Pub Fiction: Cat, Contraption & Mechanism

'Shoo! Git!'

Cat skidded along the counter, its paws losing traction on the shiny surface as it tried to escape the flick of a cloth from the Her, knocking a bottle containing the dregs of the dark bitter stuff over and leaving it bouncing and spinning on the cold marble – a small trail of froth and stickiness in its wake. It was usually less clumsy, but the Her had surprised Cat when she had come up from the Underneath and caught Cat staring curiously at the newly delivered ham that she had left hanging from a hook above the counter while she relayed a message to the Him.

'That bloody cat!'

Cat stopped running when it was out of harm’s way and slinked off towards the other end of the bar, where it sat down and began cleaning itself of the small drops of liquid that had landed on its calico coat while the Her cleaned up the mess on the bar, all the while muttering and throwing annoyed looks at Cat, who stopped its preening every few moments to make sure that the Her was still far enough away not to hit it with anything. From down below in the Underneath came the sounds of clinking and the grunts and groans of the Him and - being by default a curious creature - Cat jumped down from the bar and padded down the worn timber steps, careful to avoid the Her as she headed towards the kitchen with the ham on her shoulder.

Cat sat on a step halfway down and looked at what was happening in the place that it saw as its play- or more accurately hunting-ground. The Him was down here wrestling with a large, heavy wooden barrel that had arrived earlier, while the Himling  - who looked like a younger and less rotund version of the Him - stood with his finger rooting in his ear and a glazed look in his eyes.

'Jaysus, don’t stand there like a gobdaw, help me with this will ya?'

This was a common sight for Cat, with the Him doing the work while the Himling just stood around until forced to move and do something by the shoutings of the Him. Cat didn’t really know what was being said but it was no stranger to the tone being used when he occasionally got under the Him’s feet or just generally got too close.

A similar scene had played out the previous day with Him shouting at the Himling above the dull clinking of glass as the Himling filled a big round tub with the old bottles that had sat in crates down here for the last while. Next the Himling donned a sacking apron and added some cold water from a tap on the side wall to the tub before topping it up with steaming water from a bucket to which he had added some spoons out of a bag labelled ‘Soda Crystals’ - not that Cat knew what the bag contained as it could not read of course.  All the while the Him was shouting at the Himling to hurry up as Cat watched on from its perch on a broad shelf filled with dusty paraphernalia. The Himling then got a brush-like thing with loads of bristles and proceeded to push and twist it around inside the bottles one by one, checking them by holding up towards the bare lightbulb that hung from the ceiling, until all of them had been scrubbed. Next the Himling scraped off the old label from the outside of the bottles and rinsed them all before setting them upside-down in a rack in order to drain and dry.

Today the bottles were still sitting there and Cat came cautiously down the stairs to find its perch once again and watch the ritual he had seen happen many times before, pausing just briefly to distractedly push with its paw a few of the wooden corks that were floating in hot water near to a very low stool.

Him and the Himling ignored Cat, as they were currently rolling the barrel back and forth on the cold slabs, which they did for a short while before placing it on its side - and with some effort - onto a low wooden stand. Cat watched as the Him loosened something with a hiss on what was now the top of the barrel before picking up a brass tap with a perforated tube on one end and a wooden mallet, he then wrapped some folded newspaper around the end of the tap and positioned it at the bung at the bottom of what had been the round top of the barrel, before striking the tap end a few times to drive the bung into the barrel followed by the tapered end, with the paper wrapping forming a tight seal. Cat had watched this process on occasion before and sometimes a jet of black liquid would shoot out of the barrel and hit the Him square in the face, causing a string of words to be uttered that would make the Her come down the steps and tell the Him to shut up as there were gentlemen and ladies present in the Up Above that day. But no accidents happened this day, so the Him got a mug and poured some liquid into it from the now secured tap, tasting it before grunting approvingly.

Cat jumped down on the newly tapped barrel and watched as the Him then took the Contraption with its rectangular bowl and 4 pipes and placed it under the tap and proceeded to fill the bowl with black liquid from the tap that was now in the barrel. The Himling then sucked the ends of each of the four pipes to get the liquid to flow into the four bottles he had just positioned under each of the pipes, spitting mouthfuls of black liquid back into the bowl that was being filled. The Himling would take the empty bottles he had cleaned the previous day from their rack at one side of the Contraption and once filled by one of the four tubes, he'd put them on the ground on the opposite side and put another bottle under the filling pipe and repeat the process.

'Get off of there!'

The Him had dragged the Mechanism towards the barrel beside where the Himling was leaving the bottles and positioned the bucket of corks beside it, he threw a cork at Cat but missed - Cat just looked at the Him curiously and continued his observations. The Him just sighed and inserted a cork from the bucket into a pull-out section on one side of the top of the Mechanism, he slid that section into place, positioned a bottle on a little plate underneath before pulling down on a long lever that forced the cork into the bottle. He then placed the bottle into a crate and repeated the process, the Him and the Himling working in silence apart from the quiet gurgle of the dark liquid in the Contraption and the dull clunk of the lever in action of the Mechanism.

'Oh hello pussycat!'

The Herling had arrived home from wherever she went during the day, and Cat liked the Herling as she gave it little treats of meaty scraps and hard rubs behind the ear, both of which pleased Cat. But today the Herling went to where the Him and the Himling were sitting on the low stools in front of their machines, picked up a crate of filled bottles and carried them over to a table near the back of the Underneath. She opened a brown envelope that was sitting on the table and took out a thick bundle of oval, beige labels tied up with string. She cut the string and left the pile beside the crate of bottles. Then she got a small bowl to which she added a spoonful of white powder from a bag with the word ‘Flour’ written upon it – not that Cat knew that - and mixed them together. Then she used a small paint brush to put some of the mixture on the back of the label and affixed it neatly to a bottle, then she too – like the Him and the Himling – fell into the non-musical rhythm of repetitive work, with the air smelling of hot corks, spilled stout and floury paste, tinged with the greasy metal smell from the Mechanism and the musty odour of the Underneath itself.

Cat wasn’t happy at being ignored, it jumped up beside the Herling and sniffed at the mixture in the bowl before butting her elbow with its head, almost making the Herling drop a bottle.

'Silly puss! Don’t do that.'

The Herling picked up Cat and put her back up on the barrel that was almost empty, much to the annoyance and mutterings of the Him. Soon the tap began to gurgle and the tray in the Contraption that the bottles were being filled from was empty. When he had finished corking the bottles, the Him pried out the brass tap from the end of the barrel and used the mallet to beat back a round piece of timber into the hole to seal the cask tight again. Cat had to jump quickly off the barrel as the Him and the Himling lifted the barrel back upright and set it near a trapdoor to the Outdoors where Cat knew these barrels appeared and disappeared from regularly.

The Herling was finished putting the beige round labels with writing on them on the bottles and the Him and the Himling took the crates, each holding two dozen bottles, and stacked them at the end of the cellar six high, where Cat knew they would sit for a third of a Moon’s Time before being brought a crate at a time up into the Up Above where the people came and the corks were removed from the bottles with a long handled machine that was attached to the bar, before being poured into a glass in exchange for Round Metal Things that clinked as they were tossed into a drawer underneath the counter.

Cat yawned and stretched, then it sniffed the air for any smell of the Grey Squeakers that sometimes wandered into the Underneath, as it was his job to catch, play with, and crunch them. There was no scent of them today but it would return by its secret way later that night to check again, on its nightly patrol of the Underneath.

Just then the Herling appeared beside Cat and picked it up.

'Come on puss, up we go.'

Cat let himself be carried up the stairs purring contently, with Him and the Himling following behind after having cleaned the Contraption, putting away the Mechanism and mopping the slabs.

When everyone was upstairs the Him closed the door into the Underneath, and they headed towards the kitchen and the smell of cooking ham. The Him stopped briefly to gather four glasses before opening  two bottles of stout and two minerals. They had an hour to eat, drink and rest before the doors would be opened and more bottles poured for their thirsty patrons.

And as ever, Cat would watch over all proceedings …

Liam K

'Contraption'

'Mechanism'

[The bottling routine described here is adapted from notes regarding the procedure in the 1950s in “A bottle of Guinness Please” by David Hughes, and supplemented by passages in “3 Score and 10 – A Great Leap” by Cartan Finegan plus parts of Flann O’Brien’s “Myles Away from Dublin.”]

(Cat Photo via rollingroscoe on morguefile.com, and the Contraption and Mechanism photos were taken by the author from the public house display in Carlow County Museum.)

100 Years of Irish Brewing in 50 Objects: #13 – Pint & ½ Pint Bottles (1920-1950s)

The words of the rose to the rose floated up to his mind: ‘No gardener has died, comma, within rosaceous memory.’ He sang a little song, he drank his bottle of stout, he dashed away a tear, he made himself comfortable. So it goes in the world.

More Pricks Than Kicks - Samuel Beckett (1934)

In Ireland the pint bottle has achieved a semi-legendary status and is remarked upon and reminisced about it in equal measure as it slowly disappears from the fridges and shelves of the bars in this country. There are still many who appreciate its legacy, history and heritage, even if much of these elements are misunderstood, and there are those who enjoy and savour the taste and flavour of a beer poured the ‘proper’ way from a pint bottle into a ubiquitous flared pilsner glass, or just ‘A Glass’ as it is called in Irish pubs. At this point in time there are just a few beers still available in this Imperial measure and method of serve - the Diageo brands of Guinness, Harp, Smithwicks and Macardles, while Bulmers cider is also offer a pint bottles. These are the last relics of what was a huge industry of the past, where most of the beers consumed on this island were served in pint, half-pint and one-third-of-a-pint bottles, and when bottling companies as well as the publicans themselves bottled huge amounts of the output from Ireland's breweries. There was for sure a trade in draught beer served straight from the cask but this was more limited, and probably more often found, in the busy urban public houses.

So in most of Ireland the bottle was the most common way of drinking beer both at home and in the pub, but our love for the pint bottle is a relatively recent affair, as the half pint version was the most popular way of serving most beers for decades here, and certainly for a long period after the formation of the state in the 1922. It remained so until Draught Guinness and other draught keg beers became popular, and took over the pub beer sales in most of country. So these bottles -especially the smaller size - would have been a familiar sight in pubs, grocery shops and homes throughout Ireland.

Prior to the 1920s there was a mixture of bottle sizes that were known and discussed in the trade by how many of said bottles you could fill from a gallon of beer, so there were ‘12s’, ‘13s’, ‘14s’ and ‘16s’, with the ‘16s’ equating to a half pint (10fl. oz. or 284ml) and the others sizes up to ‘12s’ (13.33 fl.oz or 379ml), and although this latter size were sold as ‘Reputed Pints,’ interestingly there is very little mention of Imperial pint bottles up to this period.*

The newly created government of Ireland finally got around to addressing the issues around bottle sizes a not long after its formation when they published the Intoxicating Liquor (General) Act, 1924, which states the following:

9.—(1) The Minister for Justice may by order prescribe the sizes of the bottles in which any specified intoxicating liquor may be sold, and where any such order is in force it shall not be lawful to sell or supply the intoxicating liquor specified in the order in bottles of any size other than one of the sizes prescribed by the order.

And then in 1925 the following appears in the Intoxicating Liquor (Standardisation of Bottles) No. 1 Order, 1925:

AND WHEREAS it has been deemed expedient to prescribe the sizes of the bottles in which ale, beer, porter and stout may be sold:

NOW I, CAOIMHGHÍN Ó hUIGÍN, Minister for Justice, by virtue of the powers conferred upon me by Section 9 of the Intoxicating Liquor (General) Act, 1924 , and of all other powers enabling me in that behalf, do hereby order and prescribe as follows:—

On and from the 1st day of October, 1925, all ale, beer, porter or stout sold in bottles containing less than one standard quart shall be sold in quarter-pint, half-pint, or pint bottles [...]

This had to be amended on the 30th of December - possibly because the quarter-pint bottle was an error - to read:

(2) On and from the 1st day of January, 1926, all ale, beer, porter or stout sold in bottles containing less than one standard quart shall be sold in bottles containing one-third of a pint [my emphasis], one-half pint, or one pint.

(This piece of legislation was only revoked in 1983, presumably allowing the sale of any size bottle of beer providing the volume was stated on the label and that volume was correct, although this was probably the case anyway thanks to European legislation and regulations from 1977 regarding alcoholic drink volumes.)

This regulations needed to be enforced and further clarification appear to have been needed so we have another piece of legislation added on the 3rd of February 1926 which offered more information in 11 points, the most interesting being:

2. These Regulations shall come into force on the third day of February, 1926.

So a change from the date cited above.

4. The capacity of each bottle shall be defined by a line stamped on the bottle of not less than three-quarters of an inch in length and distant not less than one-and-five-eighth inches nor more than one-and-seven-eighth inches from the brim of the bottle.

This helps us to see why an where the fill lines appear on these bottles.

6. A bottle which is not completely emptied when tilted to an angle of 130 degrees from the vertical shall not be stamped.

This simple piece of wording shows why the sloped ‘shoulders’ on bottles are the shape and size they are!

7. The denomination of a bottle may be indicated by the abbreviated form of " Pt.", " ½ Pt.", or "1/3 Pt." respectively.

Again, we can see this on the bottles shown above.

8. If a maker's or trader's name is stamped on a bottle, it shall be in letters not exceeding one-half the size of the letters indicating the denomination.

On embossed bottles this defines the maxim size the bottler’s name can be appear.

11. In the case of bottles which are in stock or in use for trade on the date when these Regulations come into force, the provisions of Article 8 of these Regulations shall not apply, and the following provisions shall have effect in lieu of the provisions contained in Articles 4 and 5 of these Regulations, that is to say :—

(a) the capacity shall be deemed to be defined by an imaginary line drawn at one and three-quarters inches from the brim of the bottle ;

(b) the allowance for error permissible on verification and inspection shall be, in the case of a pint or half-pint bottle, not more than one-and-a-half drachms in deficiency nor more than one-and-a-half ounces in excess, and in the case of a one-third pint bottle, not more than one drachm in deficiency nor more than three-quarters of an ounce in excess.

Provided that the provisions of this Article shall not have effect after the 31st day of December, 1927, or such later date as may be defined by subsequent Regulations, and that after the 31st day of December, 1927, or such later date, no bottle which has not been verified and stamped pursuant to the provisions of Articles 4, 5 and 8 of these Regulations shall be deemed to be lawfully verified and stamped.

This is a long-winded way of saying that it is permitted to keep using unverified bottles as long as they conform to the legislation regarding volume, and they are destroyed or recycled by the 31st of December 1927 unless new legislation is published - and indeed it was changed on the 7th of January so that said bottles that were stamped or etched according to the legislation could be continued to be used in the trade regardless of their date of manufacturing.

Much of this legislation is tedious and difficult to analyse but Weights and Measures Act of 1928 clarifies much of what had gone before and more importantly gives is some clarity on the mystery of the numbers, letters and writing on the bottles shown here, and most others that are found in the collections of museums and breweriana collectors. It appears it was possible to incorporate verification marks into the manufacturing process of the bottles as part of the mould in which the bottle was formed and this is seen on these examples as ‘DIC’, ‘SE’ and the numbers ‘127.’

We can break these down as follows:

SE stands for ‘Saorstát Eireann’ the Irish translation for the Irish Free State which existed from 1922 until 1937.

The letters ‘DIC’ can appear quite puzzling but its meaning becomes clear if you look at the government body who was in charge of all of this legislation – The Department of Industry and Commerce.

127 is a little trickier but if we read Part 1 section 7 of the above mentioned act  - Verification and stamping of bottles during manufacture – we see the following:

The Minister may, if and whenever he thinks fit, grant in respect of any factory in Saorstát Eireann a licence in the prescribed form authorising all bottles to which this Act applies manufactured in such factory to be stamped in the prescribed manner during the process of manufacture with a stamp of verification under the Weights and Measures Acts, 1878 to 1904, as amended by this Act or with an impression derived from such stamp, and a factory in respect of which such a licence has been granted and is in force is in this section referred to as a licensed factory.

Therefore certain large glass bottle manufactures such as the company who produced those shown above – The Irish Glass Bottle Company – could bypass the need to apply individual etched on verification details by getting this licence. So it appears that this number 127 is the licence number given to this factory, which operated in Ringsend in Dublin.

Indeed the act goes on to say:

The methods of verification and stamping of bottles to which this Act applies authorised under this section shall, in respect of such bottles manufactured in a licensed factory, be in substitution for the methods of verification and stamping required or authorised by or under the Principal Act.

The company still needed inspectors from The Department of Industry and Commerce to check batches of bottles and certain fees needed to be paid, but it made the process simpler than that for drinking glasses for example which needed to be individually etched with the year date and the inspector or area number in the presence of said inspector. Other parts of this general legislation alludes to these inspectors being members of Gárda Síochána (The Irish police force), or at least appointed by them.

(The numbers that appear on the bottom of these bottles alongside the obvious initials ‘I. G. B.’ are a little more enigmatic but presumably stand for the mould numbers and variants.) 

-o-

Much has been written about the rise and fall of The Irish Glass Bottle Co. but our interests are in how it operated and functioned in the period of our concern - the 1920s. In 1928 an article regarding a visit to the company appeared in The Dublin Leader newspaper:

THE IRISH BOTTLE INDUSTRY

It was a Wexford man, Michael Owens, who in America first invented an alternative to mouth blowing in the making of bottles. A bicycle pump suggested the idea to him. The modern machines that developed out of that simple idea are still called after Owens, and to-day on the premises of the Irish Glass Bottle Co., Ltd., Charlotte Quay, Ringsend, Dublin, there is at work one of the largest and most modern Owens Bottle machines.

These bottle works are in full swing now. When we first visited a bottle factory in Dublin many years ago the Owen machines were things of the future, and it was all mouth blowing; in fact we blew a special bottle ourselves and took it home as a souvenir. A modern bottle factory is in parts a very hot place, as the heat in the furnace registers about 1,300 degrees C. Until some time back coal was the fuel used; now oil has superceded[sic] it, though at any time the factory can go back to coal if desirable. The main raw material is sand which is got from the Sutton-Malahide district, and needless to say the lime used is also a native product.

The furnace is going since November 1st last, for once the extraordinary temperature of about 1,300 is reached you have to keep it up, and so the works are carried on in three shifts of eight hours each, and the furnace never cools. The machine delivers the red-hot bottles in the course of not many seconds and workers take them up with long tongs—when you deal with red-hot bottles you need a long spoon—and place them on a steel belt revolving through another furnace. The latter furnace is 8o feet long and is quite cool at the other end; it takes about six hours for these bottles to travel the 8o feet, and by that time they are cooled. The machine is equal to turning out about 2,000 bottles in an hour.

Many things have occurred with regard to bottles in quite recent times, The tariff on bottles is 33 1/3 %, bottles under five ounces—at the request of this Company—-being admitted free. Our readers can guess the size of a five ounce and under bottle, when they are told that an ordinary beer bottle is ten ounces.

Who pays a tariff and to what extent do various parties pay it ? If a tariff excludes foreign goods and the prices of home goods do not rise, there is obviously nothing to pay; the only change is that the home Country has the whole home-market. There are foreign bottles still coming in from Germany, and from England. The prices of the half pint beer bottles is 20/- per gross and the question as to who pays the tariff is easy seen in this particular case. The imported bottles are now sold at about 15/- per gross, less duty, which practically means that Germans and English pay the tariff. In due time when the outside competitors find that undercutting will not down the Irish factory, they will give up the game and the Saorstát bottle factories will conquer the Saorstát market. The slight advantage which jam, sweets, etc., have, owing to existing taxation, has given a great fillip to jam making and consequentially the bottle industry benefits. One of the great results of any manufacturing industry in a country is the consequential effects on other home industries. Jam making has been very considerably extended in the Saorstat[sic] and the Irish Glass Bottle Company is doing a very big line in glass jars for home manufactured jams.

Some time ago there were a variety of sizes - rather of internal content—of bottles in the stout trade; the capacity of the bottles ranged from twelve up to even seventeen bottles to the gallon. The Government have stopped profiteering in that line and have made it imperative that every stout bottle contains half a pint. There is already—and there must be after a certain date—what we might call a Plimsol mark on the neck of every beer bottle it registers the half-pint contents. At the Base of some of the bottles now being turned out the words “Bottle made in Ireland ” are embossed, and we understand that this will, in due time, appear on all bottles turned out in the factory.

It is only recently—about two years ago—that the manufacture of white bottles and jars has been started. When we were in the factory last, some six years ago, there were no white bottles being made, and we expressed the hope that that development would come in time. It meant new machinery and large capital expenditure. The old Ringsend Bottle Works over the way are now re-organised, and white glass bottles and jar making are going ahead. The old system of mouth blowing is not wholly discarded, as in cases of special and comparatively small orders it is more economical to manufacture by this method than by machine.

This Company has about five thousand customers. It supplies retailers as well as wholesalers and many of its customers have their names embossed on their bottles. We were glad to see such life and bustle about the place. The Company employ about 120 men, and sometimes the number goes up to about 200, and pay wages to the amount of about twenty-three thousand pounds a year-—a valuable industry. 

This is a great insight into the company at this time and it is presented here in full including the comments on jam jars! It reinforces some of the points and observations made above. What is certainly of interest is the comment that stout was only bottled in half-pint bottles at this time, although there probably were exceptions, as has been stated already.

-o-

A helpful advertisement for The Irish Glass Bottle Company appeared in The Dublin Leader on Saturday 8th of July 1939 which shows a half pint bottle and encourages bottlers to use new bottles and not to recycle older ones – a far cry from the current ethos. It shows the prices of all of the legal beer bottle sizes and lists 1/3 pint bottles as ‘24’s’ which harks back to the older way of describing bottles by how many can be filled from a gallon. This size of bottle by the way was used for barley-wine and even for Guinness at one time, where they were called baby bottles - or even ‘Baby Guinness’ by our nearest neighbours, a name that means a different drink these days of course …

-o-

It is unclear precisely when this style of bottle with its ‘licence’ fell out of use but they were still being used in the 40s (The design and verification image were still being used in advertisements in 1944) and probably the 1950s – long after the term Saorstát Eireann was made redundant. 

New regulations issued in 1958 introduced a new verification design and regulations for bottles that was to come into force on the first day of January 1959, and which revoked the older legislation. So this appears to be the end of this style of bottle verification and presumably these were replaced by plainer, less embossed bottles of similar shape, and the half-pint version appears to have lost its shoulders in favour of a sleeker look. These bottles presumably feature the new verification stamp, with the date below and the verification inspector or area above. But according to part 6 and 7 of these new regulations:

(1) The stamp of verification to be used at a licensed bottle factory shall be of the form and design prescribed for the purposes or Regulation 5 of these Regulations, save that it shall not be obligatory to include the figures indicating the year of stamping.

(2) Notwithstanding paragraph (1) of this Regulation, the stamp of verification used at a licensed bottle factory in pursuance of Regulation 6 of the Weights and Measures (Stamps) Regulations, 1928 (S. R. & O. No. 72 of 1928), may continue to be used at such factory.

This would appear to state that the bottle factories can continue to use the older style of verification but could change to the new style - without the date - if they wanted to, but it is unclear when exactly they completely disappeared from the pubs and grocers, although it’s probably fair to assume they were gone by the 1960s.

-o-

It is also unclear when exactly the pint bottle as a serving size began to gain more popularity in Ireland but it was possibly on the rise over this same later period driven by the abovementioned brands, and in 1976 Guinness changed from the old, shouldered bottle like the one shown above to the new rocket-shaped one we are familiar with today. The half pint bottle of Guinness sadly disappeared in 1995**, and all of this size of serve from the other breweries in Ireland were well gone by this stage, as were most of the breweries themselves and the many bottlers both large and small.

We can see that our love for a pint bottle of any beer is quite recent – or at least relatively so - but that pint bottle is still around, and hopefully will be for a while as a last vestige of a bygone industry and trade.

Liam K

* There is more on the subject of bottles here.

** The bottle change is feature in this post.

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. The attached image is the author's own and cannot be used elsewhere without the author's permission. Newspaper research was thanks to The British Newspaper Archive and other sources are as credited. DO NOT STEAL THIS CONTENT!

100 Years of Irish Brewing in 50 Objects: #12 – Colonel Murphy’s Stout Beermat (1969)

 

Goodness! A rival ..!

Top men at the giant Guinness brewing group must be anxiously watching a little experiment which is going on in Manchester. If things go according to plan it could eventually lead to Ireland’s famous stout facing up to a serious rival in this country. […] If Murphy’s stout scores with Britain’s drinkers, then Guinness – Eire’s biggest export* – may find it has a challenger.

The City Editor at The Manchester Evening News - Tuesday 2nd of July 1968

In July 1968 the Watney-Mann brewery group quietly test marketed a batch of Murphy’s draught stout brewed at The Lady’s Well Brewery in Cork on a target audience in 20 of their Manchester pubs.¹ This soft launch must have been a relative success as it in turn led to a bigger campaign in June of 1969 when Watney-Mann were joined by Bass-Charrington - both giants of British brewing at the time - in trialling and marketing that same Irish stout in their pubs in the hope of unseating Guinness’s grip on the bar counters of Britain. Now under the guise of ‘Colonel Murphy,’ it was trialled in 500 of their pubs in Manchester and Brighton, with the hope of launching it in 8,000 pubs across the island in the future.² The name change and choice seems a strange decision, as nitrogenated draught Murphys had just been launched in Ireland the previous year with attractive, trendy branding³. That new branding featured a modern and stylised version of their famous older image of the strongman Eugen Sandow holding up a horse with one hand, which would seem to have been a much more marketable image and story to use and push in Britain. (‘Colonel Murphy’ was presumably named after Lt. Co. John F. Murphy who was the last of the Murphy family to play a direct role in the brewery.)

-o-

A newspaper campaign was launched in The Manchester Evening News over a period of months with the tagline we see on the beermat - ‘If you like draught stout, you’ll love Colonel Murphy’ - hardly the catchiest piece of wording and design ever produced.

The advertisement continues:

In their time, the Irish have produced two great draught stouts.
Colonel Murphy is the one you’ve never heard of before,
Because the Irish have kept it to themselves for the past 113 years.
Now at last it’s being shipped over from County Cork to England.
You won’t find it everywhere, but in many Watney-Wilson and
Bass-Charrington houses. And it’s worth looking for.
It’s dark, smooth and slightly bitter, with a grand creamy head.
A noble drink, if ever there was one.

There are obvious issues with this wording such as the comment that there have only been ‘two great stouts’ produced in Ireland - Beamish & Crawford might disagree for starters, although their stout production was in a state of turmoil at this time - and the implication that Murphy’s never exported stout to England in the past. (They had, and they have done so since too of course.) However, we know from experience that beer marketeers are not the most reliable source, or communicators, of Irish brewing history. ‘Watney-Wilson’ appears to have been referencing the Wilson group of pubs that Watney-Mann had taken over in the early 1960s and who had a considerable number of pubs in Manchester, hence the name use here which would have resonated more with local drinkers presumably.⁴

At the end of August a full page advertisement appeared in the same paper that listed every pub in Manchester and the surrounding area that was stocking Colonel Murphy, a list that ran to 347 different establishments.⁵ The following month in a half page advert under the title ‘England’s Gain’ the marketing was still focusing on its Irish origin saying that ‘naturally enough the Irish are sad to see it go. It’s dark, smooth and bitter with a grand creamy head. A drink fit for heroes.’ It also played with the exclusivity of the beer by saying, ‘It’s here. Not everywhere. But in many Watney-Wilson and Bass-Charrington houses. Try it.’ So it would appear that the brewing companies were putting a relatively sizable marketing budget behind the launch, albeit just at local level.⁶

-o-

Similarly themed adverts ran through October of 1969 but alas it was a short-lived experiment, and commenting on the pulling of the brand from its pubs a spokesperson for Bass-Charrington said in a newspaper report in November that ‘it would have cost too much to get [it] off the ground nationally’ so they had decided that ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ and that both brewing companies would be selling Guinness in their pubs within 12 months. It also quoted a ‘jubilant’ Guinness spokesperson who said that ‘it was the biggest challenge yet to draught Guinness and the fact that these great companies failed will discourage others.’³

Another report regarding Guinness draught’s success in the English market also discussed Colonel Murphy’s demise while noting that both Watney-Mann and Bass-Charrington had breweries in Cork, with the former owning Murphy’s (Lady’s Well Brewery) having acquired 51% of the shares in 1967³, while the latter controlled Beamish & Crawford, both of which were running below profitable capacity, and the hope was that Murphy’s Stout - albeit under a different name in Britain - would change the fortunes of that brewery if the experiment was a success. The article goes on to say that they might have been unlucky with their timing, as it had been ‘a hot summer for their test marketing’ but as it was still on sale up until early winter it’s hard to put much fate in that comment. The reporter also makes the point that ‘the Bass end of Bass Charrington has taken draught Guinness for some time’ so it appears that some of its pubs were already selling it at this time if it wasn't a comment on an older historical connection.⁷ The chairman of Watney-Mann, Peter Crossman, also stated in 1970's The Brewing Trade Review that ‘although we had an excellent beer which achieved reasonable sales levels, the investment and effort required to catch up with the public awareness of draught Guinness would have been less profitable to the group than the sale of a product already marketed.’

It is worth noting that at this time approximately 30,000 drinking establishments in Britain were selling draught Guinness and that figure was growing at a rate of 25% per annum,⁸ but this still seems a strange decision given their abovementioned involvement and investment in The Lady’s Well Brewery which brewed the stout, but perhaps it was a sign of them losing their love for Cork and Ireland despite those adverts they commissioned, where they sang the praises of Colonel Murphy, and indeed by the summer of 1971 they had severed their ties with the brewery and sold their stake in it.

-o-

Very little breweriana seems to have survived of Murphy’s English adventure, but there are - as we can see - some beer mats and there are probably some nice conical pint glasses sitting on the back of a few English collectors’ shelves, but it’s nice to know that at the end of the sixties a Cork brewed stout almost put it up to the biggest player in the stout market in Britain.

It's interesting to think what might have happened if they had succeeded …

Liam K

* Apart from irksome use of ‘Eire,' surely most of the draught Guinness drank in Britain was produced in their brewery at Park Royal in London?

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. The attached image is the author's own and cannot be used elsewhere without the author's permission. Newspaper research was thanks to The British Newspaper Archive and other sources are as credited.

¹ The Manchester Evening News - Tuesday 2nd of July 1968

² The Daily Mirror - Tuesday 11th of November 1969

³ The Murphy's Story - The History of Lady's Well Brewery, Cork by Diarmuid Ó Drisceoil and Donal Ó Drisceoil

⁴ The Manchester Evening News - Friday 1st of August 1969

⁵ The Manchester Evening News - Wednesday 20th of August 1969

⁶ The Manchester Evening News - Thursday 11th of September 1969

⁷ The Birmingham Daily Post - Tuesday 11th of November 1969

⁸ The Daily Mirror - Tuesday 11th of November 1969