O Caledonia

Heineken is to shut the Caledonian Brewery in Edinburgh, leaving the Scottish capital without a large brewery for the first time since the eighteenth century (a host of English cities are in the same position, including Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle and Nottingham, and London might ultimately join them following the Asahi takeover of Fuller's). 

Founded in 1869 by George Lorimer and Robert Clark, Caledonian has passed through a number of hands since, being acquired by Sunderland's now defunct Vaux Brewery in 1939 and Scottish and Newcastle in 2004, not long before S&N were themselves taken over by the Dutch megabrewer Heineken in 2008.

As part of the S&N/Heineken portfolio, Caledonian's Deuchars IPA became a nationally distributed brand - at one point, it seemed to be on the bar of every Wetherspoons pub you went in - and still ranks in the top ten cask beers by sales.

Caledonian beers will now be contract brewed at the Greene King-owned Belhaven Brewery in Dunbar, although I wouldn't be surprised if, like Manchester's Boddingtons Bitter, they eventually embark on an odyssey of multinational breweries where once famous regional beers eke out a strange half life in keg or cask form.

Only Connect

Since the start of the first lockdown in the spring of 2020, I've contributed a few bits and pieces to a local history website. One of the things that has emerged from the discussions on the Facebook page related to it is the link between farming in the area and the Stockport brewery Robinson's.

William Robinson was born in Northenden, then a farming village on the southern bank of the Mersey in north Cheshire, in 1800. In 1838, he bought the Unicorn Inn, built on Lower Hillgate, Stockport, in 1722, which he'd been landlord of since 1826. He left the pub in the hands of his son George in the mid eighteen forties, after the death of his first wife, remarried and moved to High Grove Farm in Heald Green, where he owned 41 acres (see the 1841 tithe map and 1851 census below). George brewed the first Robinson's beer in the backyard of the Unicorn in 1849 and became the licensee in 1850, relinquishing it in 1859 when his younger brother Frederic took over. The pub closed at the end of 1935 and was then demolished to make way for an extension of the brewery, with a plaque now marking the spot on the wall of the brewery yard (let's hope it survives the upcoming sale of the site when brewing moves to Robinson's bottling and canning plant in Bredbury).

There is still a Robinson's Farm in the Heald Green area, although I don't know if it's linked to the William Robinson who started the Stockport pub and brewing company in the late eighteen thirties and farmed here in the eighteen forties and fifties.  I suppose we shouldn't be surprised by the connection between farming and brewing given that the process begins by mashing malted barley.

Census returns from The History of Robinson's Brewery by Dr Lynn F. Pearson, 1997

(S)pot the difference

A photo popped up yesterday in an online Manchester history group I belong to of a mustard pot almost certainly connected to the large community of German cotton merchants and factory owners that flourished in the city in the nineteenth century, the best known of whom was Marx's pal/financer Friedrich Engels (the foundations of the Albert Club, Chorlton-on-Medlock, named after the German prince who married Queen Victoria, where he drank Pilsner beer with other emigrés in between riding to hounds with the Cheshire Hunt, were discovered in the course of building works a few years ago).

As you can see from the images below, it's pretty similar in shape to the one I snapped the last time I was in the Rhineland in 2015 in Brauerei Schumacher near Düsseldorf's central station (the pub where I finally got to drink a glass of Altbier on my first trip there in 2009).

A view from the bridge

One of my old school friends has just posted some images online from an exhibition he's involved with in Wigan, including the photo below taken outside Central Park rugby league ground in the early eighties.

My grandmother grew up with her uncle and auntie in a pub in Wigan, and after he died worked with her in a sweet shop near Central Park which later became a souvenir shop for the rugby league club. As kids in the seventies, we visited the sweet shop and then walked into the ground through an open exit gate and stood on the empty terraces.

So many questions spring to mind when looking at the photo of the people enjoying a free, if obstructed, view of the pitch: can they no longer afford to pay for admission to the ground at the turnstiles? (unemployment was rising sharply then, especially in the North West); have they stopped to watch the whole match, or just briefly on the way to or from somewhere else, like the guy on the bike?; has the yellow plastic traffic cone just fallen over in the road, or been kicked over for some reason?; what do the spectators on the adjacent terracing think of those watching the action for nothing?

Strangeways Here We Come

Channel 5 showed a documentary last night about the 1990 Strangeways prison riot.

The month long sit-in on the roof of the massively overcrowded Victorian gaol just north of Manchester city centre, during which much of the fabric of the building was destroyed, became something of an attraction, both locally and for the national media, sparking a debate about prison conditions, and leading to some improvements at the rebuilt and renamed HMP Manchester when it reopened in 1994 (notably toliets in the cells), although those who organised the protest ended up spending many more years behind bars as a result of it. One of them, already serving a life sentence, described the experience of emerging on the roof above the rotunda, overlooking the tower which was popularly, but wrongly, thought to have housed the gallows before hanging was abolished (it's actually a ventilation shaft), seeing the outside world for the first time in almost a decade and feeling human again (the other iconic landmark on the Strangeways skyline, the chimney of Boddingtons Brewery, finally came down in 2010, three years after the rest of the building was demolished).

Among the other changes at the new HMP Manchester was a ban on prison officers belonging to far right groups, before which National Front badges had been worn openly on the wings, and the closure of the social club where some of them drank heavily at dinnertime.

The prison population has increased dramatically since the 1990s and now stands above eighty thousand, so that, despite the privately-run HMP Forest Bank opening in Salford in 2000, on the site of the former Agecroft power station, as another local prison and remand facility, Strangeways has again become dangerously overcrowded and is still a place where prisoners are merely contained rather than rehabilitated.

Czeching out some Bohemian beers

With normal exporters Beer Dome not delivering to the UK at the moment because of Brexit-related customs problems, I had a look elsewhere for Czech beer online and found Halusky, an importer/retailer based in southwest London. Their mixed box of bottled beers includes a couple I've drunk before, Budvar and Pilsner Urquell, which I've also had on draught, and a couple I hadn't, from the Velkopopovicky Kozel brewery just south of Prague (if you didn't know already, the bearded billies quaffing beer on the labels is a fairly big clue that Kozel is the Czech word for goat).

Velkopopovicky Kozel 10° Svetlé Vycepni

Very pale/gold with a sweet, honeyish malt taste, but quite bitter, well carbonated, and a rather thin mouthfeel – a pretty basic lager to be honest.

Velkopopovicky Kozel Cerny

Again quite a thin mouthfeel, and a small white head, but an instant coffee hit very much like a stout and black in colour too – my kind of beer.

When the Covid pandemic is finally over, I really need to go to the Czech Republic and drink unpasteurised draught beer in a tankovna pub there.

 

Hell Is A City

I watched Hell Is A City, a 1960 black and white crime drama starring Stanley Baker and shot in Manchester, on Talking Pictures TV yesterday afternoon (I'd seen clips from it before, but never the whole film).

As part of the British New Wave, the film marks a shift away from the cosiness of Dixon of Dock Green and Gideon of the Yard towards a grittier Northern realism, exemplified by another police procedural, Z Cars, set in a fictional Lancashire new town based on Kirkby, which began in 1962. Stanley Baker does a good job at playing the tough Inspector, although his Mancunian accent veers back once or twice to that of his native South Wales, as does Donald Pleasance as on-course bookmaker Gus (echoes there of the famous Manchester bookie Gus Demmy, whose off-course betting operation would become legal in 1961), who is targetted in a bungled street robbery en route to a race meeting at Doncaster and the body of his clerk dumped on the moors between Manchester and Sheffield, scene of much darker crimes a few years later. Doris Speed makes a cameo appearance as a starchy hospital nurse not unlike her more famous role as Coronation Street landlady Annie Walker.

There are lots of still recognisable locations in and around the city centre to spot, including Piccadilly Gardens, Central Station and Strangeways Prison, but the pub which the police and criminals frequent - with its bottled beer, separate rooms, and waiters in the better ones, superintended by a landlord played by George Cooper (who would go on to appear in Z Cars) - disappeared with the rest of that area when the Arndale Centre was built.