defraud the excise. ‘ I abhor it so much that I never 1 Truman Records: Letter Books. In 1790, Hanbury was commissioning malting by Joseph Fairman (Malt Book 1790-7)469

The Brewer and the Markets intend to use one Grain of such as I do not think has paid its full Share of Duty,’ he wrote. ‘ I shall never regret to hear you have been found out and sulfer as much as the Law has power to inflict.’1 He had also to put down uncomfortably large sums on occasion—farmers not giving any credit at all (customarily) when they sold their barley, but the independent maltfactors accommodating the brewer for three or six months. In December 1802, when Kemp demanded £7000 for purchasing barley, Hanbury wrote back: ‘ it is not worth my while to carry on the Makings if I am to advance such large Sums.’2 At bottom, however, it was the direct price difference between the malt and barley markets which conditioned his opinion. A month before, he had written to Kemp: ‘ I can buy the best new brown at 445. [that is per quarter] therefore I think it Madness to make any... this convinces me of what I have often expressed in the Making of Malt, that you cannot take the same advantages of the Market in buying Barley as Malt.’3 A week later, he put off another would-be seller of barley ‘ having bought largely of Malt since you were at Poles and finding I can still buy cheaper than I can make’.4 On another occasion, he let Kemp make brown at ‘ 40*. (in the River) or 395. (at Colchester) ’—if he could buy good barley and still make it pay. If not, then Hanbury ordered him to make pale (where the margins were sufficiently wide) while he bought brown in Stortford.5 Evidently the decisions here are being made daily, and the ability to be able to switch from one to the other rapidly, having enough of a stake in malting to be able to take advantage of the barley markets, but not too much of a stake not to make it possible to exploit a falling malt market—was of the highest value. Possessing his own makings had the additional advantage of giving the brewer a basis for testing the efficiency of his buying, through the comparison of qualities and costs of malts he acquired as a buyer or as a manufacturer. Their enormous outlays on malt and hops, relative to any other single items of costs, set the primary commercial conditions within which all brewers operated. The budgets of the innkeeper-brewer, alike with those of the greatest house in the porter trade, have this feature in common. Much description of the relations between the brewers and the raw material merchants may be found by implication in Table 30, and its significance 1 Truman Records: S. Hanbury to J. Kemp, 12 April 1802. 2 Ibid. S. Hanbury to J. Kemp, 1 December 1802. 3 Ibid. S. Hanbury to J. Kemp, 11 November 1802. 4 Ibid. S. Hanbury to Messrs Wright and Casburne, 18 November 1802. 6 Ibid. S. Hanbury to J. Kemp, 14 December 1802. See also 24 February 1802, 15 March 1803, 15 December 1803 for similar tactical decisions by Hanbury. 470

Malting and Brewing table

30. Raw Materials, Costs and Profits: Meux Reid, 1810-ig [sources: Rest Books at Brewery.]

Rest Books made up in June each year. Raw material prices taken from stock valuations in some degree. Prices to publican do not include ‘allowances’. Malt

Year 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819

Malt used (qtr.)

Total cost

54,732 54,024

233,002 214,396 154,481 214,404 196,411 186,937 162,620 128,576 162,337 210,969

43,655 40,593 46,500 49,600 49,599 37,877 43,8io 48,100

Total costs raw materials Year

GO

1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819

281,112 254,220 183,959 241,358 226,245 223,926 207,183 175,172 263,671 251,743

GO

No. barrels brewed 211,008 220,853 190,103 165,317 164,857 181,756 187,193 I57A3I 168,964 183,666

Hops Average price (per qtr.) s. d. 85 79 70

i*7 4'4 9'3 7.7

105 84 75 65 67 74 87

57 4'5 6-9 io-8 i-3 8-7

Total cost

9,326 9,011 6,912 5,3io 5,783 6,144 5,522 4,632 4,292 4,872

48,110

103

o-i

39,934 29,478 26,954 29,834 36,989 44,563 46,596 101,334 40,774

88 85 101 103 120 161 201 472 167

7'5 3-6 6-i i-8 4-9 5-0 2-3 2-5 46

GO

Total costs per Costs per barrel (including barrel, interest on Profit or loss capital) per barrel raw materials s. d. s. d. GO 26 23 19 29

6-7 2-4 4-2 2'4

33 24 22 22 31 27

5'4 7'7 1-3 3-4 i-9 5-0

Average price (per cwt.) s. d.

Hops used (cwt.)

47 2-9 45 2-7 43 8-6 53 7'5 51 6-4 47 o-o 41 4‘7 47 io-i 53 5'5 48 4-6

(P) 0 IPO (P) 2 7-3 (P) 2 6 0 (P) (L) (L) (L) (P) (P) (P)

2 1 1 2 1 1 9

1-5 1-7 8-8 92 2-4 8-6 i-9

Price per barrel to publican s. 45 45 50 55 50 45 40 50

(Nov.) (Jan.) (Jan.) (Feb.) (July) (Jan.)

55 (Jan.) 50 (Sept.)

is paralleled in the books of Whitbreads, Trumans and Barclays. Both the scale, and the degree of fluctuation of these costs are greater than all others. Between the seasons ending June 1811-June 1812, for example, raw material costs in Meux Reid fell from £254,220 to £183,959; between 1817-18 they rose from £175,172 to £263,670. In almost every year these same costs made up more than half of total costs (the duty composing the biggest single slice of the remainder). Such detailed figures as are available here do not exist for a comparable period in the eighteenth century (where the only continuous series of figures came from the balance sheets in the Rest Books rather than trading accounts). Had it been possible to draw

47i

The Brewer and the Markets table

31. Raw material prices and profits, Trumans, 1742-60 [source:

Truman Records: Rest Books 1750-60.]

Price of malt (shillings per Price of hops (shillings per qtr.) Year (at midsummer) s. d. cwt.) 1741 1742 1743 1744 1745 1746 1747 1748 1749 1750 1751 1752 1753 1754 1755 1756 1757* 1758 1759 1760

— 27 26 21 20 l8 l8 20 21 24 24 24

0 0 0 0 6 6 6

45 55 60 90 140 80 80

9 6 0

54 97 78 90 60

23 24 21 21

9 6 6 6 0

36 20 22

4* 8

0

* 1757 Rest Book missing.

Profits

‘Net stock’ in trade

GO

GOt

— 5,798 4,930 8,564 6,636 3,800 8,229

23,339 28,201

8,367 8,660 6,213 5,098 6,669

63 50 42 —

9,815 6,802 6,967 7,852 —

63 58 105

3,033 12,464 12,776

32,195 39,355 44,587 41,583 48,244 54,741 61,529 65,870 — 72,021 79,028 82,066 — — — — 82,996 92,316

f Net capital values missing for 1751,1755-8.

up such a table then, when the wholesale prices of beer charged by the brewer to the publican did not change at all in response to raw material costs (unlike the position after 1799) it would be seen just how completely they could condition profits.1 The cruder calculations made by Benjamin Truman in his Rest Books of 1750 and 1760 bear out the same story. On trend, costs were going down per unit of output because of better malt and increasingly efficient production; but year-by-year fluctuations in profits came with raw material prices. The fact that he jotted down malt prices, hop prices and profits would indicate that Truman thought them linked, as, indeed, the study of his figures indicated. The run of profits given for Whitbreads in 1 The other variable which is not mentioned here is the fluctuation in the amount of raw materials used per barrel of beer, changes in which might be used to off-set the year of high malt and hop prices. The extent of weakening which occurred remained understandably a secret (gravities are not normally published at the present day) but it was presumably considerable. So, of course, were the fluctuations in the rate of profit. As may be calculated from Table 30 the maximum amount of malt used per barrel in any year at Meux Reid, 1810-19, was 2-7 bushels (1810) and the minimum 1-9 bushels (1817), the simple arithmetic being com¬ plicated by the several kinds of beer being brewed. 472

Malting and Brewing the Appendix show a similar pattern, corresponding with the incidence of bad harvests after a year’s time lag.1 The same truth is revealed by implication by the Burton brewers who had no tradition of a fixed selling price for their beer during the century.2 Starting to brew long after the porter brewers, at the end of October or even November, they could see exactly how the harvest had turned out before fixing their prices for the season. All their Baltic customers then received a circular explaining what had happened to malt prices, and how beer prices had had to be adjusted in the light of this movement. Profits, by inference, followed this main determinant of prices. It was only to be expected, as wage costs and other items did not bear so great a proportion of total costs and did not vary between the years nearly as much as charges for malt and hops. When the relative significance of raw material buying and the value of raw material stocks is considered in relation to total costs and total assets in any brewery, it will be seen that malt and hops purchasing was always crucial to the commercial success of the concern. Within those groups of brewers whose scale of production was such that they were competitive in the economics of manufacture, shrewd buying was the quickest road to profits, inefficient buying the most rapid road to ruin. The developments which came to the structure of the malt markets with the rise of factors and commissioning, as well as the increasing reliance on pale malt are alike aspects of the search for efficiency and good quality in raw materials, as we have stressed.

In the short-term, the tactics of buying might be as

vital as its long-term strategy, and the policy of all brewers was to keep the final decisions about the timing of purchases, and the quality they in¬ sisted on, firmly in their own hands. A stream of orders flowed out to factors, merchants and commissioned maltsters almost daily during the few months after the harvest, switching demands between the coastal counties and Hertfordshire, and from brown to pale, as the chance of advantage presented itself.

It was here that a business flair counted;

keeping in touch with the markets was a pre-requisite to success.

In

particular, holding stocks over the summer months might provide a very useful cushion against the effects of a bad harvest, and most brewers sought to insure themselves in this way. Such a policy demanded a good liquidity position (or good credit facilities) as it could absorb vast amounts of capital, and it helps to explain the increasing reliance on the large-scale dealers at the end of the eighteenth century and beyond, when stock 1 Appendix, Table 44.

2 Allsopp Records: Letter Books, passim.

473

The Brewer and the Markets values soared in most breweries. In these general buying tactics for malt, the brewers were subject to very much the same pressures as in the hopmarkets. The variations in the harvest yields (and the prices) were not, of course, as violent for barley as for hops; but, on the other hand, the quantities and values concerned in malt-buying were so much more vast that smaller price swings created a greater fluctuation in the amounts of money involved. The prizes for shrewdness and good luck were at least as important, perhaps greater. Much of the description of the buying policy for hops therefore applies without significant change to malt, and need not be duplicated here. The vastness of the total outlays, which is one of the most remarkable features of these business records, does need to be stressed. The table listing malt and hops used by Meux Reid shows that malt cost the house over a quarter of a million pounds in 1810, and hops over one hundred thousand pounds in 1818. Total stocks of these two commodities held by Barclays were above a quarter of a million pounds in 1825. The value of beer stocks was usually higher still. If, to this, is added debts owed to the house in trade and loans to publicans (both running at equivalent levels after 1815) the relative insignificance of the fixed capital in relation to the circulating capital may be appreciated, total (gross) assets in these years being between £900,000-^1,100,000. Merchanting ability stood side by side with manufacturing efficiency as the twin pillars upon which commercial success was founded. The successful entrepreneur, or the successful partnership, needed to possess an alliance of both skills.

474

CHAPTER XIV

THE HOP INDUSTRY HOP-PLANTING AND VARIETIES

Commercially, the advent of the hop was as important to the brewing industry as it was for the taste of the brew. Undoubtedly it provided one of the technical pre-requisites for the establishment of malt liquor as a commodity entering into regular trade upon a scale more significant than that of supplying the needs of a narrow market for immediate con¬ sumption. Unhopped ale remained largely condemned to a narrow radius of sales, for malt liquor deteriorated rapidly without the preservative qualities given by the hop, more particularly if heat or motion were present. Even with simple storage under optimum conditions, unless it was brewed of very great strength indeed, quality was not assured. A strict time-limit for the survival of stocks thus put a limit to the production of any indi¬ vidual brewer, who might not even safely brew during the cooler months for distribution during the summer when heat and pollen made present fermentation unreliable. As there was a similar curb on the marketing area from deterioration with movement, the brewer was circumscribed in both time and distance and hence locked to a large extent within his immediately local market. In the country houses, institutions and farms where costs might be of little object and waste anticipated, strong unhopped ales could be carried over in safety from season to season, but for commer¬ cial traffic the chance of spoiling was often too high where the retail price was not to be prohibitive, and the ordinary product was technically too inefficient to bear the risks of much travelling. However, despite all such problems there was undoubtedly some regular trading across the North Sea in English unhopped ale.1 It is to the rise in the minimum technical efficiency of brewing given by the hop that we can attribute the development of regular long-distance trade in beer upon an appreciable scale from England after hopping had been naturalised in these islands. The diffusion of the use of hops from the south-east and London into the northern and western regions (the traditional route for the spread of innovations in brewing and beer 1

N. J. M. Kerling, Commercial Relations of Holland and Zeeland with England (Leiden,

1954), PP- no-1?; Apps. D> E-

475

The Hop Industry drinking—as in social habits generally—whether those of hops, porter, pale ale or bottled beer) was in the process of completion by the opening of the eighteenth century, bringing the possibility of more efficient marketing to provincial brewers everywhere. Thomas Fuller, commenting upon the famed Derbyshire ale in 1662, when the use of hops was spreading through the country districts of the Midlands, noted: ‘ whereas in our remembrance, Ale went out when Swallows came in, seldom appearing after Easter; it now hopeth (having climbed up May Hill) to continue its course all the year’.1 Following this movement, naturally, came a consequent expansion of the acreage under hops, while further, less obvious, changes in the parent industry, which have been discussed, had similar if less spectacular influences upon the growing and marketingof hops. The stage for all these subsequent developments, however, was set in 1700. The primary commodity, malt, had long since been knitting agriculture to the brewing industry over the country as a whole, and now the important secondary link through hops was fully established, although from the first this was predominantly regional. As the crop was thus providing an essential raw material for brewing throughout the eighteenth century, we shall investigate the hop industry primarily in conjunction with the main manufacture it supported, just as the madder fields of East Anglia may be properly considered as an adjunct of the cloth industry of previous centuries, or the development of engineering skills in Lancashire studied from the matrix of textiles. Nevertheless, some aspects of the culture conditioned the peculiar environment of the hop-trade and must first be mentioned.2 HOP PLANTING

Hop cultivation was well documented on the continent by the thirteenth century. Its use in brewing through imports spread out from Germany and the Low Countries, reaching England in the early fifteenth century, and in the later years of the same century the practice of hop-planting seems also to have been imported.3

Certainly, hop-growing could be

1 He added, ‘Yet have we lost the Preservative, whatever it was, which (before Hops was found out) made it last so long.. .for half a year at the least after the brewing thereof’. This seems an early regret for loss of strength or, perhaps, of grut. Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (1662), Derbyshire. 2 For an excellent general survey of the industry see H. H. Parker, The Hop Industry (1934). For further details see pp. 3—4- The actual date of the innovation of hop-growing in this country is uncertain, but it was certainly a hundred years before that associated with the popular rhyme, i.e. 1524. One version of this is ‘Turkeys, Carps, Hoppes, Piccarell and Beer, Came into England all in one Year’

476

treated as an established branch of agriculture by the time of Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred points of Good Husbandry (1573) and it received its first special treatise in the following year: Reginald Scot’s Perfite Platforme of a Hoppe Garden. Where previously it had been legislated against in England, now cultivation was officially encouraged,1 and from this date most of the literature on agricultural improvement and estate management has its chapters on the hop, usually stressing the rules and requirements for successful planting rather than the means of getting the crop to the brewers, or the special commercial problems associated with its cultivation. By the time of the first excise on beer and ale under the Common¬ wealth, the gardens had become extensive enough to bear a profitable tax— so that William Prynne, with much experience of public protest against ‘illegal’ levies under the previous government, being himself a hopplanter at Swainswick in Somersetshire, was moved to give voice once more against fiscal tyranny.2 As a planter, he stressed then the characteristic of the crop which was to be emphasised by all subsequent commentators— its extreme uncertainty.

More than almost any other plant regularly

grown as a cash crop—more so than any grain and most fruits—the hop was susceptible to attack by natural enemies, against which it seemed peculiarly defenceless. When the plant was healthy, the harvest was very prolific, but so delicate was its genius, so poor its resilience against fungus or pest attack, that almost every adversity could prove fatal. Necessity, however, had its merits. Before advances in pest control and plant breeding during the last hundred years, the inevitable reliance of planters on the luck of the season was not unwelcome to many of them. Prynne remarked that the ‘ last year before this there was such a blight, that I and others had not the sixth part of the ready money disbursed out of purse for the dressing and polling of them ’—an advantageous situation if the price had soared in the meantime. In this sense, hop prices and yields, with the whole com¬ mercial milieu in which the trade flourished, became like a caricature of the general harvest scene in the eighteenth century. As prices for all grains fluctuated more widely than changes in yield, so hop prices moved inversely with yields in an even more violent rhythm, bringing maximum profit to the planter in the year with a less-than-average crop. 1 Morewood, History.. .of Inebriating Liquors (Dublin, 1838), pp. 535 et teq.j Beckmann, History of Inventions (1846 ed.), vol. 11, pp. 384-6. 2 Prynne, A declaration... (1654), p. 27. See also F. J. Fisher, Econ. Hist. Rev. V (1935), 46-64 for the comments of Samuel Hartlib in 1652.

477

The Hop Industry Ten hundredweights per acre was generally considered a middling crop for an acre of good land under hops, which at the middle and lower range of prices would bring a profit equal to that from as much as fifty acres under a grain crop, if expenses are reckoned at £ 15 per acre, and the returns £30 per acre.

Such intensive cultivation (in both labour and capital

employed per acre) distinguished the agricultural economy of much of Kent from that of almost every other region in the country. One of the soberest accounts of the hop gamble runs: In failing years if your Quantity be small they are sure to sell at a high Price; it may be your good Fortune, that when other Hopgrounds generally fail, yours may prosper... and if this should happen you may gain more by such a crop in one year than others may in Three, and... a year of Scarcity is sometimes as Beneficial to the Planter, because it will serve to consume the old stock of hops, and keep up the Price of New Hops for several years following, which will make sufficient amends for failing years, and you must observe that in Years when Hops fail, you avoid a great Part of the Charge, which is that of picking and drying....1 Cobbett, a century later, spoke the same language when describing ‘the dreadful evils of abundance’.2 For such a bad season the hop-planters waited unashamedly. Their gardens had to be cultivated more intensively than any other farmed land. Manure expenses, the cost of preparing the ground, tending the young plants for three years before the first harvest, picking, drying and bagging were higher than for any other agricultural crop (particularly in a year of glut) so that, as the chance of exorbitantly high returns induced too many planters into the field for the available demand, a ‘ good ’ year—a plentiful season—for the brewer could be disastrous for many of the smaller, less efficient and financially less resilient planters. They all knew, however, that a whole series of misfortunes was always possible, developing with an almost tropical luxuriance: the little black ‘bob’ insect and lice on young plants in the spring, the long-winged fly at midsummer, aphis, grubs and more summer lice which only heavy rain could wash away; ‘fire-blast’ (intense heat following damp which withered and parched the leaves) and the ‘ mould ’, ‘ fen ’ or blight—the greatest killer of them all.3 For such a fungus —‘vegetable disease’—there was no known defence, which meant, for the fortunate whose gardens were not affected, astonishingly good returns. The hop-planter’s ambition was, of course, a general failure in most 1 Instructions for Planting.. .Hops (Dublin, 1733), pp. 12-13. 2 Rural Rides (Everyman ed. 1948), vol. 1, p. 202. 3 A season’s epidemics are followed by T. Hale, Treatise of Vegetable Statics (1725). Repeated in Mills, New System of Practical Husbandry (1767), vol. iv, pp. 414 et seq.

478

Planting regions with heavy cropping in his own (his nightmare being the inverse of this). With hop-planting as highly localised as it was, hop-infections might well not jump intervening belts of ordinarily tilled land.

On

a broader scale, Worcester and Hereford might be clear when Rochester and Canterbury were prostrate. This highly specialised cultivation had induced the practice of con¬ tracting out one’s garden for all management prior to the harvest at an agreed price per acre, at least as far back as the mid-seventeenth century. This relieved a ‘gentleman’ from routine troubles while leaving the gamble of prices with him. Even this speculation could be ‘laid off’ at the beginning of a season by letting out the garden for a year to a ‘Hop Master’.1 Perennial protests against the import of Flemish hops, which broke native prices ‘ unfairly ’ in these long-awaited bad seasons, make the position clear. When asking for more effective regulations against smuggling in I773, petitioners spoke of a great number of years, wherein by the greatness of our Crops and the lowness of the prices thereof, we have been great loosers, by planting and keeping up the same, haveing been always in Hopes that when the Plantation came to be Less’ned, or Blastes should happen upon them, so as to raise the price, that we should have the whole and Sole advantage of it... .2 Imports did lessen the impact of such a failure, coming direct to London, the most important market for determining the price of English hops. However, the native crop had such dominance from the early eighteenth century onwards, providing normal exports of 10,000-20,000 cwt. annually to Ireland and regular, though lesser, shipments to the Continent, that prices could still satisfy the planter and alarm the brewer in a bad year. A glance at the excise returns will reveal the extreme variability in annual yield, and the irregular incidence of gluts and dearth. In 1726, for example, there paid duty 1-57 million lb.; the next year 20-39 million. In 1746, 8-34 million lb.; in 1747, 22-06 million. In 1764, 21-2 million lb.; in 1765, 4-14 million.

In 1794,

5 million lb.; in 1795, 42'53 million.3

Regionally such figures indicate even greater extremes. In 1764, desperate 1 Blith, English Improver Improved (1652), p. 243; Mills, New System... pp. 414 et seqW. T. Pomeroy, General View of Agriculture of Worcester (1794), PP- 5i“22 B.M. Add. MS. 33,056, ff. 406-7. The same point is repeated in J.H.C. lix, p. 368 and Instructions for Planting.. .Hops (Dublin, 1733), ff. 12-13; B.M. Add. MS. 38,370, ff. 127-8. 3 Ashton, An Economic History of England: the 18th Century (1955)> P- 24°- Only one pocket was reported at Worcester Fair in 1769, so bad had been the crop (R. C. Gant, Worcestershire Agriculture (Worcester, 1939), pp. i70-2)- See Appendix, p. 549.

479

The Hop Industry table

32. Hop prices, 2760-70

Winchester prices from Beveridge, Prices and Wages in England (1939), pp. 81-3. Truman’s stock valuations taken in June, each season’s hops priced separately. Charringtons record the range of prices without separating the different years. Valuations taken in March 1760-6, December 1767-70. The wide variations between current purchasing prices and subsequent valuations in stocks (reflecting the previous purchasing prices in the main) emphasise the importance of the timing of purchases by brewers, both between seasons and within the single season to take advantage of the wide swings in price. Hops could be stored in safety, with slight deterioration, for one or two seasons. There is no indication of the relative qualities to which these prices relate, an important consideration in any season, but the general significance of the degree of movement in hop prices is clearly shown. Prices in shillings per cwt. Valuations of stocks A Purchases f Year Winchester College Truman Charrington 1760 1761 1762 1763 1764 1765 1766 1767 1768 1769 1770

1307

147 60 56 60 58 208

112*0 112‘0

74'4 209*1 118-2 96-8 1827 90-0 186-8 121-3

(1759 (1759 (1761 (1762 (1763 (1764 — —

crop) crop) crop) crop) crop) crop)

70-140 76- 66 56 60 54 60-210 105- 92 48- 57

90

125- 52

6S

100 (1769 crop)

66-130 136- 78

planters appealed to the government for relief following two plentiful seasons. They represented the unfortunate owners of 29,000 acres (out of 33,000 acres, in all, planted with hops) which had totally failed. The 4000 successful acres had been so prolific that 12,000 bags, no less than three-quarters of the national crop, had come from them. The returns of the lucky planters had been as great as the misfortunes of all the rest.1 The total figures of the excise returns represent the annual quantities weighed by excise officers in the hop-gardens at each harvest, so masking the stocks carried by the planter (usually very small), merchant, factor, dealer, speculator and brewer, and ignoring any illegally marketed hops; but they show the conditions which the brewing industry had to face in the hop markets and explain the variations in price. Taking as an example the prices ruling in the decade 1760-70, which was not untypical, the scale of these fluctuations is immediately apparent. In 1817, the greatest year of dearth in the early nineteenth century, prices in Worcester2 touched the unprecedented height of £35. 103. per cwt. For their annual 1 B.M. Add. MS. 38,339, ff. 12-14. 480

2 Gant, op. cit. p. 225.

Planting stock-taking that summer, Barclays valued their old and new hops at the conservative figure of £19. 155. per cwt.; they had been -£13.

175.

in 1816

and returned to the more usual range of £6. 17 s. in 1818. At these average prices, such a season of natural disaster might well bring temporary commercial ruin in its train.1 Such a bad season, in fact the second year of failure after the first had called out all existing stocks at every stage from hop-planter to brewer, brought 40,433 cwt. into London from the Continent, as some of the major brewers bought abroad on their own account, and every dealer and factor in Southwark imported to make up for the commissions absent in Kent.2 Lesser dearths were accompanied by a lesser reversal in the usual flow of hops, which never entirely prevented trade from the Continent in cheap, inferior varieties.3 Equally significant were the rapid shifts in price within any one season, when varying reports flowed in about the state of the gardens in different parts of the country. Movements of iox. per cwt. were not at all uncommon in the crucial months of the spring and early summer. One dealer, keeping sometimes a daily record of prices, entered such a change on 11 June 1705: ‘Noat. This Wind did gt. Damage as also to ye Hops it blow’d down ye Poles and they advanced

205.

pr Cwt. for ye Wind.’4 This state of things

meant that an able buying policy was of the utmost importance for the brewer. Holding stocks over from a cheap season needed to be supple¬ mented with shrewd buying when prices dipped during the seasons. The introduction of the hop to country-brewed ales during the seven¬ teenth and early eighteenth centuries meant that the hop-planters faced a rising demand even though there was no significant rise in the total quantities of beer and ale paying duty between 1684 and 1760, either in England and Wales or in Ireland. In 1652, they were said already to have ‘grown to a Nationall commodity’, following this slow change in public taste encouraged by brewers searching for greater efficiency in their product, but the latter part of that century saw their major triumph.5 Protected after 1690 by an import duty of 20s. cwt., increased to £1. 8s. cwt. in 1710, the home industry responded with alacrity to incentives. In 1725, Defoe, echoed precisely by Bradley four years later, noted the 1 Barclay Records: Hop Book 1781-1893. This is the average buying price of the year. 2 Pari. Papers, 1819, XVI, pp. 60 et seq. 3 Annual export and import figures are given in parliamentary papers from 1822, and may be extracted from Customs Accounts before then. Exports run usually between 10,00030,000 cwt. See J. Malcolm, Agriculture of Surrey (1805), vol. 11, p. 540. 4 See below, pp. 504-6. 6 Blith, ibid. 31

481

MBE

The Hop Industry change that ‘for some years past they not only brew great quantities of beer in the north; but also use hops in the brewing their ale much more than they did before... h1 Even more strikingly, commentators writing from Ireland in the 1730’s remarked that ‘by the greate Encrease of Hop Plantations, especially in the last sixty years... a few counties only are able to supply Great Britain, and Ireland, and Foreign Countries also on occasion with Hops superior in Goodness to any raised in foreign Parts’.2 By this time, Ireland was taking an annual quantity of English hops on average as great as she was to use until the great changes coming to her native brewing industry during and after the Napoleonic wars. This was similar to the prior English development of porter brewing which favoured demands for hops; porter being by nature a bitter drink which needed to be stored for many months to come to perfection, and so in need of heavier hopping than other malt liquors to survive in safety. Being bitter already, this did not prejudice its flavour. Usual standards were 3-5 lb. to a barrel in the early years of porter brewing, dropping slowly in some of the larger houses by 1830 and after, as storage time diminished and taste moved towards mild beer. The decline in quantity was compensated to a degree by the rise in quality which undoubtedly took place, as new strains of hops were bred in the intervening years These two broad movements— the innovation of hops in country brewing and the spread of brewing porter—favoured hop-planters, accenting the years of prosperity when they came, and supporting prices in years of glut. They were both overtaken by a circumstance equally happy for both industries after 1750 when population began to rise at an unprecedented rate, carrying with it an increased demand for beer. There were, of course, temporary set-backs.

One short-lived span of

over-planting in the 1730’s coincided with the gin decades in London and the disastrous news that large plantations were being put down in Ireland under the direct incentives offered by the Dublin Society.3 In the event it was proved that soil, climate, skill and capital were available in due measure only in England, which preserved the export trade in hops across the Irish Sea long after porter had begun to flow the other way. More 1 Defoe, ibid. vol. 1, p. 83. Bradley, giving hops a puff, went so far as to claim that the ‘most part of our Countrymen doth abhor and abandon Ale as a Loathsome drinke’. Riches of a Hop Garden Explained (1729), pp. 25-6. 2 Instructions for.. .Planting Hops (Dublin, 1733). This is one of the best contemporary reviews of the industry. Also D. Hume, History of England (1820 ed.), vol. vn, p. 242. 3 Present State of British Distillery (1736), pp. 39-40; Excise (TLB), 1348, 25 February 1733. The Instructions for.. .Planting Hops were part of this campaign.

482

Planting deep-seated depressions came in 1780 and during the French wars at the end of the century, occasioned by the shrinkage in demand affecting the parent industry, and after 1817 there were a few years of over-planting.1 Overall, however, the excise returns of quantities paying duty and acres under hops, neither of which are probably subject to serious error through evasion, show the expansion which the industry enjoyed between 1712 and 1830. Another characteristic of the hop industry, noted by the Dublin Instructions, which had its effect upon the marketing structure faced by its customers, was the pronounced regional specialisation of planting. It had been so from the introduction of the plant into the gentle counties just across the Channel which were to remain its principal home in England. Kent always was, and remains, the first hop county in the land. Its two chief centres, Maidstone and Canterbury, did not themselves become, as hop towns, as famous as Farnham, but in the sheltered, rich valleys and flats about Maidstone from Mailing towards Tonbridge and in the stretch of country to the west from Sittingbourne to Sandwich with Canterbury at its heart, there was a higher percentage of hops to arable and grass than elsewhere. The East Kent plantations were, for Defoe in 1725, the ‘ Mother of Hop Grounds ’ from which, still within living memory, they had been introduced to the Canterbury district. Already, in what must have been boom decades for the locality, 6000 acres were said to have been planted there, making West Kent the ‘greatest plantation of hops in the whole island’.2 The other famous area in the south-east was Farnham—by which was meant the stretch of a dozen miles in the sheltered vale from Farnham parish to Wrecclesham and Bentley. Although Defoe did not note it, Bradley in 1729 saw Farnham as the ‘first capital Town for Hops in Britain’ enjoying at that time an initial boom period which was repeated in the early nineteenth century.3 Then the price of land rose to the fan¬ tastic heights of £500 an acre on treasured spots.4 Only this narrow strip of countryside produced ‘Farnham hops’, whose cachet put a premium on their price, as that of‘Ware’ did for malt. As a whole, rents and costs were higher in this area, the variety was picked earlier, and more people 1 Bannister, Synopsis of Husbandry (1799)1 PP- 203—42; B.M. Add. MS. 38,37°; ff- I27'3°2 Defoe, Tour... (Everyman ed.), vol. 1, p. 118. 3 Bradley, op. cit. p. 11. 4 Parker, op. cit. p. 83. See Stephenson, Agriculture of Surrey (1813), pp. 325-9; Pari. Papers, 1857, xiv, Report on.. .Hop Duties, Q_. 4913.

483

31-2

The Hop Industry in proportion were employed than in the Maidstone district to get them to market in a younger state and make the first ‘kills’ of the season at top prices.1 The third main region where hops were a principal crop was in the Severn valley. The gardens there were thickest in the twenty miles between Worcester and Hereford, principally to the west of the Severn near the river Teme and the Herefordshire border, where conditions similar to the valley bottoms of Kent and Farnham were to be found. The immigra¬ tion of the culture from the south-east occurred probably in the late six¬ teenth century, spreading rather later because ale brewing without hops had a stronger tradition throughout the rural west and north than in those areas where taste was led from London.2 By 1724, however, over onethird of the national acreage under hops, but much less than a third of national production came from the western plantations. There it remained much more diluted with fruit-growing and mixed farming than in the specialised hop-country of Kent. This may well mean that the estimate of acreage given to the excise officers is exaggerated to include the gross acreage of some farms or the gross acreage of hops under rotation rather than net acreage harvested. Average yields were smaller in the west but probably not by as much as the factor indicated in the figures. Even where unhopped ale remained the preferred strong drink in those parts adjacent to the Worcester-Hereford gardens (surviving as such occasionally far into the eighteenth century) all small beer needed hops for preservation. Bristol, South Wales, Lancashire and those neighbouring counties which were accumulating people and wealth more rapidly than most others in the latter decades of the century, also drew their hops primarily from the Severn valley. From this area came also a large part of the exports to Ireland, passing down river from Worcester to Gloucester and Bristol or by canal to the Dee and Chester. Apart from these three main centres, small patches of hops were to be found scattered far and wide over southern England wherever warmth, shelter and rich soil were to be found together. There was a small area of above 200 acres near Stowmarket in Suffolk which flourished until the nineteenth century. Tradition, supported by Aubrey, had it that from 1 Marshall, Rural Economy of Southern Counties (1798), vol. 11, pp. 45-78. A more precise account of hop areas in the south-east is given in Cobbett, Rural Rides (1821-6, Everyman ed. i948), vol. 1, pp. 252-5. 2 Gant, op. cit. p. 119; Hist. MSS. Comm. Portland MSS. 11,292; Pomeroy, op. cit. pp. 46-9. Defoe claimed that even Worcester customers bought hops at Stourbridge Fair (Tour vol. 1, p. 83). 484

t a b l e 3 3 • Hop yields, 1 yyo [source: Excise (TLB), 1349, ff. 369.] Table based on three-year average, 1729-31. Worcester area acreage was measured per 1000 hop ‘hills’, Kent area per statute acre. This underestimates Worcester yield per acre. {Pari. Papers, 1857, xiv, Q. 4405. Information from Mr D. W. Harvey.) Selected collections

Figures in 1000 lb.

Percentage of total

2725-1 2615-8 1293-0 622-1 2639

25-4 2T3

Percentage of total

Pounds per acre

3618 338i 2477

17

753 744

7i4

3

416 580

2

277-6

25H 3655 1370 779

13

8-4 3-i 2-6

10,739-0

100

20,849

too

Kent Canterbury Rochester Sussex Surrey Hampshire Essex Worcester Hereford Shropshire Lincoln

TABLE

12-0

5-8 2'5 4-8 5'5

5W9 593-6 905-8

331-5

Total (all collections)

Acreage

16 12

522 871

634 897

3

236 231 242

17 7 4

356 515

34. Acreage under hops, England and Wales, IJ24-1829

[sources: Excise (TLB), 1349, ff. 221-2, 369; Excise Revenue Accounts, 1662-182'/; Pari. Papers, 1826-7, xvn, pp. 383-9; 1830, xxvn, p. 201; 1839, xlvi, pp. 519-51.] Years ending midsummer. Collections do not exactly coincide with counties. Fractions of acres are ignored; only important collections are noted individually. 1724

A

f

A

Percentage

_A_

PerAcres centage

Acres

Acres

3,735 3,9i2

l6

3,535

19

7,443

17

2,967

l6

10,786

2,905 736

12

1,729

3

9 4

7,34i —

461

2

709 345

2

850

4

678

3

2,638 Worcester Hereford 4,4i4 Shropshire L437 — Stourbridge (Worcestershire) Lincoln 895

II

2,286

12

19

3,634

6

—

1,322 —

19 7 —

4

681

Kent Canterbury Rochester Sussex Surrey Hampshire Essex

Sarum All others Total Total crop (million lb.)

—

—

—

a

r

Percentage

Selected collections

1829

1822

1732

A

r

A

f

Acres

A

Percentage

17 25

7,508

l6

12,401

27

1,094

17 — 3

7,730 — L325

17 — 3

407

I

428

I

5 26

2,211 11,696

_ #

25

—

—

795*

2

697

— 2

4

645

I

563

I

—

875

2

1,039

2

2,292 11,407*

5

1,421

6

904

5

681

I

537

I

23,404 7-266

100

18,790

100

43,766

100

46,135 82-580

100

5-583

31-782

* Change of excise collection boundary.

485

The Hop Industry Suffolk at the end of the seventeenth century the hop was taken into Surrey and to Farnham itself; some said in conscious substitution after the decline of the cloth trade, others that the cloth trade was given up willingly in order to take a better profit from hops.1 Other favoured spots were to be found at Great Marlow and Medmenham, in the Thames valley; in Essex near Chelmsford; about Retford and Southwell in Nottinghamshire, and through many other counties. Forty-one excise collections had hop grounds on their books in the i72o’s.2 Even then, the distribution was more remarkable for concentration than wide distribution. Three-quarters of the national acreage under hops was confined to five collections in 1724 (Canterbury 16 per cent, Rochester 17 per cent, Sussex 12 per cent, Worcester 11 per cent, and Hereford 19 per cent, totalling 17,604 out of 23,404 acres). In 1829, this specialisation had in¬ creased to the extent of 90 per cent being drawn from the same few areas (Canterbury 16 per cent, Rochester 27 per cent, Sussex 17 per cent, Worcester 5 per cent, Hereford 25 per cent—41,546 out of 46,135 acres). Only in east and west Kent, Farnham and the Worcester-Hereford gardens was the true breed of specialised hop-planter to be found—the man who was in business mainly for hops—and, as between these areas, planters in the west were very much more diluted with fruit growers than in the real hop country. The greatest gains, the greatest speculation and the greatest specialisation lay always with those growing for the London market. Outside the centres of such localities, whose planters produced the bulk of supplies grown, there was little complete commitment to hops by individual farmers. Being more of a by-product of general farming or fruit growing, planted in the most congenial spots about the holding and looked upon as an investment—or a speculation—which might not give any return in some years, hops offered the chance of a pretty bonus in others. They tended to remain distinct in principle from the main crops of the farm. Hop-growing always provided a gambler’s crop in mixed farming— encouraging a gambler’s attitude—being condemned as such by Nathaniel Kent for monopolising all a man’s ambitions as well as robbing the rest of his farm of manure and attention.3 Reliance on the gamble, he feared, 1 J. Aubrey, History of Surrey (1718-19 ed.), vol. Ill, pp. 346-7; W. Stephenson, Agriculture of Surrey (1813), p. 325; A. Young, General View of Agriculture of Suffolk (1794), P- 472 J.H.C. xxvi, pp. 98-9; R. Lowe, Agriculture of Nottinghamshire (1813), pp. 38-41; Excise (TLB), 1349, ff. 221-2, 369. 3 N. Kent, Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property (1799).

486

Planting might be the excuse for general idleness, particularly when the profits of a good year’s hops made such a speculation more profitable than all the rest of the farm together. Once outside the central ‘hop country’, just as farmers were not dependent mainly on the crop, so their scattered patches were not par¬ ticularly important either for the industry as a whole or for the agricultural prosperity of the locality. In the ten collections with under 1000 lb. growth registered in 1730, or the thirteen more with under 10,000 lb. this was certainly the case. In some places the contrast with Farnham was extreme: ‘The Greatest part of Hops chargd. in a few Collns- not being Hop Countrys, particularly Bristol and Bucks, are called Hedge Hops, being planted in Hedges....n The truth was quite clear to Defoe. He had never seen a hop north of the Trent: his friend at Stourbridge fair knew that ‘there were very few hops, if any worth naming, growing in all the counties even on this side Trent, which were above forty miles from London’.2 When the market for hops was so universal, virtually co-terminous with the demand for barley, how was it that such an extreme localisation in planting always existed? The acreage grew from 23,400 to 46,100 in the century after 1724—no small degree of expansion—but was always quite insignificant when compared with that under barley, not much more than a hundredth of it. Gregory King had put the barley lands at 3,200,000 acres in 1688, but did not mention hops in his aggregates for agricultural production. The demands made by the hop on soil, situation and climate played the largest part in determining this specialisation of region. It was a delicate plant, prolific when cosseted—exactly antithetical in qualities to a grain such as rye or bigg—taking three years to mature from a seedling, demanding a good depth of rich soil in which to prosper. Loam above chalk was the foundation of the finest gardens, but even here the soil was exhausted within a few seasons unless great quantities of manure were applied annually. The situation had to be sheltered from cold winds, yet airy; moist but not wet; its climate as gentle and warm as could be found in England. Together these demands of nature implied that the valley bottoms of Kent and the other sites of intense hop culture were ideal, but more places than these in England had such qualifications. Certain Cornish valleys would have been ideal if other factors had not encouraged the concentra¬ tion which nature had begun. In the first place cultivation was complex 1 Excise (TLB), 1349, ibid.

3 Defoe, Tour... (Everyman ed.), vol. 1, p. 83.

487

The Hop Industry and expensive relative to other crops. Sir John Heath’s accounts for a small garden of 2060 ‘ hills ’—or perhaps two acres—mention winter digging at 15. 2d. per 100 hills; dressing them in the spring, 15. per 100, poling them, 10d. (the labour costs of this only); earthing them, 3\d.\ tying them, 9d.; summer digging, 15.; sharpening the poles, \\d.; and ‘picking stones of the ground ’ at an unspecified rate.1 All this was prior to any expense concerned with the harvest, and did not include the cost of poles, plants or dung or dunging. At the harvest came setting, picking, drying, and bagging; with sacks, fuel and excise to be paid, apart from labour costs and the oasts to be kept up or drying commissioned. Sir John employed, depending on the season, twenty-four to thirty-two women pickers, at the bins in fours, with their children; two to three bin-men, who acted as foremen, a kiln-man and a ‘bagger’. This cost him, for labour at the harvest alone, almost £20 in a plentiful season.2 Giving an average figure for good hop grounds in 1767, John Mills put annual costs at £15 per acre (rent £1, ‘husbandry’ £3, depreciation on poles £4, picking and drying £1. 105.) or more where rents on good land ran up to £5 per acre.3 Marshall, in 1798, thought average expenses in Kent were much higher—£18 for non-harvest costs and harvest costs at £15£20 per ton; while in the boom period after the wars James Ellis, the lead¬ ing planter in Kent, put them at £30 per acre during the year and £23 per ton at the harvest (of which ^11-^14 was for labour).4 In the WorcesterHereford gardens cropping was not so heavy and both overhead costs and contract prices were lower. All commentators on hops are clear on the main fact: that expenses of cultivation running up to these levels were six or seven times that of an acre under grain, with the amounts of labour involved throughout the year proportionately heavier.5 Returns, as everyone knew, were a gamble in any particular year, although a planter with capital and experience played his game from strength in the long run. One year with another, average land might produce half a ton per acre, although double that yield was common in a heavy crop. So great was the latitude of fertility and climate in some places that Marshall gave credit to a report that one Kentish planter, in an extraordinary season had grown ij tons on an acre.6 Profits in an unexceptional year might be £15 an acre, which could easily rise to £50 1 B.M. Eg. MS. 2983, f. 181. 2 Ibid. if. 183-200. 3 Mills, op. cit. vol. iv, p. 431. 4 Marshall, ibid. pp. 284-5; Pari. Papers, 1835, xxxi, 16th Report of.. .Excise Enquiry, p. 27. 5 Ellis (16th Report.. .ibid. p. 14) put permanent labour for hops at one man per four acres, for arable at one man per 25 acres, for grass at one man per 300 acres. 6 Marshall, op. cit. vol. 1, p. 284.

488

Planting or above in a season which the planters thought good and the brewers bad. Blith’s remark in 1652, ‘and usually once in three years they bring money enough’ proved fair comment: Hale’s, that ‘there are few things by which the husbandmen may enrich himself more than hops ’ was a snare for the unwary.1 Such a ratio of heavy initial expenses before cropping, which were re¬ imposed on the best land after ten to twelve years and on less fertile soils after six (when new gardens had to be prepared), then heavy annual costs and irregular ‘ bonus ’ returns, were very important in shaping the structure of the hop industry. The fastidious natural demands of the plant intensified the regional specialisation. Here as elsewhere, intricate skills could have been an important single factor preserving an industry in its locality when once established there. The accretion of subsidiary trades also made a move increasingly complex in forethought and organisation. Perhaps the sophisticated marketing structure may be seen as one such ‘external economy’, and the specialised pole plantations grown as an adjunct to most important hop-gardens as another factor in localisation.2 They were one more heavy capital expense, long in coming to fruition, increasing the odds that the planters who survived to prosper in the industry under such unstable conditions were those with momentum enough to carry them over unprofitable years; those established on the best spots with capital from other sources or previous ‘kills’. There was a significant rise in the size of holdings cultivated by the most important planters, in which these economic advantages were reinforced by fiscal ones. The excise duty did not bear as heavily on the trade in a ‘light’ year with high prices, but the effects of the excise system worked in the same direction in hop-planting as they did in the other commodities affected. Rising duties meant a need for more working capital although six months’ credit was the normal rule in payment.3 For Mills in 1767 the report of one man having ten to thirty acres under hops was remarkable.4 By 1790, a planter near Tonbridge was said to be picking 130 acres, and when James Ellis, ‘the greatest hopplanter in England’ described his plantation in 1835, he spoke of more than 500 acres upon which descended 4000 pickers in a heavy season, 1 Blith .ibid.; Hale, Compleate Body of Husbandry (2nd ed. 1755), vol. Ill, p. 85. 2 3000 poles were usually set to an acre, which could cost 405. per 100. The Dublin Instructions claimed the lack of suitable pole-plantations as an important reason for the failure of attempts to settle hops in Ireland. It was, in fact, one missing attribute among many. 3 Duties rose from id. per lb. (1711-79) to 1611. by 1787, 2id. per lb. in 1802 and dropped to 2d. per lb. in 1805. See above, p. 357. 4 Mills, ibid. One man was said to own 100 acres of hops in Kent in 1750 (Parker, op. cit. p. 28).

489

The Hop Industry drinking £700 worth of beer in a few days.1 In his time he had paid over £250,000 in wages alone. Years of adversity brought hardship to all those on land disadvantageous to the hop by nature to which only years of above-trend prosperity had induced hop-planting, bled out their capital and shrank the areas of cultivation back to the harder core of better land. After the extraordinary year of 1817, for example, over 51,000 acres were put down to hops, which were reduced again to 41,458 acres by 1823.2 As yields have become more certain in our own generation and demand has slowly slackened, so the tide has retreated once again to that nucleus of true ‘ hop countries ’ which were treasured as such before the great expan¬ sion of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The cautious John Mills concluded his review of costs and profits in hop-planting with the advice, ‘ I mean only to caution the husbandman whose circumstances are but middling, against embarking too far in this branch of agriculture’.3 Few precise records have survived of the different varieties of hops developed in England after 1650.4 Then, although Blith told English planters they would prosper more ‘ the nearer you resemble the Flemming in his Hopping’ he thought English soil had already bred out a superior variety.5 Flemish or Red-Bine hops were known throughout the eighteenth century as a hardy, large, coarse, early ripening, unprolific variety, altogether ‘deficient in condition’ in comparison with English varieties. They were useful, with other inferior kinds like ‘ Ruffles ’, ‘ Apple Puddings ’ and ‘Late Ripe Red-Bine’ on coarser soils and in hardier climates than those of the best hop grounds. There, the middle-sized White-Bine (or the Canterbury Hop as it was known outside West Kent) with a particular sub-species, the Golding (propagated from a particularly good plant noticed by Mr Golding, who was alive when Marshall visited the area in 1798), was the favourite, being an early ripener, of good quality, strong in flavour and very prolific in a good year—although a delicate plant.6 The Farnham Hop (known as such throughout the land) was even finer, and 1 Marshall, ibid. vol. I, p. 171; Pari Papers, 1835, XXXI> I5tl‘ Report of.. .Excise Enquiry, p. 174, App. 65b; 16th Report..., pp. 25-7. 2 Pari. Papers, 1821, xvi, pp. 346-69; 1824, xvii, p. 343. 3 J. Mills, New System (1767), vol. iv, p. 447. 4 The following discussion is based mainly on Marshall, Rural Economy of Southern Counties; Gant, Worcestershire Agriculture; Pomeroy, General View of Agriculture of Worcester; and Bannister, Synopsis of Husbandry. 6 English Improver Improved (1652), pp. 235, 243. 6 With such a typical way of developing a new strain, there were many unknown local varieties. Peter Briggins, buying at Southwark in 1707-8, often noted ‘Chapmans’ and ‘Days’ —evidently two such strains named after the people who isolated them (Briggins’ Diary (MS.), 17 August 1707, etc.).

490

Planting ripened slightly earlier, which was of great importance.

It was more

delicate in flavour than the Kent species but was correspondingly less ‘strong’ in effect.

Some brewers thought that

lb. of Kentish hops

were worth 2 lb. of Worcester. All the south-eastern species were known in the west, with ‘Non-Pareil’, ‘Naltian White’ and ‘Kentish Grapes’. The varieties indigenous to Kent and Sussex proved preferable for ‘ keeping beer’ and the Worcester hops best for fine ale designed to be kept only a month or six weeks.1 This specialisation in varieties followed the specialisation in markets; the porter brewers going to Kent for all their supplies in normal times, needing ‘strong’, average quality hops; the fine ale brewers of London and the home counties preferring Farnham hops, most of which were sold at Weyhill fair to dealers from the north and west.2 The qualities of the Worcester hops approximated to those of Farnham, being similarly used in those parts of the country which had ale rather than porter as their strong malt liquor. All things considered, it is not improbable—to put the causal relationship at its mildest in the face of no direct evidence—that the nature of demand was of some moment in inducing the specialisation in variety which occurred.3

Its influences would work silently over many years,

through the give and take of conversation over price and samples between brewer, factor, merchant and planter. They would not, in a century very unselfconscious about plant breeding for commercial harvests, tend to be the result of a deliberate policy towards a pre-considered, rationally sought end. As with the barley farmer, there was no true plant breeding known in the hop gardens. An unusually fine plant would be noticed, cuttings taken from it so as to perpetuate its qualities, and the strain resulting from the new variety thus preserved. PICKING

As acreage under hops and yields alike increased, the heavy demands of the gardens on labour, particularly at the harvest, may have helped to stabilise the pattern of cultivation.

As a great employer of the poor

throughout the year, hop cultivation possessed great political capital in these counties. At poling and tying times the gardens were quick with women and children, while men preceded them down the rows forcing home the poles with iron ‘crows’. This, with the other activities of the spring and winter provided much local employment, which had to be supplemented by 1 Mills, op. cit. vol. v, p. 129. 2 Bannister, op. cit. pp. 227-31. 3 Parker, op. cit. p. 28. Cf. L. Briant, jf. Roy. Ag. Soc. vm (1897), 56-64.

491

The Hop Industry migrant labour for the picking season. Even in their picking, hops made exacting demands on the planters. Once they had become pale, dry and fragrant—usually in the first weeks of September for the majority of gardens, with Farnham a little before Kent—they spoiled every moment thereafter and had to be picked immediately. Some planters tried to vary the varieties planted, so as to spread out the harvest a little and lower the number of pickers needed, but it remained a good rule of thumb that ‘ the more hands there are in the hop grounds at the season the better....n In this way, too, the hop exaggerated the characteristics of other arable farming. When regular surplus labour first came into areas producing more than the local supply could deal with, is hard to determine. Celia Fiennes saw ‘great Companies’ of French immigrants going home from the gardens to Canterbury in 1697, which suggests that seasonal depen¬ dence on the towns had already begun.2 It was, after all, only greater in degree for hops than for other crops, for everywhere the ‘ urban surplus ’ came out into the fields for hay time and harvest to help those permanently in agriculture who were already about their business in the busiest of seasons on the land. In 1671, Sir John Heath’s gardens employed whole families at picking time whose names do not appear during the rest of the year, so that, already, they may have come into the locality for the occasion. In Worcester and Hereford gardens, migrants were travelling from Broseley and Stourbridge in 1772, while in the next generation most were coming from Wales, thirty or forty miles away.3 For those in industry depending on water-power, this often provided a convenient break at a time when streams were shrunk and reservoirs depleted, but even at the best of times industrialists were liable to lose their labour at the harvest. Marshall sawr working people pouring into Farnham from Portsmouth and other towns in Hampshire and Surrey, coming and returning home in wagons at the planters’ charge, with fiddlers leading the excitements.4 Maidstone was almost deserted in early September:

‘Tradesmen’s

daughters, even of the higher classes, and those of farmers and yeomen of the first rank and best education’ were to be seen busy at the bins. Others came in from the local towns, London, Wales and soon from Ireland, hop¬ picking, being, for these long-distance summer itinerants, the last of their season’s work.5 At Sundridge in Kent, more than 5000 strangers were 1 2 3 4

Watkins, Complete English Brewer (1768), pp. 204-5. Journeys of Celia Fiennes (ed. C. Morris, 1947), p. 124. Gant, op. cit. p. 180; Pomeroy, op. cit. pp. 49-50. This is Stourbridge, Worcs. Marshall, vol. 11, p. 74. 5 Marshall, vol. 1, p. 242. 492

descending in the parish for the picking in 1793. Forty years later James Ellis, as we have noted, employed more than 4000 himself in a heavy year.1 So great a dependence on labour from the towns and cities (for three weeks at most, sometimes much less) increased the suitability of the specialised hop areas once the routine of seasonal employment had become established. There were other influences which certainly applied to the Kent and Farnham regions, although to what degree it would be im¬ possible to measure. First, there was the great quantity of manure required for continuous planting at the peak of fertility, much of which, like the labour, came from towns. The drain on local supplies was inordinately heavy for maintaining soil productivity with such a ‘hungry’ crop as hops, and dung remained one of the crucial governing factors in the extension of fertility before the days of super-phosphates. This factor, too, en¬ couraged permanent location not too far away from urban supplies.2 There remained the omnipotence of London as destination for most of the pro¬ duce of Kent. Direct water carriage by Kentish hoys from Maidstone to Southwark, or, when time was pressing, as rapid a road journey as from Farnham, supported a marketing structure fashioned for and by hasty price changes in a few specialised areas. William Marshall gave the proxi¬ mity of London—‘the principal place of consumption and the heart through which the produce circulates’ as a factor supporting the natural advantages of Kent for the localisation of hops in southern England.3 If economic factors such as this placed fertile spots of Cornwall outside the range of possible planting, rpithin it the most fertile areas, best suited by nature, were exactly those of most intense cultivation. The migrant pickers brought with them, from the towns all the brutality and squalor which was the lot of the urban poor in the eighteenth century. They brought a zest to the harvesting which made a season of ruthless, profitable toil, also one of celebration: there was always the air of a rural Southend or Blackpool about hop-gardens undergoing their annual invasions. In the exaggerated way of hop-growing, it was like the hay¬ making and corn harvest throughout England, work being only possible when the weather was kind, and bringing extra earnings for the family working together away from home. The organisation of the picking was highly efficient.

Men worked

through a square of 144 ‘hills’, bringing down the poles and bines which 1 J.H.C. XLVIII, 381-2; Pari. Papers, 1835, xxxi, 16th Report.. .of Excise Enquiry, App. 65b. 2 J.H.C. XLVIII, 381-2. ‘Near the large Towns, where they get great plenty of Manure.. the Ground, in Consequence of that extraordinary Quantity of Manure is more kindly’ , (Marshall, vol. 11, p. 53)3 Marshall, vol. 1, p. 292.

493

The Hop Industry were then stripped by six or eight women pickers working to one ‘bin5. A ‘bin-man’ organised each team, drawing lots for the initial stint from the steward of the garden directing operations, who kept the tallies of each group. Thereafter, the team which finished their square first might choose the next—most profitable—one: as Marshall commented ‘a stimulus to industry.. .(which).. .oftens occasions more hurry than good workman¬ ship, owing to the strivings of the different sets’.1 The oasts, where the hops were dried, had already assumed their traditional shape early in the century. The largest were in pairs, or batteries of as many as ten together, with sometimes two or more drying floors each. Each floor consisted of wooden battens upon which rested hair cloth, a construction similar to many malt-kilns, so that a kiln might, on rare occasions, be used alternatively for malt and hops. As in malt drying, the use of charcoal, which had been almost universal before 1700, became supple¬ mented by, or abandoned in favour of, coke as the century progressed.2 A clear flame remained the essential quality in a kiln, so that no smoky taste be imparted to the hops. Even before the work of Michael Combrune brought the thermometer to the attention of brewers, its advantages had been detailed in hop-drying, for precisely the same reasons, by the Dublin Society in 1733. Their Instructions ran: ‘Any servant may, with the help of this instrument, be able to mend and correct the Fire with great certainty, and not be liable to commit mistakes in the Drying of Hops, which often proves so fatal.’3 However, when Marshall was asking his questions in the hop-fields in 1798 he could not find anyone who used it—they all said so much depended on the state of the crop.4 5 By the end of the century, sulphur was commonly added to the fire in order to give a better colour to the hop, while preserving its qualities more efficiently for brewers anxious to carry their stock over a season. After drying there followed the most unpleasant job of the harvest— bagging. A long sack, 7^ x 4 feet, was suspended through a round hole in the upper floor of the kiln and a man inside trampled down the hops as they were poured in above his head. Only the finer hops were packed in ‘pockets’, smaller sacks, 7^x3 feet, holding only 1^ cwt., so that the bulk of the crop went into the long -z\ cwt. bags.5 Then, after weighing, 1 Marshall, vol. I, p. 243. 2 Blith, ibid. p. 243; Marshall, ibid. pp. 260-70; Mills, ibid. p. 431. 3 Instructions for Planting.. .Hops (Dublin, 1733), pp. 50-4. 4 Marshall, op. cit. vol. I, p. 265. 5 Pockets were made from hessian—‘Hamboro’ Rolls’—and the bags from tow and hemp, manufactured at Maidstone and Gainsborough, Lincolnshire.

494

Picking sealing, and being marked with the planter’s name and parish by the excise officers, the bloated sacks, with each corner stuffed tight and tied like a prick ear, for ease of manhandling and sampling, they were ready for market. In conclusion, Marshall’s description of the picking deserves to be recalled, being justly regarded as one of the finest pieces of agricultural reporting in the eighteenth century. From his pages comes a glimpse into a world still recognisable when East London moves out to the hop-fields. Alongside any discussion of the economics of the hop-industry in the eighteenth century there runs this social story: the crude energy and hard living in primitive places of shelter of townspeople ‘ as much in a state of nature as the American Indians or the savages of the Southern Hemi¬ sphere’; plundered gardens; village life overwhelmed by the alien crowds; and—a horror to come—cholera in 1831-2. For Marshall, in 1791, even the raucous celebrations at the Hop Supper on the eve of return to the towns had their place. ‘ These rustic feats, and the revelry which attends them,’ he wrote, ‘are the more excuseable as they close the labours of the year, and may serve, by leaving favourable impressions of the past, to alleviate the sufferings of toils to come.n Migrant labour here implied economic truths: the chanciness of the crop up to the last minute, the need for rapid harvesting at precisely the right time, the wide price swings of these crucial weeks, speculations, and the power of the great Southwark hopfactors. All are parts of this same world. 1 Marshall, vol. I, p. 260. The date when the long-distance migration for hop-picking from East London began remains uncertain.

495

CHAPTER XV

THE HOP-MARKETS HOP-MARKETING

Under the interaction of the demands of hop-planting—its localisation, heavy capital costs before cropping, and high running costs per acre with irregular returns—and the requirements of the brewing industry, the marketing structure of the new industry had assumed a precociously mature form by the opening of the eighteenth century, even though the growing prosperity of the great hop fairs might seem to belie that claim. In retrospect, we can see that selling at fairs remained suitable for dealings in hops long after it had become anachronistic for most other commodities, again in response to the peculiar nature of hop-planting and its market. Reference to the chapter on malting will make it quickly apparent that a similar evolution occurred in the distribution of power and initiative within that industry, particularly in the section of it working for the London porter market, but this remained distinct, in the case of malt, from the marketing pattern of other regions not dominated by London. Hops absorbed a lower percentage of the brewers’ total costs of production than malt (so that variations in the price of hops were not usually as important for his total outlays). Transport costs were also relatively less important and growing areas more specialised. Therefore, hops travelled nationally to supply national markets and were handled by merchants and factors who were concerned with trade of national—and, indeed, international— scope. Although the analogy is fallible, there is a certain similarity to the relative economic positions of wool and dye-stuffs in the cloth industry— from the nature of the case the commercial handling of dyes being the more specialised trade. For the areas north of the Trent where hops could not be grown, and for the group of counties north of the London marketing area at the beginning of the century (beyond a range of thirty to forty miles beyond the capital, from Suffolk round to Northamptonshire), Stourbridge fair, on the banks of the Cam just downstream from Cambridge, was the great mart. After the cloth transactions had finished in August there came, traditionally, sales of wool in September, but both these staple commodities were eclipsed ‘at least in show’ by the sale of hops at Defoe’s visit in 496

Marketing 1722.1 This was evidently a recent change of the latter two generations, following the general adoption of the hop for ale brewing as well as small-beer brewing in the Midlands and the North. For the eastern side of England, all the important gardens were in Kent, Sussex and Surrey with a few in Hampshire (the smaller growth of the Severn and Teme valleys being destined mainly for western and north-western markets) which meant that distribution needed to spring from some intermediary selling point.2 Being a seasonal trade itself, supplying an industry similarly seasonal at this era—brewing usually stopping in June, getting under way again in September and often reaching full activity only by the best brewing month of the year, October—hop-marketing could conveniently fit into the pattern of trade which an annual fair invited. And as Stourbridge already brought merchants together from just those parts of the country needing hops, it was natural that such suitability in time and position should make it an important marketing centre for the new trade. Even the back-carriage provided by the consignments became a convenience, by establishing return freights for merchants and barge-owners delivering great quantities of cheese and wool and cloth south from Lincolnshire and parts north, east from Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire, to Stourbridge.

In the

trade of London and the north-east coast, too, this back-carriage in hops gave a useful additional profit to such merchants as William Cotesworth.3 Stourbridge, undoubtedly the greatest hop mart in the country in 1700, did not drain the life out of dealings in London as might have been imagined. From the first, Southwark was the centre of operations with the greatest merchants and wealthiest factors. For them, Stourbridge was a useful selling point at the convenient crossroads where north met south and west came east, so that most of the hops sold there had come owned or marketed by London tradesmen.

Some, Defoe claimed, had come

straight round from Maidstone and Rochester by sea, to Lynn and thence up Ouse and Cam to the fair,4 but most arrived via the warehouses of Southwark. After the fair, too, dispersal by coast to the north-east and by river west into Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire was as convenient. Such great facility for water carriage—the rain upon thirteen counties, no less, flowing into the rivers of the Wash, gave Stourbridge its great 1 Tour... (Everyman ed. 1948), vol. I, pp. 80-5. 2 Derby, a mid-point, received supplies equally from Stourbridge (Cambs.) and Shrewsbury (J. Houghton, Husbandry and Trade Improved (2nd ed. 1728), vol. 1, no. 37). 3 E. Hughes, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century (1952), pp. 56. 4 See J. H. Andrews, ‘Trade of the Port of Faversham, 1650-1750’, Arch. Cantiana, lxix (1956), 128-9. 32

497

MBE

The Hop-Markets strength as a market for heavy, bulky commodities. ‘In a word,’ says Defoe, ‘all the water of the middle part of England which does not run into the Thames or the Trent comes down into these fenns.’1 Before the canal age, the natural and economic watershed of the country—that central band of territory unpenetrated by natural courses of navigable water lying between the river systems of the east coast and those to the west and north-west—sheltered the rapid rise of the hop¬ gardens in the Severn Valley. Stourbridge marketed predominantly for the north and east, London and Farnham for the Thames valley, the south and Ireland, and Worcester for Wales, the north and the west. When the canals had come, such protective zoning was, of course, weakened. It seems probable that Worcester hops were sent more and more across to the head of the Trent navigation and down to breweries in Nottingham¬ shire and Derby, as well as flowing down the Severn, their natural line of exit. The books of Thomas Greenall and Peter Stubs in Lancashire, and those of Benjamin Wilson and his successors in Burton-on-Trent after the mid-eighteenth century, alike show their closest connexions to be with Worcester hop-merchants, although quite certainly not to the exclusion of Southwark.2 Indeed, the advantage of better carriage from the Worcester gardens into the Midlands fought the increasing hegemony of the London market as time went on. Burton turned more and more to Southwark. Always, the characteristic of hop-marketing, emphasised by its great seasonal fairs, was the national network of sales belonging to the Southwark dealers. They remained unrivalled in commercial strength and rapidly drew to themselves the commercial ‘centre of gravity’ of the industry by developing an initiative over planters and brewers alike. It was the con¬ solidation of their long-existing national markets by these men which had led to the decline in hop-trading at Stourbridge Fair—in general decay— when Gunning paid a visit in 1789.3 For this sector of the trade, hops, like cloth, were passing over to a more continuous form of commercial organisation. Such was still not the case, however, with Weyhill Fair, which served a rather different function from that of Stourbridge. Here, in distinction to the marketing of the Kent and Sussex crops, the London buyers approached the factors and planters at a fair held in the hop country and attended directly by the growers. Until far into the nineteenth century Weyhill Fair preserved its pre-eminence as the time and place from which 1 Tour... vol. I, p. 79. 2 T. C. Barker and J. R. Harris, St Helens, 1750-1800 (Liverpool, 1954), p. 95. 3 H. Gunning, Reminiscences (1854), pp. 168-70.

498

Marketing the Borough was guided in its current prices at the onset of the new season.1 Almost all the Farnham hops were sold there, except for the early ripeners which took the road to Southwark to secure scarcity prices before the fair opened on io October. So important was the centripetal influence of Weyhill that in the mid-nineteenth century it was even drawing London factors and merchants for dealings in Kent and Sussex hops (of which only samples would appear, the crop itself remaining at the Borough, from which both buyers and sellers had come). As we have seen, the sheltered vale of Farnham was so suited by nature for hop-growing that it enjoyed boom conditions more intense even than those in Kent. Production per acre, prices and quality were all the highest in England. The reputation for quality had led Farnham growers to protect the special mark upon their ‘pockets’ with great jealousy because this local premium had encouraged dealers in ‘foreign’ hops to come to Weyhill.2 The bulk of the Farnham crop was destined for London marketing (if not consumption) but not for the vats of porter brewers. Before 1830, the books of all of them indicate that no such redeployment of their demand came to the hop-market as had deeply affected their barley markets: always they wanted robustness rather than high intrinsic quality and they continued to find this almost exclusively in Kentish hops. In the ale market, however, it is perhaps justifiable to relate in some degree the growing price-differential (and through that the extra boom conditions there) between Farnham-grown and other hops to the expansion of fine ale brewing in the Thames valley and London in the early nineteenth century. This relative swing to ale brewing (which was only beginning at this time and meant that the rate of expansion of the ale brewers was faster than that of the porter brewers, not that there was any absolute decrease in the amount of porter brewed) increased the relative demand for finequality hops of delicate flavour within the hop-markets—in short, a help to the Farnham varieties. Understandably, being one of Farnham’s sons, Cobbett could not imagine a fairer sight than Weyhill in a good season, nor a greater agricultural calamity than low prices there.

His general

condemnation of regrating and forestalling soon turned to hostile ridicule when a hop-merchant named Waddington was prosecuted in 1800, the crime being in the interests of price-protection for hop-growers.3 1 Pari. Papers, 1857, xiv, Report.. .on Hops, Q_. 5585; Bannister, Synopsis of Husbandry (1799), pp. 230-1. 2 Stephenson, Agriculture of Surrey (1813); J.H.C.

lxiii

(1808), 476, 485;

lxix

(1813),

82, 496. 3 W. Cobbett, Rural Rides (Everyman ed. 1948), vol. I, pp. 224-5; see below, pp. 517-19*

499

32-2

The Hop-Markets Hop-marketing in the Worcester region developed rapidly from the beginning of the century, when a formal mart was established at the county town in 1703.

Subsidiary markets developed in neighbouring

places which were natural transit points for inter-regional trade: Bewdley (1717),

Belbroughton

(1742),

Tenbury

(1774),

Stourport

(1777).1

Worcester remained by far the most important of these, whose life it sustained, and the relative eminence of hops in the total trade of the city was indicated by their being instanced before other commodities when the local authorities petitioned Parliament for canal or turnpike. The usual order went: hops, grain, salt, cider, fruit.2 In 1779, as many as 35,000 pockets (of old and new hops) were reported passing through the market there in a bumper season.3 Nevertheless, activity and speculation remained on a more modest scale than in Southwark, for besides the lesser quantities involved, the marketing structure in the west concerned fewer inter¬ mediaries. It seems that most planters themselves sold in the market there to merchants, without factors mobilising their consignments, similarly that the agents providing credit to the planters, and so pledging their sales direct, were also the merchants selling to brewers.4 This more tightly knit structure therefore left fewer interstices for the later accretion of specialised agents working on commission, in distinction from those who were also merchants in touch with brewers on their own account. It is apparent from the correspondence of Greenalls and Stubs that these persons did obey instructions sent to them about when and where to buy.5 The letters received by Peter Stubs reveal a pattern of purchasing in hops which is probably typical for Lancashire brewers at this time, before Southwark merchants and factors began to bid more actively for trade through travellers after 1800. Peter Stubs was at this time himself an agent for distributing hops and malt to home brewers and publicans in the Warrington district and he ordered almost entirely from Midland dealers, no London houses bidding successfully for his custom between 1790 and 1802.6 Joseph and Stephen Barber of Walsall, and Oakes and Bangham of Bridgnorth, had most of his trade, but occasionally lots came from others at Worcester, Newark, and Dudley—all dependent upon the Worcester 1 Gant, Worcestershire Agriculture; Barker and Harris, St Helens (1954), pp. 95-6. 2 Two instances are in jf.H.C. xx (1725), 595; li (1795), 159. 3 Gant, op. cit. pp. 170-2. The national crop of 38 million lb. compared with 10 million lb. for 1778 and 12 million ib. for 1780. In a short year the Worcester crop might be 5000 pockets {Summary of the Trial of S. F. Waddington (1800), p. 76). 4 Summary of the Trial..., p. 40; Pari. Papers, 1857, xiv, Q_. 4605. 6 Barker and Harris, ibid. 6 Peter Stubs, Letter Books, passim.

500

market. Most of the letters sent market reports and advice on buying. When a flood of consignments came from the planters in the first week of September 1794, Humphrey Oakes wrote to Stubs on 9 September: ‘ we got the planters down 20-40 per cent to 70s.... but expect they will not be lower till after Worcester Fair. Would recommend you to sell.. .as suppose it may be done well before there is more come to Warrington (I will be accountable for any loss).’ Bangham wrote the next day: ‘Next Saturday should be a good day to buy. Your command to me at Bridgenorth or the Hop Pole, Worcester.’ At more leisurely moments in the year they sent travellers to Stubs with samples and often included printed circulars on prices and conditions with their letters. In addition, they were not averse, when the need arose, to arrange his purchasing of barley and malt, and some even accepted reverse trade (which fitted conveniently into a ‘book-keeping barter’ system) by selling his famous files in their area.1 Little has been written on these Worcester merchants, who have left fewer traces in national records than have their Southwark fellows. J. H. Meredith set up as hop-merchant there in 1745, and Leonard and Harrington in 1759,2 but both these names, with the merchants supplying Peter Stubs, seem to have been eclipsed by Phillips and Yarranton in the next generation. It was with this house that the Greenall family had their main connexion, as we have noted. For a brewer in this region, Worcester stood as the main source of purchasing, but did not exclude more local dealings at Liverpool, and occasionally direct from the Borough: Greenalls’ ran regular accounts with William Weston and Hooper, Duncan and Co. there, the Burton firm with Bolland, Stephenson, Sanderson, Yeates and Brown.3 For the north-west the large supplies sent to Chester Fair were awaited as the occasion for a lowering of the price—hence Greenalls occasional advice to their Worcester friends not to buy many for them until it opened. But usually they had insufficient stocks by then and brewing had already started, so they were compelled to have some more highly priced lots sent on which had come earlier to market. As Phillips and Yarranton took instructions on commission, they are shown to be handling every kind of transaction, even to selling the hops which they grew on their own plantations. Certainly, too, they sold in London 1 E.g. Stephen Barber to P. Stubs, 28 February 1798. 2 Gant, op. cit. 3 Barker and Harris, loc. cit.', Greenall Records: Letter Book, T. Greenall to W. Weston, 14 December 1786, 7 August 1787; Allsopp Records: Letter Books, 1789, 1801-9, 1808-10, passim. 501

The Hop-Markets independently and were the agents for Southwark dealers when the London market needed supplies. They were ordering Kentish hops themselves for northern customers.1 In such a case as this the consignments would come direct by wagon (at 6.?. per cwt. extra in 1790) or by sea according to the urgency of the need.2 Just as in the case of Wilson and Allsopp, one of the smaller benefits from intelligent advance buying and stock policy was the saving of transport costs (for both hops and grain) in the more leisurely journey by water. Of the 15,000 bags reported as being used annually in London3 at the mid-century, with most of the 6000 bags going from there as exports to Ireland, a third was estimated to have been used before Christmas in each season. A few brief months, therefore, saw hectic business in hops for both planter and merchant. As the hot months could not be used for regular brewings, a rhythm for the year had been adopted in brewhouses whereby the summer was the period used to accommodate repairs and extension of plant, the annual accounting and preparation for the ensuing season. Orders would accumulate and stocks run down. It being in September in most years that brewers would begin serious production again, this was the time when, all over the country, they began to look out for their new crops of malt and hops, particularly after seasons of high price when they had relied more on accumulated stocks than purchases. In some years, if the summer was cool and demand high, they would seek to start in earnest during August, which threw even earlier pressure upon their raw material markets. Earlier ripening barleys and hops thus had the impor¬ tant commercial asset of meeting the onset of this seasonal demand much more opportunely than varieties coming to harvest only in mid-September. One situation was more immediately significant for the planters: where a previous bad season had raised prices, with a good season following, the smaller flow of early hops would take the scarcity price before the bulk of the crop broke it. For the planters and merchants, therefore, no less than for the brewers, timing was crucial to their profits; while, for the sellers, speed of marketing in the summer was the main thing. Following 1 They also bought malt and barley occasionally for Greenalls. Greenall Records: Letter Book, T. Greenall to Phillips and Yarranton, 21 and 28 December 1795. 2 Barker and Harris, loc. cit.; and T. Greenall to Hooper, Duncan and Co. 12 March I79I3 B.M. Add. MS. 38,339, ff. 12-14. This is a reasonable estimate for the million barrels of beer brewed there, and a hopping rate for porter of 4 lb. per barrel (Barclay Records: Hop Book, 1781-1893; Customs and Excise MSS. Excise Statistics, 1662-1805, P- 144).

502

the first rush, if they could manage it, sellers held off to take advantage of any rise which might occur, or be induced, in the spring. The fact that hops were on offer at Stourbridge (Cambs.) in mid-June (not all of these being of the previous season) suggests that some of the con¬ temporary strains matured much earlier than those of today. Even July appears by our standards to be very early for a hop harvest, but the diary of Peter Briggins, an occasional dealer in hops at Southwark, leaves no doubt that much buying and selling was on by then in a normal year. In 1705, for instance, there were already 800 bags at Stourbridge on 15 June, while he first quoted a price for new hops that year on 6 June. He wrote ‘noat but few hops yet come to town’ on 30 June 1707; yet, by 13 July, 1000 bags had arrived at Stourbridge (some no doubt from South¬ wark).1 Activity began at Weyhill long before the fair opened: the date 10 October rather coincided with the peak of marketing there, while at Worcester the great fair opened a month beforehand on 8 September and the hop fairs at Bewdley and neighbouring towns were held during October.2 In the Severn valley ‘pulling’ usually took place in the second week in September, while traditionally 12 August was the day upon which some idea of the harvest might be predicted: Till Hawkehurst fair has come and gone There may be hops or there may be none.3 The relative timing of the hop harvest in the south-east and in the west did enable Southwark factors and merchants to estimate the broad results of the slightly earlier crops in their own regions before it was too late for them to enter the market at Worcester.

In a plentiful year, Worcester

would supply its natural marketing areas of the Midlands and the north west, above all ‘Liverpool, Manchester and other considerable towns’ (usually with average prices, alike with average quality, a little lower than those in the south) without any incursion of London buyers. Their appearance in the market was the sign of a short crop in the south and the occasion for a general upward movement in prices.4

As Oakes and

Bangham, Peter Stubs’ main suppliers, wrote from Bridgnorth on 9 September 1791: ‘our market advances daily owing to unlimited orders from London and Kent’. In both Worcester and Kent, however, before the bulk of the harvest began to move along rivers, coasts and canals, the premium on early sales 1 In this year he noted prices on 8 and 23 June. 2 Gant, op. cit. pp. 129, 136, 156-7. 3 Pomeroy, op. cit. p. 49; Pari. Papers, 1857, xiv, loc. cit. p. 367. 4 Summary of the Trial of S. F. Waddmgton (1800), p. 78.

503

The Hop-Markets would pay the extra land-transport costs and send the heavy carts rumbling through the countryside on their way to London. From the first curling of the young bine about its pole to the final dissolution of its fruit in a brewer’s hop-back, the hop was the subject of speculation. High risks brought the hope of large gains to everyone con¬ cerned in the trade and to many who were not, so to contemporary moralists the plant stood condemned as the object of a veritable rake’s progress in the agricultural kingdom. The situation had been capitalised into a formal annual sweepstake by a nation of inveterate gamblers. Obligingly, the old hop-duty of id. per lb. (differentiated in the annual published accounts from subsequent increments in the rate of tax) provided the necessary record of annual yields to test the hazards of prophecy. Periodicals carried regular reports of these yields, and odds were quoted at every inn through hop-growing or hop-marketing regions, over which large amounts of money changed hands—to the fury of Cobbett.1

In July 1821, John

Taylor was told at Sittingbourne that £130,000 was at stake there alone.2 By the mid-nineteenth century, so it was affirmed, as much was being wagered here as at the Derby, and as such it was falling more and more under the general condemnation of such excesses.3 For the dealers in hops, at least, such betting was often not merely for the sake of a gamble— they were committed to that in any case by their trade—but an attempt to lay off some of the risks imposed upon them by nature. The current wagering odds represented the most accurate forecast available on the state of the harvest and one peculiarly sensitive to the latest estimates. Through these anticipations dealers could employ funds to offset the risks they had taken by investing in hops in the first place.4 In one sense, no doubt, this was as morally reprehensible as a bookmaker covering his liabilities but, in another, just an elementary insurance against losses from real transactions. In this sense (however generally popular for the fun of wagering itself) the rise of the formal annual bet on the hop harvest at the end of the eighteenth century cannot be dissociated from the growing perfection of the market structure which had accompanied the tremendous increase in transactions in hops. Although the intricate commercial details of the market in hops remain often obscure, the broad outlines of the trade are not in doubt. For the first decade of the century there survives the cryptic diary of Peter Briggins. 1 Cobbett, Rural Rides, vol. I, pp. 202-3. F°r Worcester, see Gant, op. cit. p. 172. 2 John Taylor, Diary (MS.), 26 July 1821. 3 Pari. Papers, 1857, xiv, loc. cit. Q . ci c. 4 Ibid. QC!V 1839-67, 1880-1.

504

He was a member of the Society of Friends, growing a few hops himself as a side-line at Newington Green, while speculating regularly in hops, honey, wax and tobacco, in addition to his main dealings on the Exchange in the Funds.1 For one who entered the hop-market so sporadically—there are some seasons when only the occasional parcel finds a reference amongst the record of his many other dealings—and who quite certainly would not have had any significant amount of the trade in his hands, the sophisticated organisation of the market he has to play appears remarkable.2 There could be no more revealing evidence of prevailing London prices being the exact barometer of a national market. Briggins depended on the advice and up-to-the-minute information of his cousin, William Tiby, whom the diary reveals obliquely as a professional operator in the hop-markets. Occasionally, Briggins bought on joint account with Tiby.3 Usually, it appears, he dealt on his own account, but almost always while in Tiby’s company at a Southwark inn. Their meeting places with merchants, factors and other dealers (Briggins being the true speculator buying only for a rise and resale to the same groups from whom he purchased) were the Greyhound Inn, Battlebridge (in the Borough) and Petit’s (a coffee¬ house). All these were regular centres of merchandising and as precisely grouped as the inns in Aldersgate, such as the Castle, where he bought his wax, or the Three Cups, the George, the Surgeon’s Head, and Etheridge’s Coffee House on the north bank, where he bargained over honey. Dealings at the inns where dealers met were subject always to reports about prices ruling at the main points where the hop harvest was initially sold by the planters, or where merchants gathered seasonally (at Weyhill, Worcester and Stourbridge), so that life for William Tiby was peripatetic. Briggins provides the commentary for his journeying. Throughout the winter and early spring he recorded selling prices, then governed mainly from stocks in Southwark. But, in March, began the regular visits to inspect his own gardens in Newington, judging the bines there for their own sake, but equally as an indication of what might be happening to the new season’s growth generally. On 21 March 1707 (as in other years), Tiby went off to Wickham Fair, reporting on the state of the gardens and prices throughout his journey. As a result of such estimates for the ensuing 1 I have seen this MS. through the kindness of one of Peter Briggins’ descendants, Mr B. Howard. See also The Eliot Papers, ed. E. Howard (Gloucester, 1893-4). 2 This is an inference; the diary seldom mentions quantities, but when it does they are usually less than twenty pockets. 3 Ibid. 4 December 1703. The following section is based almost completely on the five volumes of the diary.

505

The Hop-Markets season, prices hardened through the spring and Briggins sold parcels steadily from £3. 2s. per cwt. in January up to a quotation of £5. 55. on 24 April which Tiby procured for him. Three days later he got a bid of £5 per cwt. for his entire stock, irrespective of quality. Then, at the begin¬ ning of May, Tiby went off to Maidstone, to see the market there and all the East Kent gardens en route, reporting this trip on 25 May. On 1 July, he set off again to see another part of Kent, and was at Stourbridge on 12 July. Briggins noted on the following day: ‘ W.T. wroat word that there was about 1000 bags of hopps at ye fair most new, not above 4 Ld. of old, they talk ye now at £5 and yet they went of[f] very dull’, and on 17 July: ‘W.T. came home this night. To Southwark abt. hopps. There was a prity many at ye Inns but cared not to sell till they saw how ye fair went.... ’ On 25 August, Tiby wrote from further afield, having visited Bridg¬ north where the slightly later harvest in the Worcester region enabled him to gauge prices in the fuller knowledge of the Kent and Sussex crops. This year he was not reported at Weyhill, which he visited on almost every other year recorded, but as early as the following February he had already begun his new season’s rides by reporting on the state of the gardens in Worcestershire again. Such a season’s travel is typical of his ceaseless journeyings to provincial markets wherever hops were grown or sold. There is an obvious parallel here with the annual trip of John Taylor the Quaker malt-factor across the barley country between Sawbridgeworth and Cromer for a summer holiday which coincided with the ripening of the harvest.1 Doubtless, too, Briggins kept Tiby equally informed of the prices ruling in Southwark while he was away, as other travellers sent home their accounts, for his diary shows a meticulous account of their movements, suggesting that he visited the Southwark sources for these quotations as assiduously as his cousin gathered news from the provinces. This whole chronicle of Mammon is scattered amongst a record of philanthropic strivings of his fellow-Quakers to redeem their time on earth, and lies between the out-pourings of his self-communicated homilies—a confessional dialogue conducted between these same private covers. The theme he urged many times in the religious entries (and which is demonstrated by the commercial ones) is the lesson of two parables: that of the Talents and the Foolish Virgins. It is the one theme which makes both aspects of the diary consonant in spirit. Here is the voice which spoke confidently and with dignity down the generations, more prominent in malt-marketing and brewing than in hops, but present 1 See above, p. 462.

506

Marketing none-the-less in all three industries—as in so many others—during times which held no conflict (on temperance grounds) between the worldly success of an entrepreneur and the salvation of a Quaker’s soul. The marketing structure at Southwark, which gradually cast its shadow longer over each planting area in England, grew up and was at all times founded upon the crops of the Kent and Sussex gardens, supplemented by those of Farnham. The planters in the first counties had no recognised fair as at Weyhill or Worcester which they could themselves attend, to treat with merchants anxious to handle their crops—a lack which presumed the existence of specialised factors intermediary between the many growers and the relatively few merchants, always a distinguishing feature of the Southwark market. Using the highway of the Thames, the bulk of the crop would arrive round the coast to the City rather than overland. However, the more rapid land carriage which brought the early bags to market probably explains why the warehouses should lie to the south of the river. The main exit from Kent was at first Maidstone-Rochester via the Medway, but later such more easterly ports as Faversham1 profited greatly from the spread of planting in East Kent. Many hops were brought up to the Southwark warehouses by Kent hoymen who themselves acted as principals, or as selling agents for the different consignments carried in their vessels, duplicating on a lesser scale the similar, and very natural development in the marketing of Hertfordshire malt by the factors controlling barges on the river Lea.2 Since there was no great fair in Kent, it was no more common for planters there than elsewhere to keep stocks by them, so that much forward selling was done, under bond, where entire crops would be contracted for at a fixed price. The heavy running expenses of a plantation throughout the year, with the great additional labour of the harvest, meant that planters stood in need of cash in large amounts just before sale which encouraged them to pledge their crop to the person who offered to provide it. Specimen agreements for delivering all the produce of a garden ‘well dry’d and Bagged on or before the last day of October next’, except for half a hun¬ dredweight for the planter’s own use, exist in the surviving ‘Book of Precedents’ of a Deal solicitor dating from 1736.3 Doubtless this is evidence for a widely used method of sale, whereby the merchant took over the formal risks of price movements at the latter end of the season. 1 3

J. H. Andrews, op. cit. 2 Excise (TLB), I351) *6 April 1755John Taylor, Notary Public. I saw this book through the active kindness of Mr D. Downes. The sum of £ioo—the mutual bond—was also traditional enough to find its way into a specimen ‘blank’. 5°7

The Hop-Markets The factors organised the sale of the crops of many small gardens, making possible an efficient collecting system with efficient bargaining power for the many producers. At the end of the century, factors did their agency work (that is, apart from the speculation of merchanting they generally undertook as principals, owning hops themselves) for a traditional com¬ mission of 3s. per bag, when prices were moderate, rising to 4s. a little later in the case of higher prices.1 This freed the planter from responsibility and expense, once the hops reached the Borough, for his factor usually controlled storage and negotiated insurance, sale, delivery, and remittance. The large network of purchasing and commissioning from planters is illustrated by every fire in a Borough warehouse which led merchants and factors to claim rebates for the planters on duty paid—and the size of their dealings becomes clear. In 1756, for example, Ambler, Downs and Chappell lost in a fire a stock of over 400 cwt. bought through twelve factors, and many more than a score of planters scattered all over East and West Kent and Sussex.2 At a similar disaster, in 1772, Timothy Yeates (one of the most prominent hop-merchants operating in Southwark) lost a store of over 1000 cwt., valued at above £5000, and in 1815 the Hand in Hand Fire Office became liable for £15,500 when the stock of John and George Evans, factors, was destroyed.3 The numbers recorded in trade directories, because of the large-scale dealings of a few individuals, do not reflect the true nature of the market, for the many people in a very small way of trade are entered in them on the same terms as the greatest, which can give a misleading picture of the whole. In 1814, for example, there were more than fifty-eight persons listed as dealers, merchants or factors in hops in the Post Office directory, no great change in numbers from the record of Kent’s directory in 1780. Almost all of them dealt in seeds, corn or some allied commodities in addition to hops, and most are to be found in the Borough. One or two important names—such as Bolland of Mark Lane, Wood, Wigan and Co. of Cannon Street—are to the north of the river, and in 1814 one firm dealing in ‘Timber, hops, corn and seeds’ was to be found by the Padding¬ ton canal, but the market operations of all of them—the actual dealing— was centred firmly south of the Thames, as it always had been, and to which the Hop Exchange building was to bear permanent testimony. The 1 Pari. Papers, 1801, II, App. 8 of yth Report.. .on High Price of Provisions, evidence of T. Brown; 1857, XIV, loc. cit. QQ_. 5538-43; Letter to S. F. Waddington in Reply to His Appeal to the British Hop Planters... (Southwark, 1800). 2 Excise (TLB), 1351, if. 445-6 (8 July 1757). 3 Ibid. 1354, f- 211 (n June 1772), 1389, f. 293 (13 January 1815).

508

Marketing directories at the end of the eighteenth century cannot indicate that less than a dozen firms had a pre-eminent proportion of the total trade passing through their books. From very early on, the leaders of the trade were a clearly defined group. In the first brewer’s ledger available, that of Samuel Whitbread between the years 1746-52, the hop accounts show virtually all his custom being given to Hudson and Davies (of the Seven Stars, Thames Street) who were also Benjamin Truman’s main dealers.1 Whitbread ran a few odd accounts with Simes (ten pockets only in 1747), Wykes (sixty-five pockets in 1748-9) and ‘sundry hopp factors’ with Canterbury addresses. Almost certainly these were selling via Southwark, for Whitbread (in a fairly small way of trade still) would probably not have been seeking contacts in the plantations himself. The small purchases are settled at once in cash, only Hudson and Davies running an account with normal credit and periodic settlement. At any period in the ledgers of the porter brewers, London ale brewers, and country brewers, the appropriate generation of hop-factors and merchants become familiar names, common to almost every set of books which have survived. At the centre of the trade were John Bolland of Mark Lane, later to link with Prestwidge and Co. of Cannon Street; Foreman (giving up in favour of Bolland and Prestwidge after his death in 1790) ;2 Y eates and Brown of St Mary’s Hill; Dawson and Owen of Thames Street; Thackrahs of Eastcheap (in Tooley Street by 1780); William Golding; Broadley; Coffin and Sons; Thomas Irvine; Joseph Lockwood; Sir James Sanderson, and other, more transient, stars in the Southwark heavens.3 Being so firmly placed in the market, there was much redeployment of the same families in different partnerships, or the entry of the occasional new family into an established firm rather than many entries of new blood into new firms. Families did not show as great a continuity in hop-merchanting as in brewing, and most seem to fade out from particular partnerships in one or two generations, even if descendants carried on the trade in other firms. The continuity of the firm, on the other hand, is often remarkable, and the single ledger of a hop-merchant—Thackrah—known to be surviving is fruit of such continuity. 1 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Trade Ledger 1746-52; Truman Records: Rest Books 1741-1830. 2 Truman Records: Rest Book 1790. 3 See also the purchases of the Victualling Commissioners which reveal the same pattern, except that Irvine, Coffin, George Scholey and Sanderson seem to be more prominent than the others, in contrast to the private records. Naval purchases were 1000-5000 cwt. annually (P.R.O. Adm. 112/173-185).

509

The Hop-Markets The few firms mentioned in the preceding paragraph were in the centre of the hop-market between 1780-1820. In the earlier decades, Barclays were buying mainly through Golding, Foreman, Dawson and Owen—switching to Bolland and Prestwidge from Foreman in the i79o’s. They had a varying population of small accounts on their books (some¬ times as many as nine) but, when taken together, these in no sense supplied anything near the scale of the 500 bags which a major account might contain during a season. In 1795 came a 200-bag purchase from ‘Gurneys and Co.’, which would not seem coincidental (Richard and Hudson Gurney being closely associated with the brewery at the time, and partners in 1801) but the establishment of this famous Quaker name in the hop-market did not follow. From the end of the century, their connexions with Thackrahs (near neighbours after 1780 as were most of the others) became much closer, and in some years all other custom was squeezed out. However, such complete reliance upon a single supplier did not continue. For Trumans, too, by the end of the century, there had come almost a monopoly link with the single firm of Bollands; they gave their custom to him exclusively in many years and it was often riveted by extended credit. In 1823, for a single year the partners took the unprecedented step of giving their entire trade to Thackrahs, but what personal story this volte face conceals remains obscure.1 With Whitbread, familiar names reflect the familiar story once more, but with one unusual twist. At the turn of the century Yeates and Brown, Bolland and Prestwidge were succouring the brewery with loans and discounts on an impressive scale, enjoying most of their custom in hops, but sharing the ledgers with most of the other important factors and some lesser figures.2 Amongst the latter are the names of Joseph Royle of Canterbury and Joseph Frost of Woodford, both merchants outside the Southwark market and operating at the place of growth. Even Thackrahs’ purchasing direct from Royle was unusual in that it by-passed one link in the full chain of dealings; Whitbread’s custom was short-circuiting two. After 1807, however, his purchases began to follow the more traditional plan of being concentrated in the main on one or two houses—Bush, Wilson and Were, and then, from 1812, Bollands. By a happy chance one ledger of a major firm of hop-factors, Thackrahs, has overcome the hazards of survival and gives a cross-section of their 1 The Rest Book may be misleading about the absolute nature of the switch. 2 For these credit transactions see above, pp. 282-3, and below, p. 528.

Marketing trade between 1804-14.1 It confirms the inferences drawn from the books of brewers and, taken together, both sources with what other comment is available, are probably sufficient to avoid most of the obvious distortions which an absence of‘internal’ business records does so much to encourage in commercial and industrial history. Thackrahs’ trade was nation-wide, there being perhaps 700-750 customers in the ledger, most of them (by number) having less than fullpage accounts. These represented small annual transactions with private persons brewing their own beer, Brewing Victuallers, provincial brewers throughout the land, and merchants (who provided the pockets of hops which stood at the door of most grocers’ shops for sale by the pound to home brewers in country districts).2 The wide geographical network of sales is shown by accounts of merchants in Dover, Norwich, Coventry, Exeter, Leicester, Knaresborough, Bristol, Manchester, Paisley, Kilmarnock and Edinburgh. Like John Bolland, Thackrahs would send their travellers or agents round the distant markets with samples to seek custom.3 By volume, however, the bulk of their trade was concentrated in a few hands and confined to London, being complementary to the brewers’ pattern of purchasing. The firm enjoyed a further large connexion with the London merchants Johnston and Thorley, Bustard and Co. (whose respective accounts came to £9723 and £4786 in the 1806 season)—two houses in the bulk trade to Ireland. London brewers buying from the house included Kirkman of St Giles; Cowell of Maid Lane; Thomas and Robert Pryor of Shoreditch; George Tritton of Wandsworth; Clowes, Martineau, Godings, Henry Meux and Barclays. John Gardner of Cheltenham was also a customer, with many other unidentified country brewers. All the most important of these accounts with London brewers are marked by extended credit transactions. Henry Meux and Co. after 1811 were buying on a scale of £2500 each season, paying for credit beyond their six months’ allowance; Kirkmans also took extended credit on their purchases of ^1200-^1400, and also Barclays, who were Thackrahs’ main customers. Their purchases ranged from £11,000 in 1806 down to £6335 in 1808, and up again to £18,000 in 1810 (being perhaps a tenth of Thackrahs’ total sales) and extensive interest payments took place in 1806-7. This was supplemented by the personal loan of £3000 to a Charles Perkins, almost 1 Ledger ‘A’ is still held at Tooley Street, Southwark, by May (Hop Merchants) Ltd. I heard of this book through the efficiency of the Council for the Preservation of Business Archives and studied it by the courtesy of Mr H. L. A. May of the same firm. 2 Pari. Papers, 1857, xiv, loc. cit. Q.Q.. 4053-5. 3 S. Allsopp to J. Bolland, 16 November 1809.

The Hop-Markets certainly connected with the family in the brewery, which he contracted in 1809 and maintained until the ledger ended.1 From Kirkman’s account one can see how easily a merchant in a position of strong liquidity passed from real to monetary transactions. Kirkman commonly paid his debts to Thackrahs in bills of denominations much larger than his purchases, receiving the balance regularly in cash on which he paid the usual discount rate. Stonard, Unwin and Co., leading distillers, but also brewers, of Bromley, carried a debt of £9000 to Thackrahs until 1810, which had been from the first a purely financial transaction. Thackrahs’ purchasing was, in nearly all cases, through established factors in the Borough; about forty names appeared on their books. Some¬ times, all the planters selling through such a person are listed under his entry: the multiplicity of their names and the smallness of their consign¬ ments illustrates the need for someone to organise collection and sale for the hop planters. One large account (with Joseph Royle of Canterbury) and a few small ones (as Fairbrass of Faversham and Chambers of Maid¬ stone) do show that there was some purchasing direct from the planting areas, and there was a fair amount of buying and selling to fellow merchants and factors in the Borough, as one party or another was caught short of supplies. Overall, however, only a small fraction of buying appears to take place outside this market and only a small fraction of selling within it. Apparently there were no loans between Thackrahs and any planter. When the ledger opens John and George Thackrah were partners, and George Jr was taken into partnership in 1812. The rapid accumulation of capital in the business shows what prosperity could be found at the centre of the market, with but modest rates of profit.2 The partnership capital rose from £63,000 at the balance in August 1804, to £123,000 in 1814, the profit varying between £4400 in the leanest year (1805-6) and £12,160 in 1814. On the average of ten years it was £8500. The credit side of the balance, struck each summer, consisted of the three main items, balances outstanding to the house, cash in hand and stocks. As one might expect, coming at the time when purchasing of the new crop was about to begin in earnest, stocks were very small—never valued above £3000 and often at 1 Charles was not, it seems, one of the three sons of John Perkins, but perhaps a grandson. A. C. Perkins was partner with F. Perkins and George Thackrah in the Birtley Ironworks (leased from Lord Durham in 1825). The fifth son of Frederick Perkins (third son of the first John Perkins, manager to Thrale) b. 1811, married Eden Thrackrah, thus linking conjugally two families long connected by material interests (see S. C. Barber, History of Perkins Family (MS.) at Barclay Perkins, Southwark). 2 This is subject to the ambiguity that the balance sheets upon which a balancing sum called ‘profits’ is entered may not have shown withdrawals from trade during the year.

512

Marketing justa few hundreds or less (for example, they were £59 on 31 August 1814), while cash in hand was high: £81,870 in 1814 and above £50,000 in several years. Balances owed to the house were likewise high, varving between £30,000 and £60,000 suggesting a fair degree of‘extended credit’. Unfortunately, no balances were struck in October when the real time of extension might be gauged and the books which would have recorded this side of the business separately have not survived. To be able to see how many remittances had come in between August and November each year, and how much of these very high August balances had become available for purchasing the new crop, would add much of significance to the extant figures. This portion of the picture would be fully drawn, however, only if the position about possible seasonal credit to Thackrahs in the autumn were known, as they are not. Without a study of their business records, of which Thackrahs’ ledger is but one example, it is impossible to do full justice to the story of the evolution of the group of important Southwark hop-merchants and factors during the eighteenth century. In the absence of these documents, it is the peripheral evidence from the books of brewers (and the Admiralty Victualling Commissioners) which reveals the influence they exercised over the regional sales of hops throughout the country. These customers’ accounts suggest transactions on a scale rivalling that of the greatest houses in internal trade and of some houses close to the greatest in foreign trade. The nomenclature of factor or merchant meant, at most, an indication of the degree of each type of transaction conducted. All factors (between the growers and the market, as between the brewers and the market) seem to have bought and sold themselves, besides selling the planters’ consign¬ ments or buying the brewers’ supplies of a commodity which they never owned, on a flat-rate commission. Independent merchants, too, acted on occasion as commissioned agents for brewers as well as dealing on their own account. In such a speculative market as this, the identification (or the isolation) of function implied in the differing words of‘merchant’ and ‘factor’ is nowhere more misleading than when applied to men con¬ cerned in it. There may have been a natural evolution in individual cases from being simply factors or simply merchants towards the combined function. In times of rapid expansion from small beginnings ‘factoring’ would naturally result from the large number of consignments needing to be organised for sale and distribution. As wealth accumulated in the hands of these factors, and as the market evolved, subject to other pressures, these agents were induced to invest in hops on their own. They needed 33

513

MBE

The Hop-Markets stocks to be able to fulfil orders efficiently, and they turned towards the wider margins often available for principals. In the brewers’ books the word ‘hop-factors’ appeared from the start, in the 1740’s, but it is difficult to be sure if this implied buyers’ or sellers’ factoring or, of course, the single intermediary organising both collection and sale, giving credit to both sides.1 This may have been the predominant market structure in the less sophisticated early years; but, more probably, the brewer bought from the market direct (the word ‘ factor’ at this time implying a dealer who had evolved from planters’ factor but who owned the hops he sold to the brewer) and only later evolved his own commissioned buying between himself and the merchant, which added another stage to the marketing transactions. These shifts in the relative commitment to planters’ commissions, independent dealings or brewers’ commissions, are exactly the movements which are impossible to trace without a run of private records; yet it is this degree of commitment of the various persons in the market which con¬ ditioned their attitude to the producers and the manufacturers. It is perhaps wise to leave the question open, except to suggest that by the mid-century there had been a large co-mingling of functions; and by its end, Waddington’s case revealed a balance of power which was very much depressing the influence of planters’ factors in the Borough. The size of the few hop-merchants’ and factors’ accounts in the books of the handful of porter brewers, coupled with the extended credit which they allowed, is proof enough of size attracting countervailing size. But with such swelling of individual accounts leading to commercial con¬ centration, there developed a further change in the technique of trading, paralleled in malt-merchanting, which was similarly in conformance with the emergence of these very powerful customers. In the same way that factors appeared originally in this market as intermediary between it and the grower, so now, an increasing volume of sale became organised by factors between the brewer and the market, buying for the manufacturer rather than selling for the planters. And whereas the planters’ factor came into existence from the multitude of suppliers and a national market, so the brewers’ factor was a response to the power of a handful of customers. This meant that a frequent chain of transactions now ran from planter to factor to merchant to factor to brewer, with short-cutting developing freely across one or both of the middle stages, aided by a convergence of function between factoring and merchanting. The brewer’s hop-factor, 1 See above, pp. 455-62, for malt factors.

SH

Marketing as his malt-factor, was a powerful man extending much credit to his customers, as the planter’s factor did, but in turn he remained much dependent on them individually. The porter brewer needed vast quantities of hops annually, perhaps on average 7000-8000 cwt. if he was brewing 150,000-200,000 barrels; but in any single year, because of the great price variations, he might well wish to buy 15,000 cwt. or none at all. True, he did not need to find hops of the finest quality, but his keenness to get value for money was not at all impaired by this. Such a great quantity perforce had to be collected from many plantations (not all at the same time or in the same place if it was to be done advantageously); then graded and stored, as with malt. Hence, the brewer relied extensively on the skills of his factor, it being worth his while on such a scale to pay just for these skills alone. Almost invariably, samples would be sent to the brewer who kept the final decision over purchase in his own hands, but the selection of the samples was the crucial thing, as every brewer with a reliable factor knew.1 Some angry recriminations in retrospect, from brewers to their factors, that parcels were of poor quality and that their decisions to commit their customers in advance to bad supplies, also, by implication, showed the degree of reliance which marked the normal transactions between them.2 All the factors were operating on their own account; but, being such large customers, the brewers could hold a factor to commission for a good proportion of their trade, rather than facing directly the price of indepen¬ dent merchants. The functions, here as elsewhere, were distinct, but became intimately entangled in the actual operation of the market. Both sides tended to claim that, such being the mutual structures of industry and trade, each had become the sacrificial victim to the monopoly power of the other—a good indication that each group had come to depend inescapably on the other, but that both sides feared that dependence. In short, oligopoly was facing oligopoly. Chafing under the market situa¬ tion, the large manufacturer or the large seller of a raw material was in reality regretting the influence which each had had in developing a com¬ mercial structure suited for supplying most adequately the needs of the other. By 1857, a witness to the committee investigating the hop trade noted how tight was the ring of factors and merchants in the Borough, as the committees on the malt trade before 1830 had stressed the power of the malt-factors and the high proportion of malt which did not pass through the market at all. They dealt, said the witness, only with whom they knew.3 As far as the leaders of the trade in hops were concerned, this 1 Pari. Papers, 1857, loc. cit. QQ_. 1486-91.

515

2 See above, p. 460.

3 Ibid. Q_. 7768. 33-2

The Hop-Markets statement had described the main feature of their trade over the last century. It is, perhaps, generally true that powerful customers demanding regular supplies at competitive prices and assured quality, possessing both the commercial initiative to take the best advice and the influence to implement it, create the powerful dealers who alone can satisfy their demands. It is not coincidental that the largest customer of all in the food and raw material markets of these centuries—the navy—found just this inevitable dependence upon large-scale operators, by definition so few in numbers that collusion was always a threat. In our own century, warcontracts have tended to favour the already big more than the small men for the same reasons. The vital short-run conveniences overbore possible long-run disadvantages when the consequences of such special influences of demand began to be reflected in the structure of the market. However, in the Borough there was continuing keen competition amongst the leaders of the market, none of whom possessed sufficient hold on brewer, fellow merchant and factor, or the growers (as a whole), to dictate their terms. Nor, above all, had they any power over the quantities coming to market at this time. That was nature’s alone: a trading, non-manufacturing oligopoly could not control either production or price significantly. And, when foreign hops were bought, they came usually through established houses whose allegiance and interests were shared between planter and customer rather than in defiance of them.1 As far as is known there was never any united attempt by brewers to purchase stocks themselves on joint account to be thrown on to the hop-market in order to break prices, as they did with barley several times.2 Much stress has been laid upon the need to pay large sums in duty as a simple major reason to explain the need of the planter to accept credit from his factor and merchant. The other impression gained from public comment is also that such credit bonds were the main strength of the position of market intermediaries over brewers. Emphasis therefore needs to be laid upon the high premium given in such a large-scale, uncertain, national market, to that peculiar blend of knowledge, experience, skill and instinct which makes up commercial expertise. This was the prime basis of the position of factors, upon which specialised knowledge and the advice so essential to the customers they served, accreted the adjuncts of convenience and influence. Undoubtedly, the provision of credit was the most important of these for the brewer; but with it, too, came the other 1 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Rest Books 1799-1802, 1817-18. - See above, pp. 233-4.

516

conveniences: the freedom from bother given by their collecting, grading, insurancing, and warehousing a multitude of small lots from the growers, and their similar service of organising payment to the growers. The more intimately the operation of any raw material market is studied, perhaps the larger do the skills and experience of its operators, so easily taken for granted by external observers and critics, emerge as the real defence of their commercial status. It was through the agency of Phillips and Yarranton that the relationship between the Worcester and London market, the stress between them on occasion and the current tensions between planters and dealers in the hop-trade generally, were exposed to brewers all over the country. In 1800, there occurred a noted ‘medieval’ trial for forestalling and regrating.1 The unprecedented problems of famine prices and bad trade in these years breathed momentary life into several anachronistic laws (including the 1563 labour regulations) which the economic enlightenment and business conditions of previous generations had consigned to slumber. In the hop case, when S. F. Waddington2 appeared in the King’s Bench after his trial at the Worcester Summer Assizes for selling, at Worcester, produce which he had previously bought, there occurred a notable judicial inter¬ jection from the bench. Defending counsel opened with a volley from Adam Smith, quoting that free trade had made this offence as obsolete as prosecution for witchcraft, only to be sharply rebuked by Lord Kenyon for invoking that ‘treatise written in a closet’.3 Nothing had cast so bright a light upon the dark mysteries of hop-marketing before; and with these beacon words to guide it, the court plunged energetically into the forest of accusation and prejudice. Against this, as at the Assizes where he conducted his own case, Waddington argued, with complete laissez-faire orthodoxy, the case for the ‘individual’s right to employ his capital in trade as he best thought fit’. Phillips and Yarranton were Waddington’s agents at Worcester, and he, a stranger in the market there, arrived in person on 29 March 1800, after buying up large stocks in the Borough, to persuade the Worcester planters to hold back supplies and so clinch his corner. As material inducement he offered forward-buying terms which rose from £12. 105. per cwt. spot 1 My account of it is drawn from i East 153; Summary of the Trial... (1800) [in King’s Bench, 8 February and 16 May 1800]; Letter to S. F. Waddington... (Southwark, 1800); Cobbett, op. cit. vol. I, p. 225; Cobbett, American Register (1816), p. 329. 2 Waddington traded in Southwark as ‘Waddington, Warwick and Co.’ The firm sold to the Victualling Commissioners in 1799 (P.R.O. Adm. 172/185). 3 Summary of the Trial..., p. 5.

5W

The Hop-Markets price, to £15 per cwt. in eight weeks, and was prepared to take all he was offered to starve further the markets of immediate supplies. He had made arrangements to set up a warehouse (and a bank) to accommodate all those who deposited their hops with him. In the evening of the same day, some ninety-seven planters attended a dinner given by Waddington at the Hop Pole Inn (where the local committee of planters met) at which, immediately after the loyal toast, it was said—a pretty detail—a second one, to ‘ Hops at £20 a hundredweight’ was ‘drunk with rapture by every Hop Planter in the room’.1 Not unnaturally, these sanguine hopes were unfulfilled. Despite every machination of the speculators, which had convinced many people that prices were ruled by them, it was the activity of nature rather than man which was causing the trouble. Waddington had succeeded in buying at most 1000 of the 4000 pockets at market in Worcester. In addition, he had very large stocks in Southwark but was certainly not one of the greatest operators there; nor was there evidence of collusion with the half-dozen other people whose decisions did matter collectively. It is questionable how far the structure of the hop trade had developed towards the point of conscious oligopoly where free trade might deserve obloquy from the judicial bench. In remote market towns the three traditional offences might still affect prices markedly in the short run— and it was from such a general economic environment as this that the laws had issued in the first place. But, in a nationally organised market such as the trade in hops, only a near national monopoly could have done so. The speculation which was rife in the trade (and, given the circumstances of the trade, inevitably so) aided by every individual touching the com¬ modity from planter to brewer, could at most have shifted prices only slightly round a curve determined predominantly by natural forces. And, to remedy these shortcomings of the market, it was worse than useless to menace on principle the dealings of every merchant in it. Here, as else¬ where in the administrative system of the time, an inadequate hotch-potch of commercial law regulating transactions, corporate activity and human relations, was tolerable only through being inoperative and, when activated, intensified the problems it sought ostensibly to solve. Given the uncertain crops and high annual expenses of planting, there was a universal need for long-term credit to the grower. ‘ If the planter is prevented from entering into a contract with the hop merchant respecting his future crop,’ commented Waddington’s counsel, ‘you may grub up every hop plantation in the country’. He might have added that this 1 Summary of the Trial..p. 67.

518

Marketing credit to the grower was mirrored by that advanced to the brewers, and that their custom as well as the planters’ produce was being widely mortgaged. Nevertheless, to act against the abuse of such necessary pro¬ vision of credit, the law could only propose the complete elimination of middlemen; so in undoubted conformity to the law, Waddington was found guilty, and the verdict of the Assize court stood confirmed. He languished in the King’s Bench prison for twenty-seven weeks and suffered a fine of £500 before emerging to liberty and recompense. His progress to Maidstone, as champion of the ‘oppressed planters’ was a triumph. Twelve miles from the town, planters took the horses from his carriage, decked it with hop bines and drew him by relays to the town. ‘ There he rode in triumph through the streets, made a speech which was received with immense acclamation; “Waddington and the freedom of commerce” resounded through the streets; and a subscription on his behalf was entered into.’1 In this litigation under statutes for the defence of the common good, the real struggle was between two vested interests seeking purely sectional advantage. The action had been brought against Waddington by London hop-factors (counsel for the Crown had included a partner in the house of Scott, Brown and Yeates)—factors of the brewers rather than the planters—and by London merchants, who together saw his Worcester campaign as a further step in the combination of producers to support prices against them and squeeze their margins. These attempts at col¬ laboration which have been noticed, sprang largely from the realisation amongst planters that the hop trade was coming more and more into the hands of an identifiable small group of merchants who knew one another intimately in the market (where they all met daily). They were becoming conscious of their common interest against planters and brewers and had their tentacles of influence by credit stretching out over both.

In par¬

ticular, there was the movement, already mentioned, that factors on the Southwark market, operating between planters and market, were becoming dealers on their own account more extensively as the century had pro¬ gressed. Doubtless, the fluctuating prices offered margins for principals much more lucrative than a fixed-rate commission to agents, particularly when the trend price was rising. Again, accumulating wealth in the hands of factors encouraged investment, and what more advantageous investment could there be than in hops, when one was on the inside of such a fancy market? Even provincial and London brewers in close touch with their 1 T. C. Turberville, Worcestershire in the Nineteenth Century (1852), pp. 110-12.

5W

The Hop-Markets dealers found it profitable to chance their arm at the game. At the end of the century there is little sign of a hop-factor being accused by a brewer of being the ‘ growers ’ factor’ (as Sampson Hanbury accused one of his malt-factors of being) so that it was not illogical for the prosecution of Waddington to be supported by Southwark. By that time, indeed, there might have been a complementary planter’s toast to ‘Hops at £20 a hun¬ dredweight and confusion to the factors’, who were out primarily to widen their margins at the expense of the planters.

More immediately to the

years in question, it will be remembered that this was not a time when the brewers could be accommodating in their raw material markets. Prices were so high that, with other traditional effects of a bad harvest augmented by war-time economic conditions, there had been a slackening of demand. They were putting what pressure they could on malt and hop prices, weakening their brews, and even turning to inferior substitutes for malt and hops on a considerable scale, all with a view to cutting down still further on their purchases while disguising the effect of doing so. Imports of quassia alone indicated how dangerous this substitution might become for the hop-market. Adulteration was one clear example of how changing conditions in the parent industry reacted upon the structure of their subsidiary markets. The extent to which planters pledged their crops in advance in exchange for credit cannot be accurately known, but without any doubt it affected a substantial proportion of the hops marketed. Obligations established in advance of sale linked every stage in the marketing arrangements from hop-planter and maltster through to the publican (and to many of his customers). An age which welcomed in its intellectual debate a theory of political economy emphasising the free market and its anonymous cash nexus saw, in the actual commercial operations of these industries, the influence of credit spreading ever more widely through their body politic. Waddington’s case had produced one of the best ‘internal’ revelations of hop-marketing, which was scarcely surpassed until the parliamentary investigation of 1857.

Much of the evidence given before the latter

committee was retrospective, agreeing with that of 1800, so that together they span the broad picture of conditions between 1800-30. Advancing money was most general in the growing regions of the Weald of Sussex and the Weald of Kent, where planters were more modest in resources than elsewhere in the two counties, and in Farnham; but it was very prevalent in all districts, including Worcester, where it had remained 520

Marketing a function of the merchants.1 As both planter and brewer were found to depend substantially upon the experience and the credit possessed by the various kinds of intermediary, all important schemes for planters to sell direct had broken down, although Bass at Burton seemed to have developed some contacts with them.2 Many of the East Kent dealings were in ready cash at the time of the harvest—with planters of greater financial inde¬ pendence than elsewhere—and factors whose customers came from these favoured areas could give very different reports on the extent of advances. W. Harryman had only one tenth of his 724 customers with advances in 1857 and thought that bankers proposing to lend to any of the others would have first checked with him—as none had.3 The general impression then, as before 1830, was that this proportion would very much underestimate the general degree of such forward transactions. It did show, however, that extension of credit came as much in good times as bad—as much, that is, for helping with the overhead costs of extending plantations in boom years as in covering running costs in a depression.4 Being as deeply involved with the law as the malt and brewing industries, through the regulations for growing and selling their hops, with their level of prices similarly determined in large part by a flat rate of excise duty (which might vary with the yield and price between 10 per cent and 35 per cent upon the value of the crop)5 there was every incentive for the planters to face the Excise, as they did the hop-factors, as a united body. Usually, in such instances, the interests of the hop planters and dealers ran together and pressure was consequently more effective (it was in fact the factors rather than the planters who usually petitioned for repayment of duty). But there remained an intensifying problem of commercial strategy, which also encouraged them to draw together, as vital as the other issue and of more immediate concern to producers. In this realm, the merchants and dealers in the market were in no sense allies of the planters; and only the planters’ factors, in the strict interpretation of that function, were above suspicion.

More and more, their commitments were becoming

equivocal between planters and merchants, as they developed dealing on their own account, thus increasing the incentives for a united expression of opinion in the hop country against the market interests. It is difficult to know how far all these inducements to collaboration became effective over the innate condition of many competitive producers 1 Pad. Papers, 1857, xiv, op. cit. Q_Q_. 1883-94, 3870, 3876. 2 Ibid. QQ. 3846-8, 4015-17, 5822; Parker, op. cit. 3 Ibid. Q.Q.. 6406, 6460, 6465. 4 Ibid. Q. 6412. 521

6 Ibid. Q. 1066.

The Hop-Markets in a raw material market, which is, by nature, that of minimum ‘effective’ prices and perfect competition in the long run, particularly when faced by such a national market as Southwark. The existence of an organisation of planters does not touch the question of its effectiveness, as the burden of most early trade-union history suggests. Here, as with the hop merchants, without a close study of ‘internal’ documents which do not now exist— and may never have existed—in relation to the other evidence, judgment is difficult. The literature of public accusation is a quicksand of un¬ demonstrated hypotheses waiting to trap those who trespass upon it. In Waddington’s case, as in similar passages of arms in other industries, much was made of‘the Committee’ backing him.1 This body represented all the Herefordshire and Worcestershire planters. In less anxious times seven years before, a similar organisation was functioning at Farnborough,2 Kent, and united petitioning had been a common feature in the hop¬ growing counties for many years, the wording and timing of the documents often suggesting close collaboration between regions and some continuity of organisation.3 When bad times struck—for the planters—as in 1804 and after 1819, there were renewed flurries of petitioning for postpone¬ ment of duty, and something which might have been a strike—or at least a very common reluctance to pay—which the Excise acknowledged to be the result of hard times. Such temporary respites in paying duty were allowed for several years in the face of repeated pressure by the planters.4 These matters do not appear to have concerned the brewers much, even indirectly, for prices responded to more direct stimuli and there was no effective action taken to limit acreage or entry into the industry, so they will be pursued here no further. It is intriguing to notice, in conclusion, that even within the planting interest itself there was division—as in the malt industry—between growers ‘with capital’ and those (supposedly) ‘without capital’, joined by potential growers, also without capital, who might be induced to set up gardens. The larger producers were protected from ease of entry into the trade and ease of expansion within the trade by less affluent rivals, through the high rate of taxation, which increased the minimum amount of working capital needed by growers. They were anxious to support this burden, as were the larger maltsters, while the 1 Letter to S. F. Waddington..op. cit.; Excise (TLB), 1374, f. 338. 2 At the Bush Inn, its chairman John Williams Esq. (J.H.C. xlviii (1793), 381-2). 3 xxvi, 98-9; B.M. Add. MS. 38,370, ff. 127-30; Monthly Mag. xv (i) (1803), 595. 4 This is a good example of united petitioning. See Excise (TLB), 1372, f. 447; 1374, ff. 1, 58, and jf.H.C. lxxxv, 179, 232, 411, 455, 506, 535; B.M. Add. MS. 38,370 loc. cit. The years in question were 1819-22, 1826-8, 1830 {Pari. Papers, 1849, L, 282). 522

Marketing small men denounced it.

Significantly, the lesser planters alone sent

memorials against the hop-excise in 1823, claiming that all factors, merchants and speculators wanted the tax ‘ because the greater the diffi¬ culties are with which the grower has to contend so much the more is he at the mercy of the buyer’, while all the planters with capital liked ‘the present sacrifice... which they can afford, provided it be accompanied by a severe pressure upon all and the total ruin of a great part of the re¬ mainder’.1 The great ones in the hop industry therefore join that reluctant company of established interests in early nineteenth-century Britain—the Bristol merchants complaining against anti-slavery and freer commerce to the West Indies, the Liverpool shippers standing against repeal of the timber duties, the Manchester cotton spinners protesting against the export of textile machinery, the brewers and maltsters happy in their strait-jacket of control—who were all waiting to be pushed into the chill, if invigorating waters, of free trade. THE BREWER AND THE HOP-MARKET

It is abundantly clear that almost all the brewers carried on their books far fewer hop accounts than malt accounts: a feature which, it is suggested, is due as much to the different structures of the two markets as to the difference in the value of the two accounts. Where the purchases of malt became organised to a large extent through factors of the brewer, the names of the many individual maltsters still crowd the pages of many ledgers, for in this context the purpose of the factor was to by-pass the central market. The characteristic of the hop accounts, on the other hand, is the paucity of names, the size of the accounts, and the hegemony of the Southwark entrepot. It is with the knowledge of this market background that the buying policy of the brewers must be examined. Samuel Whit¬ bread’s annual purchases from September 1746 until 1750 showed, for example, the variations in buying policy in individual years which became steadily more important as the scale of brewing increased and, with it, the brewer’s degree of commitment in the raw material markets: September

1746-7, £42°o; 1747-8, £1600; i748-9> £544°; 1749-50, £2970.2 For the brewers as well as planters, one of the conveniences offered by their factors and merchants, in hops as well as malt, was warehousing, of which Whitbread was already taking full advantage. Where summer valuations of stocks become available in the Rest Books of breweries, the importance 1 B.M. Add. MS. 38,370, loc. cit. 2 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Trade Ledger 1746-52. 523

The Hop-Markets of this buying policy, above all in such a market as hops, is made clear. Benjamin Truman’s stocks varied between £1700 (for malt and hops) in June 1741, to £6200 in December 1746, falling to £1700 again in 1752 (when production was greater) and reaching -£22,500 in 1761. Thrale had 357 cwt. in stock over the summer of 1752 and 1157 cwt. in 1756. To list all the annual variations would be unnecessary and tedious—they reflect unmistakably the variations in price and yield down the years, which conditioned decisions to buy for stock or brew from stock, while the advent of two successive bad seasons would find every brewer caught with few stocks carried over and heavy current outlays. Some idea of the increased scale of finance, with its consequent in¬ creasing importance for buying, may be seen by looking at the early nineteenth-century figures. Then, the much vaster production (150,000 barrels and above annually, rather than 50,000 and below) meant that a few thousand hundredweight of hops inevitably had to be carried forward over the summer months. Barclays’ stock varied between 4000-8000 cwt.; its value between £ 10,000 and £100,000. In 1802, Whitbreads had £24,000 value in hops; in 1803, £6860; in 1817, £10,170; in 1818, £60,970. During the 1820’s, Trumans, for their size, had the heaviest stock-carrying policy of all, having been caught worse than most in the 1817-18 famine. In June 1821, they had no less than 32,000 cwt. (at 75s. per cwt.) in store; 16,000 cwt. in 1822 (at £4 per cwt.); 17,000 cwt. (valued at £162,000) in 1825 and 11,000 cwt. (worth £31,000) in 1828. It will be seen from these extremes how much more the aggregate values were affected by variations in price than quantity. To show, from this situation, how the fortunes of the brewer as manufacturer depended on his skill as a buyer, one may instance the years 1824-5, during which Trumans increased their stocks by 2000 cwt. and used perhaps 7000 cwt. in brewing.

Barclays in the same season could enter—no doubt with

satisfaction considering the rise in price that year—‘none bought’. Trumans brewed from stock almost completely the next year, but their 8000 cwt. in the summer of 1826 were marked down to £50,000—in particular they lowered the price of their 1824 season’s stock from £11.1 u. per cwt. to 27s. This meant a net loss of perhaps £30,000 over the two-year cycle of purchase, consumption and stock in comparison with Barclays, who were out of the market in 1825 rather than 1826. The reaction to 1818 was perhaps the most unprecedented of all. Trumans went into that devastating season with 1874 cwt. (in June 1817) valued at £11 per cwt., as they had bought the greater part of their current

5M

The Brewer and the Hop-Market needs on the rising market of the previous year, using up just 1000 cwt. from stocks of 2866 cwt. (valued at 130s. per cwt.) held in June 1816. Being thus fairly exposed to the market, having already cushioned them¬ selves as much as possible against the hardening prices of the previous season (in common with the other porter brewers), they took energetic action to break the planters’ golden dreams. Out of 2000 cwt. in stock the following June no less than 1662 cwt. were of foreign growth, half the price of the £24 per cwt. current for the Kent crop of 1817. Barclays, similarly, had 1752 cwt. of foreign hops and only 194 cwt. of English hops in stock by 1818. For this one season the normal outflow of hops from England as a whole was sharply reversed as imports came in from the Continent to meet the shortage. The only previous occasion when the English supplies to the hop-market had been by-passed—again in an emergency—was in 1799-1801, when prices had risen high enough to in¬ duce collaboration for importing barley on joint account, and the wild prosecution of Waddington for forestalling.

Small amounts of foreign

hops were valued by Whitbreads and Trumans (but not by Barclays) in 1800-1, following a season when the English crop of 1798 was at £10. 105. per cwt., and Barclays averaged their purchasing prices at £13.35. for 1799 and £14.145. for 1800. When the crisis was over, in 1801, Whitbreads were dumping eighty-nine bales of their foreign supplies at Hamburg (from which port doubtless they were due to sail for the Thames), failing to get any remittance at all from the auction.1 A more costly experiment in American hops, bought through Thackrahs and held at their warehouse, to be eventually resold to Cropper, Castellain and back again to Thackrahs between 1826 and 1833, lost them £9500 (on £i5,ooo).2 In normal years, British planters and their factors as yet had nothing to fear in price and quality from foreign competition. The provision of credit, being only one of the many conveniences, both financial and commercial, afforded by merchants and factors to brewers, was yet that aspect of their business which called forth most comment at the time and remains in retrospect the most intriguing development of the relations between the two parties. The normal trade practice of giving six months’ credit with hop selling must, of course, be discounted from the discussion, although this was three or four months longer than the usual commercial rates for other commodities (except malt) and was itself a considerable advantage for the brewer. Planters were usually paid immediately after their sales (and sometimes, of course, before) so at once 1 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Rest Books.

525

2 Ibid. Partners' Ledger 1818-51.

The Hop-Markets a credit-gap on a fair scale was interposed, and across it a brewer could only stretch at his financial inconvenience, quite apart from the commercial consequences which such a step might involve. Beyond this normal period of credit, however, extension varied with time and place, and in many cases must lie concealed from the eyes of any inquirer. It is a salutary thought that John Perkins, as manager of Thrale’s brewery, tried in vain to discover from his master’s wife the extent of the obligations which the house had contracted in a bad year, and which had been masked in the ledgers and balance sheets from even his eyes.1 He might suspect, but he could not prove. Where accounts ran over the six months’ time limit (a very normal event) interest at 5 per cent began. So conventional was it, even in the case of a distant provincial brewer, that, when John Bolland inquired of Samuel Allsopp about his remittance, he received a short note explaining: ‘ I considered no other that if you rec’d interest for the overtime it made no difference to you.... ’2 The complications begin where accounts are not complete or where these extensions of credit are transferred from the hop accounts to the ‘surplus capital account’ or even to the private account of the brewer quite outside his business records, along with all the other investments in the firm or personal loans to the man, whose origins were innocent of material commerce. Still further, the question becomes com¬ plex through the involvement of some hop-merchants in discounting bills and providing outright loans on note of hand, which extended their range of financial servicing into spheres where convenience, interest rebates and tacit obligations complicated still more obligations which sprang from the sale of hops. Henry Goodwyn, for example, had £15 ‘interest’ owing to Dawson and Owen on his balance sheet in the summer of 1784; £10 to Yeates and Brown in 1787 and £250 in 1788 for interest and discounts together.3 Being merely a cross-section of obligations at one point in time, such figures give only the minimum limit for what may have proved substantially greater sums during the rest of the year. That this is likely may be seen by turning to their hop accounts, which reveal a turn-over with Yeates and Brown (then their main suppliers) of between -£7000L11,000 annually, but a range of trade debts accumulated over time with a few factors of much greater sums. Bearing in mind that most purchases would be made before Christmas each year and that these balances were 1 Rylands MSS. 616. Box I, Memo. Book (1773), entry of 9 July 1773. 2 Allsopp Records: S. Allsopp to J. Bolland, 16 November 1809. 3 Charrington Records: Goodwyn Trade Ledger 1784-8.

526

The Brewer and the Hop-Market struck in the last week in June, the ‘carry-over’ of extended credit is clear from Table 35. table

35. Goodwyn’s hop accounts, 1784-8 Amount debited to hops

Number of factors

Year

GO

1784

9,800 15,952 19,281 20,725

3

17,731

3

1785 1786 1787 1788

4 5

5

This is on average much greater than their total expenditure on the com¬ modity would have been for the whole year, and it comes at a time when, on normal length of credit, most of their obligations would have been settled. The debts owed by Trumans to hop-factors at the time of their summer rests showed similar fluctuations. In 1741, they were £3273 out of a total debit balance for all obligations of only £8590: in 1746-7 they were nil. They were negligible in 1775-6, but over £14,000 in 1785 (when malt debts were running at £24,500)—out of a total of £68,000—and £17,000 in 1790. As would be expected, the years of high debts coincided with years of high prices, or of heavy purchasing (reflected in high valuations of stocks on the credit side of the books), and followed the run of the trade. 1815 with £31,300; 1816 with £34,300, were the high points of hop debts: by 1818 they had fallen to £9000 and they were nil in 1822, 1824, 1828 and 1830, interrupted by the peak of 1825 when they were £19,000. Values of stocks, however, in this latter season were £162,000. Clearly, when the planters were petitioning against disaster, the brewers were liquidating obligations contracted with factors in fat years for planters. Direct loans (outright, or when long-run debts are switched to the capital account) seem to be recorded more in a year of bad trade generally for the brewers, not necessarily their bad years for hops. Presumably, wealthy merchants and factors might be persuaded to advance credit at 5 per cent by agreeing not to foreclose on debts more easily than new ‘external’ creditors might be found. When it came to the point, in fact, the initiative might even lie with the debtor in the short run. What would it profit the creditor of a prosperous but illiquid brewery if he refused to allow this funding of commercial credit? 527

The Hop-Markets Foreman lent Trumans £4000 in this way for the two years 1784-5, Dawson and Owen £1500 and Bolland £660 in 1797; Bolland £3500 in 1799 and a further £3200 in 1816; Thackrahs £5000 in 1827. Apart from the long-run convenience of the normal six months’ credit, it seems from the balance sheets (which do not reveal much of the dynamics of this sequence), that such occasional loans as this, coming at times of acute pressure, were more important than a running ‘float’ of credit at least for the main porter brewers. The valuation of stocks, admittedly illiquid in any emergency, usually far outweighed their indebtedness to hop men. When Whitbreads’ outstanding debts for hops changed from nil in 1801 to £24,270 in the following season; from nil in 1817 to £15,230 in 1818 and back to nil in 1819-24, a similar process was evidently at work, but again there were only three years between 1799 and 1830 when their hop debts over-topped stock valuations.1 This brewery, however, shows up as more deeply committed to hop factors for discounts and loans in bad years than Trumans. The familiar names appear as part of the younger Samuel Whitbread’s general recourse for liquid funds to relatives, friends and merchants, and as such his policy for survival in years of crisis is dis¬ cussed in its appropriate place.2 Here only the extent of his commitment to hop-suppliers is in debate. Bolland and Prestwidge lent £4000 for two months in April 1797, £3500 for a further two months in July and £4000 again in July 1798.3 Yeates and Brown lent £5000 for a similar term for June 1797 (taking on where Bolland intermitted) and £2000 in September. In 1798, they lent a further £11,000 and kept up such a flow of credit until it slackened off through 1800-1 to cease in 1802-3 and revive on a smaller scale (with a note for £2500) in 1804. Such lending on note was involved with discounting (presumably of real bills rather than accommodation bills), also being done through Yeates and Brown, who accepted a total of £33,000 between January and August 1799 and £4000 in 1800 and 1801. More discount facilities were being provided by Prestwidge and Wilson between 1799-1801 and in 1803; and by Joseph Wilson in 1806-7. The timing for these facilities is common to the others from corn-factors and tradesmen in commercial relation with the brewery. In the emergencies of bad seasons, the brewer still had to keep up his rate of purchasing, so what more natural than to borrow from those whose returns were all the greater 1 Whitbread Records (Brewery): Rest Books 1799-1830. 2 See above, p. 283. 3 Ibid. Private Ledgers 1770-1818.

528

The Brewer and the Hop-Market in just those seasons which were the brewer’s misfortune—his raw material suppliers. He was offsetting in part the effects of the bad harvest at 5 per cent, and in the long run it was the secondary ‘income effects’ of the same misfortune upon his customers in the public houses which proved the more intractable problem. The loan position of Whitbreads after 1800 is far from clear, but with the strong banking representation amongst his partners it seems unlikely that there was much ‘financial servicing’ being supplied by hop-factors in normal years, a position mirrored in Barclays, but not quite to the same degree in Trumans. The comparison even before this time is not quite exact because the period after 1796 with Whitbreads is in part particular to that brewery, which was suffering from a serious decline in the efficiency of its managers following the death of the elder Samuel Whitbread. This, as much as the bad times, reversed their credit position. Whereas the old man had got his business into a strong creditor position over discounts and loans, making a steady income from them to supplement his brewing profits, under his successors the gains from trade had to support a more chronic burden of servicing credit than did his rivals. With the custom of long credit for hop purchases, and the ease with which such credit might be extended at interest, there must have been a great temptation for brewers everywhere to overcommit themselves in the raw material markets in the urge to expand production, or to slip rapidly into debt with poor buying or inefficient production. The sanguine policy of Henry Thrale (which led him on more than one occasion to the brink of disaster) expressed itself most nakedly in the rise in his arrears of payment to malt- and hop-factors—a debt which prevented the brewhouse from getting such advantageous terms from them as rivals, through the definite commitment of their custom which such long credit entailed.1 Even brewers were not loth to take what advantages they could of the price fluctuations. In 1805, for example, Benjamin Wilson bought wheat for a rise in London, leaving it at the warehouse of his malt and barley factor. The quantity was evidently large as he sent a remittance of £1000 in part payment.2 This deal remained fully in character with his other mercantile operations, which ranged from pure speculation to simple 1 See above, p. 267. 2 Allsopp Records: B. Wilson to Brocksop and Newman, 23 May 1805. 34

529

M B E

The Hop-Markets purchasing for use.1 He was doing exactly the same thing with hops more regularly, but here his dealings through the London factors, from whom he bought for his needs as a brewer, seem designed mainly to offset these greater raw material costs for use. Sir James Sanderson and Co. and Sir William Stephenson and Co. were the two houses with whom Wilson was in most intimate contact. He dealt for his hops mainly through Southwark rather than Worcester merchants when he went beyond Gainsborough and Newark in his purchasing and was connected with several others in the Borough. With these two houses, however, he was remitting bills on London quite apart from those in payment for hops bought, and through them also he speculated. ‘ I shall thank you for advice how far my Lots of bags may be benefited by the alteration [i.e. in price] and on any change of consequence’, he wrote to Sanderson on 19 May 1791, but refused to sell on their advice in June, thinking that prices would rise yet further.2 He then had two lots with Stephenson and at least thirty-five bags with Sanderson (which realised £519 in July).3 In 1804, there were even greater hopes in store, when he was preparing to sell through Prince, Son and Johnson to the Commissioners of Victualling: ‘it would handsomely diminish my great stock and enable me more boldly to meet the new Crop ’. If this speculation should prove unsuccessful, Wilson trusted that ‘the next will make amends for all’. When London brewers had accumulated stocks, it was not uncommon for them to sell off through merchants,4 or to oblige other brewers who were taken a little short—as they did regularly with beer stocks. There do not appear to have been many large-scale transactions in raw materials in any London accounts which would suggest that merchanting was not important for their fortunes in the sense that it was for the Burton firm. Sampson Hanbury once remarked specifically that he did not like to be concerned in any speculation in hops, as all such purchasing was on the joint account of the brewery.5 He was a member of a Quaker partnership. There was no parallel movement by brewers moving backwards to establish direct control over their supplies of hops (as many London brewers were doing with malt) in an attempt to insure themselves against hardening prices.

Always, it appears, the markets were too risky to

justify such a venture and few brewers have developed any significant 1 Allsopp Records: Wilson to F. Kabuun, 5 September 1805, and to J. Laber (Danzig), 12 November 1803. 2 Ibid. 11 June 1791. 3 Ibid. Wilson to Sanderson, 19 May and 2 July 1791. 4 As in 1764 (B.M. Add. MS. 38,339, f. 12). 6 Truman Records: Letter Books, S. Hanbury to John Kemp, 20 May 1802. 530

The Brewer and the Hop-Market stake in hop-growing even now, most preferring to take advantage of market prices, even when supported by a marketing board.1 In the tactical commercial situation of the eighteenth century, there were further argu¬ ments against expending capital on so specialised and uncertain an under¬ taking. First, there was no price-gap to take advantage of between two stages in marketing this raw material as there was between the prices of barley and malt: all the processing of hops had to take place at the harvest¬ ing. When malt prices were going up, the brewers could set off some of the increase by moving back a single stage in purchasing to a scale which did not shift so markedly (as it paid them to do on a rising market but not, of course, on a falling one).2 In hops, the decision had to be either growing one’s own—or entering the Southwark market. It must be remembered, too, that there was a very early consolidation of an efficient market in the Borough, in which powerful merchant houses able to encourage custom with the extension of credit were flourishing before the porter brewers emerged as a powerful manufacturers’ interest.

Further, their moves

back into malting in the later decades of the century coincided with a re¬ deployment of the sources of supply towards areas without so consolidated a merchanting organisation as that of the Hertfordshire malt-factors. There was no such reorientation of the hop-markets and no such ‘boom’ in an underdeveloped region in hop-growing at a time when the brewers might wish to by-pass traditional marketing channels. Where they received from their customary channels not only hops but loans, discounts, and extended credit, the extra working capital (or at least the trouble of making other arrangements) to replace these convenient financial services were a continuing deterrent to change, quite apart from the extra fixed capital needed in developing the new risky trade—capital they might better employ in brewing more beer or ensuring sales more effectively. At the heart of the question, however, lay the simple truths that the bad years when it might pay them to grow their own hops were more than balanced by the years of glut when it would not, and that the percentage of their total costs taken by hops were not high enough to make them as anxious about hop buying as malt buying. This being the case, it is not surprising that evidence for brewers with hop-gardens is mainly confined to instances in the specialised case of breweries being located in suitable hop country, when a garden might 1 Truman, Hanbury and Buxton, Guinness, Courage and Barclays, Whitbread, however, do have hop-gardens at the present time. 2 See above, pp. 469-70.

531

34-2

The Hop-Markets find itself a natural part of the brewery estate. Only then, as with the Odiham Brewery in Hampshire, at the Swan brewery, Fulham, in 1740, at Wateringbury and Ashford in Kent, does the alliance of function occur,1 and even here, when the scale of production in such a brewery rose above a fairly modest level its owners did not similarly expand their investment in growing hops to cope with the increment. Before 1830, there seems to be no instance of a major brewer, brewing away from hop country, deliberately moving into the control of hop-gardens in a different locality. Whitbread went as far as any London brewer when he established connexions with a hop-merchant in Canterbury.2 Benjamin Wilson at Burton, however, did rent and eventually buy a small hop-garden from his brother (previously his partner) in 1796.3 Antithetically, there are but few recorded instances of growers moving forward to absorb merchanting functions themselves, which one might think would have been a more trodden path. Phillips and Yarranton of Worcester, as we have seen,4 spanned the whole spectrum from planting to merchanting; but they appear to have moved back from the market to the hop-yard, possibly through a defaulting planter. A witness to a parlia¬ mentary committee in 1793, H. Dyson of Sundridge, Kent, had evidently developed as a trader from being a planter,5 but, in general, the movement represented the influence of London stretching out into the growing areas much more than the planters’ usurpation of any of the commercial functions of the metropolis.

Doubtless the cause is common to both

themes: the extending power of experience, capital and credit. Even the ambitious Hop Exchange scheme in i860, after the end of this period, which had been designed specifically to bring planters and brewers into more direct commercial association, failed.6 It is probable, although unproven, that the failure of this scheme re¬ flected in part the development in the commercial structure of the hopmarket mentioned above which had been existing since 1800, if not before. Considering the complete change in the structure of the London brewing industry (by far the most important single source of demand for South1 W. P. Serocold, The Story ofWatneys (1949), p. 31; Pari. Papers, 1857, he. cit. Q. 5422. The Odiham brewery could supply itself with 100 pockets in average. Wateringbury may have been more of a hop-garden than a brewery, having 130 acres planted; Feret, Fulham Old and New (1900), vol. 11, pp. 217-20; V.C.H. Herts.-, pp. 168 etseq. Barnard, op. cit. iv, pp. 197-211. See above, p. 510. 3 Allsopp Records: Ledger of J. W. Wilson. 4 Above, pp. 501-2. 6 jf-H.C. xlviii (1793), 381-2. In certain known cases hop-growers set up as brewers, for example R. and J. Barrett (1839) and G. Trimmer (1856) at Farnham, Surrey (G. N. Hardinge, op. cit. pp. 40-1). 3 H. H. Parker, op. cit. 532

The Brewer and the Hop-Market wark) during the previous century, it would be surprising if consequential change had not been induced in the structure of trading hops, at least to a limited extent. As we have seen, there could be little temptation for the brewers to take action bold enough to short-circuit the established market entirely, while there were influences enough emanating from the problems of planting which would have helped to induce the dominance of powerful merchants and factors having great influence over the planters. To these influences was added the effect of a concentration of demand in London into fewer and fewer hands, which itself became first a strong supple¬ mentary interest encouraging large-scale dealing by individuals, and then moulded a change in the function of the largest dealers.

533

STATISTICAL APPENDIX

This Appendix has been drawn up to illustrate statistically the main themes discussed in the text and to give the quantitative outline of de¬ velopments more systematically than could be done in words. The two maps are designed to show the dominance of London and the home counties as a centre for the production of beer brewed for sale and the dominance of the eastern side of the country, particularly East Anglia and Bedfordshire, in the distribution of the malting industry. The graph (Table 36) gives the statistical pattern of national changes affecting the brewing industry. Discounting the problem of frauds, the excise figures show the degree to which brewing for sale advanced on home brewing and the degree to which Common Brewers ousted Brewing Victuallers. Tables 37 and 38 elaborate this picture giving the changing numbers of each kind of brewer and the amounts of both strong and small beer that each brewed for sale. Price changes, linked so often in London to changes in the rates of duty, are summarised in Table 39 and the annual changes in malt and hop prices (plus hop yields), the other major factors in brewers’ costs, are given in Tables 40, 41 and 42. The other Tables are planned to show developments in certain in¬ dividual breweries in London, whose records provided the main basis for the text. Production (43), profits (44), capital (45) and one complete set of balance sheets (46) have been selected from a wide choice of data. Because many of the eighteenth-century account books in each brewery have disappeared, these series have had to be taken from different firms. The labour of preparing such statistics and the amount of space required to print them prevented fuller coverage.

537

/

Map i. Distribution of malt production paying duty (by excise collections) 1801-2.

1. 1801-2 was an abundant year, 19m. bushels only being excised in the previous year. This does not materially affect the distribution. 2. Excise collections broadly coincide with counties, plus additional town centres. There is some discrepancy however: Hertfordshire collection included much of Middlesex and parts of Essex; Cambridge collection included Huntingdonshire and a small part of Suffolk, Bedford collection included land in four other counties, etc. In addition much of Surrey collection would have been in the neighbourhood of London. For this reason the excise boundaries must be treated with the same circumspection which should apply in the county figures for population returns. Boundary lines shown here are county boundaries. 3. For discussion of fraud in malting and excise statistics see above, pp. 340-50, 369-83.

539

1- 1755 was an average year for the period. 2- Figures give only excised production at the point of production, taking no account of home brewing, fraud, distribution to non-local markets. 3. For comment on the excise collection boundaries see note to map on p. 539. Boundary lines shown here are county boundaries.

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7th Report of Commissioners of Excise Enquiry [on British Spirits, Part II].

1834, xxv, 10th Report of Commissioners of Excise Enquiry [on Malt Duty in Ireland].

1:835, 1835, 1857, 1899,

xxxi, iyth Report of Commissioners of Excise Enquiry [on Malt], xxxi, 16th Report of Commissioners of Excise Enquiry [on Hops]. xiv, Report of Select Committee on Hop Duties. xxx, Report from Select Committee.. .[on] Beer Materials. D.

PUBLISHED WORKS, BEFORE 1850

This list includes diaries, letters, travels, etc., written before 1850 but published subsequently. It does not include articles in newspapers, Annual Register, Dictionary of National Biography, Edinburgh Review, Gentleman's Magazine, House of Commons Journals, London Gazette, Monthly Magazine, Monthly Review, or Directories, references to which will be found in footnotes to the text. Articles are distinguished by an asterisk

Accum, F. A. Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisoning (1820). Accum, F. A. Treatise on the Art of Brewing (1820, 2nd ed. 1821). Aldous, H. G. The Beer Duty (privately printed) from Journal of the Institute of Brewing, 1901. Allport, D. Camberwell and Neighbourhood (1841). 562

Bibliography Amsinck, G. S. A Retrospective View of the Quantity of Strong Beer Brewed by

the First Ten Houses from 1800 to 1830 (1837). Analysis of the British House of Commons (1823). Assembled Commons, The (1836). Aubrey, J. Natural History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey, 1673 (1718-19). de Baert, A. B. F. de P. Tableau de la Grande Bretagne (Paris, year vm). Bannister, J. Synopsis of Husbandry (1799). Barclay, J. Art of Brewing and Distillation (1820). Barclay Perkins’ Brewery’, Penny Magazine, x (1841). Barham, J. F. Considerations on the... Prohibition of Corn in the Distillery (1810). Baverstock, J. H. Practical Observations on the Prejudices against the Brewery (1811). Baverstock, J. H.

State of the Brewery (1813).

Baverstock, J. H. Treatises on Brewing by the late James Baverstock

(1824).

Baverstock, James (Sr). Hydrostatical Observations and Experiments in the

Brewery (1785). Beale, J. Treatise of Cyder and Perry (1665-7). Beckmann, J. History of Inventions (English ed. 1846).

Use of Grain in Distilleries (1808). Biographical Index to the present House of Commons (1808). Black, W. Practical Treatise in Brewing (1849). Blake, G. Strictures on a New Mode of Brewing.. .(1793). Blith, W. English Improver Improved (1652). Boerhaave, H. New Method of Chemistry (English ed. 1727). Boswell, J. Life of Johnson (1791; Oxford, 1946 ed.). Boyle, P. Publican's Daily Companion (1795). Boyle, R. Some Considerations of Experimental Naturall Philosophy (1663).

Bell, A.

Bradley, R. A Complete Body of Husbandry (1727). Bradley, R. Riches of a Hop Garden Explained (1729). Brande, W. Town and Country Brewery Book (1829). Brasbridge, J. Fruits of Experience (1824). Brereton, W. Travels, 1634-5 (1844).

Brewers’ Monopoly: an Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Advance of Porter (1818). British Encyclopaedia (1809). Brown, W. H. R. Golden Lane Brewery (1808). Burnaby, A. Essay upon the Excising of Malt (1696). Burnaby, A. Proposals for Laying a Duty on Malt instead of Beer (1696). Burney, F. Diary of Fanny Burney (1742-6, 1904).

R. London Tradesman (1747). Case for the Capital Corn Distillers of Scotland (1787). Case of the Brewers in Relation to a Bill.. .(1696). Case of the Distillers of Corn in Northern England (1787). Case of the Farmers and Maltsters.. .[on] Payment of the Duty on Malt (1720). Case of the Greater Number of Victuallers of London and Westminster (n.d.).

Campbell,

563

36-2

Bibliography Case of the Victuallers in Relation to a Bill.. .(c. 1700). S. Every Man his own Brewer (1790, 6th ed. enlarged 1798). Cholmondeley, R. H. (ed.). The Heber Letters, 1783-1832 (1950). Clarke, G. R. History of Ipswich.. .(1830). Clarke, S. The British Gauger. Clarkson, T. Portraiture of Quakerism (1807). Cobbett, W. American Register (1816). Cobbett, W. Cottage Economy (1823; with a preface by G. K. Chesterton, Child,

1926). W. Rural Rides (1821, Everyman ed. 1948). Colquhoun, P. Observations and Facts relative to Public Houses in the City of London.. .[by a J.P.] (1794). Colquhoun, P. Treatise on the Wealth.. .of the British Empire (1815). Comber, T. Real Improvement in Agriculture.. .(1772). Comber, W. T. State of National Subsistence (1808). Cobbett,

Combrune, M. An Enquiry into the Prices of Wheat, Malt, etc... .(1768). Combrune, M. Essay on Brewing (1758).

M. Theory and Practice of Brewing (1762). Comparative View of the External Commerce of Bengal (Calcutta, 1833). Considerations of the Landed Interest [on the] Corn Distillery (1783). Considerations on the Effect of Bounties on Exported Corn, Malt and Flour...

Combrune,

(1768).

J. ‘ The Method taken for Preserving the Health of the Crew of... the Resolution’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, lxvi, xxii (1776).

*Cook,

Cook, J. Voyages Towards the South Pole (1777).

G. A. Souvenirs de Londres (Paris, 1817). T. H. Dictionary of Arts and Sciences [Plates] (1764-6).

Crapelet, Croker,

Cunningham, J. Address.. .relative to the Scotch Brewery (1781). Cunningham, T. History of Customs and Taxes (3rd ed. 1778). D’Anvers,

C. Argument against Excises F.

(1733).

D’Arblay, see Burney,

Davis, T. General View of the Agriculture of the County of Wiltshire (1794).

M. Serious Considerations on the Several High Duties which the Nation.. .Labours under.. .(3rd ed. 1744). Defoe, D. Tour of the Whole Island (1724-7, Everyman ed. 1948). Decker, Sir

E. Scheme for Advancing.. .the Excise upon Beer, Ale .and other Branches (1713).

Denniston,

*Desaguliers,

J. T.

‘A New Kind of Hydrometer made by Mr Clarke’,

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, xxxvi (1729-30). Discourse on the Preparation, Preservation and Restoration of Malt Liquors [by C-(P)] (1733)Disney, J. Thoughts on the Great Circumspection Necessary in Licensing Public

Ale-houses (1776).

J. View of Ancient Laws against Immorality and Profaneness (Cambridge, 1729).

Disney,

564

Bibliography Distilleries.. .in their Connection with the Agriculture, Commerce and Revenue of Great Britain (Edinburgh, 1797). Dixon, W. Impolicy of the Continuation of Prohibition of Distillation from Grain

(Liverpool, 1810). Eboranos (Robe, T.). Reasons for Promoting the British Distillery (1735). Ellis, J. Instructions for Collectors of Excise (1716). Ellis, W. The Modern Husbandman (1750).

Enquiry.. .[for] Reducing the Duties on Malt and Beer (1830). Enquiry into the Principles of Taxation.. .of Articles of Consumption (1790).

J. F. ‘Extract from a Letter to Sir John Sinclair, Bt., M.P., on the Prices of Corn’, Annals of Agriculture, XL (1803), 450-63. Every Man his own Brewer (1768). *Erskine,

Excise anatomized (1733). Fardell, H. Brief Letter on.. .the Malt Duty (Cambridge, 1830). Farey, J. General View of the Agriculture of Derbyshire (1815). Farington, J. Diary (ed. J. Greig, 1922-8). Farthing, J. Excise Rectified (1695). Feltham, J. Picture of London (eds. 1805-18). Fielding, H. Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers (1751). Fiennes, C. Journeys (ed. C. Morris, 1947). Fitzherbert, Boke of Husbandrye (1523). Flower,

R. Observations on Beer and the Breweries

(Cambridge, 1802).

Ford, W. An Historical Account of the Malt Trade and Laws (1849).

Freeholder, A British. True State of the British Malt Distillery (1760). Fuller, T. The History of the Worthies of England (1662). General Description of All Trades (1747). Green, R. Porter Brewery Detected.. .(1764). Gregory, O. Treatise on Mechanics (1806). Guide for the Brewing of the Finest Malt Liquors (1724). Gunning, H. Reminiscences of the University, Town and County of Cambridge, from the Year 1780 (1854). T. Complete Body of Husbandry (2nd ed. 1758). Hale, T. Treatise of Vegetable Statics (1725). Hanway, J. Journal of Eight Days' Tour (1756). Harris, W. The Brewer, Victualler and Gauger's Assistant (1793). Henderson, R. Inquiry into Laws on Retail Sale of Ale and Spirits (1817). Hale,

Holt, J.

General View of the Agriculture of Lancaster (1794). J. A Collection of Letters for the Improvement of Husbandry and

Houghton,

Trade (1681-1702). Howard, Howard,

E. (Compiler). The Eliot Papers (Gloucester, 1893-4). R. A Few Words on Corn and the Quakers (1807).

Hue and Cry after them Brewers that Raise their Rates on Drink (Dublin, 1725). Hughes, E. Treatise on Brewing (1796, 4th ed. 1798). Hughson,

D. A History and Description of London, Westminster and Southwark

(n.d.). 565

Bibliography D. History of England (1778, 1820). Hutcheson, R. K. Treatise on Excise.. .(Bristol, 1797). Hyde, W. Letter to Sir J. Danvers on Licensing.. .(1791). Hume,

Impartial Enquiry into the Present State of the British Distillery (2nd ed. 1736). Importance of the Brewery Stated.. .(Edinburgh, 1797). Instructions for Collectors of Excise (1781). Instructions for Gaugers of Excise in the Country (1775). Instructions for [Excise] Officers in the Country (1778). Instructions for Officers in the London Brewery (1724). Instructions for Supervisors of the London Distillery (1727). Instructions for Planting. . .Hops (Dublin, 1733). Jackson, Henry. Essay on British Isinglass (1765). *Jackson, H. ‘British Isinglass’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, xm (1773).

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WORKS PUBLISHED AFTER

(1794).

1850

This list does not include general text-books of economic history quoted in footnotes or tech¬ nical works on brewing and malting. Articles are distinguished by an asterisk.

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569

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57°

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Beer Has a History (1947). King, F. A. The Story of the Cannon Brewery, iyyi-igyi (1951). King, W. T. C. Rise of the London Discount Market (1936). *Knox, D. M. ‘The Development of the Tied-House System in London’, Oxford Economic Papers, x (1958). Larwood, J. and Hotten, J. C. History of Signboards (1866, 1898). Leader, R. E. Sheffield Old and New (1901). Lloyd, C. The Nation and the Navy (1954). Locke, A. A. The Hanbury Family (1916). Lord, J. Capital and Steam Power (1923). Marchant, W. T. In Praise of Ale (1888). *Mathias, P. ‘The Brewing Industry, Temperance and Politics’, The Historical Journal, 1, no. 2 (1958), 97-113. *Mathias, P. ‘A Connection between the Brewing and Distilling Industries and Agriculture...’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, v (1952), 249. #Mathias, P. ‘The Entrepreneur in Brewing’, The Entrepreneur (Conference Papers of the Economic History Society, 1957). *Mathias, P. ‘Industrial Revolution in Brewing’, Explorations in Entre¬ preneurial History (Cambridge, Mass.) v (1953), 217. Matthews, P. W. and Tuke, A. W. A History of Barclays Bank (1928). Maud, F. H. The Hockerill Highway (Colchester, 1957). Maurizio, A. Geschichte der Gegorenen Getrdnke (Berlin, 1933). Meacham, C. S., see Briant, L. and Meacham, C. S. Merson, A. L. (ed.). 3rd Book of Remembrance of Southampton, vol. 11 (1955). Michel, C. Geschichte des Bieres (1901). *Miller, W. F. ‘Thomas Areskine of Edinburgh’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, v (1908), 32-3. Molyneux, W. Burton-on-Trent (1868). Mossel, D. A. A., see Ingram, M. Muirhead, J. P. Origin and Progress of the Mechanical Inventions of J Watt (i854)*Munroe, J. H. M. and Beaven, E. S. ‘Various Conditions Alfecting the Malt¬ ing Quality of Barley \ Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, 3rd series, xi (1900), 185. Namier, L. B. Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929). Nef, J. U. Rise of the British Coal Industry (1932). One Hundred and Fifty Years of Brewing [Georges of Bristol] (privately printed, 1938). Owen, J. B. Rise of the Pelhams (1957). Parker, H. H. The Hop Industry (1934). Parkinson, C. N. Trade in the Eastern Seas (1937). Patents, see Abridgment of Specifications. Phillips, M. A History of Banks (1894). King, F. A.

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W. P. (ed.) The Story ofWatneys (1949). * Shannon, H. A. ‘Bricks—a Trade Index’, Economica, New Series, 1 (1934). Smiles, S. Boulton and Watt (1865). Smiles, S. Industrial Biography (1863). Southill, a Regency House (1951). *Spiller, B. ‘The Georgian Brewery’, Architectural Review, cxxn (1957). *Steiger, A. ‘Vom Hopfen’, Essays presented to R. Tschudi, Westostliche Abhandlungen, ed. F. Meier (1954). *Stopes, H. ‘Brewery Companies’, The Statist (1894). Stopes, H. Malt and Malting (1885). Stow, J. Survey of London (Oxford, 1908 ed.). Strong, S. Romance of Brewing [Plates] (privately printed, 1951). Summerson, J. Georgian London (1951). Survey of London [London County Council Publications] (1908- ). Taylor, H. A. and D., see Two Hundred Years of Malting. *Thirsk, J. ‘Farming in Kesteven’, Lincolnshire Architectural and Archaeo¬ Serocold,

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Walcott, R.

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Whitbread's Brewery (1947, 1951). Wilbraham, A., see Drummond, J. C. Wilson, Charles, History of Unilever (1954). *Wilson, D. C. and Brown, H. D. Food Technology, vn (1953), 250. Wilson, G. B. Alcohol and the Nation (1940). *Wood, A. C. ‘History of Trade and Transport on the River Trent’, Trans¬ actions of the Thoroton Society, liv (1950), 19. *Wood, O. ‘A Cumberland Colliery during the Napoleonic Wars’, Economic a, New Series, xxi (1954), 54-63. Yamey, B. Resale Price Maintenance (1954). Yeats, J. Technical History of Commerce (1871).

574

INDEX Present-day authors’ names appearing in the text are not cited in the index

Abbott and Treffry (merchants, Plymouth), 148 Aberdeen, 151, 392 Abington, John (partner in Calvert’s Hour Glass Brewhouse), 313 Accum, F. A. (writer on brewing), 415 Adam, Skinner and Co. (merchants, Bom¬ bay), 191 Adams, Daniel (malt-merchant), 443 Adams family (malt-merchants), 444, 459 Adams, John (malt-factor), 457 Adams, Thomas (Trustee of Lea Naviga¬ tion), 444 Adams, William (malt-factor), 417 Adnams and Co. (brewers, Southwold), 46,448 Adulteration, 50, 77, 112-14, 161, 230, 249, 347, 352, 419-23 Advertising, 136-8 Africa, 172, 193 Agriculture, see Barley, Hops, Malt Aitken (instrument-maker), 69 Albion Mills, 86 Aldeburgh (Suffolk), 434 Aldenham (Herts.), 438 Aldersgate (London), 505 Aldershot (Hants.), 200 Ale, see Beer Aliens (brewers), 3-5 Allen (brewer, Ratcliffe), 299 Allen (brewer, Wapping), 299 Allen, Alexander (instrument-maker), 69 Allen, Thomas (cooper, London), 224 Allen, William (of Alnwick, Northumber¬ land), 148 Allfrey, E. (partner, Griffin Brewery), 249 n. Alloa, 434 Allsopp, James (of Derby), 181 Allsopp, Samuel (brewer, Burton-on-Trent), 526; barley buying, 449, 466; exports, 182, 189-92; home market, 185; London trade, 183- 4; m. niece of B. Wilson, Sr, 81; price policy, 227,380. See also Allsopp’s Brewery Allsopp, Thomas (brewer, Burton-on-Trent), 181 Allsopp’s Brewery, Baltic produce imported, 178-9; barley-buying, 449"52, 466-7; brewing season, 186-8; change product, 184- 6, 192; English market developed, 182-6; exporting arrangements, 176-8;

family enterprise, 180-1; hop-buying, 498, 526, 529-30, 532; malt-buying, 400; mak¬ ings, 407, 467; price policy, 380; shipping interests, 179-80, 188; trade, 176-93. See also Allsopp, Samuel; Wilson, Benjamin Althorp, Viscount, 243 Alveley (Shropshire), 395 Ambler, Downs and Chappell (hop-mer¬ chants), 508 America, 172, 207 Amsterdam, 177-8, 182 Anchor Brewery (Southwark, London; Barc¬ lay Perkins), 26, 199, 223, 348, 433; attacked in Gordon Riots, 270-1; attemperator rejected, 75; Barclay (Charles) and publicans, 115; beer stocks, 14, 21, 77-8; casks, 54-7; cellars rented, 58; clubs attached, 277; country trade, 129, 142, 144-6; early owners, 258-9; exports, 8, 141; financial problems, 265-9; hop¬ buying, 510-11,524-6,529,53m; hop-rate, 17; horses, 79-80; hydrometer, 70; Indian Ale, 15, 190; investments, 282; Irish trade, 155-6; King’s Bench prison tap served, 331, 337; malt (black), 423, (Norfolk), 416-18, 420; malt-buying, 456; malt prices, 396; makings owned, 468; mashing machines and elevators, 95; noble visitors, 137; ownership crisis, 271-4; partners and capital, 285, 287-8, 301-2, 304, 314-15; price leadership, 231-2; production, 25-6, 228, 246, 266, 268-70, 55 ; profit-sharing with clerks, 275-6; public houses con¬ trolled, 119, 131-5; Quaker investments in, 283, 287-96, 301, 304-5; Quakers buy brewery, 273; raw material stocks, 460-1, 470, 474, 480; refrigerator, 75; size (1692-1700), 7-9, 11; staff and wages, 35-6; steam-engine, 83, 85, 87, 90-2, 97; Thrale (Henry), 260, 265-74; Thrale (Ralph), 259-60; vats, 61-2; yeast sales,

49-5°, 236 Anderson, J. and W. (timber merchants),

I77~8

Andrews, Benjamin (contract brewer), 198 Andrews, Joseph, 32 Angove (brewer and banker, Falmouth), 329 Apprenticeship, 23-4, 219, 258 Areskine, T. (brewer, Edinburgh), 299

575

Index Armstrong and Co. (Liverpool), 148 Arthington (brewer, Leeds), 299 Ashbourne (Derbyshire), 299, 450 Ashby (brewer and banker, Staines), 329 Ashwell (Herts.), 438 Astell, William (Muscovy and Baltic mer¬ chant), 206 Atkinson, Christopher [later Saville, Chris¬ topher] (malt-merchant, London), 285, 334 Atlee, J. F. (distiller), 75 Attemperators, 73-4 Aubery and Co. (merchants), 177 Aubrey, John, 484 Aveling, T. Butts (clerk, partner, Truman’s brewery), 132, 275, 276, 298 Backhouse, James (Quaker), 299 Backhouse and Hartley (brewers, Tadcaster), Bacon’s Bank (Ipswich), 323 Bagehot, Walter, 321 Bain, Mary, 279 Baker, John (partner, Trumans), 264-5 Bakers, purchase of yeast from brewers, 49-51 Baldock (Herts.), 438, 463 Baldock and Rigden (brewers and bankers, Canterbury), 329 Baltic Sea, 173-84, 205-6 Bamford, Samuel, 46, 239 Bangham, see Oakes and Bangham Bank of England, 234 Banks, loans to brewers, 281-4, 287-8, 294-6, 302-6, 363 Banks, Sir Joseph, 69 Barbados, 141 Barber, Joseph (barley-merchant, Worcester), 451 Barber, Joseph and Stephen (hop-merchants, Walsall), 500 Barclay family, 286, 299, 306, 318, 326, 328-9, 336, 451 Barclay, Agatha, 288 Barclay, Alexander (of Philadelphia), 288 n., 292 n. Barclay, Arthur Kett (banker), 295 n. Barclay, Bevan, Barclay and Benning (ban¬ kers, London), 293-4 Barclay, Charles (partner, Anchor Brewery), 129, 236, 242, 245 n., 295 n., 463; on adulteration, 114-15; defends great brew¬ ers, 135; Master of Brewers’ Company, 221; on monopoly in brewing, 230-2, 240, 362; M.P., 333-5. v Barclay, David Jr (s. of Robert Barclay), 333—4^ Barclay, David Sr (partner. Anchor Brewery), 287-8, 292, 444 Barclay, John (banker), 287, 288, 294

Barclay, Richenda, 287 n., 292 Barclay, Robert (partner, Barclay Perkins’ brewery), 222, 326, 331; American birth, 288, 292; barley-buying Committee, 233; Committee of Trade questioning, 146, 154; fined for coopering, 224; house-building allowance, 315; loans from relatives, 296; Master of Brewers’ Company, 221; part¬ ner, 273, 275, 287; Regent’s Park Canal shares, 447; steam-engine enquiries, 83; withdrawals from profits limited, 314. See also Anchor Brewery Barclay, Robert Jr (s. of Charles Barclay), 295 n. Barclay, Susannah Willett (Hanbury), 294 Barkway (Essex), 463 Barley, cultivation, xxi, 152, 155, 158, 165, 233-5, 387-408; coasting trade, 433-7; for distillers, 374, 405, 4^0-2; exports and im¬ ports, 425-7; joint purchase by brewers, 233-4; in Lincolnshire, 174, 395, 449; marketing areas, 434-7; in Norfolk and East Anglia, 392-8, 402-3, 405, 428-37, 439; prices, see Malt; quality, 373, 401-5, 448-50; in Scotland, 398-401; in Shrop¬ shire, 395; trade in, 181, 234, 425-9, 436, 502; trade with Ireland, 168-70, 425-6, 428, 435; trade to London, 437-47; trade with Scotland, 400-1, 434-5; varieties, 401-4. See also Malt Barnard, A. (writer on brewing), 138, 179 Barnard, Joseph (banker, Bedford), 286 n. Barstow and Elliott (merchants, Danzig), 179 Basingstoke (Hants.), 343 Bass, William [and Co.] (brewers, Burtonon-Trent), 176, 186, 192, 227, 256, 380, 453, 52i Batavia, 191 Bath, 302, 306, 436 Baverstock, James Jr (brewer, Alton, Hants.), 66, 67 n., 70-1, 150, 328, 418, 448 Baverstock, James Sr (brewer, Alton, Hants.), 66-7 Beamish and Crawford (brewers, Cork), 45, 162, 167 Beauclerk (investor, Whitbreads), 285 Beaumont, John T. B., 238-40, 456 Bedfordshire, 279, 287, 428, 436 Bedwell Park (Herts.), 277, 278, 321 Beer, bottled, 142, 145, 151, 171, 189, 193 n., 194 Beer, distant trade (see also Exports), 46, 141-51, 182-6; difficulties of, 146-8; trade with Ireland, 141, 151-8; trade with Scot¬ land, 151, 400-1; strength needed for dis¬ tant markets, 139-40, 204-5

576

Index eer duties, 356-61, 369. See also Excise eer exports, 139-41, 171-95; Baltic market, 173-82, 185; involving barter, 178-80; from Bristol, 194; conditions size of breweries, 140, 173-5; Hodgson and India, 190; Indian market, 189-93; other foreign markets, 193-5; quantities, 172, 176, 189, 194; shipping capacity for, 172. For exports of malt see Malt; for exports of hops see Hops; for exports of barley see Barley Beer, innovation of beer-brewing, 3; mar¬ keting areas, xxii-xxiii, xxvii, xxviii, 139-42, 173-6 Beer, measures, xvii, 78, 188 n., 363 Beer, preventive for scurvy, 200, 206-9 Beer, prices in London, 13, 109-16, 162, 225, 234, 244,251, 381-3,471, 546; in provinces, 171, 175, 182, 184, 191, 226-7, 379-8i, 473; public control of, no, 241-2, 360; under control of brewers, 109-11, 114-15, 225-6, 229-40; vary with quality, 226-8 Beer, production and consumption (see alsa individual breweries, Brewers, Burton-onTrent); in London, 6, 21-2, 25-6, 140-1, 214, 378, 544-5; national production for sale, xxii, 372-8, 389, 541-3 Beer, pump (in public houses), 106-9 Beer varieties. See also Porter brewing, xvii-xviii, xxv, 14-15, 139-4°, 15°, I84“5, 364-5, 454, 476; unhopped ale, 3-4; con¬ centrated, 204-9; India pale ale, 192; intermediate, 113 n., 241-2; naval, 196 Beer Street (W. Hogarth), xxv Belbroughton (Worcestershire), 500 Belfast, 182 Bell Brewhouse (Shoreditch), see Harwood, Ralph Bengal, 192 Benning, Ambrose (banker, London), 291 Bentley (Hants.), 483 Bentley family (brewers, Yorkshire), 257 Bentley, Timothy (of Huddersfield), 257 Berry, William (clerk of Golden Lane Brew¬ ery), 247 Berwick-on-Tweed, export of malt from, 431 Best, Thomas (brewer, Chatham), 85, 198-9 Bevan family (bankers and brewers), 326, 329 Bevan, Amelia (Perkins), 273, 287, 288, 291 Bevan, Priscilla, 291 Bevan, Sylvanus (banker, partner, Anchor Brewery, 287, 288, 444 Bevan, Timothy Paul (druggist), 273, 287, 288, 318 Bewdley (Worcs.), 500, 503 Biley family, 348 37

Biley, Edward (brewer, London), 85, 94 Billingsly and Jillard (brewers and bankers, Oakhill, Somerset), 329 Birkbeck and Ball (iron-casters), 87 Bircham and Fox (brewers and bankers, Reepham, Norfolk), 329 Birlingham Hall (Derby), 181 Birmingham, 175, ^34, 290, 467 Bishop’s Stortford (Herts.), 437,444,457,470 Black Eagle Brewery (Spitalfields, London), see Truman’s Brewery Blackstone, W. (jurist), 351, 354 Blackwall (Essex), 438, 441 Blakeney (Norfolk), 429, 434 Bland, John (banker), 294 Bland, Michael (partner, Martineau and Whitbreads, London), 302 Bland, Thomas (banker, Norwich), 294 n. Blandy (brewer and banker, Reading), 329 Bliss, T. (brewer, Maidstone), 333 Blith, W. (writer on agriculture), 489-90 Blofield (Norfolk), 417 Blundell, John (barley-merchant, Lincoln),

451

Boerhaave, H. (chemist), 64 Boldero and Co. (bankers, London), 293 Bolland, John (hop-merchant) 511, 526, 528. See also Bolland and Prestwidge Bolland and Prestwidge (hop-merchants, Mark Lane, London), 283, 501, 508-10, 528 Bond, Phineas (Philadelphia), 292, 293 Boreham, Captain (brewer, Whitechapel, London), 256 Boswell, James, 260 Boulton, Matthew, 39, 60, 80. See also Boulton and Watt Boulton and Watt (Soho), 81-3, 86-98, 167 Bow Brewery, see Hodgson Bowles, Brown, Ogden, Cobb and Stokes (bankers, London), 283, 301 n. Bowles, Ogden and Co. (bankers, Salisbury), 307 Bowley (brewer, Cirencester), 299 Boyd, William (merchant, Cork), 157 Boyd, see Rothlander and Boyd Boyle, Robert (scientist), 67 Bradley, Richard (agricultural writer), 481, 482 n. Bradley, Richard (brewer, Bristol), 155 Braithwaite (engineer), 87 Bramah, Joseph (inventor, engineer), 53, 87, 95 n., 107-9 Brandon (Suffolk), 445 Brent (brewer, London), see Martineau’s Brewery

577

M B E

Index Brewers, as bankers, 325-30; buying policy for barley and malt, 443-74; buying policy for hops, 481, 502, 509-17, 520, 522-33; capital: loans to brewers (see also tender individual breweries), 252-3, 261, 264, 267-70, 273, 277-86, 291-7, 313, 441, 458-9> 510-13, 525-9, 53i; combination, see Combinations; control of distribution, 5, 104-6; control of retail prices (see also Combinations), 109-16; control of public houses, 8, 103, 118-38; entry into trade, 23-4, 253-65, 287-8; family continuity (see also under individual brewers), 312, 318-22; and bad harvest, 376-83; home brewers, see Home Brewing; intermediate brewers, 241-2; importance of merchanting skills, 460-2, 469-74, 523-5; non¬ business activities (see also under individual brewers), 330-8; politics, 115-16, 234-5, 240-3, 250, 308, 331-8, 359-61, 363, 410, 432; provincial (see under individual names and towns)-, publican brewers, see Brewing victuallers; other business interests, 56-8, 178-80, 322-5; retail brewers, 242; Scot¬ tish, 151, 257-8; social position of, 7, 1367, 259-60, 263, 265, 273, 277, 308-9, 320-2, 330-6; Trustees of Lea Navigation, 443-6; Trustees of Regent’s Park Canal, 446-7 Brewers’ Company, xxvi, 24, 116, 218-24, 228-30, 337; apprenticeship, 23-4, 219, 258; legal powers of, 219-20; limited in¬ fluence of, 220-2. Brewing Industry, accounting system, 28-30, 142-3, 146; accurate measurement in (see also Thermometer, Hydrometer), 63-4, 71-3; ale and porter brewery expansion, xxiii, 12, 20, 23, 25, 102-3, 190-1; attemperation, 74-5; brewing processes, xviii, t6-i8, 38-41, 63-4, 71-3; economies of scale, 38—43; empirical nature of skills, 65-6,81; and excise (see Excise); finance of, see Finance; mechanisation, 81-95; num¬ bers of breweries in England and Wales, 542-3; numbers of breweries in London, 6, 22, 544-5; partnership control (see also under individual brewers), 312-18; planning the brewery, 37-43; production (see Beer and under individual breweries)-, refrigera¬ tion, 75-6; brewing season, 19, 88, 186-7, J97> 502; waste products (see also Grains, Yeast), 18, 41-2, 49-51, 236. Brewing Victuallers, xxiii-xxiv, xxvii, 3-4, 6, 100, 102; controlled by malt-merchants, 466; becoming Common Brewers, 254-5; and excise system, 347, 351-2, 363-6, 368,

409; exports, 152; hop supplies, 511; num¬ bers, 343-4, 542-3; production, 376-7, 542-3. Briand, Rene (brewer, Hoddesdon), 28, 42, 255 Brickwood family (brewers), 319 Bridge, Thomas, 207 Bridgnorth (Shropshire), 500, 503, 506 Bridport (Dorset), 343 Briggins, Peter (hop-merchant, London), 450, 490 n., 503-6. Brighton, 267, 270 Bristol, 397, 426, 434, 436, 484, 523; exports from, 188,193-4; exports to Ireland (beer), t52, 155 (hops and malt), 169-70; porter brewing, 45-6, 155. Bristol Porter Brewery [George’s], 45,155,466 Broadley (hop-merchant, London), 509 Brogden, James (investor, Whitbread’s brew¬ ery), 285 Brogden, see Preschell and Brogden Brookes and Co. (brewers, Stratford, Essex), 1H, 367

Brookes, Rose and Bromfield (porter brewers, Liverpool), 45 Broseley (Shropshire), 492 Brougham, Lord, 243, 334, 362 Brown, Charles (maltster, Hitchin), 467 Brown, Crisp (maltster, Norwich), 338, 411, 416-18, 463 Brown, Timothy (brewer and banker. Whitbreads, London), 234, 301, 306, 307, 310, 315, 326, 329 Brown, W. H. R. (see also Golden Lane Brewery), 53, 244-9 Brown and Parry (brewers, London), see Golden Lane Brewery Browne, T. (barley-merchant, Lincoln) Broxbourne (Herts.), 443 Bruce, Allen and Co. (merchants, Calcutta), 191 Bullock (brewer, London), 115 Bundy, William (patentee of refrigerator), 75 Burdett, Sir Francis, 239 Burdon (brewer and banker, Newcastle), 329 Burn, John (merchant, Berwick-on-Tweed), 148 Burnaby, Anthony (writer on malt), 9, 38 Burridge, Robert (merchant, Lyme Regis), 171 n. Burton, William (Commissioner of Excise), 342 n., 360-1. Burton brewers (see also under individual brewers. Exports); agreement on prices, 226-7; exports, 140, 171, 173-93; first Common Brewers, 174-6; home market

578

Index Burton brewers (cont.) sales, 182-6; London sales, 150, 182-5; raw material needs, 449-54, 498, 526, 530; trading interests and barter, 56-8, 178-80, 322-3; use of hydrometer, 71; prices, 473 Burton-on-Trent, 167, 254, 319, 380, 441, 466; population, 176; size conditioned by breweries, xxvii, 192-3; special water, 16, 174, 192. See also Burton brewers, Ex¬ ports. Bury St Edmunds (Suffolk), 439, 462 Bush and Co. (distillers, London), 74 Bush (brewer, Croydon), 299 Bush, Wilson and Were (hop-merchants, London), 510 Bustard and Co. (merchants, London), 511 Butcher, James (yeast and isinglass dealer),

Street), 5, 15, 22-3, 25, 116, 221, 313, 333,

52-3 Butler, A. and T. (barley-merchant, Lynn), 45i Butler, William (brewer, Deptford), 224 Butts (see Casks), 78 Buxton family, 336, 462 Buxton, Sir Thomas Fowell (partner, Tru¬ man’s brewery), 230 n., 231, 297-8, 333 Buxton, Thomas Fowell, Sr. 297 Byde, Alderman (brewer, Mile End) Byles Brown and Co. (malt-merchants), 283 Byng, Admiral Sir George, 200 Byng, Hon. John, 45, 101 Cadwallader, Williamina (Philadelphia), 292 Caernarvon, 165 Calcutta, 190, 192 Calvert family (brewers, London), 286, 332-3, 443-4 Calvert, Charles (brewer, Calvert’s Hour Glass Brewhouse, Thames St), 52, 114, 221, 230-1, 234-5, 240, 243-4, 250, 333,

336,

417, 422, 468

Calvert (Felix) (brewer, Calvert’s Hour-Glass Brewhouse, Thames Street), 22-3, 25, 70, 75, 83, 85, 146, 199-200, 220-1, 226, 266, 313, 443-5Calvert, General Sir Harry, 200 Calvert, John Jr (M.P.), 333 Calvert, John Sr. (brewer, Calvert’s Peacock Brewhouse, White Cross Street, St Giles), 83, 85, 9L 3i3, 333, 443, 445 Calvert, Nicholson Sr. and Jr. (M.P.s), 333, 444 Calvert, Peter (partner, Calverts), 220, 221, 443, 445 n. Calvert, Robert (partner, Calverts), 221 Calvert, Sir William (Alderman) (brewer, Calvert’s Hour-Glass Brewhouse, Thames

443 Cam (River), 496-7 Cambridge, 308, 439 Cambridgeshire, 403, 428, 433, 436 Campbell, R. (writer), 23, 24, 99 Canada, 171 Canals: Paddington, 508; Regent’s Park, 446; Trent and Mersey, 175-6; others named, 180 n. See also Malting industry, Lea Navigation Canning, William (brewer, Westminster), 9 Canterbury, 3, 183, 483 Cape family (brewers, London), 348 Caravan, 78 Cardington (Beds.), 261, 263 Carhill and Co. (merchants, Hull), 181 Carlyle, Thomas, 33 Carron wharf (London), 258 Carruthers and Boyd (merchants, Cork), 156 Carruthers, Charles (merchant, Cork), 157 Casks, 22, 53-8; burden on capital, 55; in distant markets, 56, 146-7. (See also Staves, Coopers) Cast iron, 7, 412 Castell, John, 120 Castle and Ames (brewers, Bristol), 85 Caswall, Timothy (M.P., Hertford), 443 Cator (timber merchant, London), 271 Chad well, John (pump-maker, London), 109 Chambers (hop-merchant, Maidstone), 512 Champion, Peter (brewer, London), 24 Charrington’s Brewery, 12, 30, 85, 146, 150, 190-1, 319, 348, 448, 480 Chatham, 148, 195 Chemical Lectures and Essays, 66 Chemistry, application in brewing, 64-5, 70-1, 266-7 Cheshire, 215 Cheshunt (Herts.), 444 Chester, 169, 186, 344, 484 Chester Fair, 501 Chevallier, Rev. John, 402 Chew, Benjamin (Philadelphia), 292 Child’s Bank, 281 Child, James (brewer, Anchor Brewery, Lon¬ don, 8, 258 Chillingworth (brewer, London), 9 Chippendale, John (coopers, London), 56, 57, 224 Chivers, Nathaniel (brewer), 45 Cholmley, Daniel (brewer), 24 Cholmeley, John (brewer, London), 9, 333-4 Christie’s Brewery (Hoddesdon), 119, 329,

448 Cisterns, underground, 59-60

579

37-2

Index Clarke, J. (brewer, London), 8 Clarke, S. (writer, instrument-maker), 68-9 Clerke, Sir Philip Jennings, 270 Clerks, see Staff Cley (Norfolk), 429 Cleypole, Benjamin (clerk, Trumans), 35 Clinch (brewer and banker, Witney), 328, 329 Clough, Thomas (malt-merchant, Bishop’s Stortford), 444, 445, 463 Clough, W. (malt-merchant, Herts.), 463 Clowes and Co. (brewers, London), 85, 203, 224, 348, 511 Clubs, see Public houses Clutterbuck, Daniel (banker, partner in Whitbreads), 302, 307, 326, 329 Coal, use of by brewers and maltsters, 3, 6, 9, 84, 93, 412-13 Cobb and Co. (brewers and bankers, Mar¬ gate), 28, 57 n., 255, 322, 329, 331 Cobb, Francis (brewer and banker, Margate),

, , ,

199 319 327 329 Cobbett, William, xxv, 100, 375, 478, 499,

5°4 Cobbold and Co. (brewers and bankers, Ipswich), 319, 322-3, 328-9, 467 Cobbold, John Chevallier, 323 Cobbold, Nathaniel, 323 Cobbold, Thomas, 323 Cobham family (malt-merchants, Ware), 457 Cobham, Lord, 259, 334 Cobham Park, Surrey, 309 n. Coburne, Priscilla (brewer, Bow), 9 Cockayne, Alderman, 431 Cockton, Paul (publican), 120 Coffin and Sons (hop-merchants, London),

5°9 Coke, use of by maltsters, 6, 412-13; use in hop kilns, 494 Colchester, 149, 322, 434 Colet, Dean of St Pauls, 125 Collinson, James, Capt. (Liverpool), 45 n. Colombo, 191 Colquhoun, Patrick, J.P., 126, 127, 390 Combe and Delafield (brewers, London), 25 n., 85, 93, 256, 468 Combe, Harvey Christian Jr, 447 n. Combe, Harvey Christian Sr (brewer, Lon¬ don), 48, 85, 234, 256, 309 n., 330, 332-6, 447. See also Combe and Delafield Combinations, 214-51; amongst Burton brewers, 226-7; amongst coopers, 57; amongst hop-planters, 215-16, 521-3; amongst maltsters, 217, 410-11; amongst porter brewers, 115, 222-51, 361; amongst provincial brewers, 241 n., 337, 365-7; encouraged by state interference, 215-18

Combrune, Gideon (brewer, London), 85,

245 Combrune, Michael (writer and brewer, Lon¬ don), 12, 17, 21, 24, 42, 45, 64, 66, 67 n.,

174, 432, 494 Commissioners of Victualling, see Naval brewhouses, Navy Committee of Porter Brewers, 223, 228-37. See also Combinations Competition {see also Brewers, Combinations), 213-51; imperfect, 213-15, 225, 231, 237; Anti-Monopoly Committee, 238-40, 251 Connolly and Somers, 166 (brewers, Dublin) Cook, Captain James, 206, 207 Cooke, Thomas (distiller, Bow, Essex), 49, 68, 74, 82 n., 236, 374 Cooper, Francis (partner, Trumans), 263 Cooper, James (millwright, Poplar), 86 Coopers, ‘abroad coopers’, 104-6; at Barc¬ lays, 36; Chippendale’s importance, 56-7; Committee of Coopers’ Trade, 224; ‘great coopers’, 57, 224 Coopers’ Company, 54, 220, 223-4, 352 Copenhagen, 205 Cork, 152, 155-6, 162, 166-7, 169, 201 Cornwall, 328, 436 Cornwallis, Capt. the Hon. William, 173 Cornwallis, Earl, 263 Cornwallis, Lady Mary (Whitbread), 263 Cotton, Sir J. H. (owner Red Lion Brewhouse), 11, 58 n., 333, 445 Country Brewers Association, 241 n., 337. See also Combinations Courage’s Brewery (London), 5, 146, 319, 348, 53i n. Courage, John (brewer, London), 258. See also Courage’s Brewery Coventry Porter Brewery, 185 Cowell, John (brewer, London), 444, 511 Cox, Sir Charles (brewer, London), 7, 333-4 Cox, Cobbold and Co. (bankers, Harwich), 323 n. Cox and King (brewers, London), 85 Crabb, John (brewer and banker, Hitchin), 328-9 Cripps, J. (brewer and banker, Cirencester),

329, 333 Cromer (Norfolk), 451, 462, 463, 506 Cromer Hall (Norfolk), 462 Crompton, Samuel, 65 Cropper, Castellain and Co. (hop-merchants, London), 525 Crosse, Sir T. (brewer, London), 333 Crossman family (brewers, London), 319 Crowley (brewer, Alton), 299 Culmer, James (Canterbury), 183

580

Index Cumberland, 344 yjDistillers, 255, 303 n.; adoption of hydroCurries and Co. (brewers, London), 85 meter, 67-9; adoption of steam-engine, 82; Customs, duties with Ireland trade, 152-5; in Ireland, 159-60, 163, 165-6; Dutch, effectiveness, 341-2; use of hydrometer by, 428,430-2; purchase of yeast from brewers, 68-9, 147. See also Excise 49-51; use of barley and malt, 374-5, 391-2, 397-9, 405, 426; use of sugar, 397, Dalrymple, Sir John, 209 422, 432-3. See also Spirits Danzig, 176-9, 181-2, 185, 187-9, 43* Dixon, James (cooper, London), 198, 199 Darby, Abraham (iron-master), 22, 260, 412, Dixon, Libbeus (cooper, Whitbreads), 32 414 Dorchester (Dorset), 150 Darra, Thomas (malt-merchant, Herts.), 457 Dover, 200-3, 345 Dartmouth, 142 Dowden and Lee (brewers and bankers, Darwin, Dr Erasmus, 174 Alton), 329 Davy, Sir Humphry (chemist), 53 Dowding, Richard (cooper, London), 57, 224 Dawber, William (barley-merchant, Lincoln), Down, Thornton and Free (bankers, Lon¬ don), 281, 244, 306, 307 452 Dawes (brewer and banker, Warwick), 329 Doyle, Sir F., 217 Dawson and Owen (hop-merchants, London), Draper, Sir Thomas (brewer, London), 201 Draymen, see Staff 509, 510, 526, 528 Drays, 9, 78, 352 de Nassau, Maurice, 172 Drew (banker and brewer, Chichester), 329 Deal (Kent), 119, 199, 322, 345 Drewe, W. and J. (merchants, Exeter), 148-9 Deanne (brewer and banker, Reading), 329 Dring (instrument-maker), 69 Debenham, Thomas (maltster, Bishop’s Dublin, brewers, 45, 164-7, 365, 466; Castle, Stortford), 461 164-5; exports t0> 153—7,182; Society, 163, Dee (River), 484 169, 482-3, 494 Defoe, Daniel, 175, 481-4, 487, 496-8 du Bois, Guillaume (merchant, Danzig), 179 Delafield, Joseph (brewer, London), 25 n., Duckett, Sir George, 447 48, 80, 84 n., 93, 94, 95, 137, 146, 154, 233, Duncan and Co. (hop-merchants, Liverpool), 256, 447. See also Combe and Delafield Demerara, 191 50i Dundas (Lord Melville), 239 n. Denmark, 169, 426 Dunstable (Beds.), 438 Denne, Adam (investor, Trumans), 264 Dunwich (Suffolk), 434 Denne, Alan (partner, Trumans), 263 Dupper and Co. (Baltic merchants), 178 Denne, Ann (partner, Trumans), 263, 264 Dursley, Lord, 173 Denne, John (partner, Trumans), 263-4 Dyson, H. (hop-planter and merchant, SunDenton, P. and J. (barley-merchants, King’s dridge, Kent), 532 Lynn), 449, 452 Deptford, 202, 206-7 Derby, 150, 173-4, 186-7, 395, 423 Desaguliers, J. T. (instrument-maker, writer),

68 Devizes (Wilts.), 436 Dicas (instrument-maker, Liverpool), 69 Dickinson, John B. (malt-merchant, Ware),

East Anglia, 170, 393, 395, 398, 408, 428-37. See also Barley and Malt East Smithfield, 201, 267 East India Company, 189, 214, 218, 248, 335,

338 Edinburgh, brewers, 45, 151, 190; Review, 238-9, 243 Edwards, Humphrey (engine-maker), 96 Egan and Co. (brewers, Dublin), 167 Elbing (Poland), 187-8 Elevators, 95 Elliott and Co. (brewers, Nottingham), 85 Elliott and Co. (merchants, Danzig), 179 Elliott, Thomas (brewer, Sheffield), 44 Elliot’s (Stag Brewery, London), 37, 85, 129 Ellis, James (hop-planter, Kent), 488-9, 492 Elsinore (Denmark), 205 Embury (brewer and banker,Tewkesbury), 329

444

Dickinson, Joseph Jr (brewer, London), 257 Dickinson, Joseph Sr (maltster, Ware), 257 Dickinson, Rivers (maltster, Ware; brewer, London), 256, 327, 443 Dickinson, William (M.P.), 240 Dickinsons (malt-merchants, Ware), 241,256, 439, 443, 444, 457 Dickinsons (Red Lion Brewery, London), 11, 58 n. Dimsdale, Thomas (banker, Hertford), 444, 446

581

Index Engineers, 60, 86-8, 108-9. See also Steam- engine ^ Erskine, J. F. (writer on agriculture), 430 Essex, 287, 433 Estcourt, Thomas (M.P.), 127 n., 242 Etherington, R. (merchant, Hull), 188 Eton (Bucks.), 255 Evans, John and George (hop-merchants, London), 508 Evans, Oliver (of Delaware), 95 & Excise, 339-83; allowances, 246-8, 337, 362-9; attemperators objected to, 74-5; duties, xxiv, no, 112, 152-4, 159-66, 204-5, 238, 241-3, 331, 336, 339-40, 355-61, 369, 383; duty on beer abolished, 243; economic.effects of, 21, 238, 336, 338, 339- 65, 368, 383; effectiveness of survey, 340- 50; establishments, 343-4, 348-50; frauds in brewing, 10, 199, 203-4, 230, 345-6, 35G frauds in malting, 342, 345, 358,360,409-11; use of hydrometer, 68-70, 73; jurisdiction, 353-5; licences, 368-9; penalties, 247, 353; regulations, 350-3, 406-10, 431, 494; reliability of statistics, 341- 2, 345, 348, 369-72; statistics, 369-83; surveying naval brewhouses, 202-3 Exeter, 155 Eye (Suffolk), 322 Fahrenheit (scientist), 67 Fairbrass (hop-merchant, Faversham, Kent), 512 Fairman, Joseph (malt-merchant), 445 Falkland Isles, 206 Farish, Rev. Prof., 69 Farnborough (Kent), 522 Farnham (Surrey), hop cultivation, 483-6, 491; marketing (see also Weyhill), 493, 499, 503, 506-7, 520; picking, 491-2 Farr (brewer and banker, Beccles), 329 Feast, Sir Felix (brewer, Peacock Brewhouse, London), 7, 9, 355 Felton, Matthew (yeast dealer), 50 Fenton, Murray and Wood (engine-makers, London), 96 Fermentation, 18, 19, 20, 48-9, 51; attem¬ perators to control, 73-5; ignorance of nature of, 49, 76 Ffordham, James (malt-merchant, Herts.),

457 Field, John (clerk, Barclay Perkins), 35 Fielding, Henry, 127 Fiennes, Celia, 492 Figgis, Samuel (clerk, Whitbreads), 32, 156, 157, 158 Filtration, 53, 108. See also Isinglass

Finance, 252-330; capital in casks, 55; capital (initial), 24, 253-8, 261, 273; capital (joint and surplus), 301, 304, 314-15, 353-8; capital in stocks, 76-7, 253, 459-60, 470-4, 556-8; capital in tying trade, 133-5; crises, 266-70; high liquidity of brewing, 254, 320-2; profits, 226, 232, 268-9, 471-2, 553; re-investing profits, 252, 260-5, 3H Fire insurance companies, 250 Fison (malt-merchant, Thetford and Nor¬ wich, 463 Fitzherbert (writer on agriculture), 401 Fitzpatrick. General, 285, 334 Fletcher and Co. (coopers, London), 57 Flint, 344 Flushing (Walcheren), 194 Ford, William (maltster, writer on malting), 217 Fordham family (malt-merchants, Herts.), 327

Fordyce, A. (banker, London), 266 Foreman and Co. (hop-merchants, London), 509-10, 528 Fox, C. J., 239 n. Fox, Elizabeth (investor, Anchor Brewery), 292 Fox, John (brewing victualler, Flintshire), 344 ‘Fox and Reynell’ (of Philadelphia), 292 Frauds, see under Excise Freame, John (banker), 288 Freame, Priscilla (m. David Barclay, Sr), 288 Free trade in beer, 240-3; Edinburgh Preview supports, 238-9, 243; hop-planters oppose, 522-3; maltsters oppose, 464-5; Waddington’s case, 517 Friend, Sir John (brewer, London), 7, 9 Frost, Joseph (hop-merchant, Woodford), 510 Fulham, 254 n., 532 Fuller, Thomas (writer), 476 Furrance (cooper, London), 57 Gainsborough, Thomas (R.A.), 33, 265 Gainsborough Dupont, 33 Gainsborough (Lines.), 175-6, 179, 187, 530 Gardner, H. (barley-merchant, Norwich), 451 Gardners (brewers, Cheltenham), 139, 329, 5ii

Garfit and Clayton (bankers), 286 n. Garrick, David, 113 Garrow, William (Attorney General), 250 General Chamber of Manufacturers, 217 General Description of All Trades (1747), 104 George II, 66 George III, 91, 126, 288 George, Philip (brewer, Bristol), 45, 255 George’s brewery (Bristol), 155, 193 n., 466

582

Index Germany, 169, 176, 193, 199 Gibraltar, 141, 194 Gibson (brewer, Saffron Walden), 299, 328, 329 Gideon, Sampson (financier), 359 Gilchrist, Thomas (merchant, Berwick-onTweed), 148 Gipps, George (hop-merchant, Kent), 334-5 Gladstone, W. E., 73 Glasgow, 193, 426 Glass manufacturers, 194, 215 Glauber (chemist), 206 Gloucester, 484 Gloucestershire, 261 Godings (brewers, London), 12, 150, 511 Golden Lane Brewery, 52, 61, 85, 226, 232-3, 243-5 L 303 n., 318; capital raised, 245-6, 249; decline, 249, 251; prosecuted, 52-3, 24M, 347, 367-8; output, 246, 249, 551-2 Golding, Mr (hop-grower, Kent), 490 Golding, William (hop-merchant, London), 509,

5io

Goodwyn’s Brewery (see Red Lion Brewery), 88, 92, 203, 277, 306, 527 Goodwyn, Henry, 11, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 95, 96, 146, 228, 233, 303, 468, 526. See also Red Lion Brewery Goodwyn-Hoare’s, see Red Lion Brewery Gordon Riots, 270 Goree, 200 n. Gorr and Co. (merchants, Danzig), 178-9 Gorton, Robert (merchant, Manchester), 147-8 Gosling (banker, London), 445 Gothenburg (Sweden), 186 Graham, Col. John, 193 Grains (brewers’), 18, 41-2 Grange Leeson (brewer, Dublin), 167 Grant, James (clerk, partner, Trumans), 274-5 Grant, John (brewer, London), 200 Grantham (Lines.), 449 Grattan, 160, 164 Graves, Admiral, 209 Great Marlow (Bucks.), 486 Green, Mr (brewer in Griffin Brewery), 463 Green, A. (brewer, Nottingham), 85 Green, G. (pump-maker, London), 109 Green, Samuel (brewer at Whitbreads), 32-5> 279

Greenall and Co. (brewers, St Helens), 45-6, 329, 336 Greenall family, 501 Greenall, Thomas, see also Greenall and Co., 139 n., 184, 381, 498, 500 Greene, E. B. (brewer, London), 15. See also Elliot’s (Stag Brewery)

Greene, William (brewer, London), 9. See also Elliot’s (Stag Brewery) Greenhall (brewer, Warrington), 85 Gregory, Olinthus (writer on mechanics), 108 Grenville, Lord, 164 Gretton (brewer, Burton), 299 Grey, Charles, Earl, 286, 334 Grey, Elizabeth (Whitbread), 285 n. Grey, Capt. George, R.N., 285 Grey, Mary, 308 Griffin Brewery (Meux Reid), 146, 348; country trade, 140-2; finance, 304-5; maltfactors, 459; moving coopers, 105-6; part¬ nership articles, 316-17; production, 246; raw materials and profits, 459-60,471,474; sale and new partnerships, 300-3,310; sign¬ boards, 138; steam-engine, 85, 95-6; tied trade, 131-2; vats, 61-2, 330 Griffiths and Co. (merchants, Madras), 191 Gruit, 4 n., 476 n. Guinness, Arthur Sr and Jr, 45 n., 165, 167, 319, 466. See also Guinness’s Brewery Guinness’s Brewery (Dublin), 18, 85, 140, 166-7, 466, 531 Gunning, Henry, 498 Gurney family, 275, 328-9, 332, 336, 451, 462, 510 Gurney, Agatha (m. Sampson Hanbury), 294, 297, 298 Gurney, Christiana (investor, Anchor Brew¬ ery), 291, 292 Gurney, Hannah (d. of John Gurney), 297 Gurney, Hannah (d. of Joseph Gurney), 287 Gurney, Hudson (banker, partner in Anchor Brewery), 288, 294, 302, 326, 332, 333, 335, 462, 510 Gurney, John (painter, Norwich), 288, 293,

295, 305 Gurney, Joseph (of Norwich), 287 Gurney, Richard (partner in Anchor Brewhouse), 288, 294, 302, 326, 332, 333, 335, 5io Gurney, Robert, Bartlett and John (bankers, Norwich), 294, 298 Gurney, Samuel (bill-broker, London), 326 Gurney and Bland (bankers), 293, 296 Gurney’s Bank (Norwich), 293, 296, 305, 326, 398, 462 Gwilt, George (surveyor to Anchor Brewery), 91 n. Gyfford’s Brewery (London), 83, 85, 93, 199, 256, 433. See also Combe and Delafield Hackney, 444 Hager, Thomas (brewer, London), 9 Hailes and Co, (distillers, London), 74

Index Hale, Thomas (writer on agriculture), 412 Hall, James (merchant, Leith), 142 Halsey, Edmund (brewer, Anchor Brewery, London), 7, 8, 9, 28, 202, 259, 333, 334. See also Anchor Brewery Hamburg [Hambro’], 177-8, 234, 431, 525; introduction of porter brewing to, 45; staves from, 54 Hammond, E., 25, 85. See also Combe and Delafield Hammond and Co. (London), 199, 203 Hammond, Peter (brewer, London), 222 Hammond, W. (brewer, London), 333-4 Hamoaze (near Plymouth), 203 Hampson, Waite (malt-merchant, Herts.), 457 Hanbury family, 299, 326, 329, 336, 451 Hanbury, Anna (s. Sampson Hanbury), 297 Hanbury, Charles (b. of Sampson Hanbury), 294 Hanbury, Osgood (f. of Sampson Hanbury), 294, 295, 298, 462 Hanbury, Rachel 1 (Gurney) (s. of Sampson Hanbury), 294 Hanbury, Rachel 2 (Barclay) (d. of Osgood Hanbury), 295 Hanbury, Sampson (partner, Truman’s brewery), 133 n., 134, 326; country trade and its problems, 143-7, H9, 184; Chip¬ pendale, John, his friend, 56; hops, refusal to speculate in, 530; hounds owned, 265; loans for brewery obtained, 286-7, 305; malt-buying, 416-17, 458-62, 469-70, 520; maltsters, compensation offers to, 464 n.; partner, 275, 294-8; profit on rentals re¬ fused, 121; tied trade organised, 114-15; Trustee of Lea Navigation, 443-4; yeast sales, 236 Hanbury, Taylor and Co. (bankers, London), 305 Hankin family (malt-merchants, Ware), 267, 439, 444 Hankin, Mrs (investor in Whitbreads), 267 Hankin, Thomas (malt-merchant, Ware), 457 Hanway, Jonas, xxv Hardy, Mr (brewer, Holt, Norfolk), 463 Hare, J. (investor in Whitbreads), 285 Hare, W. (barley-merchant, Newark), 451 Harlow (Essex), 418 Harrington, see Leonard and Harrington Harrison, John (brewer, London), 24 Harrogate (Yorks.), 449, 451 Harryman, W. (hop merchant, Kent), 521 Hartshorne Brewhouse (Tower Hill), 199, 201-3, 209 Harvey, John (brewer, Lewes), 319 Harwich (Essex), 201

Harwood, Ralph (Bell Brewhouse, Shore¬ ditch), and innovation of porter, 14-15, 413; not a leading brewer, 22-3; Trustee of Lea Navigation, 443 Haswell, Thomas (clerk, Whitbreads), 32,156 Hatfield (Herts.), 438 Hatton Garden (London), 184 Havana, 193 Hawkhurst Fair, 503 Hayton, William (merchant, London), 262, 280, 281 Heath, Sir John, 488, 492 Hector (brewer and banker, Petersfield), 329 Hedingham (Castle and Sible, Essex), 462-3 Heligoland, 182 Henry VIII, 5 Hentig, John and William (Baltic merchants), 181 Hereford, 169, 186, 484 Hertford, 437, 444, 457, 463-4 Hertfordshire, 267, 274, 287, 396, 398, 403, 408, 412, 416, 420, 428, 434, 438, 456, 457, 467. See also under Barley, Malt Hetherington, W. (excise official), 343 n. Hey wood, Arthur (merchant, Liverpool), 183 Hill, John (malt-merchant, Wells, Norfolk), 432 Hill, Mark (merchant, Dartmouth), 142 Hinkly (instrument-maker), 69 Hitchin (Herts.), 342, 418, 438, 467 Hoare family, 5, 326, 329 Hoare and Co. (bankers, London), 284, 303-4, 311, 419 Hoare, Charles (banker, London), 304 Hoare, George Matthew (partner, Red Lion Brewery), 303, 326 Hoare, Henry (banker, London), 303-4 Hobhouse family, 326, 329 Hobhouse, Sir Benjamin (banker, Bath; partner, Whitbreads), 301-2, 306-7, 326, 333-4 Hobhouse, J. C. (s. of B. Hobhouse), 333 Hobhouse, Clutterbuck, Phillott and Lowden (bankers, Bath), 301 n. Hoddesdon (Herts.), 437 Hodges & Co. (merchants, London), 156 Hodgson, F. (brewer, London, Kingston), 333 Hodgson, George (brewer, Bow, Mx.), 190, 192, 319, 366, 444, 448 Hodgson, Mark (brewer, Bow, Mx.), 190, 444 Hogarth, W., xxv Holland, beer imports from, 3; brewers from, 4; malt exports to, 170, 426, 428-32; Russian isinglass from, 51. See also under Distillers

584

Index Hollick (brewer and banker, Cambridge), 329 Holyhead, 165 Home brewing, xxii, 342, 376-7, 424, 511 Hook, Robert (scientist), 67 Hooper (publican, London), 114 Hop-merchants and factors, 215, 255, 267, 424, 504-33; development of factoring, 513-17; Parliament, 334, 335 n.; provision of credit to brewers, 283, 525-9, 510-13, 531; provision of credit to planters, 507, 516-21; Waddington’s prosecution, 499, 5i4, 5I7-I9

Hop planters: combinations, 521-3; and ex¬ cise, 215, 216 n., 352-3, 477, 521-3; in Parliament, 334 Hope, Andrew (investor, Trumans), 264,443 Hope (brewer, London), 23 Hops (see also Hop-merchants and factors, Hop-planters); amounts used, 17, 206, 482, 502 n., 515; consumption in London. 502; cultivation, 476-95; duties, 357, 504, 521; exports, 167-9, 479> 481-2, 502; import* duty, 481; imports, 479, 525; introduction to Europe, 4 n., introduction to England, 3-4, 149 n., 475-7, 481-2; Ireland, failure in, 163, 489 n.; picking, 491-5; prices, 450, 470-4, 477-82,499, 502-8, 516-22, 524-31, 550; production, 479-80, 485-7, soon., 549; regional growth, 483-90; sales to Brewing Victuallers, 100, 511; Southwark Market, 505-20, 522, 530-2; speculation, 504; spent hops sold, 41; Stourbridge Fair, 484 n., 487, 496-8, 503, 505 n.; trade and marketing, 181-2, 493, 496-533; transport costs, 442 n.; varieties, 490-1; yields, 477-83, 485, 549 Hornblower and Maberley (engine makers),

95 Horninglow (Staffs.), 176, 179, 450, 452 Horse Shoe Brewery (Bainbridge Street, St Giles, London), disaster to vat, 62, 363; hop buying, 511; steam-engine, 85, 91; taken by Henry Meux, 310. See also Meux, Henry Horses, costs of, 81-2, 92-3; dray-horses, 8, 78-82; mill-horses, 8, 79, 84 Hotchkiss, James (brewer, London), 23 Houblon, Jacob (M.P., Herts.), 443 Houghland, Joseph (merchant, London), 171 n. Houghton, Mrs (investor, Trumans), 286 Houghton, John (writer), 412, 438, 441 Houghton, Michael (maltster), 383 Houldsworth and Barnard (malt makers, Lon¬ don), 209

Hounslow Heath, 200 Hour-Glass Brewhouse (Thames Street, Lon¬ don), see Calvert, Charles, Calvert, Felix, Calvert, Sir William House of Commons, 215, 225, 232, 239-40, 245, 332_6, 358-9, 409. See also Brewers Howard, John (investor, Whitbreads), 280 Howland, Thomas (carrier, Thame), 142 Hubbard, Thomas (merchant, Yarmouth), 142 Hucks, Robert (brewer, London), 9, 22, 116,

,

309 333 Hucks, Thomas (brewer, London), 199 Hucks, William (brewer, London), 9, 333 Hudson and Davies (hop-merchants, London),

5°9 Hull, 46, 150, 173-4, 176-9, 182-3, 186-7, 189, 380, 434 Hume, Joseph (M.P.), 243 Huntingdon, 463 Huskisson, William, 243 Hydrometer, 67-73; adoption in brewing, 71-2; use by Customs for spirits, 68-9; importance of, 72-3; introduction to distil¬ ling, 65-9, in Ireland and Scotland, 69-70, 72; use in beer excise, 347 Hydrostatical Observations and Experiments in the Brewery (1785), 71 Hythe, 3 India [East Indies], 145, 171-3, 189-92, 448. See also Beer exports Insworth (near Plymouth), 201, 203 Ipswich, 440 Ireland, barley and malt trade with England, 168-70, 425-6, 428, 435; beer exports from England, 141, 151-8, 181; beer ex¬ ports to England, 167; brewing industry in, 153-5,158-67; failure of hop growing, 163, 489 n., hop imports, 168-9, 479 Irvine, Thomas (hop-merchant, London), 509 Isherwood, Henry (brewer, Windsor), 255,

333 Isinglass, British, 52; Persian, 53; introduced into porter brewing, 15, 51-3; prosecution over, 52-3, 248-9; 352, Russian, 51 Islington, 257 Italy, 195 Jackson, Henry (chemist), 52, 206-7 Jackson, Humphrey (chemist), 52-3, 206-7, 266-7, 421 Jacomb, Henry (investor, Whitbreads), 280 Jamaica, 141, 193 Jennings, Arthur (investor, Whitbreads), 280 Jennings, Mrs (investor, Whitbreads), 280

Index Jennings, David (brewer in Whitbreads), 32, 34, 284, 310 Johnson and Co. (distillers, London), 74 Johnson, see Prince, Son and Johnson Johnson, Dr Samuel, 47, 61, 117, 206; com¬ ments on brewery, 259, 274; encourages Thrale, 268; helps to run Anchor Brewery, 265-76; opposes excise jurisdiction, 350, 3 54; proposes profit-sharing with J. Perkins, 276; reluctant to sell brewery as Executor, 272-3; sends porter to McCleods in Skye, 142, 172; supports chemical investigations into brewing, 70; tells Thrale of harvest, 450; warns Thrale in crisis, 266-7, 269; writes letter to Lord North for Thrale, 335 Johnston and Thorley (merchants, London), 511 Joint stock companies in brewing, 244-51 Jones, Hugh (of Paris), 194 Joslyn, William (publican, London), 120 Judd, William (carrier, Barking), 142 Kamchatka, 207 Kearsley, J. H. (brewer, Wigan), 333, 336 Kelly, Jeremiah (brewer, Deal), 198-9 Kemp, John (maltster, Colchester), 149, 416, 433_4> 459) 46 L 469-70. See also under Truman’s Brewery Kent, 169, 433, 478, 481; hop cultivation, 483-93; hop-marketing, 493, 497-9, 503-4, 506-8, 510, 512, 519-22, 532; hop picking, 492-5; hoymen, 148, 464, 507 Kent, Nathaniel (writer on agriculture), 428, 430, 435, 486 Kenton (wine merchant, London), 189 Kenyon, Lord, 517 Kesteven (Lines.), 395 Kett, Elizabeth (d. of Kett, Richard), 288 Kett, Richard (banker, Norwich), 288 Ketts and Back (bankers, Norwich), 294, 296 King, Captain, R.N., 208 King, Gregory, xxii, 388-91, 487 King family (malt-merchants, Herts.), 444, 454, 463 King, James (malt-merchant, Herts.), 463 King, Richard (malt-merchant, Herts.), 445 n. King, Robert (malt-merchant, Herts.), 445 n. King’s Bench Prison, 331, 337, 519 King’s Lynn (Norfolk), 429-30, 434,436,449, 497

Kingston-on-Thames, 150, 438 Kinship, business importance of, 271-5, 279, 286-91 Kirkman and Co. (brewers, London), 12, 511-12 Knight (brewer and banker, Farnham), 329

Lacon and Co. (brewers, Yarmouth), banking, 328-9, 390; control of public houses, 105, 119, 122; porter brewed, 46; Rests taken, 30; shipping and trading interests, 323, 467 Lacon, Sir E. K., 333, 411 Lade, Lady (investor, Barclay Perkins), 267 Lade, Sir John (brewer, London), 7, 333-4 Lancashire, 182, 227, 398, 484 Langmead and Co. (brewers, Plymouth), 85 Lasceles, John (cooper, London), 224 Laundy, Lewis (clerk, Barclay Perkins’ Brewery), 8, 259 Law and Holt (engine fitters), 89 Law, Henry (merchant), 177 Lawther, G. and Son (barley-merchants, Car¬ lisle), 451 Lea (River), 190, 222, 428-9, 436-8, 441-7, 457> 462, 464, 507. See also under Malting industry Leadbetter, C. (writer on surveying), 68 Leak family (malt-merchants, Herts.), 439 Leak, William (maltster, Ware), 440, 444, 457

Leake, Henry (brewer, London), 5 Leeds, 257, 436 Leicester, 179 Leith, 142 Leonard and Harrington (hop-merchants, Worcester), 501 Lester, George (clerk, Barclay Perkins’ Brewery), 35, 276, 292 Lichfield, 268, 450 Lincolnshire, 174, 403 Lisbon, 194 Lisle, Edward (writer on agriculture), 401-2,

436 Liverpool, 256, 328, 501, 523; barley trade, 426, 431-6; Burton beer sent, 171, 175, 182-3; exports from, 155, 185, 188, 193; porter brewing, 45-6 Liverpool, Lord, 235 Lloyd family (bankers), 296 Lloyd, David (brewer, Coventry), 299. See also Coventry Porter Brewery Lloyd, John (banker, London), 295 Lloyd, Mary (d. of Sampson Lloyd), 294 Lloyd, Sampson (banker, Birmingham), 294 Lockwood (Huddersfield), 257 Lockwood, Joseph (hop-merchant, London), 5°9

Lomb, T. (industrialist), 65 London and Country Brewer, 16,24, 4°) 64,415 London Tradesman (1747), 99 Long, John (patentee of attemperator), 74 Lucas (brewer and banker, Hitchin), 299, 329 Luce (brewer and banker, Malmesbury), 329

Index Lushill (Wilts), 285 Luton, 438

Mangles, Joseph (partner, Griffin Brewery), 334

McCulloch, J. R., 361, 388 MacDonald, Lord Chief Baron, 247 McFarlane and Mazure (merchants, Dublin) Mackes, W. (partner, Combe and Delafield),

85 Macleod of Macleod (Skye), 142 McLunn, Mr, 463 Madden and Co (brewers, Dublin), 85 Madeira, 193 Madras, 190-1 Maidstone, 497, 506, 483-4 Mailing (Kent), 483 Malt, bounties, 429-33; duties, 355-61, 400, 546; exports, 168-70, 427-33; ‘long malt’, 341-2, 430-2; malt and barley prices, 239, 249, 266-8, 395-6, 427, 432-3, 469-74, 547-8; national production, 372-8, 388-9, 393-4, 541; trade with Ireland, 168-70, 425-8; trade with Scotland, 400, 434; transport costs, 438, 441-2, 446; uses of malt, 373-5; varieties and quality, 415-20, 448-9. See also Malting industry, Malt merchants and factors, Maltsters Malting industry, brewers owning makings, 311, 416, 465-9; effect of excise system, 339, 352-3, 362, 406, 44°, 464-5; excise regulations, 351, 406-10, 431; frauds, see Excise; Hertfordshire, 405-7, 410-20, 437- 47, 456-64; Lea Navigation, 437-9, 441-6; national distribution, 393-4; Nor¬ folk and East Anglia, 393-8, 405, 408, 410-11, 416-20, 428-37, 439, 468-70; ‘sprinkling’ controversy, 408-10; structure of production, 423-4, 454; techniques of production, 405-14, 419-23 Malt-merchants and factors, becoming ban¬ kers, 327-8; becoming brewers, 255-7, 327; credit to maltsters, 456-7, 464-5; export trade, 431-2; in Hertfordshire, 438- 41; loans to brewers, 267, 283, 285, 441, 458-9; relations with brewers, 417, 455-700; supplying Burton-on-Trent, 451-2; trading areas, 433-9; Trustees of Lea Navigation, 443-6. See also individual names Maltsters, becoming brewers, 255-7; com¬ binations, 217, 410-11, 417 n.; fraud by, see Excise; scale of production, 411, 423-4, 463; skills, 405-13, 416-17, 437 Malyn (brewer, London), 8-9 Manchester, 436, 523; beer sent from Lon¬ don, 147-8; beer sent from Burton, 182-3, 186, 227

Mann family (brewers, London), 319 Mansfield, Lord, 347, 354 Margate, 199 Marshall, William (writer on agriculture), 398, 428, 438, 488, 490, 492-5 Martin, Benjamin (instrument-maker), 68, 70-1. Martin, Joseph (banker, London), 445-6 Martineau and Co. (brewers, Lambeth, Lon¬ don), amalgamation with Whitbreads, 298, 302, 310-12; control of public houses, 131; hop-buying, 511; no partnership articles, 312; ownership of makings, 416, 419, 468; site on Thames, 146 Martineau family, 310, 312, 318, 348, 468 Martineau, John (brewer, London; partner, Whitbreads), 77-8, 131, 146, 230 n., 298, 302, 310, 422 Martineau, John, Jr (brewer, London; part¬ ner, Whitbreads), 311 Martineau, Joseph (s. of John Martineau; brewer, London; partner, Whitbreads), 302 Mashing machines, 94-5. See also Brewing Industry (processes) Maudslay, H. (machine-tool maker), 95 n. Maysey, Ann (investor, Whitbreads), 279 Maysey, Boughton (clerk, Whitbreads), 32, 33, 279, 280, 281, 444, 467 Maysey, Joseph (malt-factor, Whitbreads), 279, 444, 468 Maysey, Margaret (investor, Whitbreads) 279 Maysey, Sarah (investor, Whitbreads), 279 Mazure, see McFarlan and Mazure Medmenham (Bucks.), 486 Medway (River), 507 Meggott, Sir George (brewer, London), 7, 333-4

Mercantilism, xxvi, 51-2, 431-2 Meredith, J. H. (hop-planter, Worcester), 501 Merzeau, Peter (clerk, Truman’s brewery), 35 Meux family, 319 Meux, Henry, 62, 85, 97, 131, 3°3, 310, 334, 363,422, 511. See also Horse Shoe Brewery Meux Reid, see Griffin Brewery Meux, Richard, 61, 131, 228, 302, 310, 330. See also Griffin Brewery Meux, Richard Jr, 303. See also Griffin Brewery Meux, Thomas, 230 n., 303. See also Griffin Brewery Middleton, John (writer on agriculture), 390 Mildred and Sampson (brewers and bankers, Diss, Norfolk), 329

5^

Index Milford Haven (Pembrokeshire), 201 Military contracts, 193, 195-201 Mills, John (writer on agriculture), 488-90 Mohon, Charles (malt-merchant, London), 283 Molson’s (brewers, Montreal), 36 n., 62 Molyneux (cooper, Whitbreads), 279 Molyneux, W. (writer), 174 Moncony (scientist, instrument maker), 67 Monger, James (owner, Anchor Brewery), 259 n. See also Anchor Brewery Moore (millwright, London), 87-8 Mortimer, J. (writer on agriculture), 411 Mortlock, John (banker), 462 Moseley, Dr Benjamin (investor, Barclay Perkins), 291 Murdoch, Warrach and Co. (brewers, Anderston, Glasgow), 45 Murdoch, William (engineer), 52-3, 87 Mylne, Robert (architect), 60 Nanson and Co. (malt-merchants, London), 283 Napoleon, 185 Naval brewhouses, 195, 200-4, 209; advan¬ tages, 202; attemperators, 74-5; frauds in, 203; hop buying, 5090., 513, 517, 530; lent to brewers, 203; steam-engine rejected, 97; vats, 59 Navy (see also Naval brewhouses), attempt to concentrate beer, 204-9; combinations amongst contractors, 57; contracts, 195-201; delays in payment for beer, 195, 197-8; rations, 196 Needham, Rawlings and Co. (merchants, London), 109 Nesbitt, Arnold (b.-in-law Henry Thrale), 266, 269 New South Wales, 172, 193 New York, 141 New Zealand, 207 Newark (Notts.), 179, 449, 467, 530 Newbury (Berks.), 342, 436, 438 Newcastle on Tyne, 172, 201, 434 Newcastle-under-Lyme (Staffs.), 467 Newcastle, Duke of, 115, 359-60 Newington Green, 505 Newmarket (Suffolk), 462 Newton, J. (barley-merchant, Newark), 451 Nicholson, Joseph (brewer, London), 9 Nolan, Sjt (lawyer), 368 Nore, the, 200 Norfolk, 287, 311, 403, 416, 418, 428, 433. See also Barley, Malt Norman Cross (Hunts.), 200

Norris, Admiral Sir John, 200 North, Lord, 163 North America, isinglass from, 51; staves from, 54; exports to, 170-1 North Shields (Northumberland), 186 Northampton, 463 Norwich, 222, 288, 290, 417 n., 462; banks (see also Gurney), 296-7; brewers, 113, 365; London beer sent to, 142 Nottingham, 150, 173-4, 346- See also Beer, varieties Nottinghamshire, 392, 395 Oakes, Humphrey and Bangham (hop-mer¬ chants, Bridgnorth, Worcs.), 500-1, 503 Oakley (brewer and banker, Deal), 329 Oates, Mrs (brewer, Portsmouth), 202 Oates, Robert (agent, Allsopps), 183-4 Odiham (Hants.), 532 Old Ford (Essex), 444 Orkney Islands, 208 Oswestry (Shropshire), 395 Oundle (Northants.), 200, 201. See also Smith, John Ouse (river), Great, 497; Little, 444 Overing, Noah (brewer, Wapping), 9, 198 Oxford, 436, 438, 451; University, 260, 308 Page, Charles (brewer, London, Cork), 165 n. Page, Sir G. (brewer, London), 333 Page, William and Henry (malt-merchants, Herts.), 457 Paget, Lord, 175 Palmer, John (brewer, Bath), 324, 333 Palmer, Samuel (brewer, Bath), 324 Parnell, J. (barley merchant, Newark), 452 Parry, Joseph, 53, 244-7. See also Golden Lane Brewery Parry, Thomas (publican, Chatham), 148 Parsons family, 303 Parsons, Alderman Humphrey (brewer, Red Lion Brewery, London), 5, 11, 23, 58, 136, 199, 330-1, 335 Parsons, Sir John (brewer, Red Lion Brewery, London), 7, 9, n, 199, 335 Pasteur, Louis (chemist), 49 Patteson family (Norwich), 336 Patteson, J. (brewer, Norwich), 333, 336 Peacock Brewhouse (White Cross Street, St Giles, London), 555. See also Calvert, John, Sr Pelham, Henry (Sec. to Commissioners of Victualling), 206 Pelham, Lord, t,1 Pellat and Co. (brewers, Portsmouth), 198 Pembrokeshire, 436

588

Index Portman, E. B. (M.P.), 217 Portsmouth, 436; contract brewers, 195, 197-200, 202; naval brewhouse at, 201-2 Portugal, 193-5 Pratt, W. (barley-merchant, Banbury), 451 Preschell and Brogden (merchants, London), 280 Prestwidge and Wilson (hop-merchants, Lon¬ don), 528. See also Bolland and Prestwidge Prince, Son and Johnson (hop-merchants, London), 530 Prince Regent, xi, 62 Printon, Benjamin (brewer, Burton-onTrent), 174 Prior and Co. (brewers, London), 463 Prior, John (brewer, London), 445 n. Prior, Vickris (malt-merchant), 459 Prior, William (brewer, London), 444 Pritchard, Benjamin (cooper, London), 224 Proctor family (malt-merchants, Herts.), 439 Proctor, Ambrose (malt-merchant, Herts.),

Pennant, T. (historian), 61 Penzance, 201 Pepys, Samuel (diarist), 7, 67, 150, 174 Perkins, A. C. (partner, Birtley Ironworks), 512

Perkins, Charles, 511-12 Perkins, Frederick (s. of John Perkins, part¬ ner, Anchor Brewery), 221, 231, 463, 512 Perkins, Henry (s. of John Perkins, partner, Anchor Brewery), 221 Perkins, John (partner, Anchor Brewery), 222, 230 n., 288, 296, 331; becomes partner, 272-6; entertainment allowance, 137; res¬ ponsibilities as H. Thrale’s manager, 8, 31, 33-5, 47, 60 n., 258; rights as partner, 3x4-15; saves brewery from rioters (1780), 270-1; saves brewery in crises, 267-9, 281, 526; second marriage, 273, 287; visits to Ireland, 155-6 Perkins, Rosa (investor, Anchor Brewery), 291 Pery (Lord, Speaker of Irish Commons), 163 Petersson, C. A. (Baltic merchant), 177 Philadelphia, 290, 292-3 Phillips, Anthony (brewer, Wapping and Deptford), 197-8 Phillips (clerk, Whitbreads), 32 Phillips and Yarranton (hop-merchants, Worcester), 501, 517, 532 Phipps (brewers and bankers, Northampton), 254, 255, 329

Piggott, Ann (investor, Whitbreads), 280 Pirn, Elizabeth (nee Bevan, investor, Anchor Brewery), 291 Piozzi, G. (2nd husband, H. L. Thrale), 137, 142 Pitt, William, the Younger, 163, 239 n. Player, Henry (brewer, Portsmouth), 197,199 Pliny, 4 Plot, Dr R. (writer), 174 Plumer, William (maltster, Bishop’s Stortford), 445 Plymouth, 148, 173, 200, 202, 467 Poland, 74, 176. See also Danzig Poles (Essex), 298, 462. See also Hanbury, Sampson Poles worth, 451 Popper family (malt-merchants, Herts.), 444 Pot Act, see Public houses Porter brewing, advantages of large-scale production, 20, 43, 58, 60, 244-5; changes in, 76-8, 209, 213, 419-23; diffusion of, 44-6, 185-6; hops used in, 17, 482, 515; innovation, 12-21; stability of beer, 18-21; techniques, 15-18; water suited for, 16, 44. See also Beer, Brewers, Brewing industry

443, 444, 457 Proctor, George (malt-merchant, Herts.), 457 Prussia, 176; King to visit Whitbreads, 137 Pryce, Elijah (clerk, Whitbreads), 32 Prynne, William (writer on Excise), 477 Pryor, Robert (brewer, London; partner Trumans), 298, 318, 444, 511 Pryor, Thomas M. (brewer, London; partner, Trumans), 298, 318, 511 Public houses, beer pump, 106-9; clubs at, 264, 277-8; control by brewers, 5, 8, 103, 117-38, 236-7, 249, 300, 303 n.; criticism of, 125-8, 241, 352; decline in skills of publican, 102-6; defended by Excise Com¬ missioners, 125-6, 364; hop-marketing at, 501, 505-6, 509; numbers in England, 100, 117; numbers in London, 103 n., 117, 122, 127; profits of publicans, 100,111, 113-14; publicans’ debts to brewers, 125-8, 241, 352; radicals at, 239; restriction of licences, 126-30, 238, 331, 364; social importance of, xi, 101, 277-8; tax on publicans, 116 Public houses mentioned in text: Botany Bay, 139 n.; Bush Inn (Farnborough), 522 n.; Castle (Aldersgate), 505; Crown (Crown Court, Fleet Street), 108; Crown and Anchor (Strand), 239; Dog and Duck (St George’s Fields), 101; English Hotel (Flushing), 104; Etheridge’s Coffee House (City, London), 505; Flying Horse (Grub Street), 278; Garraway’s Coffee House, 101, 246; George (City, London), 505; Green Dragon (Southwark), 119; Grey¬ hound Inn (Southwark), 505; Hind’s Head (Chiswell Street), 278; Hop Pole

589

Index Public Houses mentioned (cont.) (Worcester), 501; King’s Arms (Blackman Street), 278; Mitre (Portsmouth Common), 142; Oxford Arms (Whitecross Street), 120; Peacock (Gray’s Inn Lane), 150; Petit’s Coffee House (Southwark), 505; Red Bull (Cambridge), 142; Rising Sun Hotel (Bou¬ logne), 194; Seven Stars (Thames Street), 509; Ship (Gray’s Inn Road), 139 n.; Ship (Somerset Street), 114; Spread Eagle (Strand), 121; Sun (Eagle Court), 120; Surgeon’s Head (City, London), 505; Swan (Bedford), 142; Three Cups (City, London), 505; Vine (Thames Street), 117 Publican Brewers, see Brewing victuallers Puckeridge (Herts.), 265

Rennie, John (engineer), 86 n., 87, 92,96,444 Retailing, beer and spirits, 100-6; general changes in, 99-100. See also Public houses Retford (Notts.), 486 Reynolds and Co. (bankers, London), 445 Reynolds (of Ketley), 83 n. Rich, Charles (cooper, London), 224 Richardson, John (writer on brewing), 45-6, 64, 67, 71-3, 174, 415 Richardson, Overend and Co. (bill-brokers, London), 295, 305 Richardson, Thomas (bill-broker, London; investor, Anchor Brewery), 296, 326, 398. See also Richardson, Overend and Co. Ridge, Sir Thomas (brewer, Portsmouth), 197-9, 202, 333 Riga, 188 Rixon and Co. (coopers, London), 57, 224 Robinson, Armstrong and Co. (merchants, Liverpool), 148 Robinson, Frederick John (Chancellor of Exchequer), no, 241 Rochester (Kent), 479, 497 Rolfe, John (brewer, Harwich), 198-9 Romney, G. (painter), 33 Roper, John (malt-merchant, London), 283 Rotherham, 257 Rothlander and Boyd (merchants, St Peters¬ burg), 180 Rowntree, Thomas (engineer), 87, 109 Royal Society, 52, 64, 68, 205, 402 n. Royle, Joseph (hop-merchant, Canterbury), 510, 512, 532 Royston (Herts.), 439, 463 Rundle, R. (investor, Anchor Brewery), 293 Rush, Mr (investor, Anchor Brewery), 267 Russia, exports to, 176, 186; introduction of porter brewing, 45; isinglass from, 51-3; staves from, 54. See also St Petersburgh

Quakers, 292, 298-9, 505-7, 530. See also Anchor Brewery, Trumans, and individual families Quin (instrument-maker), 69 Raikes, William and Thomas (Baltic mer¬ chants), 177 Ramsbottom and Baverstock (brewers, Wind¬ sor), 85, 255 n. Ramsbottom, John and Richard (brewers and bankers, Windsor), 150, 255 n., 328-9, 333, 335

Ramsbottom, Thomas (brewer, Windsor), 367, 422 Ramsgate, 186 Randell and Sons (malt-merchants, London), 283 Ranworth (Norfolk), 417 Ratcliffe, Samuel (brewer, London), 198 Rawson, Thomas (brewer, Sheffield), 44 Raymond, John (brewer, London), 116 Read, General H. (investor, Trumans), 286 Read, Henry, Sr (s.-in-law, Benjamin Tru¬ man), 274 Read, William Truman (partner, Trumans) 274, 286, 297 Reading (Berks.), 200, 436, 438 Reddington, W. (writer on brewing), 70, 72 Red Lion Brewery (St Katharine’s, London), bank loans, 303-5; hop buying, 526-7; horses, 84, 92-3; makings owned, 468; new partners, 303-4; steam-engine, 83-90, 92-3; vats, 58. See also Cotton, J. H., Goodwyn, H.; Hoare, H. and G. M.; Parsons, H. and J. Refrigerators, 75-6 Reid family, 303, 310 n. See also Meux Reid, John and Thomas (sugar refiners), 311 Rendle and Co. (brewers, Plymouth), 85

Saccharometer, see Hydrometer Saffron Walden (Essex), 255, 438, 444, 463 St Albans (Herts.), 438 St Helens, see Greenall St Katharines, see Hartshorne Brewhouse, Red Lion Brewery St Petersburg, 180, 185, 188-9 Salaries, see Wages Salisbury (Wilts.), 436 Salt and Co. (brewers, Burton-on-Trent), 176, 186, 192, 227, 255 Salusbury, Sir Thomas (unde of H. L. Thrale), 267 Sanders (brewer and banker, Witney), 329 Sanderson, Sir James (banker, hop merchant, London), 334, 501, 509, 530

590

Index Sandford and Co. (ale brewers, London), 12 Sandwich (Kent), 345, 483 Sangster, Robert (clerk, partner at Whitbreads), as partner, 275, 300, 308-11; comments on malt, 454; in dispute with T. Brown, 306-7; rights as partner, 315; salary and service, 32-4. See also Whit¬ bread’s brewery Saunders (instrument-maker), 69 Saville, Christopher, see Atkinson, Christopher Scarisbrick, Joseph (writer on Excise), 68 Scott, Reginald (writer on agriculture), 477 Scott, Brown and Yeates, see Yeates and Brown Scott, Claude (grain merchant, London), 234 Scott, John (brewer. London), 24 Scott, Thomas (malt-merchant, Herts.), 457 Scrase (solicitor, investor, Anchor Brewery), 267, 269 Scurvy, 206, 207-9 Searle family (malt-merchants, Herts.), 327, 328, 329, 439, 444 Searle, James (malt-merchant, Saffron Wal¬ den), 255, 329, 445, 458-9, 461 Searle, Samuel (malt-merchant), 463 Serle, Andrew (malt-merchant, Herts.), 443 Sessions (brewer, Charlbury, Oxon.), 299 Severn (river), 436, 498 Shackle, Thomas (timber merchant, brewer, London), 256 Shannon, Robert (writer on brewing), 64, 72, 75, 165, 420 Shaw, Dr Peter (writer on chemistry), 64,

66 Shaw, Stebbing (writer), 174 Shaw-Lefevre, C. (partner, Whitbreads), 333, 334, 336 Shea, Mrs Jean (brewer, Portsmouth), 198 Sheffield breweries, 44-5 Shelburne, Lord, 223 Shepherd, Mr (clerk, Whitbreads), 32 Shepherd, Samuel (M.P.), 250 Sheppard and Co. (brewers, Faversham, Kent), 85 Sheppard, Samuel (malt-merchant, Herts.), 445 n. Sheridan, R. B., 354, 421 n. Shewed, Thomas and Godfrey (partners, Whitbread’s brewery), 261-2. See also Whitbread’s brewery Ships, Adventure, 206; Dantzig, 188; Dis¬ covery, 208; Endeavour, 206; Hmdostan, 190; Humber, 179, 188; Penguin, 206; Porter, 179,188; Resolution, 206; Sally, 188 Shorter, Stephen (publican, London), 121 Shorthose, Thomas (agent, Allsopp’s), 184

Shum, George (brewer, London), 25 n., 48, 85, 93, 256, 332-4. See also Combe and Delafield Sikes, Bartholomew (instrument-maker), 69 Simes (hop merchant, London), 509 Simond, Louis (writer), 79 Simonds (brewers and bankers, Reading), 200, 319, 328, 329 Simpson (brewer, Mayfield, Ashbourne), 299 Sittingbourne (Kent), 483, 504 Skinner, William (partner, Red Lion Brewery), 303 Skye, 142, 173 Slaney, R. A. (M.P.), 243, 397 Slater, David (brewer in Whitbreads), 34 Slater, William (clerk, Whitbreads), 33, 279, 280, 284 Slocock (brewer and banker, Newbury), 329 Sloper, Samuel (clerk, Whitbreads), 32 Smeaton, John (engineer), 33 n., 59 n., 60, 86-7, 95 n., 203, 443 Smiles, Samuel (writer), 83 n., 228 Smith, A., xxiv, 53, 99, 214, 250, 339-4°> 358-9, 517; favours malt tax, 342 Smith, Charles (writer on corn), 390 Smith, Sir Culling (investor, Whitbreads), 285 Smith, John (brewer and banker, Oundle, Northants.), 28, 200, 201, 329, 448 Smith, John (maltster, Norwich), 468 Smith, John (merchant, Gainsborough), 148, 176 Smith, Samuel (merchant, Norwich), 142 Smith, Rev. Sydney, xi, 242-3, 352 Smith, Wienholt and Co. (Baltic merchants), 177 Smyrna, 195 Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, 74 Solly, Isaac (Baltic merchant), 177 Southampton, 436 South Town (near Yarmouth), 468 Southill Park (Beds.), 33, 308, 441. See also Whitbread, Samuel, Jr Southwark, 3, 5, 169, 182, 260, 270, 297, 332, 334, 481, 497, 502-3. See also Anchor Brewery, Hops Southwell (Notts.), 486 Southwold (Suffolk), 434 South America, 193 South Walsham (Norfolk), 417 Spain, 193-5 Speer, William (instrument-maker), 68-9 Spencer, Lord Robert (investor, Whitbreads), 285

591

Index Spirits, consumption in England, xxv, 242, 375, 482; consumption in Ireland, 159-60, 166; imports, 426; in the Navy, 196, 203-5. See also Distillers Spitalfields, 263, 274, 297. See also Truman’s Brewery Springall, David (investor, Barclay Perkins’ brewery), 292 Springall, Nathaniel (m. Hanna Gurney), 287, 292 Staff, 28-37; becoming partners, 271-3, 275-6, 298, 309; clerks, 8, 31-3, 275-7; collecting clerks, 31, 106, 122; draymen, 36, 78; investments in breweries, 279, 284, 318; mobilised for defence, 37; salaried brewers, 8, 33-5, 202-3; unimportance of semi-skilled labour, 35-6 Stanstead Abbotts (Herts.), 255, 437, 443 Statute of Apprentices (5 Eliz. I, c. 4), 219, 248 Staves, imports, 54, 57, 178-9, 256 Steam-engine, 80-98; advantages of, 81-2, 92-5; ease of adoption, 80; first orders from breweries, 82-4; high-pressure engine, 95-6; horse-power rating, 84 n.; length of life, 96-7; Watt engines in breweries, 85 Stein (M.P.), 185 Stephens (brewer and banker, Reading), 329 Stephenson and Co. (brewers, London), 85 Stephenson, Peter (instrument-maker), 69 Stephenson, Sir William (banker and hopmerchant, London), 501, 530 Stettin, 182 Stewart and Head (brewers, Bow, London), 131 Stonard, Unwin and Co. (brewers, Bromley), 367, 512

Stort (River), 428, 437, 444 Stosch, Baron (of Berlin), 207 Stourbridge (Worcs.), 492 Stourbridge Fair (Cambridgeshire), see Hops Stourport (Worcs.), 500 Stow, John (writer), 5 Stowmarket (Suffolk), 484 Streatham, 270 Struthers, John (brewer, Glasgow), 45, 85 Stubs, Peter (brewer and maltster, of War¬ rington), 225; barley buying, 436, 451-2; ‘box’ (club), 278; hop buying and selling, 498, 500-1; malt selling, 500; porter bought, 45 n.; porter not brewed, 46; yeast sold, 41 Suffield, Lord (of Norfolk), 462 Suffolk, 364, 403, 428, 433. See also Barley, Malt

Sugar, in brewing, 234-5, 422; refining (Martineau), 311; steam-engine for sugar plant¬ ing, 97-8 Summerfield, William P. (brewer, Coventry), 299. See also Coventry Porter Brewery Sunderland, 434 Sundridge (Kent), 492 A Sure Guide to Distillers, 68 Sussex Downs, 393 Sutcliffe (brewer and banker, Ilkley), 329 Swainswick (Somerset), 477 Sweden, exports by Swedish brewers, 193; hops exported to, 169; introduction of porter brewing to, 45, 185; staves from, 54. See also Exports Tadcaster (Yorks.), 256 Tamworth (Staffs.), 179 Tash, Thomas (partner, Calvert’s brewery), 3i3 Tawney (brewer and banker, Oxford), 328-9 Taylor and Lloyd’s (bankers, London), 294-5 Taylor family (malt-merchants, Herts.), 328, 439, 444, 457 Taylor, H. A. and D. (maltsters, Ware), 437 n. Taylor, Henry (patentee of beer-concentrate), 207 Taylor, J. (brewer, Liverpool), 85 Taylor, J. (brewer, London), 85 Taylor, John (malt-merchant, Bishop’s Stortford), annual holiday at Cromer, 451,462-3, 506; business as malt-factor, 456-61; family, 457-8, 463; relations with Sampson Hanbury, 458-62 Taylor, John, Jr (maltster, brewer, Saffron Walden), 255, 463 Taylor, Joseph and William (sons of John Taylor of Bishop’s Stortford); malt-mer¬ chants, Stortford), 462, 463 Taylor, Joseph (malt-merchant, Bishop’s Stortford), 445 Taylor, Samuel (malt-merchant, Ware), 457,

458 Taylor, Vickeris (Trustee, Regent’s Park Canal), 447 Tea, consumption, xxv, 375; dealers, 216 Teme (river valley), 484, 497 Temperance, xii, xxv, 125 Tenbury (Worcs.), 500 Tetley family (brewers, Leeds), XIII, 254, 319 Tetley, William (brewer, Leeds), 255 Thackrahs (hop-merchants, London), 169 n., 509-13, 525, 528 Thackrah, Eden (m. Perkins), 512 n. Thackrah, George, Jr (hop-merchant, Lon¬ don), 512

592

Index Tithes, 216 n. Todhunter, Joseph (brewing chemist), 235 n. Tollemache (brewer and banker, Ipswich),

Thackrah, George Sr (hop-merchant, Lon¬ don), 512 Thackrah, John (hop-merchant, London), 512 Thames (River), breweries sited by, 5, 140, 146, 197, 201, 311; carriage of barley and malt, 342, 428-9, 436-8, 443-4, 446; car¬ riage of coal, 454; carriage of hops, 507; carriage of beer, 149-50, 188, 197; water for brewing, 16, 44, 192 Thermometer, introduced into brewing, 42, 63-7; use in hop kilns, 494 Thetford (Norfolk), 462 Thomas, William (malt-merchant, London),

329 Tomkins family (malt-merchants, Herts.),

Thomson, Professor (Glasgow University), 69 Thornton and Co. (bankers, London), 445 Thornton, Robert (patentee of beer concen¬ trate), 208 Thornton, Samuel (M.P.), 127 Thornton, Thomas (partner, Red Lion Brewery), 303. See also Red Lion Brewery Thoyts and Co. (coppersmiths, London), 87 Thrale, Henry (owner, Anchor Brewery), 34-5, 47, 52, 56,79,136,173, 287, 3i4, 35°, 450; ambition, 61; dangers of ambition, 228, 265-9, 529; death, without male heir, 271-4; duped by H. Jackson, 206, 421; hop-buying, 524; hydrometer adopted, 70-1, 417; inactive in Brewers’ Company, 221; Irish trade, 141, 155; M.P., 31, 137, 332-7; malt-buying, 418; military contract, 199; upbringing, 260, 308; vat of beer lost, 60 n.; vats installed, 59. See also Anchor Brewery Thrale, Mrs H. L. (Piozzi), 61; comments on profits, 226, 228; dealings with J. Perkins, 47, 258; gives Perkins a house, 315; gives Perkins reward, 271 n.; negotiates for sale of brewery, 271-3; opposes H. Jackson, 206; orders bottled porter, 142; rents col¬ lected by J. Perkins, 156, 291; runs brewery with J. Perkins, 266-70. See also Anchor Brewery Thrale, Ralph (owner, Anchor Brewery), 11, 22; buys brewery from Halsey’s heirs, 24, 258-9, 273; clerk to Edmund Halsey, 8; does not attend Brewers’ Company, 221; M.P., 116, 333-4; malt-buying, 418; over¬ spends on Henry Thrale, 260. See also Anchor Brewery Thrale, Ralph (maltster, Hertford), 424 Threlfall (brewer and banker, Liverpool), 329 Tiby, William (hop-merchant), 450, 505-6. See also Briggins, Peter Tickell, Henry (patentee of refrigerator), 75

283, 327 Tompson and Co. (malt-merchants, London), 292 Tomson, Thomas (brewer, Ramsgate), 319 n. Tomson and Wotton (brewers, Ramsgate), 319 m Tonbridge (Kent), 483 Tooke, Thomas (writer and merchant), 244 Torbay, 200 Treatise on Mechanics (1806), 108 Trees, Boyce (malt-merchant, London), 256 Trent (River), 173-4, J76, 182, 192, 408 Trevithick, Richard (engineer), 96 Trevor and Keogh (brewers, Dublin), 85, 166 Tritton (brewer and banker, London), 329, 511 Trollope, Mrs (writer), 61 n. Truman, Sir Benjamin (owner, Truman’s Brewery), 25, 266, 289, 509; beers brewed, 14; calculates profits, 39, 472; comments on business, 265; compensates publicans, 113 n.; controls brewery, 11, 263-4; death, 274; descendants, 275, 297; greatest brewer in London (1750), 260, 266; not an M.P., 337) production and capital of business, 22-5; sees Duke of Newcastle, 115; stock policy, 419, 524. See also Truman’s Brewery Truman, Joseph Jr (partner, Truman’s brewery), 263 Truman, Joseph Sr (owner, Truman’s brewery, 263 Truman’s Brewery (Black Eagle Brewery, Spitalfields, London), allowances to pub¬ licans, in; balance sheets (1741-1830), 55, 557-8; barley imports, 234; beer in pub¬ licans’ cellars, 105; beer stocks (1741-3), 14-15, 77; beers brewed, 14; black malt, 420 n., 423; brewery established, 11, 263; ‘cabinet dinner’, 330; capital (1741-90), 24, 55,471-7; capital and loans, 264, 283-4, 286, 295-6, 301, 304-6; control of public houses, 119, 121-2, 131-5, 138; country trade, 141, 143, 145-9; early history, 263; East Anglian malt, 417, 419-20; exports, 140 m, 194; hop-buying, 509-10, 524-5, 527-30, 531 n.; hop prices, 480; horses, 79, 85; malt-buying, 442, 456, 458-62, 464 n.; 468-72; malt prices, 396; ownership after Sir B. Truman’s death, 274-5; Pr'ce con“ trol, 114-15; price rise of 1761, 115; pro-

593

Index Wapping brewers, 197-8 Ward, Mrs Carolina (brewer, Yarmouth), 105 n. See also Lacon’s brewery Ward, Thomas (carrier, Shipstone), 142 Ware (Herts.), 267, 342, 405, 418, 423, 436-46,457-8,463-4,467-8. See also Malt, Malting industry Warminster (Wilts.), 436 Warrington, 451, 500-1. See also Stubbs, Peter Water (in brewing processes). See Porter brewing, Burton-on-Trent Waterford (Ireland), 153, 155, 166 Wateringbury (Kent), 532 Watkins, G. (writer on brewing), 40, 45, 60 Watney family (brewers, London), 318 Watson (engineer, London), 92 Watson, Captain J. R. (of Dawlish), 292-3 Watson, Sir W. (h. of Christiana Gurney), 292 Watt, James, 40, 65, 81-94 Wedgwood, Josiah (industrialist), 60-1 Weevil (naval brewery, Gosport), 201-3 Wells (Norfolk), 429, 432, 434 Wells, John (partner, Griffin Brewery), 303 Wells, Samuel (brewer, maltster, banker, Biggleswade), 123, 129, 319, 328-9, 454-5 Wells, William (partner, Griffin Brewery), 303 Wesley, John, xxv West Bromwich, 183 West India merchants, 203, 205, 215, 218,

Truman Brewery (cont.) duction (1748-1830), 23, 26, 55, 551-2; profits and costs (1769-75), 39, 470-2; pur¬ chase of casks, 55-6; Quaker partners, 275, 294-8; security fund, 315; staff and wages, 31 n., 35-6; steam-engine, 83, 85, 93; under Sir Benjamin Truman, 263-5 Turkey, 172, 195 Tusser, Thomas (writer on agriculture), 65, 477

Twining, Richard (tea merchant), 216, 248 Twopenny, Mr (investor, Truman’s brewery), 264 Tyhurst (brewer, Chatham), 199 Tylee and Gent (brewers and bankers, Devizes), 329 Vallance, John (patentee of refrigerator), 75 Valparaiso, 191 Van der Schaal, J. W. and M. (Baltic mer¬ chants), 178 Van Duren, Peter (brewer, London), 5 Van Bruiven, W. and Sons (Baltic merchants), 178 Vansittart, N. (Chancellor of Exchequer), 232, 234-5, 241, 420 Vats, 15, 24-5, 58-62; advantages, 20-1, 23, 58-60; contest for largest, 61-2; disaster to, 62; first used, 58. See also Cisterns Vaughan, Sjt (lawyer), 368 Villebois, Henry (partner, Truman’s brewery), 275. See also Truman’s Brewery Villebois, John Truman (partner, Truman’s Brewery), 275, 297. See also Truman’s Brewery Viry, Count (investor, Anchor Brewery), 267-8 Von Ankum (merchant, Danzig), 179

335, 432 West Indies, exports to, 172, 182, 191, 193-4, 200 n., 208-9 Westcote, Lord, 260 Westmorland, Earl of, 164 Weston and Co. (brewers and bankers, Nor¬ wich), 329 Weston, William (hop-merchant, Liverpool),

Waddington, S. F. (hop-merchant, London), 499, 5i4, 517-22, 525 Waddington, Warwick and Co. (hop-mer¬ chants, London), 517 n. 1 Wages, 8, 31-2, 34-7, 202-3; l°w wage costs in breweries, 36-7, 229-30. See also Staff Wakefield (brewer and banker, Kendall), 329 Wakefield, Edward (writer), 72 Walberswick (Suffolk), 434 Walcheren Expedition, 184 n. Walker and Co. (brewers, Fermoy), 85 Walker, J. (of Calais), 194 Walker, James (patentee of mashing machine),

50i

Weyhill Fair, 491, 498-9, 503, 505 Weyland, B. D. (Baltic merchant), 177 Wheeler, Daniel (patentee of roasted malt), 423

Whitbread family (brewers, London), 258, 287, 318 Whitbread, Ive (merchant, London), 261 Whitbread, Lady Mary (w. of Samuel Whit¬ bread I), 173 Whitbread, S. C. (partner, Whitbread’s brewery), 312 Whitbread, Samuel, I (brewer, London), 14, 42, 56-7, 7L 97-8, 139 n-, 173, 228, 264, 266, 268-9, 271, 275, 307, 312; appren¬ ticeship, 23-4; attemperator refused, 75; banks seek him as a partner, 326; Brewers’

94

Walpole, Col. Robert, 150 Walpole, Sir Robert, xxiv, 335, 356 Walsby, John (brewer, Battersea), 200

594

Index Whitbread, Samuel (cont.) Company, 222-3; brewery established, 11, 25, 260-1; cellars rented, 58; cisterns built underground, 59-61; comments on staff, 32-3; and Duke of Newcastle, 115; Excise defrauding no wish for, 347; exports, 194; financial affairs, 277-80; Gainsborough paints clerks and Smeaton, 33, 87; hop¬ buying, 523, 532; hydrometer refused, 70; Irish trade, 141, 143, 147, 156-7; King George III visits brewery, 137, 277, 330; landed estates, 263, 280, 287, 320, 333; ledgers entered up, 36, 277; M.P., 221, 333, 337; malt-buying, 418-19; makings hired, 467; marriage, 262-3; military con¬ tract, 199; public houses controlled, 119-21; steam-engine installed in brewery, 83, 88, 90-8; Trustee of Lea Navigation, 444. See also Whitbread’s brewery Whitbread, Samuel, II (brewer, London), 34, 114, 136, 253, 265, 286, 307, 315, 417, 422, 454; capital and partners, 301-2, 306-7; career, 308-9; comments on staff, 35; cor¬ respondence with Samuel Wells, 123, 129; defence of brewery (1803), 37; helps trade as M.P., 31, 232, 234, 250, 333-5, 338; landed estates, 324, 332; loans to, 283-5 (from hop and malt merchants), 283, 528 (from W. Wilshere), 301, 441; Martineau family, 310-11; suicide, 312; Trustee of Lea Navigation, 444. See also Whitbread’s brewery Whitbread, W. H. (partner, Whitbread’s brewery, 312) Whitbread’s Brewery, capital (1762-90), 24; capital and partners, 256, 300-2, 314, 326-7; casks purchasing, 56-7; cisterns, 59-60; country trade, 142-6; establish¬ ment of brewery (1742), 11, 25, 260-3; export trade, 141,194; fermentation appara¬ tus, 75; finances, 277-87, 291, 294, 296, 305, 528; hop-buying, 509-10, 523-5, 528-9, 532; horses, 79-80; hydrometer, 70-1; Irish trade, 141, 143, 156-8; malt¬ buying, 406, 441, 454, 458, 467-8; malt, Norfolk, 411, 416-19; malt, roasted, 423; malt stocks, 460, 471-3; ma,t store and wharf established, 447; makings owned, 468; management problems, 306-12; Mar¬ tineau amalgamation, 298, 310-11; porter tun room, 14; production, xxiii, 25-6; public houses controlled, 119-21, 125, 129, 131-4, 138; royalty visit brewery, 137, 277, 330; staff, 32-7; steam-power, 83-5, 88, 93—8; storage cellars, 58; Timothy Brown dispute, 306-8

White, Matthew (brewer, Bristol), 45 Whitmore, William (patentee, mashing machine), 94 Whittenbury, Richard (surveyor, Lea Naviga¬ tion), 442 Whittingstall, William (maltster, Herts.), 255 Whittington (Stoke Ferry, Norfolk), 468 Wickham Fair (Hants.), 505 Wightman, John (brewer, London), 23, 261 Wigney, G. A. (writer on brewing), 65 Wigram, Sir Robert (partner, Griffin Brewery), 302-3, 317 n., 333-5. See also Griffin Brewery Wigram, William (partner, Griffin Brewery), 302, 333-5

Wilberforce, William, 97, 127 Wilkins, William (cooper, Whitbreads), 157 Wilkinson, John (ironmaster), 82, 87, 260 Willett family (bankers), 288 Williams, E. (investor, Anchor Brewery), 8 Wilshere family (attorneys, Hitchin), 326, 329, 440, 441 Wilshere, John (s. of W. Wilshere, Sr), 440 Wilshere, William, Jr (of Hitchin), 440-1 Wilshere, William, Sr (partner, Whitbread’s brewery), 256, 301, 310, 312, 327; making, 413, 440-1 Wilson, Ann (d. of Benjamin Wilson), 181 Wilson, Benjamin, Jr (brewer, Burton-onTrent), 183, 441, 453; barley buying, 379, 449-52 (heavy barley demanded), 415; beer strength insisted upon, 184; capital not borrowed, 252; casks, 55; cotton mill part¬ nership, 323-4; exports, 28, 176-7, 186-9; hop-buying, 498, 529-30; hop garden bought, 532; hydrometer, 71; malting, 407-8, 411; other trading activities, 180-1; porter brewing, 45; prices, 461; shipping interests, 179-80, 187; staves imported, 178-9 Wilson, Benjamin Sr, 180-1 Wilson, Sir Henry, 239 Wilson, John Walker (brewer, Burton-onTrent), 180-1 Wilson, Joseph (hop-merchant, London), 283, 528 Wilson, William (s. of B. Wilson, Sr), 180 Wilson, see Prestwidge and Wilson Wiltshire, 393 Winchester College, 480 Windsor (Berks.), 150, 185, 438 467 Wise, Samuel (clerk, Anchor Brewery), 8,259 Wood, Matthew (hop-merchant, London),

334, 336, 420, 422 Wood, Wigan and Co. (hop-merchants, Lon¬ don), 420, 508. See also Wood, Matthew

595

lb

253C 28 Index Woodbridge, 434 Woodcock (brewer and banker, Halesworth), 329

Woodhouse, James, 105 Woolaston, William, F.R.S., 69 Woolf, Arthur (engine-maker), 95-6 Worcestershire, hop cultivation, 169, 479, 484-6, 488; marketing, 500-3, 506-7, 517-22, 530; picking, 492; Worcester Fair, 501, 505. See also Hops Worthington family (brewers and bankers, Burton-on-Trent), 176, 179-80, 186, 227, 329

Wrecclesham (Hants.), 483 Wren, Sir Christopher, 201 Wright, Ichabod (banker, Nottingham), 295 n. Wright, Maria (m. A. K. Barclay), 295 n. Wyatt, Scarth (malt-merchant, Herts.), 457 Wykes (hop-merchant, Canterbury), 509 Yallowley, Jacob (clerk, partner, of Whitbreads), brewery investments, 284; clerk, 32, 34, 307; Executor to S. Whitbread, I,

34; partner, 34, 275, 300, 306, 308-10, 315; steam-engine installation, 90, 94 Yarmouth, grain trade, 323, 429-30, 432-4; London beer sent, 142; makings, 468; por¬ ter brewing, 46. See also Lacon Yarranton, see Phillips and Yarranton Yeast, xviii, 20, 41-2, 48-51, 235-6; brewers’ monopoly in, 236; drying, 50; trade in, 49-52. See also Fermentation Yeates, Jasper, of Philadelphia, 292 Yeates, Timothy (hop-merchant, London), 508. See also Yeates and Brown Yeates and Brown (hop-merchants, London), 283, 501, 509-10, 5i9, 526, 528 York, 449, 451 Young, Arthur (writer on agriculture), 127, 39°, 397

Younger, William (brewer, Edinburgh), 45, 151, 183, 257, 258 n., 319 Younger, W. Sr. (of Winton,near Edinburgh), 257

Zimmerman (merchant, Danzig), 179

I

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DATE DUE / DATED

CARR M°LHAN