100 Years of Irish Brewing in 50 Objects: #1 - D’Arcy & Son's Anchor Brewery Livery Button (c. 1900)

On the closed square piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to their uniforms, the first two black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest squad white, with transverse green sashes. 

James Joyce – The Dead

That colourful description by Joyce of bottles of beer lined neatly on top of a piano in the supper room which was situated upstairs in a tall house on Usher’s Island - a little west of the centre of Dublin city on the south side of the river Liffey - is quite a strong and evocative image, the words conjuring up the formality and neatness of soldiers in uniform on a parade ground in a time long gone. The story is set around the end of the 19th century and at that time there were a number of breweries within the general vicinity of that house, and it is very probable that these unnamed (and of course fictional) beers were the relatively local Guinness stout, plus imported Bass ale from England as both were extremely popular at that time in households in the city and their labelling would fit Joyce’s description.

And although we will be staying around the environs of Usher's Island, it is a uniform other than the military ones alluded to above that is of significance to those with an interest in the history of our country's brewing past.

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When we consider those who work in breweries we tend to focus on the owners and the actual brewers of the beer, but there are a host of other departments in any successful brewing business such as marketing, administration and - very importantly - the logistics of getting the beers from the supplier to the consumer. Nowadays, transportation is often handled by cold-chain distribution in vans and trucks but in the past the delivery of beer would have been literally handled by draymen who drove their horse drawn carts laden with barrels through the cities and countryside, going either directly to the local bottlers and wholesalers, or to canal boats and trains for distribution around the whole country, or perhaps even to ships - starting a journey which might bring those barrels half way around the world.

This small button measuring 3cm (1 3⁄16 inches) in diameter is made of a copper alloy - possibly brass - and shows some green patination where the gilding has worn away to expose the base metal. It is probably from the livery uniform of one of the draymen who worked for the Anchor Brewery of John D’Arcy & Son on Usher Street, not far from where those aforementioned other-uniformed squads lined up. It features the words ‘J. D’Arcy & Son Ltd. Brewery’ and a nicely embossed anchor whose pronged ends appear to resemble demons’ tails. The button must be from between 1896 and 1926 give the date when the brewery became a limited company and when it closed, but it is probably from the earlier part of that period given other examples of the same style date from that era. The reverse is missing the eyelet and shows the name of the supplier ‘Comyns & Son, College Green, Dublin’ who were sellers of livery uniforms too, although there is no indication that they also made any actual uniforms for D’Arcy & Sons - they may have just supplied the buttons to the brewery for use by another maker - but it is certainly possible they did so.

In the book ‘Ireland: Industrial & Agricultural’ published in 1902 there is a photograph of a drayman wearing a double-breasted livery jacket, and although the buttons cannot be made out clearly, it would seem logical that they would be similar if not the same as the one shown here. The drayman is holding a beautiful, four-year old roan Clydesdale gelding called ‘Butter Scotch’ and they had jointly won the top award for the best horse and float at the Royal Dublin Society Spring Show in 1898 as well as the Guinness sponsored Challenge Cup for overall best horse and vehicle - awards which D’Arcy’s were well used to winning according to press cuttings from this era. The fine-looking gentleman’s name was Thomas Curran and they beat competition from The Mountjoy Brewery, two of Guinness’s floats, and one from Bass, Ratcliff, and Gretton Ltd. to win their awards according to RDS records.

Around 1889 Alfred Barnard visited D’Arcy’s for his series of books on the breweries of Britain and Ireland and wrote extensively about the business. As ever with his visits, Alfred goes into a lot of detail regarding his tour of the brewery and its layout but of most interest with regard to our current topic is the mention of fifty Clydesdale and ‘Irish’ horses being stabled on the site, with more being hired during the busy season. D’Arcy’s employed upwards of 300 people at this time too, some of whom would have been the draymen who worked with those horses, delivering casks of Darcy’s porter around the city. We can see some of those draymen again in this sketch from Alfred’s book and the uniforms of the dray men are visible, as are the floats - or drays - themselves.

To get a better idea of the layout of the brewery we can look at the Goad’s Fire Insurance Map from 1893, and this gives another good insight into the brewery layout in glorious detail, including the buildings with the extensive stables mentioned by Alfred. Incidentally, you can also see how the site backed on to the John’s Lane distillery of John Power & Son, indeed in places it is difficult to make out where one begins and the other ends.

This map ties in nicely with this sketch of the brewery from Stratten & Stratten's 'Dublin, Cork, and South of Ireland: A Literary, Commercial, and Social Review' from 1892. This again shows our draymen coming and going from the brewery and aids our understanding of the scale of the business.

This button is a tiny but tangible and tactile part of Ireland’s brewing history and deserves to be appreciated as such, and we can now perhaps picture in our minds a drayman at the turn of the last century donning his livery uniform before starting the hard work of delivering casks of ale around the city of Dublin. This type of button did not just adorn the livery uniforms of D’Arcy’s brewery, as they appear to be a relatively common addition to many a jacket at that time and later. The Phoenix and Guinness breweries used them too, and it is probable that all of the bigger brewing concerns in Dublin and elsewhere had similar. There is very little provenance attached to the example shown here but looking at the broken eyelet it is likely that breakages and losses were common, and no doubt there are a quite a few similar buttons to be found, perhaps in the corner of an old cellar or having fallen through a grating on the street, still waiting to be found by an appreciative soul.

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Some Brewery History Notes: A Complicated Backstory ...

The foundation date of the original brewing concerns that occupied the site of D'Arcy's Anchor Brewery is unknown according to Alfred Barnard in his write-up mentioned above - although other sources such as an advertisement by the brewery in The Sport in May 1897 and a write up from which the above image of an entrance gate is taken in The Freeman's Journal in September 1913 mention a date of 1740 - which we must take with a pinch of salt. Alfred also mentions deeds in the possession of the then proprietor which date back to 1782 when the site was owned by a Kavanagh & Brett, with the brewery coming into the hands of John D’Arcy via a John Byrne in 1818, and was owned by his son Matthew D’Arcy at the time of Alfred’s visit. The brewery was expanded by Matthew with the addition of more land, buildings and equipment and by then the area taken up by the brewery and its operations was seven acres. Of note was the mention of a copper brew kettle of ‘mammoth’ proportions which was said to be the largest in the world at this time – an interesting claim if hard to prove. It held 1,300 barrels, took over a year to make and on its completion ‘thirty people partook of refreshments therein.'

We can add further to that information, as John D’Arcy was in partnership at first with a James McNulty according to Saunder’s Newsletter in October of 1819 when that partnership was dissolved. The earliest mention of a brewery on Usher Street in newspapers is for a porter brewery owned by Samuel Madder & Co. from London who were brewing there in 1785 according to Saunders's Newsletter in April of that year. In 1797 it was owned by a John Ormston who became bankrupt according to Saunder’s Newsletter from June of that same year. A newspaper advertisement in The Hibernian Journal in March of 1806 states the brewery was owned (or operated) by an Edmund Grange & Co., where they produced porter under the Hibernian Anchor Porter Brewery name, and a Leeson - a famous Dublin brewing family name - is mentioned with Grange as an owner in Saunders's News-Letter of March 1809. John Byrne may have been the next owner of the site before then selling it to John D’Arcy. To add further complications the aforementioned Kavanagh & Brett were still brewing together up to 1799 when their partnership was dissolved according to Saunders's News-Letter in October of that year, with John Brett residing in Usher's Island. This is at odds with their mention by Alfred above but they may have been brewing on a different site.

The Anchor Brewery appears to have had quite a convoluted history, not helped by the issue that there may have been multiple breweries on Usher Street and the streets surrounding it, which may muddy the ownership details. It is possible that there were breweries side-by-side that became a single entity in time. There are a number of histories available online and in books but many seem to just repeat parts of Alfred Barnard's history, although some do give a varying account - so reader beware.

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Finally, it is worth mentioning that by 1914, when Joyce’s Dubliners book of short stories that features The Dead was eventually published, Darcy’s brewed ‘O’Connell’s Dublin Ale’ as well as porter, having acquired the brand when the bought The Phoenix Brewery a few years previously. Later examples of the labels from D'Arcy's time of marketing the brand are red in colour so perhaps the original Phoenix label (from around the same period as our button) was also a shade of red? It would be fanciful to think that it was beers from the Phoenix brewery that were in Joyce’s head at the time he wrote those lines, but perhaps I am wrong about Guinness and Bass and there is a - albeit tenuous - connection between the passage quoted above and D'Arcy's brewery on Usher Street ...

Liam K

(Here is the link to object #2)

Please note, all written content and the research involved in publishing it here is my own unless otherwise stated and cannot be reproduced elsewhere without permission, full credit to its sources, and a link back to this post.

Newspaper image of D'Arcy's brewery gate © The British Library Board - All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk) from whom I have received permission to display this image on this site. Button images are the authors own - as is the button itself - and the image of the D'Arcy Label is from 'The British, Foreign, and Colonial Tradesmarks' Directory' from 1866. The Goad fire insurance map of Dublin was sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Other images are from where stated.