Brewing Was A Way of Life

BREWING WAS A WAY OF LIFE The Story of Hydes’ Anvil Brewery by Neal Hyde

I have been very gratified with the comment and feed back I have received since the publication of my book “Brewing Was A Way Of Life” in 1999. This has further stimulated my mind in to dwelling on the tremendous changes that have taken place in the Brewing trade since I joined it in January 1948.

At the time there were well over 20 brewers trading in the Manchester area who were all members of the Manchester and District Brewers Society. The majority of these were situated in Manchester, Salford and Stockport. However, owing to mergers and take-overs there are only about four of them whose names would be known and recognised by the modern generation.

There was a lot of competition just after the Second World War and in the 1950s, but the trade was much friendlier in my view than it is today. Draught beer was of course all cask conditioned and racked into wooden casks. If you had a technical problem, it was easy to pick up the telephone and speak to your opposite number in another company for advice.

I know that during the 1939 war, Chesters Brewery at Ardwick was in trouble with its yeast and asked if we could let them have some of ours which my father duly did as we had a special rapport with all the ‘other’ Hydes at Chesters as dealt with in my book. Then just after the war in 1949, when we were having problems with our yeast we decided to ask Chesters if we could have some of our own yeast back again. Our head brewer at the time, Richard Davies, sent me over to the Ardwick brewery as a young man to collect the yeast in a stainless steel barm can. Needless to say I wasn’t allowed to return to Moss Side without a sampling session in the Brewer’s office at Chesters. However, when I did return to our brewery the new yeast strain was pitched straight away in to a brew of mild ale. Unfortunately, this did not solve all our problems as the resulting brew tasted just like Chesters beer and was unacceptable to our customers. I am not criticising Chesters beer as after all they sold far more beer than we did, but nevertheless Chesters beer had a distinctive flavour which was different from most other Manchester beers in those days. If you liked their beers you probably wouldn’t enjoy ours and vice versa.

There has been a lot of publicity comparatively recently in the press about William Hague and his consumption of 14 pints of beer a day whilst he had a holiday job as a youngster working on a brewer’s dray. Well I think all breweries today are ‘dry’ for obvious reasons but prior to the breathalyser there is no doubt that this sort of consumption was very much the norm in that particular job. Not at all easy to understand by those who are not beer drinkers or easy to defend. Times were very different, there was a lot less traffic and wagons didn’t move very fast.

The first take-over bid I remember in our area was made by Wilsons Brewery of Newton Heath in 1949 when they absorbed Walker and Homfrays of Salford. This quite shattered people in the trade at the time as there had been a moratorium on this sort of activity because of the war. A decade later in 1959, Charles Clore’s bid for Watney Mann really did come as a big surprise and completely upset the industry. Although this bid was unsuccessful, it was the catalyst for promoting consolidation in the brewing industry throughout the country. As I mentioned at the beginning, this has resulted in the disappearance of many well known breweries in the Manchester area which is a great loss to all of us. From a national point of view, including micro-brewers, there are now fewer breweries than ever and even less real choice.

It is important I think that local breweries like my own company continue to thrive. They do have a great future I am sure.