(bottles rattling)
(horn beeps)
(machinery humming)
(air hissing)
(air whooshing)
(liquid running)
(machinery humming)
- [Man] Your life was the brewery.
You know, you didn't leave the job,
because it was such a good job.
You know, it paid well,
with lots of overtime,
you weren't just a number, you know,
you clocked in, and when you clocked out,
you're still part of the brewery.
You know, that was it, the
brewery was your family.
(upbeat rhythmic music)
(beeping)
(horn tooting)
(barrel clanking)
(barrel rattling)
(knocking)
(snapping)
(clinking)
(rattling)
(liquid pouring)
(upbeat rhythmic music)
- I don't think it's a coincidence
that the surviving breweries
in London for so long
were those, mostly
those, along the Thames,
because that was one of
the important aspects
of London brewing, that you had the Thames
as a terrific route in
for your raw materials.
- Most people lived local,
because we had Watney Cottages,
which was next door to the brewery,
and then you had two blocks of flats.
I think it was Reid House,
Combe House, and Watney House,
and that's where, originally,
when you got a job there,
you got a flat as well,
or a house to live in,
as part of the job.
- Where I was born, it
backed on to Watney's,
so it was right in front
of our bedroom windows.
So you could smell the
hops, and malt, and barley,
and everything.
And the beer.
And you could hear the
noises of those lorries,
and the horse-and-carts,
and we used to go down
to the stables along the
river, and feed the horses
when we were kids.
- I lived just the other side
of Wandsworth Roundabout,
when I was a baby, you know.
And Mum used to walk me
down the road by the hand,
and I could smell the brewery from there.
The hops, and the horses
was up and down there
as well, you know.
And so, I got a sort of
long memory of the horses,
and that smell.
Sort of grew up with that smell.
- We were always Young's of Wandsworth,
never Young's of London.
It was always Wandsworth
that we identified with.
And, yeah, I think the local
community were very proud.
I mean, apart from the fact
that they would all have
at least one relative who
worked in the brewery.
Everybody felt connected to it.
- The one thing about the
breweries that I worked in,
there were always a
big sense of community,
even at Watney's.
In Watney's Brewery,
people were there second,
third, fourth generation,
and if your father worked in the brewery,
the chances were you worked
in the brewery as well.
- There were lots of
families, I mean there's one
in particular that did 250 years.
One of the sons was a
drayman, another of the sons
worked in the brewing area,
another one of the sons
was a driver.
He's still alive, he's 90 years old now.
- Well, yes, a lot of
people in the brewery
were interrelated.
You had to be a bit
careful if you were talking
about somebody in a sort
of, rather derogatory way,
or somebody (laughs) might sort of say,
"oh, you're talking
about my brother-in-law",
you know? (laughs)
(upbeat rhythmic music)
- Mortlake was the biggest
employer in the district.
So, as far as I was concerned,
and my parents were concerned,
to get a job in the brewery,
you know, you're made for life.
- My mum's cousin, who was a plumber
in one of the breweries,
was down for afternoon tea,
as you did in them days.
And he said, "What did you wanna do?"
And I said, "I'm not sure."
And I explained what
I was doing at school.
And he said, "Have you
thought of trying brewing?"
I said, "No."
He said, "Well, I know
they send you to college."
I thought, "Oh, that sounds
like the answer to a prayer."
'Cause I was the oldest of
four, and money was tight,
so if I could get a job
which was gonna educate me
at the same time, brilliant.
And get paid for it.
- My mother, by the time I left school,
had been working in the payroll
department for the brewery
for a number of years,
and when I left school,
my father pushed me to be,
wanted me to be an electrician.
So, every year, they took
on one fitter, mechanical,
and one electrical.
So, I went for the interview with my mum,
and basically, the interview
was, "Can you play football?
"Can you swim? Can you play cricket?"
And the answer to that is,
"Yeah, not bad, any of those."
He said, "You've got the apprenticeship,
"and you're playing for the
third team next Saturday."
- Well, my stepfather at the
time, who was Vincent Hanrahan,
was a foreman in a bottling hall.
And he said to me, "Oh, I
can get you a job in there."
And I said, "No way."
And he left it.
And then I got a phone call
from, I think it's Michael Ives,
who was another foreman, and he said,
"You've gotta come for an interview".
So, I went there, and
I remember going there,
18-year-old, hair all
over, 'cause I had an afro,
jeans on, chewing gum, and I
sat there and I looked around,
thought, "Oh my god, what
kind of place is this?"
Anyway, Michael Ives asked
me several questions,
and then he said, "Do you want this job?"
I says, "No."
So he says, "Well, why are you here?"
I says, "'Cause I was sent here."
And he said, "Right, okay,
you start on Monday."
- I met the chemist, and
he gave me what I thought
was a very thorough interview.
He then took me to see the Head Brewer,
and then at the end of
that, he said, "Okay,"
he said, "Let's go for a beer."
And I thought, "Oh, that's
just what I wanted to hear."
So the two of them took
me to the old sample room,
and they said, "What do
you want a glass of beer?"
So they gave me a glass
of beer, which I drank.
It was very nice.
And then they said, "Have
you tried the Special?"
And I said, "Oh, I'll try that as well."
So, I'll have a quick glass of Special.
And then the First, or
the Second Brewer came in,
and he went, "Oh, have
you tried our Old Nick?
"It's a very good bottle, try this."
And he gave me a bottle of the Old Nick.
And then somebody else came in
from the warehouse, and said,
"Oh, have you tried our Light Ale?
"Here it is."
And everybody came in and wanted
me to try a different beer.
And I was trying all these
beers, I had a fantastic time.
Sorry.
(laughs)
And the funny thing is, that
what was actually happening
is that Young's, the guys
I was gonna work with,
wanted to get the true
and honest John Hatch.
So, they got me completely
legless, to find out
what I was really, honestly like.
So the interview only
started in the sample room.
- I wrote to 30 breweries
and was given two job offers.
One was Fuller's, and one
was Truman's of Brick Lane.
And I actually turned
the Brick Lane job down,
because I was going to be one
of 20-odd lab technicians,
and when I said, "Do I go
out 'round the breweries,
"sampling, and testing, and whatever?"
And they said, "Oh, no, no, no, no.
"We've got two lab technicians for that."
But, with Fuller's, when I
asked the old Head Brewer then,
he said, "Oh, no, no, you have to go out
"and get the samples, of
course, we've got nobody else
"to do it for you."
So it was great, it meant I could go out,
see the process, sample the
beer, go back and test it,
and then go back again and
tell them what I found.
So, you had a complete loop,
which I sort of enjoyed
that side of it a lot.
- When I first started
there, I think there was
between two and a half
thousand, three thousand people
work there.
'Cause you had all the
transport divisions,
so they were delivering
all the beer around London,
and then you had, as I say,
all the old people that did
all the barrels, the coopers,
and all these sorts of things,
so it was a big thing.
- You wouldn't of imagined
that so much was going on
in such a small space.
You know, you walked in
there, and you walked around,
and you looked, and you thought,
"Wow, how do they get away with this?"
'Cause it was, you know.
It wasn't, I'll say it
was, what was the word,
what's the saying?
It was controlled mayhem, I would say.
But it worked.
- I liked the fact there
was loads of beer barrels
knocking about, and I
loved doing the machinery,
this sort of Victorian conveyor
belt, that used to go around
everywhere, and everything
was moved by these chains.
I mean, in this day and age,
it would have been probably
a health and safety nightmare,
but it was really quaint,
and everybody, all the
engineers that run it,
they knew everything inside out.
It was, it was incredible.
- I think my first recollection
working at Fuller's
was the barrels, because
barrels have right of way,
and they used to go across the yard,
and they used to roll 'em,
and you could hear the barrels
going across.
And then later on, they took that away,
and you miss not hearing the barrels.
- And there'd be a man at each
junction, and these barrels
would be hurtling along at speed,
and it was their job to
turn them off right or left,
or stop them, or fill them,
or sniff them, or clean them,
or do whatever needed doing at that point.
And then, there was a very primitive lift.
It was like Heath Robinson,
really, but it worked.
It worked.
- The casks used to get
rolled across the yard,
so, with the horses coming in,
I mean, they could have been
rolling through the horse shit as well.
(laughs)
- In the old days, it
was copper, and wood,
and it was very, very
old, getting run down,
and it was sort of all
held together with bits
of sellotape and string to
keep it going, you know.
The walls used to move with
cockroaches, and flies,
and it really wasn't, you
wouldn't want to drink
a pint of beer if you knew
how it was made back then.
- There was lots of noise,
and banging, hammering.
Casks, when you take out the
bungs, is a noisy operation,
there's always that going on.
Lots of steam everywhere,
lots of leaks here and there,
water everywhere.
- And you'd walk in, and you
had the gatehouse to your left,
and you walk along, then you had the lab,
then you had the brewhouse on the right,
and then you had the cask
yard, where they used to
knock the bungs out, tip
all the, that's when you had
the, they used to take the dregs,
where all the hops were,
they'd tip that all out,
and that's where the smell came from.
And you'd just see these
blokes, rain, winter, sunshine,
they were out there, bang,
bang, banging it out.
You could hear that noise.
- For the first six months,
it was real training,
'cause I mean, you know, you
were fresh out of school.
So you knew, I mean, I knew
a bit about the process,
from talks with me
father, but you learn all
the basic analysis, so, how
to do alcohols, gravities.
- Yeah, well, I mean, a lot
of it was on-the-job training.
So, we did various courses
when, in-house courses, largely,
but then, as I progressed
from the laboratory,
through on to the brewing
side, I was, if you like,
it was very much sitting
by experienced brewers,
and being shown how to make
beer in that particular brewery.
- I had to do every, virtually
every job in the brewery,
and go and spend a week at a maltings,
and a week picking hops, or
working with the hop merchants,
and seeing how hops were
bought and sold, as well.
So, it gave me a very thorough induction.
- Fork-lift training,
when I first started,
it was, get on a truck, this
does that, that does that,
that does that, forward,
reverse, there you go.
That was it.
- Well, I started out as a
brewing room boy, and that was
to generally clean up at the
brewing room after the brewers.
I then moved into the
brewhouse in late 1966,
as a copper boy, looking
after the boiling copper.
- One of my jobs was to
change the bulb on the jetty.
You had to climb up the lamp
post, and hang over the river,
and fight the rats off this
jetty to change the light bulb.
And always, the apprentice got that job,
'cause he's always the smallest
one and the lightest one,
so you had to shimmy up there
and change the light bulb.
- So, I ended up working
in the bottling stores
for about, just over a
year, fixing the machinery
like a semi-skilled fitter.
Then, it's like, here,
once you get in the doors
of the brewery, any jobs
that became available
within the walls of the
brewery, before it went outside,
you had first dibs at, really.
And a job in the stables
came up, and I applied.
- We used to come in, in the morning,
at six or half past six, and
we had a pool of labourers,
and I was one of the pool, you know?
There was about, my memory's
about eight or 10 of us,
some days, and we used
to gather in the yard,
and then our foreman used to come up.
So, Harry Wagner, his name was,
he was the man that
took me on, lovely man.
He used to come up and
he'd say, "Right, Ted",
he'd call me Ted, "You
go along with so-and-so
"on the transport, you go in the tun room,
"you go there, you go there."
So it was, you know, and
anybody else that was left over,
that didn't have a job, would be knocking
bungs out of barrels in the yard,
when they was being cleaned.
(upbeat rhythmic music)
- Obviously, we had the brewing staff,
who answered to the board, and
they were producing the beer.
The beer would then be
pumped around the brewery,
where it would either go
into cask, or into keg,
or into bottle.
All these different
departments had a building
with their own team of
people working there,
all highly specialised.
You then had transport, who
would take the beer out,
so we had drays, with
associated stables and horses,
and we had motorised
wagons, who drove the beer
for larger distances.
We had a garage on site, who maintained
the drays and the wagons.
Other support staff, we had carpenters,
who were literally spending
every day rebuilding
the bits of the brewery
which had been falling down,
or been damaged by a
cask rolling into them.
We had electricians, the
cooper, who was providing casks,
and everyone was equally as overjoyed
when we got a gold medal,
from the yard upwards,
right through to the directors.
It was a massive team effort,
everyone here did their thing.
- I was Head Brewer, which
meant I was responsible
for all of the production of beer on site,
from the purchase of the raw materials
to the quality of the beer
in the public house estate.
- We were working to a formula.
When I was in Brick Lane,
we ended up brewing,
for example, lots of Carlsberg,
so there, you're just
working to somebody else's
beer recipe, et cetera.
You're not having much input.
But here, I've been able to have an input
into some of the way the processes worked,
an input into some of
the beers, new beers,
or modifications to existing
beers, and things like that.
So, you feel like you're
having an impact, if you like.
An effect.
You are having a genuine
role in what's coming out
and reaching the final customer.
There's a, for me, there's
a real satisfaction in that.
- I always liked the brewing
side, because you know
you're making, especially
if you're making bitter,
it takes a week to make, and
you know that after two weeks,
it will have all been drunk.
(laughs) So there's, sort of,
good job satisfaction there.
- A typical working day would
be, come in at eight o'clock,
and start general duties,
either moving the hops
from the hop loft up to the
copper, and get them ready
to put into the copper.
- Manually tipping bags of malt, as well.
So, you quite often do about
80 50-kilo bags straight in,
in the mornings.
- There's five flights of
stairs, and there was no lift,
so everything that either
came up was carried up,
or there was hoists.
- Do you know what, I
loved my sack barrow.
Sounds sad, doesn't it?
But, believe it or not,
it takes a long time
to be able to wheel up a
50-kilogram bag of malt
and flip it just at the
right distance, so that
all the malt goes into
the little hole hatch.
And it took me ages to perfect that.
I'd have malt flying all over the place,
I couldn't even run it up the
gantry when I first done it.
So yeah, I enjoyed doing that, I think.
- [Brendan] The copper
was about 16 metres deep,
so you got in by a ladder.
You had to climb down when
they were cleaning it.
While people were in the copper,
there was a tank above it,
could be filling up with hot wort.
- I started off as a Junior Brewer,
which meant that I, effectively,
was acting as a supervisor.
And I would do my turn at
mashing in, in the morning,
at five o'clock, and do my
turn at finishing the brew,
which usually finished about
eight o'clock in the evening.
- A typical day for me, as a brewer.
I arrive at the crack of six o'clock,
run up to the mash tun
floor, where I was met
by the foreman, a guy called Mick Lewis.
Great, big, muscular guy.
I'd always say, "Morning,
Mick, how are you doing?"
He'd always glare at
me, and if I was lucky,
he would say, "Fair to middling".
And he'd be sat on the
table, waiting for me,
although I was always exactly on time,
under a No Smoking sign, puffing away
on a rolled-up cigarette.
I'd always say, "Mick,
you can't smoke in here!"
And he wouldn't answer me, he'd say,
"You gonna start, then?"
And there were two mash
tuns, and I, the brewer,
would take one mash tun, the
foreman would take the other.
And basically, you had a tap, or two taps,
hot tap and a cold tap, to
get the right temperature,
and a thermometer, and you
had a big, big, black wheel.
And the idea was to open the taps,
and turn the big, black
wheel, and the black wheel
opened a slide which allowed
grist from the grist case
to fall into what's
called a Steeles masher,
which was like a churning, rotating screw.
So, you got water gushing
in through the sides,
grist coming in from the top,
and at the end of this screw,
you get this mash.
- You had a thermometer on
a stick, so that you could
put it into the mash to
tell the temperature,
and you also had then, had sacrometers,
to measure present gravities, et cetera.
So, those were the
basic tools of a brewer.
Other than that, it was
a pen and piece of paper,
for calculation.
- And then, eventually,
the wort would come
from the coppers, you
would allocate it into
the fermenting vessels,
and then hand over to
the Finishing Brewer, as they were called,
and then the Morning
Brewer could go home early,
which was lovely.
I used to go to the cinema, actually,
and watch a film in the afternoon.
I loved it.
- The first runnings from
the mash tun are very strong,
and the last runnings are quite weak.
So, the second copper was weak,
the first copper was strong.
And then, you would blend them together,
going into a fermenting vessel.
In order to work out the proportions,
you had to understand quadratic equations.
Before we got calculators,
and we had calculators,
everybody used to have
to do this on slide rules
and whatever, and if you got it right,
then you got the beer right at the end.
If you got it wrong, then
you had to add water,
or, if it was too weak,
then you had no options.
- Yeah, it wasn't very hygienic.
You know, pigeons everywhere
in the grain silos,
mice in the silos, grain
silos, weevils in the grain,
so it wasn't very good.
But, then again, by the time
it's been boiled, and cooked,
and fermented, you know,
all your bacteria's gone,
so it's okay by then,
it's just the initial,
when the ingredients went
in, 'cause it was so old.
- [Ken] Within three
days of arriving here,
the guy who was running the
laboratory came up to me,
and said, "Look, I'm not a
microbiologist," he said,
"but I've just done some
swabs," and he said,
"You better have a lot at these plates."
And all of the counts
were very, very high,
in terms of potential infection.
- Yeah, when I first started in '78,
a mixture of conical
vessels, fermenting vessels,
which was the latest thing
that Reg Drury had brought in,
and they were all stainless steel,
in-place cleaning systems,
and quite easy to produce
a clean vessel every
time, before you use it.
But the other half was
what's called open squares,
which are big vessels
with a different yeast
that grows on the top, a sort
of foamy yeast on the top.
And that was very much a manual operation,
to clean those, and keep those clean.
And also, it was exposed
to the air, as well.
So, there were lots of inherent problems,
microbe problems with those.
And cross-contamination, as well.
So, I was into the bugs, and
the bugs were the problem
with Fuller's.
It did have another name,
Fuller's, in those days,
I don't know if you picked up on that yet.
It was called "Full of Shit
and Turnips", was its old name.
And when I was at my previous
job, before I started here,
they said, "Why are you going there?
"Their beer's terrible, you're
better off to go and work
"somewhere else."
So, I regard that as a bit of a challenge.
So, we pushed all the bugs
(laughs) out of the system,
basically, until, sort of,
the beginning of the '80s.
It took a couple of years
to get it all sorted out.
And, with the extra investment
that went on, as well,
meant that we ended up
actually with clean, pure,
cultured beer.
- It was in the '70s
that Young's got really,
beer got very popular, and we only had
the Victorian brewhouse, so we
were working 'round the clock
to get the beer brew, which suited us,
'cause we'd all got mortgages,
and we got overtime for it.
(laughs)
(machinery whirring and clanking)
- It's really funny,
'cause you always had,
in those days, brewers were in charge,
traditionally in charge of
places, in charge of areas.
So, you had a brewer that's
in charge of brewing,
and then you have one in
charge of filtration and tanks,
and you'd get one in charge of packaging,
or a type of packaging.
And I always thought the packaging brewers
should be paid more, because
brewing, to some degree,
is very much bulk liquid
production, (laughs)
whereas packaging, it's,
it can be a by-the-minute
nightmare, in terms of it's fast-moving.
You've got a limited time to
do what you need to produce,
you've got people waiting to collect it,
you've got materials arriving,
you've got to put the right
liquid in the right bottle,
with the right label, with the right date,
and of the right quality.
You've got to pull all
that together very quickly.
- Bottling, when I started in industry,
was largely done for what
we called the tied trade,
for pubs, so we would be
bottling into returnable
half-pints that would go
into the pub in wooden cases,
plastic cases.
They would then go back to the brewery,
deposited, you'd have to wash
them, refill them, et cetera.
But it was a nice, closed loop.
- Big balance of men, as opposed to women,
because it was very physical work.
But the exception to that were the ladies
in the bottling hall.
Absolute tigers.
- It was from the war, basically,
you know, that women were
employed in bottling lines,
and it continued on, after that.
It was the only area that
we had female labour in,
in terms of shop floor.
- We clocked in, with the
old-fashioned clocking machines,
so, we had to be on the
production line for 7:30.
So it wasn't just about
walking through the door,
you had to be in your
wellies, overalls, headphones,
gloves, and down on the shop floor,
because obviously, production line,
if there was any holdups,
then it put everything behind.
When I first started, when we
used to do the quart bottles,
all that used to be hand.
We used to put them on
the conveyor by hand,
they'd go 'round the
filler, and sometimes,
if they had a tiny crack
in them, hairline crack,
they used to explode,
so that was terrific.
So, there was always a lot of noise.
I had to learn to lipread
as well, and to lipread
bad language, because nobody
spoke normally in there.
You know, if you didn't swear,
then you weren't part of it,
so I learnt my choice
swear words in there.
Most of them was all
right, some of 'em, well,
the men were scared of 'em.
You know, they were kinda
tough, and very mouthy,
and everything.
And sometimes, if there was a
young boy start, or something,
they'd tease the life out of him.
- I went down there, and
I was, and they said,
"Hello, we got a new piece of meat!"
(laughs) I thought, "Blimey,
they're gonna kill me here!"
- But, I was taken to one
side, when I first came in,
in 1988, as a young
postgraduate, and I was told,
"Be very careful in the bottling hall,
"'cause the bottling
girls, if they catch you,
"they'll do bad things to you."
And I said, "What sort of bad things?"
"Oh, really bad things!"
And I said, "Well, how bad?"
And I was told that they would actually
take my trousers down, and my underpants,
and they would shave me, and
they would then apply lipstick.
(interviewer laughs)
Now, I hadn't gone through that before,
I wasn't gonna go through
it either, so I decided,
there and then, I would
always be very discreet
in the bottling line.
And I would literally,
I would open the door,
and peer through to make sure
that there was nobody around,
and I would slip in, get
the bottles, turn, and run,
as fast as I could,
back to the laboratory,
and I would be heaving, gasps for breath,
and relieved to finally
make it in one piece.
But they never caught me, thank goodness.
- So, the majority were women
in there, in our department.
You had the men, it was the chargehands,
and did kind of like, the heavier lifting.
But most of us did it,
we all did heavy lifting.
And I remember, we was
trying to get equal pay,
'cause it was that long ago.
And, I remember having to, they said,
"Right, if you can put a case together,
"to say that you women
work the same as the men,
"then we'll consider it."
So, I weighed crates, I did everything,
went to them, and said, "Well, basically,
"we're doing the same job."
So, you know, they put us on equal pay.
- Yes, there were two coopers.
They had a full workshop, all set up,
which was an amazing place to go into,
especially for somebody who'd never seen
a cooper shop before, they had everything.
The staves, the wood, they
had everything, just...
And it was all pristine.
And the skill they had, just
putting a barrel together,
to watch somebody do that is,
yeah, it's amazing, really.
- [Robert] Yeah, it's like
being in a Dickens novel,
in the workshop.
Old tools, Victorian tools,
same methods, but skilled men.
- Yes, I mean, the wooden
casks tended to have a sort of,
pitch lining, and if that got pitted,
then you would be through to the wood.
Very, very prone, very difficult
to wash, because you can't
heat them up and sterilize
them through heat,
so not particularly good for cleaning.
Also, very heavy to handle.
Stainless steel and
aluminium came in after that.
(barrel clanking)
- I think it is fair to say
that there was a division
between the transport blokes
and the inside workers.
And, the one was the inside workers,
and the outside workers.
Partly because the transport
were on a different
payment system, which was
called job-and-finish.
- Now the dray's job, you
used to come in the morning,
get your tickets for your daily work,
and you would come
'round here with a truck.
The lorries would back up
onto the loading bay there,
and you would throw your
boxes down, wines and spirits.
In those days, the canned beers
were 'round the side, there,
and they used to handball
them up to each other.
And you'd go back 'round
onto the loading dock,
in the brewery there,
and load your barrels
and your kegs on.
And then you'd be off, and
so, the thing about it,
once you was out on the road,
you was your own governor.
- Sometimes, we'd have
three loads of beer,
which might be just three
pubs, you know, it might be
eight ton of beer for one,
eight ton for the second one,
eight ton, you know, unload
it, come back, load up,
go out again, so on, so forth.
And, it was job-and-finish in them days,
and we was finished by 11
o'clock, 12 o'clock, every day.
You know?
And that was the beauty of that.
- We used to have, like, old Bedfords,
where you had the gear stick, and it,
you see, it'd feel like
you had a long day at work,
because years ago, you
trying to get it into gear,
driving along, it was, that
was half your day's work.
You're tired by then, and
then you used to be baking hot
in the cab, because the,
all the heat used to come
through the bottom of the engine.
- Again, learning a new skill.
So you were, you know, flipping
kegs off a side of a lorry,
getting them into a pub, some
of them very low ceilings.
Using the old, yeah, the skids.
Some of them was rickety,
you had to rope 'em down,
and that's when we used to
do the barrels of bitter.
So, they were like, that
tall, about that wide,
and you had a rope, and
you're standing there,
on this wooden thing,
you can hear it creaking,
and you got your mate at the bottom,
like, "If you let it go!"
(laughs)
So you gotta hold onto
it, and slide it down.
- [Ken W.] And you got a
36-gallon wooden barrel,
dropping it down a 10-foot cellar,
And, I mean, they, once they
pushed 'em over the side,
they had to know what they were doing,
that rope, and, you know, it was an art.
And then, you see a little
guy, and they used to put
all the barrels up on the stillions,
and you could see a little
guy, you know how heavy
these things are, and just,
they used the momentum
of the fluid inside,
and they could twist it,
throw it, put it up on the stillions,
and it was a work of art,
it was absolutely brilliant.
And they could do it so quickly, as well.
- Dave Kinnard was in the
cellar, and he was sending up
the empties, and we used to
stack 'em about three high,
so I've grabbed two,
and as I'm span 'round,
I've knocked the one there.
And, I haven't thought nothing of it.
And he's gone, "oh, Cyril, you!"
(laughs)
I've just knocked him on the
head, there's blood pissing
out of his head (laughs) like that.
Alex is on the floor,
crying with laughter,
and he's just like, "I've
nearly killed a man,
"you think it's funny."
Well, that's what it was like,
you just, you know, well,
he was all right, he went home
and that, and didn't see him
for a couple of weeks.
- Yeah, they got allowance
of beer, and at every stop,
they also got a pint of beer.
So, on some occasions,
before the drink driving laws
took place, you'd have
people coming back in,
and open the lorry
door, and out they come.
And they'd pick themselves
up off the cobbles out there,
walk in to the office,
pick up their next load,
and go out and deliver again.
- I think you would notice,
there was a lot more formality
in those days, certainly in the offices.
Everyone wore a suit, you
wouldn't dream of turning up
not in a suit and tie.
The systems were very simple,
but everything was manual,
so paperwork was all
manual, paper everywhere.
- Obviously, the first
day was the busiest day,
on the Monday.
We'd get all the clock cards
in, 'cause in those days,
you had to clock in and out.
And we had to check
every single clock card,
for the whole brewery, because
they were allowed to be
no more than 15 minutes late a week.
If you were more than 15
minutes, over the whole week,
then your pay was deducted
for the minutes you,
so we had to know how
much a minute they earn,
and then there'd be
overtimes, pieces of paper,
in those days, with overtime
on for various people.
Transport, they used to get a bonus,
we'd get that come in as
well, all that sort of thing.
And, all that would take most
of the day to check that,
and then, on the Tuesday
morning, we would actually
work out the wages.
They paid in cash, in those
days, so we had to work out
how many notes we wanted,
we had to get it down
to the nearest, to the penny.
And, of course, I'd been
used to having a comptometer,
to work with, to do any, when
you do the manual payrolls,
a lot of additions to do, in
working out overtime rate.
Well, Keith never had any machines at all.
(laughs)
He didn't believe in them.
This is what you use, you use your brain.
So, of course, I had to quickly learn
how to do manual arithmetic again.
(hooves clopping)
- One of John Young's passions,
apart from people and beer,
was animals, and he loved horses,
in fact, he loved all animals.
And, even though it probably
became more cost-inefficient
to use a horse, compared
to a motorised wagon,
he insisted that we used
to have horses here,
to deliver beer.
- We had four pairs on the
road, so that was eight horses,
going out with four drays, we called them,
or horse-and-carts.
And, we would deliver in up to a
three-and-a-half-mile radius.
- When I first started, I
didn't go out on the road
for about a year and a bit, I suppose.
So, mainly, I mainly
done stable work then.
Just, mucking out the horses,
and putting down clean beds
when required, brushing horses,
cleaning all the harness,
all the sort of jobs that had
to be done on a daily basis.
- Farrier was a very strong
man, and we had a very hot,
in the winter, a great
place to go and watch him,
and schoolchildren used
to come in, and watch him.
And, he would actually
make the shoes here,
Make them, the whole process.
And he would have the
furnace going, and the horses
would be tied in there,
and he would lift them up,
the legs of the horses.
- My first experience of
actually going out with a horse,
I went out as a third man,
'cause you had two guys,
worked on the, with the horses.
And, if you had a new horse,
they'd bring a spare man out,
to make sure the horse
stood still where it was,
stationary when they
was delivering the beer,
and that was, I done that
for quite a few months.
In general, it was, you
know, everybody knew us,
and everybody used to
wave as we were going
along the streets, and if
you pulled up, at a job,
you would get quite a
lot of people come 'round
and speak to you.
So, in some ways, it was a
bit of an advertising tool
for the brewery, as well,
the horses being out
on the road.
And, I always look at it, if
you saw a lorry outside a pub,
you wouldn't go and stroke the
front of the lorry, would ya?
So, a horse, you'd go and
stroke him, wouldn't ya?
- Well, the horses, you had, there was
a few characters there, you know.
I mean, there was one,
you'd have to watch him,
because if you didn't he'd
give you a little nibble,
and that's it.
I mean, so you had to,
he had them big chompers,
so if you didn't, you got caught.
- Having the horses
here made a difference.
You know, you live in an industry,
in a sort of mechanised world.
To have the horses, you
know, you'd get a sort of,
great, big, burly
drayman coming down here.
Sort of, had a bad day,
you could start talking
to the horses, going, "Goochie,
goochie", and, you know.
- And, as time when by, John
Young got things like peacocks,
in the stables, to sort
of, brighten the place up,
which was fun, they were
absolute pests, the peacocks.
Big bird, very, very small brain.
Always getting in the way of drays,
and walking through puddles
of acid, and, you name it,
they did it.
And, they often used to
flutter over the wall,
and try to escape, and
they were eagerly caught
by the locals, wanting to
get a free pint of beer
by returning these peacocks.
So, it was complete carnage.
- But what was always
interesting was, we had the,
we had the nativity scene at
the end of the yard, there,
on the main road.
And the nativity scene every
year was quite exciting.
The people were obviously statues,
but everything else was
live, and we'd have the sheep
would go out there,
ramrod would go out there,
and the donkeys would go in,
and the horses used to be
hanging around a bit, too.
And we'd often get a
Shetland pony staying,
stabled on here, who was
doing part of the pantomime.
So, the Shetland pony
would be in there, as well.
And all the kids used to stop.
I remember coming in one
morning, and standing over
the stable, and looking at
it, the kids, and families,
all the way around.
And I lent over there, and
the donkey grabbed hold
of my tie, and it chewed
it, until it got right up,
until there was just me
and the donkey, like that.
And he couldn't let go of my tie.
(laughs)
You can imagine what that was like.
Mildly embarrassing, but
also wondering how on Earth
I was going to get rid
of it, with all the kids
rolling around with laughter.
That was, but it was such
fun, it was great fun,
they were such things.
(upbeat rhythmic music)
- [Iain] Your life was
the brewery, you know,
you didn't leave the job,
because it was such a good job.
You know, it paid well,
there's lots of overtime,
you weren't just a number.
You know, you clocked in,
and when you clocked out,
you're still part of the brewery.
At Christmas, there was
a big Christmas party
for all the kids, in the canteen.
And everyone would take their kids there,
and they'd all get a free present.
So, as I say, it was all
geared 'round the family.
- I think Young's was
the most sociable brewery
in the country, and I was
told this on many occasions,
by lots of people that came to visit us.
Any excuse for a party,
and we would do it.
We had the most lavish
Christmas dinner dances.
It was just a wonderful
place to work, really.
Very, very sociable, very friendly.
- We had an association, to
organise inter-brewery sports,
which was great at
bringing people together,
both from within breweries,
cross-functional teams,
and against other breweries.
So, you could be playing
anything, we had 20-odd
disciplines, from bridge,
and darts, and snooker,
right through to quite
high-level football, tennis,
squash, badminton.
- We decided that some people
were getting a bit too old
for rugby, or football, so we
decided we would play croquet.
We had a lovely playing field,
right next to the brewery.
None of us could play croquet,
but we learnt very quickly.
We found it was an excellent
game for taking part
with other people, at all levels,
and it could be quite vicious.
So, croquet became,
almost our signature game
at Watney's brewery, for entertainment.
- We had a sort of
on-site club, social club,
(clears throat) which is now offices,
and we had a sports ground down the road.
- Oh, it's really social!
So, this break room, which is not far
from where reception is,
they had the darts board,
and everyone would go in
there and play crib, or cards,
and, you know, it was
just a nice little social,
20 minutes to half an
hour break in the morning,
and in the afternoon, getting everybody,
and everybody used to go.
- The canteen was the melting pot.
Like, you went in there
for your breakfast,
and you had everyone in
there, and you just, like,
you could sit back, and
just watch the show.
We had some characters work here.
You know, you just,
letting 'em get on with it,
don't get involved.
And, when you're new,
you sort of think, like,
"I'll just sit back, and listen."
And I knew a few people
here, anyway, and that,
but you just think, "I won't,
like, give it the big 'un
"'cause I'll just get slapped
down, so I just keep quiet."
(machinery rattling and whirring)
- [Billy] Your first day issue here,
you got a pair of overalls,
pair of protective boots,
gloves, and a pint mug.
So, I remember when I got
mine, I said to the storeman,
"What's that pint mug for, mate?"
He said, "Well, it's a brewery, innit?
"You get a beer."
I went, "I never thought of that."
- Well, one of the perks, obviously,
is that there was a beer allowance.
And, typically, that was, two
quarts a day, at one time,
Of the mild, for the operators.
Senior managers were allowed the bitter.
- The most important thing about Young's
is that we were the last
wet brewery in the country.
Breweries were declared
as either wet or dry.
With a dry brewery, you
could not drink on site,
but you got an allowance
to take home with you,
on a regular basis.
A wet brewery is, you can
drink all you want on site,
pretty much, but you had to
buy beer to take away with you,
at full price.
With health and safety
encroaching on those breweries,
almost every brewery in
the country became dry,
apart from Young's.
- Directly outside the office windows,
there used to be a cellar
flap, and there would be
a firkin of Pride put
down there every week,
or a firkin of bitter.
And, during tea breaks and lunch breaks,
down would come the men
from the offices, pipes on,
cigarettes on, cigars, with
their pots in their hand,
the paper under their arms,
and they would progress
down to the office cellar.
And they'd have a couple
of pints at half past 10,
11 o'clock in the morning.
They'd be back down
there again at lunchtime,
and they'd go back in there
again in the afternoon.
- We also had a beer machine here.
You got 10 tokens a week,
in your wage packet,
which was two pints a day.
And not everybody used to
drink, they used to stick 'em
in a bucket, in what we
called the mess room,
where you'd sit and read your newspaper,
in between jobs, whatever.
And they used to put
'em in a bucket there,
and people used to help themselves.
But we had a fella here
called Allan the Gallon.
Now, he's quite a famous
name here, as a drayman.
Allan would get his beer
out of the beer machine,
and have a few pints
before he started working.
I've been out a few times
with Allan, he was okay,
he was quite a laugh, but to
be truthful, he was useless.
Because, after a few beers,
he would be asleep in the cab,
and nine times out of
10, you'd done the job
with your driver, left
Allan asleep in the cab.
(laughs)
- If you wanted somebody
to do a dirty job,
you'd just say, "Can you do
that, clean that mess up?"
And he'd say, "Oh, it's not
my turn to do that, John."
You'd just say, "Oh, I'll
give you a disc if you do it."
And then, they would do it.
And, of course, then they
would have an extra pint.
I can't remember when
the beer machine went,
but that was a solemn day for everybody,
it was almost like a funeral.
I think people did put
"RIP" on the beer machine,
and whatever.
- At Christmas, we used
to get a Christmas card,
and I hope the tax office isn't listening,
they used to get a Christmas
card, with 250 pounds cash
in it, and then we used
to get Christmas bonus,
that was paid into your wages,
of another hundred pounds.
We'd get a litre and a half bottle of
Royal & Ancient Whiskey, and this turkey
that could feed about 5,000.
Why they chose to have
these largest turkeys ever,
I don't know.
And, the thing is, they
always gave the turkeys out
on Christmas Eve, or
nearest Christmas Eve.
So, most people used to
go into the local pubs,
it was tradition.
You went to the pub at 11
o'clock on the last day,
when you've finished work.
This is 11 o'clock in the morning.
And some people had
these turkeys with 'em,
and quite often, after
Christmas, they'd say,
"Dunno what happened to
it, I left it somewhere."
So, there'd have been
these turkeys defrosting
in various places, yeah.
But they were huge.
(upbeat rhythmic music)
- There was a lot of
council housing in Chiswick,
where the workers would
naturally come from.
When the council house changes came in,
where people were allowed
to buy their council houses,
so many people then ended up moving away,
so they ended up not
wanting to stay after work,
because they had to get home.
And that, sort of, destroyed
a lot of the social side
of being at the brewery.
- When I joined, the majority
of people were employed
in production, warehousing, distribution.
Which was very, very
manual, in those days.
And the office staff were far, far fewer.
We've probably got exactly
the same number of people
on site, but now, all the
people who aren't working
in the warehouse anymore
have been replaced
with people in marketing, IT, finance,
which have grown disproportionately.
- New technology took over
that wasn't manual work,
it was more engineering
work, and even the operators
had to be a bit more technical,
'cause they were working
with computers all the time.
So, that's where it
changed, and then you've got
a different type of person.
They weren't drinkers, you know?
They were more university
people, they wanted to have
a glass of wine, and go down,
and canapes, or whatever,
you know what I mean?
It was totally different from
wanting to go down to the pub,
and have a beer, and a pint,
and a pork pie, you know?
That whole sort of culture went away.
- A little bit different in
the latter years, you know,
the last seven or eight
years, because, I don't know,
it was a lot more pressure
on everybody, I think.
You know, there was
more, jobs entailed more,
and, especially in the
offices, and stuff like that.
You know, people had to do
more, and that community,
sort of thing, wasn't the same, you know?
But that was understandable,
I think, you know,
with the changes in their
jobs, and more pressure
to do more hours, and,
you know, less money
and stuff like that.
It's just, it's the same everywhere.
- As I say, there was
the unpleasant period,
where we were having to reduce
manpower, in particular,
having to cut costs on
pretty well everything,
and it became very much
cost-driven, and cost-centered.
Which was far less enjoyable.
- We've always had a good
relationship with Young's.
When they closed, that was
a real sad day for Fuller's,
because we were losing our friends,
and the people we
socialised with, as well.
- You know, they're sitting on a site
that is worth more money
to be developed than it is
as a production brewery, and, particularly
in the middle of Wandsworth.
They were hemmed in,
they literally could not
expand the brewery any
more, they were hemmed in
on all sides, they got
a river, they got roads.
Terribly difficult to
get anything in and out
of the brewery.
That pressure eventually
meant that Young's closed.
- The thing is, with the brewery,
Young's was never supposed
to get as big as it did get,
and I think that the
options were, in those days,
probably to shut the
brewery, and then build
a new brewery somewhere out of London,
on a sort of brownfield
site, or something,
which would have been
incredibly expensive.
Or, to amalgamate with a larger brewery.
And the board at Young's
chose to amalgamate
with Charles Wells, at the time.
- Yeah, it was awful, really.
But, things have to move on, I suppose.
And it was, you know, quite depressing
to, sort of, see the
site empty, for so long.
End of an era.
- [Martyn] Finally, again,
you have this problem,
you've got a huge property, by the Thames,
you've got very expensive
housing areas all around you,
what are you gonna do with it?
Are you gonna have an industrial
production site there,
which is not necessarily
making you enormous returns,
or are you gonna sell it to a developer?
Inevitably, selling it to
a developer was the answer.
- It's just sad, that the
breweries have gone now.
You know, I think it's a
loss for the community,
because it was the
community, the breweries.
It was a way of life that's gone now,
completely gone, you know.
Modern breweries are
totally different, you know,
the high-tech, they all
run with big valve blocks,
computers, you know,
they press the button,
and start the process, and that's it.
You know, there's no soul to it.
- [Martyn] Fuller's was
about the only one left
that was still able to maintain itself
as an independent family
brewer, but even then,
you'd get a lot better return
on your money as a retailer,
as a pub owner, still,
than you do as a brewer.
And, eventually, somebody
came along and waved
a very large cheque at them, and said,
"We would like to buy your brewery,
"you can carry on being pub retailers."
- Sometimes, in everyone's
life, you get something,
you know, and it's once in a lifetime.
And I think this job
was once in a lifetime.
- I loved every day of it,
and I wouldn't have
swapped it for the world,
and I would never have left
if it hadn't have closed.
- Really, really proud to
have worked for a family firm,
for 43 years, and not had
to worry about anything.
I haven't had to worry about security,
I haven't had to worry about anything.
I always new that a job was there for me.
- Everybody goes to work to make money,
but it's not many places
where you go to work,
you make money, but you actually enjoy it.
I can't remember one day, getting
on my bike in the morning,
no matter what I'd been
up to the night before,
thinking, "Oh, I've gotta go there".
All I could think about
is, "Once I get there,
"it'll all be all right."
(upbeat rhythmic music)
