by Ian Walker
“Well, if it’s any help, the antiques programmes on TV say that brown furniture isn’t selling at the moment,” added Molly.
After a brief discussion, Molly said, “Let’s think about it overnight and we can make the final decision tomorrow.”
As well as the table and chairs, the room also contained a sideboard. There were several items on top of it, including a Moorcroft fruit bowl, matching candlesticks and an ornate clock. The clock had an inscription on it, which Nigel had never noticed before.
He picked it up and read the inscription out loud. It said ‘To Major Goodyear on the occasion of his retirement, September 5th 1958. From all your employees and tenants at Goodyear’s Brewery Chesterfield.’
*******
Father knew that Sarah and I could never have children. He also knew that we were both devastated by this. He never talked about it, but I knew that he was worried about the future of the brewery and, in particular, who in the family would take over the business from me.
Eventually his prayers were answered when Rebecca gave birth to a baby boy in March 1958. He was a bonny little chap with fair hair and rosy cheeks. He was the spitting image of his father. Sprout suggested they call him Frederick, as he said it was cool to have the same name twice, even cooler if his Christian name was English and his surname was German. However, my sister was not impressed, so she and Herman decided to call him Nigel instead.
My father had been waiting for some kind of sign like this, especially since he was about to turn 65. So he finally decided to step down as Managing Director, although he kept his Chairman’s role. But since that role only involved him attending board meetings once per quarter, he effectively handed over the day-to-day running of the company to me.
We worked side by side for a few months before he eventually retired in September 1958. On his last day, we held a farewell party for him in the brewery cellars. I will always remember him standing there, pint in hand, laughing and joking with his employees. The staff presented him with a clock as a retirement gift before consuming even more beer than they did at our wedding. It was a fitting tribute to the man who’d been Managing Director of the brewery for the past 28 years.
I asked him what he was going to do in his retirement and he told me that he intended to enjoy the rest of his life. He said he wanted to travel and see a bit of the world. The first place he wanted to go to was Italy, where he planned to visit Rupert’s grave. It had been fifteen years since Rupert was killed in action and Father was finally able to face the prospect of seeing where his eldest son was buried.
Unfortunately, my father was destined never to visit Italy or to have a long and happy retirement, as four months later he was knocked down and killed whilst crossing the road outside his house. I later discovered his false teeth in the gutter. They’d been knocked out by the impact.
His funeral was one of the largest Chesterfield had ever seen with all the brewery employees and tenants attending the service. It had to be held in the Crooked Spire, as it was the only church large enough to accommodate all the people who wanted to attend. There were representatives from both of Chesterfield’s other two breweries and from various suppliers, as well as family and friends. And my father had many friends.
His coffin was taken from the Crooked Spire on the back of the same horse-drawn dray that had been used at my mother’s funeral. He was buried in the graveyard of St Peter and St Paul Church in Old Brampton, in the same grave as my mother. It had been his dying wish.
The contrast between the burial and the service at the Crooked Spire could not have been greater, as the only people at his burial were the undertakers and the six members of his immediate family.
I’d learnt so much from my father and as I stood alongside his grave watching his coffin being lowered, I couldn’t help shed a tear as I remembered my happy childhood with him. In particular, I reflected on him sitting in front of the radio listening to the BBC whilst smoking his pipe, looking happy and content with his lot in life.
In his final months, my father may have retired from the business, but he still acted as a sounding board, giving me advice about running the brewery whenever I needed it. Now he was gone. I was all alone at work especially since Rebecca had left when she became pregnant with Nigel.
The brewery may have been a family business, but right at that particular moment in time the family consisted of just myself. I was alone at work and as good as alone at home. It was not a happy time for me. This was made even worse as our beer sales had started to decline.
The late 1950s had seen many changes. No longer did sons merely follow in the footsteps of their fathers. Rock ‘n roll had been thrust on an unsuspecting world when Bill Haley released ‘Rock Around the Clock’ in 1955. The same year saw James Dean portraying a disaffected teenager in Rebel Without a Cause. Elvis Presley released his first single in 1956 and in 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth. I was in my late twenties by then and I began to think that I no longer understood the world.
The British brewing industry was not immune to these changes as witnessed by the fact that a new type of beer was sweeping the UK. It was a different beer to all those that had gone before and was the drink of choice of the young generation. It was called keg and we didn’t make it. The reason for this was simple: we didn’t have the equipment. To make keg beer you needed to be able to pasteurise, chill and filter the beer and, most importantly, you needed a supply of kegs and a keg-racking machine in order to fill them. In total, the cost would have been several thousand pounds, which was money we just didn’t have.
Our tenants, of course, were demanding the new type of beer, as they didn’t want to see their customers going elsewhere. The Ashgate Brewery demonstrated one possible solution, when it introduced Flowers keg alongside its own beers. Overall sales in their pubs increased, but this proved to be a false dawn, as sales of their own beers fell dramatically. As a consequence of this, they sold out to Mansfield Brewery in 1959.
In his will my father had split everything between Rebecca and I. If it had been just down to me, we would have sold his house and invested the money in the company. Rebecca, however, wanted to spend her share on buying a larger house for her family to live in. She said that they needed the space as she and Herman were planning to have more children in future. In the end, we agreed that if I invested my inheritance in the business and Rebecca did not, I would increase my shareholding to 55% with Rebecca’s share dropping to 45%.
There was also the little matter of what to do with our grandmother before we put the house on the market. She was 92 by then and was incapable of looking after herself. Father had done his best, but even he was thinking about putting her in a home just before his death. Rebecca and I both agreed that with his passing this was now the best course of action. So in February 1959, we arranged for her to take a room at the Riverside Old Folks home just outside Chesterfield.
It was very nice, but Granny didn’t like it. She said it smelt of cabbages and they wouldn’t let her drink sherry before her evening meal or have a brandy at bedtime. She died only three months after moving in. I did feel guilty about this, but what choice did I have? She couldn’t continue to live by herself and she couldn’t move in with Rebecca and Herman and their young son. As for moving in with Sarah and me, well I wouldn’t have wished that on anybody.
In June 1959, we sold the house where my sister and I had both grown up to a firm of solicitors who wanted it for their offices. It was a great location for them right in the centre of Chesterfield, but it meant that it was destined never to be a family home ever again. Rebecca took most of the furniture in order to furnish the new four-bedroomed house that she and Herman had bought on Chatsworth Road.
I took the oak dining table, chairs and the sideboard. Sarah was not at all happy as she claimed that they were too old-fashioned for our house. However, by this stage I was past caring about what she thought. I took my father’s radi
o even though it was 25 years old, as well as the clock he was given when he retired. One other thing that I kept was the art deco nude from his desk.
Mind you, the saddest part of the whole process for me was when I discovered his medals and the hipflask, which he’d given to Rupert when he’d gone off to fight in Italy. He’d thrown them in the bottom drawer of his desk where they had remained for the past fifteen years. There was no way that I was going to throw them away and so I took them home with me as well.
I went up into the attic to clear it out and discovered many of Rupert’s old toys. These included the Hornby O gauge train set he had received as a Christmas present back in 1933. It had always been his favourite, but despite this he’d always let me play with it. There were also loads of old family photos including a framed picture that my father had told me was the earliest photo ever taken of our family.
It was taken in 1871 just nine years after Goodyear’s Brewery had been founded. It featured a seated Benjamin Goodyear with his walrus moustache, flat cap and Albert chain, his wife Mavis with their youngest son Alfred, who was then only six months old, on her knee. Also in the photo was my grandfather, who was five years old alongside his sisters Ruth, aged seven and Felicity, aged three. The final person in the photo was Benjamin’s mother Rose, my great-great-grandmother who must have been 72 at the time the photo was taken, since she had been born in 1799.
It was an odd feeling looking at her dressed in her long skirt. She had a stern expression on her face and her hair was scraped back into a central parting. She had been born in the eighteenth century, long before the invention of photography. It was also before Waterloo and Trafalgar and 38 years before Queen Victoria came to the throne, at a time when slavery was still legal in Britain.
I wondered why the photo had been kept in the attic and could only think that it was because of the subsequent family feud. In 1897, Alfred had fallen out with his father after declaring his love for Cassandra Maynard, the youngest daughter of Ernest Maynard who owned our great rivals, Brimington Brewery.
Alfred subsequently married Cassandra and went to work alongside her brother at their brewery in Brimington. It was said that he and my grandfather never spoke again. I guess it was not surprising then that the photo of them as children should end up in a chest in the attic.
Funny to think that fifty years later my own father had actually wanted me to marry the granddaughter of Cassandra’s brother.
We didn’t have space for the items I’d discovered in my father’s attic, so I merely transferred them to my own attic. I meant to find a more permanent home for them at some point, but I never did and so they are still there to this day.
Chapter 16
Nigel and Molly took the clock, the Moorcroft fruit bowl and the candlesticks into the living room. They put them with the growing collection of items that were going to be sold at auction.
Returning back to the dining room, they discovered that the sideboard contained a canteen of silver cutlery, which they added to the auction pile. Some of the drawers contained several tablecloths and a set of place mats, which they opted to give to charity. One of the cabinets in the sideboard housed a collection of glasses, whilst the other contained various bottles of spirits, most of them half full.
The spirit bottles looked extremely old so Nigel and Molly decided to tip their contents down the sink and put the bottles into the bottle bank. The glasses were nothing special so they opted to take them to the charity shop.
One of the drawers in the sideboard contained several tins full of old coins, which Nigel and Molly added to the coins they had discovered in the first bedroom.
Finally, they took down the pictures and a large copper charger from the walls and carefully placed them amongst the other items destined for the auction house. They had finished the dining room and it had only taken them a little over an hour.
It was now half past three so they decided to call it a day, as they still had to fit in several visits to the recycling centre and the hospice shop.
In the end, it took them three visits to the recycling centre before they were finally able to go to the hospice shop.
Whilst they were there, they wanted to arrange for somebody to pick up the larger items of furniture.
The manager explained that they would only take items that they were confident would sell. Anything that was either stained or worn out, or that didn’t comply with the latest safety legislation wouldn’t be acceptable to them.
Nigel and Molly thanked him and after agreeing that the furniture would be collected at 9 o’clock on Thursday morning, they set off back to Ashbourne.
“We’d better think of an alternative plan,” said Nigel once the two of them were sitting in the car. “I just assumed that they would take the lot. It now looks as if that won’t be the case and so we’ll need to get someone else to collect anything they don’t want.”
“I think the council will collect bulky items,” said Molly. “I’ll check on the internet to see how much they charge. But I’ll do it tomorrow as the first thing I want to do when we get home is to put my feet up and have a glass of wine.”
“Good idea,” said Nigel as he started the car and set off for home.
The following day they arrived at their uncle’s house even earlier than they had the day before. It was day three of the great clear out. They still had their uncle’s study, living room, attic, shed and the garage to go through and they wanted to get as much of it done as possible that day.
It was the turn of their uncle’s study next. This was only a small room, but they were disappointed to discover that once again it was packed full of junk. The fact that both the dining room and the third bedroom had contained relatively few things had lulled them into a false sense of optimism. It was clear that they had underestimated how long the process was going to take.
The study was more like the second bedroom, however. It contained numerous papers and documents, which had to be examined before being thrown away. It would just be their luck to bin the whole lot only to miss a valuable share certificate.
As well as being a study, it had also been their uncle’s den and it contained many objects that must have been of great sentimental value to him.
Molly went to make tea for the two of them whilst Nigel removed the art deco nude from their uncle’s desk. It was obviously quite valuable and would make a good lot for the auction house.
Also on the desk was a plastic beer cowl with ‘Goodyear’s Sparkling Bitter’ written on it.
“I’d forgotten that the brewery also made keg beer,” Nigel thought to himself as he picked it up.
*******
Father’s house sold for £8,350 and once the estate agent and solicitor’s fees were paid, my half share meant I had a little over £4,000 to invest in the business.
However, I had a dilemma. I’d always wanted to build a second pub to the same design as the George Stephenson. But now I had an alternative way in which to spend the money, namely on a keg-racking machine and all the rest of the equipment needed to produce keg beer.
It was a tough choice, but in the end I decided that we needed to produce keg beer. What swayed me was the feeling that buying another pub would only delay the inevitable, that ultimately it wouldn’t stop the decline in our beer sales. We needed to embrace the new world we were living in, a new world that wanted keg.
I decided to base our new brand on Bottoms Up Bitter. With an original gravity of 1035 it was our weakest bitter, and sales had been going backwards for many years, as most people preferred the stronger Goodyear’s Pride.
Bottoms Up Bitter was to be relaunched as a keg beer called Goodyear’s Sparkling Bitter with an advertising strapline that read, ‘Add sparkle to your life with Goodyear’s Sparkling Bitter’. I devised it myself and thought it was quite catchy. Of course, it was never going to be advertised on TV like Mackeson Stout or Davenport’s. But it was on several billboards around Chesterfield, as well as on drip mats in o
ur pubs.
Despite the fact that the launch of the new beer was relatively low-key, the whole exercise proved to be very expensive. It wasn’t just the cost of all the equipment we needed for the production of keg beer, there was also the outlay for all the dispense equipment. It cost me £1,500 to buy 300 steel kegs and even the cost for designing the new cowl came to over £300. Mind you, I was very happy with the pre-production model and decided to keep it as a souvenir. In the end, the total expenditure came to £8,000 and I had to increase our mortgage with the bank in order to make up the funding gap.
However, the new beer was a success and sales began to soar, albeit mainly at the expense of our other beers. So in April 1960 I took the decision to make our cooper redundant. Sales of cask ale were declining and I had decided to introduce steel casks alongside the kegs, as they cost far less to maintain than ones made of oak. He was 66 at the time so we didn’t have to make any redundancy payment to him, although I did feel sorry for his apprentice who had to retrain as a fitter working on the new keg beer.
I felt less sorry for the Maynards at Brimington Brewery, who couldn’t afford to change over to the new keg beer and therefore sold out to Whitbread’s in May of 1960. The first thing Whitbread’s did was to close the brewery down.
For nearly one hundred years there had been three breweries in Chesterfield. But with the closure of Brimington Brewery we were now the only one left. Consequently, I was now even more alone than ever.
Chapter 17
“Do you think this cowl is worth anything?” asked Nigel as Molly returned to the study carrying two mugs of tea.
“I doubt it,” she replied. “Although there is a market for old brewery items, I’m not at all sure that it extends to old keg cowls. Mind you, they can always make it part of a job lot.”