Managing Change at Tetleys By Peter Brookes
Managing change at Tetleys
By Peter Brookes
(From BHS Newsletter no.110, September 2025)
Our Editor and my old friend from Burton days, alerted me to some posts on the Brewery History Society Facebook page from Reg Thompson relating to Tetleys in the 1990s. I was Brewery Director at Tetleys at the time and Reg worked in the brewing and fermenting department and furthermore was GMB Union Branch Secretary. Reg's comments (complementary!) related to a major change programme we instigated in the brewery at this time known as Vision '96. The aim of the plan was to change completely the way of working at the brewery based on a philosophy of 'leadership and enablement', rather than 'command and control'. Looking back 20 years later, it was astonishing to read Reg's comments and to see how much he had thought about the potential benefits of the plan.
First, I must paint a brief picture of Tetleys and how the company progressed to the 1990s. I have already discussed the early history of Tetleys as maltsters from the days of William Tetley (Joshua's father) through to the development of Chadwick Street maltings and the effects of the merger process to form Allied Breweries and its malting division, Albrew Maltsters (Brookes, 2017). I am now looking at a different phase of the Tetley story as the business broadened to take in brewing. And again, it is about people as well as process.
Joshua Tetley (1778-1859) was a restless and inquisitive man. By 1822 he had a secure and profitable malting business and a developing business merchanting brandy and wine. He was living in Park Square in Leeds with the gentry of the time. But it was not enough; he looked on at the successful large-scale brewers of London and wondered why similar businesses did not thrive in the north. And then an opportunity arose to lease the buildings and buy the business of William Sykes in Salem Place, Hunslet, Leeds. He paid Sykes £400. Joshua had a very tough start to his brewing business and did not take a single order in the first month. But Joshua had belief and determination; he had been a quality maltster and was determined to be a quality brewer and the phrase, "Quality Pays", was born. And it did pay, in the second year trade doubled, and the business was on its way. Joshua stuck with the "Quality Pays" axiom throughout his life and it was adopted by subsequent family members to the advantage of the business. It is likely that he derived this philosophy from his malting background; he made quality malt, he appreciated its value and got a good price for it.
There were however many ups and downs. Tetleys remained brewers for sale for over 60 years and were almost too late in developing their own licensed premises. They relied on agencies in London and Manchester to sell the beer to the free trade. They failed to see the development of the 'tied' trade as Burton and London brewers bought up licensed premises and secured sole outlets for their beer. Business was being lost, but at last in 1890 the decision was taken to buy a pub and start to secure a tied trade. This was the 'Duke William', at the north gate of the brewery which stayed open until 1953. The building survived long after this date and there were plans to convert it to a museum in the 1990s, but sadly this did not happen and the building was demolished. The purchase of the pub was a crucial moment and the decision was taken almost too late. This had a profound effect on the Tetley family and resulted in a determination not to be caught by slow decision making again; did they manage to achieve this?
The fortunes and downturns of the company have been well charted by Clifford Lackey (Lackey, 1985). Through to the 1950s Tetleys generally followed a business philosophy of 'no mergers, no take-overs'. But post World War Two times were changing, small brewing companies were vulnerable to take-over by companies often outside of brewing eyeing the High Street property assets of brewers. Tetleys determined not to be caught again as in their failure to recognise the onset of the tied trade. Accordingly, a period of friendly, gentlemanly mergers started in 1954 with the acquisition of Duncan Gilmour and Co. of Sheffield. More followed with William Whitaker of Bradford, Melbourne Brewery of Leeds, Walker Cain of Warrington and Liverpool, Thomas Ramsden of Halifax and Charles Rose of Malton. Tetleys was a powerful regional brewer when Allied Breweries was formed in 1961 and substantially re-organised in 1969 (Brookes, 2017).
The management style followed by the Tetley family was generally one of benevolence. Employees were cared for and personnel policies were enlightened. Noel Tetley (1898-1971) was particularly influential in this respect and this feeling was passed on to his son, Richard, who was production director of Tetley-Walker at the time of Allied Breweries' formation. I attended management courses run by Richard in the early 1970s and apart from his ability to get all slides upside down I was impressed. People were assets not costs to Richard. But in the harsh world of Allied he did not prosper.
The effect of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission investigations into the brewing industry has been well discussed and documented (Anderson, 2012; Brookes, 2017). As far as this article is concerned suffice it to say that Allied put its breweries into a 50/50 joint venture with Carlsberg: Carlsberg-Tetley. This immediately shows the strongest brand name of Allied, at last emerging after 20 years or so! Chief Executive was an Allied man: Don Marshall who had at one time run Tetley-Walker to the west of the Pennines. He was good to me but did not have an easy time with Carlsberg.
I had joined Tetley Walker in the late 1960s and spent my time in process research and malting in Warrington and Burton. Out of the blue I was offered the job of Brewery Director at Leeds in 1993. I took it. As I took over Leeds brewery the atmosphere in the company was nervy. The cultures of Allied and Carlsberg were quite different. Allied believed in a profit centre approach based on individual trading companies and strong tied trade. Carlsberg believed in firm central control with breweries operating as cost centres. Conflict was likely.
Tetley Bitter was brewed in Leeds and Warrington and was still a 1 million barrel brand with almost 600,000 brls in cask. But as I took over sales were falling and marketing effort was directed to the smooth flow ale in keg and cans. As sales fell productivity indices such as fixed cost/barrel and output/man worsened.
The work force at Tetleys had been nurtured on the success of the brand and the loose, "Quality Pays" philosophy. But there had been little change in organisation since the formation of Allied over 20 years earlier. There was a hugely hierarchical management structure and considerable demarcation. There were shift brewers and shift supervisors. There was little flexibility and considerable overtime. The engineers were managed separately from production and were often working overtime at weekends to fix plant problems. There were eight grades of industrial employee and endless debate about job grading. There were several work systems from 168-hour cover to 3-shift, 2-shift and day work. There had been little attempt to train employees to gain and be rewarded for new skills. Some of the shop stewards could be difficult and appear resistant to change but this was largely because of frustration at management's perceived lethargy and disinterest in improving the work force.
There were visionaries of course, Reg being one, and the senior steward, Ken Boothroyd was very capable of seeing the way forward and the need for change. The whole could be described as a dog's breakfast. Quality Pays was not enough.
Now you can tinker around with things, but I believed that a major change programme was needed to increase flexibility, remove demarcation and increase skill levels. The idea was to get decision making on to the line, people with hands on the beer should take the decisions and must have the appropriate skill and equipment to do this. I needed a head brewer of like persuasion and I had the perfect recruit with Graham Simpson who was head brewer at Warrington and looking for a change. We were fortunate in having a visionary personnel manager in Les Kitchen who could crunch the numbers, an astute and computer literate planner in Jeremy Cartwright and a sound accountant in David Dixon. Accordingly, we developed an all-embracing three-year change plan which became known as "Vision '96". This was presented to the whole work force at the Queens Hotel in Leeds in January 1994.
The headline was to make Tetley recognised as a world class brewer and to foster continuous improvement and a pursuit of excellence in the business. To achieve this objective, the strategy was to focus on customer service, product quality and low-cost production; how? Well, to get low-cost production requires people and organisation change and computer integrated manufacture. The real challenge was organisation change.
My aim was to de-layer the management structure, create multi-disciplinary teams, train the work force and put decision making right down the line. This approach was hammered home continuously at departmental meetings throughout the brewery. There did, of course need to be redundancies. I forecast job losses of around 160 from a workforce of 650 to achieve a productivity of 6000brls/man. But productivity would not increase by redundancy alone, the organisation had to be changed. As a start the brewery was organised into three areas: brewing and fermenting, processing and packaging.
As a fundamental we decided that engineers would be integrated into multi-disciplinary working teams responsible to the line manager. All employees would be known as 'technicians'. Teams would be led by a 'Leader', who could have operating or engineering skills. There would be no overtime, no hourly pay, the time clock would end. Employees would be salaried, paid monthly and enjoy so called 'staff' conditions of welfare and sick pay. The salary would be paid for an agreed annual hours attendance. A form of 168-hour cover was needed the detail of which was discussed inexhaustibly. This was a vital step in achieving ownership of the plan by the workforce. Eventually we allowed a free vote to be taken, and employees opted for a 12-hour shift system which yielded a rotating 4-week shift pattern of: 3, 5, 2, 4, which allows 168h cover on day and night shifts and an annual attendance of 2184 hours. The average working week would be 42h and each department would have 4 teams. In addition, there would be an 'Improvement' team able to work across all departments to provide support on the line or on projects. This rota provides an 8-day sequence of rest days, which compensates for the intensity of 12h attendances. Additional hours more than 2184 were built into the salary and had to be worked if required. But work would not be 'manufactured' to demand attendance. Trust on both sides was key. Furthermore, training was crucial.
The overriding philosophy was to put the quality of the beer in the hands of those closest to it. Accordingly, laboratories were developed on the line and employees were trained to make measurements of colour, pH, and bitterness and to react to the results. A big challenge was to train in microbiological control. This proved difficult but employees quickly learned to test for infection using the ATP bioluminescence technique based on the luciferin/luciferase reaction. Increased pay was offered for increased skills. At this time the Institute of Brewing and Distilling was developing the Foundation Certificate in brewing. Technicians were encouraged to study and to sit this exam; some embraced this opportunity wholeheartedly including Reg Thompson.
To make the changed organisation work effectively requires giving the workforce the right tools for the job and ensuring that unlimited access to those tools is available. I have already mentioned the crucial role that on-line laboratories play in this. The second key system goes under the name of, 'Computer Integrated Manufacture' (CIM), common place now but not so in the mid-1990s. However, we were fortunate that at this time hard-wired relay logic systems of process control could be replaced by silicon chip based programmable logic controllers (PLCs). This was also a time of rapid development in the scope of personal computers (PCs) which provided user-friendly operator interfaces and the ability to store vast amounts of data.
Capital cost of equipment was also falling as 'Microsoft' operating systems sought to dominate the world and for a time a 'buyer's market', developed with undoubted benefit to the Company. The rudiments of CIM were thus available. Of course, the starting point is measurement, effective sensors are available to measure pH, temperature and pressure and training in bitterness and colour measurement is straightforward. The control of the plant is affected through the PLC, which handles simple input and output instructions e.g. 'open', 'close'. Inputs are from the sensors and outputs are instructions to machines, pumps, motors, valves etc. The final need of the technician to see what is happening and to store information for future use is provided by a 'Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System' (SCADA), this communicates with PLCs by an 'ethernet' and can have a user-friendly interface through the PC.
There is a lot of jargon here, but it was surprising how quickly the basic principles of CIM were accepted by the workforce. There was a realisation that real information on the status and quality of the beer was in their hands and they could make decisions on the progress of the beer through the brewery. Training and support were crucial in gaining acceptance and ensuring success.
Control at plant level through a regime of CIM is relatively straightforward and explicable to the workforce. But working above SCADA in the hierarchy are systems of business planning known as MRP (materials requirements planning) and MRPII (manufacturing resource planning), (Brookes, 2005). The objective for these systems is to reduce working capital by minimising stock holding of raw materials, beer in process and finished beer for sale. In this way a production schedule is generated right back to the brewhouse and can be used by the teams in the brewery who can also make inputs to more effective planning and stock control.
Now this sounds like utopia; it wasn't. There were problems in implementation with organising of the teams and the use of the computer systems. Engineers did not take easily to working in teams led by an operator and still required the protection of the old-style Chief Engineer. But if you believe in multi-skilled teams you just must tough this one out. The better team leaders will win through. Relentless communication and belief are needed.
MRPII systems run on clever software. At Tetleys we were heavily invested in a system called PRMS. We led the Group on this. An alternative system known as PRISM was being promoted at Warrington and by certain frustrated opinion formers of little practical experience. Jealousy of Tetleys' potential success was a motive here. Astonishingly at a late stage the decision was taken at HQ by John Smith, Operations Director to use PRISM in C-T. This was a major blow to Leeds brewery and caused a huge amount of retraining, which was a big challenge as the general independent view was that PRMS was a superior system. And that is how it goes. Carlsberg stayed out of this debate and simply observed the resulting mayhem.
Vision '96 was accepted by Leeds employees, but this decision on MRPII made achievement of our objectives more difficult. Nevertheless, the plan represented a totally different way of organising the brewing of the beer. Acceptance and ownership did steadily gain strength and when Warrington brewery closed in 1997, we had a better organisation to take on the increased production. There was a real feeling that something had changed. I liked to think that this was a demonstration that Tetleys were again at the forefront of innovation and would not be caught out by failing to react to the current marketplace. Reg Thompson's comments over 20 years later demonstrate the profound effect the plan had on employees. And we achieved our improved productivity indices and significantly reduced fixed costs/barrel.
But environments change and events happen. Beer volumes in Carlsberg-Tetley in the late 1990s were falling. There seemed to be an inability in marketing to provide strategies to increase sales. Skol was neglected and the Castlemaine XXXX bubble burst. Production was required to lower costs more and more and training budgets were cut substantially and foolishly. Allied sought to get out of the 50/50 joint venture with Carlsberg and to concentrate wholly on retailing and wines and spirits and Carlsberg's interests lay in the international brand market.
In 1997 Carlsberg acquired 100% ownership of Carlsberg-Tetley. Don Marshall was gone, and the UK Chief Executive was Ebbe Dinesen. This change happened at a crucial time for Vision '96 as employees settled to the new conditions of employment and a more satisfying future. Carlsberg management was suspicious of devolved decision making and preferred strong central control. The ethos of the company changed. Many visionary employees remained for a time including Reg Thompson and Ken Boothroyd. But in 2000 I was replaced as Brewery Director and so the focus of the plan was lost.
Ultimately the brewery closed, a sad and unnecessary end for a proud business. Interestingly I was asked to return to the brewery and organise training for employees seeking to take the Foundation Certificate of the Institute of Brewing and Distilling. This had some impact as Reg has remarked and he proved to be a good student.
Peter Brookes
References
- Anderson, R G (2012) Brewery History, No. 146, 3.
- Brookes, P A (2005) The Brewer and Distiller, 1, (8), 17.
- Brookes, P A (2017) Brewery History, No. 172, 45
- Lackey, C (1985) Quality Pays, The Story of Joshua Tetley and Son, Springwood Books, Ascot