If Only They Could Talk

by Ian Walker

  I had four days in which to arrange either bank finance or to find another buyer and I began my search immediately.

  My first port of call was the Westminster Bank but that drew a blank.

  “Why won’t you lend us the money?” I pleaded. “I’m only asking for £100,000. It was only a year ago that we had a £225,000 loan from you?”

  The manager told me that he realised this, but unfortu­nately the Westminster Bank wasn’t investing in breweries anymore

  At least that part of Hugo’s story seemed to be correct. Furthermore, numerous visits to various other banks con­firmed that the entire banking sector had stopped investing in breweries. Too many of them had caught colds when they realised that the pubs they had taken as security weren’t worth as much as they once were.

  I was getting more and more worried and I was also getting extremely irritable. This didn’t go down too well with Amanda, who started giving me the cold shoulder as a result. Her attitude did not concern me though as I had a far more pressing issue to sort out before I started worrying about my relationship with her.

  My search for a ‘white knight’ also proved fruitless. It seemed that nobody wanted to buy a small provincial brewer any more, well at least not for a price that was higher than the Sheffield offer.

  By the time Friday arrived, I had admitted defeat. Rebecca and I decided to accept the Sheffield Brewery offer as the lesser of two evils. I didn’t want to tell Hugo, as I didn’t want to give him that pleasure, so I phoned his father instead.

  It was the worst day of my life so far. Little did I realise at the time that things were to get far worse before they got better.

  I returned home that evening only to discover a note on my kitchen table. Sitting on top of it was my front door key. The note was from Amanda and just said, ‘It’s been fun whilst it lasted but now it’s time to move on. Amanda x.’

  Later I discovered that she’d cleared out the rest of Sarah’s things, all her jewellery, her handbags, shoes and clothes. It was my fault for telling her that she could have the lot. But to tell you the truth, I was past caring by that point.

  In fact, the only thing that she hadn’t taken was Sarah’s old school beret, the one that I had pinched all those years ago. It was the only thing that she didn’t have any use for. I picked it up from the bed where she had left it and started sobbing uncontrollably.

  Chapter 24

  Nigel started taking the brewery-related items off the wall and placing them on the ever-growing pile of articles to be taken to the auction house.

  Meanwhile, Molly had gone into the kitchen to prepare some soup and a roll for each of them, as it was nearly time for lunch.

  Nigel removed the acid-etched mirror first. It was very large and extremely heavy. It was at least a hundred years old, probably Edwardian.

  The enamel advertising signs were next and fortunately these were quite light in comparison.

  Finally, it was the turn of the three wooden pub signs. One of these was substantially larger than the other two and whilst he was taking it off the wall Nigel noticed that it wasn’t a pub sign at all. It was, in fact, the sign that used to hang outside the brewery’s sample room. It proudly announced ‘Goodyear’s Brewery Cellars’ in gold letters on a green background.

  Nigel turned the sign around and immediately spotted there were 35 names written on the back. Some of them Nigel recognised. There was Alf Parkes, Jim Stuart, and Eileen Greenbank, all of whom had been at the funeral. Also there was Bill Steadman who couldn’t attend due to ill health.

  “These must be the names of the employees who were working at the brewery when it closed,” Nigel thought to himself as he looked at the old sign.

  *******

  The fact that we’d accepted the Sheffield Brewery offer didn’t mean that we were taken over the next day. For a start, they had to complete due diligence and the legal side of the takeover.

  Of course I had to tell the workforce that we were about to be taken over. It was another one of those jobs that I didn’t relish and my worst fears were confirmed when poor old Marge burst into tears.

  I said something bland like, “In the meantime it’s busi­ness as usual.”

  It was the type of statement managers always make to their workforce just before something terrible happens. The problem was that everybody knew that Sheffield would close the brewery down and most of them would lose their jobs. As a result, the atmosphere in the brewery was pretty toxic during the three months it took to complete the sale.

  Four weeks after the sale had been agreed, I received some terrible news, something that caught me completely by surprise.

  It was whilst I was having a meeting with our solicitor that he turned to me and said, “Miles, you do realise that your house is included in the sale?”

  I hadn’t, of course, but after thinking about it I realised that my house and the George Stephenson next door were still on the same set of deeds. The two properties had both been built on one plot of land and we’d never asked the Land Registry to separate them. There had never been any need to do so since we owned both properties. Furthermore, we’d told the Inland Revenue that the house was built as staff accommodation, so we could offset the cost of building it against tax. Technically it wasn’t a lie, being as though I was a brewery employee myself. However, thirteen years later that particular decision was about to become a major headache for me.

  “Well, can’t we just exclude it from the sale?” I asked.

  “We could have done if you had told me about it earlier,” came the reply. “But unfortunately it is on the list of com­pany assets that has gone to Sheffield Brewery’s solicitors. I very much doubt if they will agree to it being removed. After all, why should they? Even if they did they would almost certainly want to renegotiate the price and given your weak position I wouldn’t recommend that at all.”

  “Shit, what can I do?” I pleaded. “I will be left homeless unless you can think of a solution.”

  “My advice would be to create a lease for yourself,” he replied. “You can make the terms very favourable. I’d sug­gest a peppercorn rent and a clause saying that you have the right to remain in the house for as long as you are alive. In that way, they still get the freehold, but at least you would retain occupancy of the house for as long as you want to live there.”

  I thought about it for a couple of minutes before saying, “Do it.”

  The takeover was completed on May 22nd and the brew­ery closed down the same day. All our employees were made redundant except for a few who were transferred to jobs in Sheffield.

  I didn’t know whom I was most sorry for, myself or the workers who’d lost their jobs, many of whom were third or even fourth generation employees.

  By the time we’d paid all the outstanding bills, I came out of the deal with a little over £3,000 whilst Rebecca got £2,500, not really much for over one hundred years of own­ership by the Goodyear family.

  On the final day, I removed all the things from my office, my degree certificate, the mirror from the wall, the pub signs, advertising signs and all the awards we had won. Alf Parkes took them to my house in the back of one of the brewery vans.

  Most of the other stuff we burnt in the backyard of the brewery, including the old horse-drawn dray that had last been used to carry my parents’ coffins. Then it was all over. I’d arranged for the staff to have a final drink in the Spa Vaults across the road from our offices. It was the very least I could do. It was a sad affair as we all drank pints of Goodyear’s Lament, a special final brew with an origi­nal gravity of 1056. It tasted good but it broke my heart to think that beer would never be brewed in the brewery ever again.

  “It’s the best thing I’ve drunk since I was on my mother’s teat,” announced Bill Steadman. This helped to lighten the atmosphere in the pub a little.

  I was late arriving at the pub, as I wanted to take a last look around before I left. I wandered through the brew­house where Bill Jones used to drink so
much of the beer he brewed, providing of course that he turned up for work in the first place. I moved on to the fermentation room and the racking room before going into the bottling hall where the girls had stuck labels all over my bare backside. The men’s locker room where I had first seen pictures of naked ladies was next, followed by the office where Jane used to work. I made a final visit to my own office, which of course had originally been my father’s and before that my grandfather’s.

  Then I walked across the brewery yard, which had been the setting for my wedding reception and went over to the warehouse where we used to store all our full casks prior to delivery. I stood on the loading bank where the men used to load up our drays, before I moved on to our wine and spirits store. From there I wandered into the brewery cellars, the scene of so much drunken revelry over the years. Finally, I went into the one room that held the most vivid memories for me, the hop store. Like all the other rooms I’d visited it looked like a shadow of its former self with everything now removed from it.

  Having completed my final tour I locked the front door for the last time with the keys my father had given me on my eighteenth birthday and went to join the workforce across the road. They had already consumed quite a few pints and the mood was far happier now than it had been when they’d started, fuelled as it was by extra strong beer.

  I stayed for a couple of hours and enjoyed all the stories they were telling about their happy days spent working for Goodyear’s.

  Finally, as I was just about to leave, they presented me with the sign from the brewery cellars. They had all written their names on the back.

  “So that you won’t forget us,” said Alf.

  I thanked them all and asked Frank, the licensee of the Spa Vaults to look after it until I could collect it. With that I left.

  The following day I drove back and collected the sign. I also took the opportunity to unscrew the brass plaque from the front of the brewery. It said:

  Goodyear’s of Chesterfield

  Family Brewers since 1862.

  Sheffield Brewery stripped all the equipment out of the brewery over the next few weeks and sold most of it as scrap. Only the keg racking line and the cylindroconical fermenting vessel were saved and they were sold off to other breweries.

  The brewery was demolished the following year, but not the office block, which was allowed to fall into dereliction. It was a sad reminder of my family’s former business and it upset me every time I had the misfortune to walk past it.

  Chapter 25

  Molly had almost finished preparing lunch, but there was just enough time for Nigel to take down a couple of small pictures that hung in the hall. There was also a brewery clock, which Nigel carefully removed from the wall.

  When he examined it, he was surprised to see that it wasn’t a Goodyear’s clock, but was from Sheffield Brewery.

  Nigel took it through to the kitchen where Molly had just finished serving up the soup.

  “Look at this,” he said holding up the clock. “It’s a Sheffield Brewery clock. I’m surprised Uncle Miles kept it, as it was Sheffield Brewery that took over Goodyear’s in 1967. He always hated them.”

  “It’s a good clock and if your uncle was anything, he was a pragmatist. Also he was a tight-fisted old bugger who wouldn’t throw anything away if it meant he had to buy another one to replace it.”

  “Thinking about it,” said Nigel. “I seem to remember that Uncle Miles actually worked for Sheffield Brewery after they’d taken us over.”

  *******

  I was down but I wasn’t completely out. Yes, I’d lost my business, ownership of my house, most of my money and my girlfriend, but at least I still had a job. Sheffield Brewery had offered me a role as Regional Innkeeper Director for Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.

  In total, I was one of five people from Goodyear’s who man­aged to get a job at Sheffield Brewery. The rest of my former employees were all made redundant, although the majority of those were close to or past their normal retirement date.

  Sheffield Brewery had been expanding rapidly in recent years and as well as taking us over, they had also taken over Richardson’s of Newark three months previously. Consequently, they were short of senior managers and since they wanted to have a smooth transition following our takeover, they appointed me to my new role. As a result, I started working for them at the beginning of June 1967.

  Despite having the title ‘Director’ I did not have a seat on the board. That honour went to my boss, Phil Yates, the Tied Trade Director who had six Regional Innkeeper Directors reporting to him.

  In reality I was a manager. I felt the only reason why I had the title of ‘Director’ was so that my boss could avoid any angry phone calls from tenants who called up demand­ing to speak to a director.

  Sheffield Brewery was a far larger company with a com­pletely different culture to the one we’d had at Goodyear’s. For a start, the brewery itself was a dry site, with all drink­ing on the premises prohibited. Staff received vouchers for two dozen cans of beer per week, which they had to con­sume at home. In fact, it was a disciplinary matter if they drank them at the brewery.

  Barbara Castle had brought in the Road Safety Act during 1967, which introduced the breathalyser for the first time. Sheffield Brewery announced that, if any of their staff were caught drinking and driving, they would face sum­mary dismissal. It didn’t matter what the circumstances were. If you got caught over the limit, you would be sacked, even if the offence had occurred during your own time.

  I could see the sense in the new drink drive laws and I suppose that times were changing. But it still seemed strange to me to be working in a brewery where you couldn’t even organise a piss up.

  One other thing that was very different was the large variety of point of sale material that was available to support the Sheffield brands. At Goodyear’s we only had drip mats and bar towels. At Sheffield, however, there were ashtrays, drinks trays, water jugs, key rings, lamps and even records with the company’s advertising jingles on them. On my first day, I was given a brewery clock to take home. I didn’t know if it was because they thought my timekeeping was suspect, but I accepted it nevertheless.

  I had my own secretary and four business development managers reported to me. They, in turn, were responsible for 86 tenanted pubs, most of which had been Goodyear’s pubs, or had been owned by Richardson’s of Newark.

  It didn’t take me long to realise that I had a major prob­lem on my hands. Despite the relative success of Sparkling Bitter, Goodyear’s Pride had still been our best-selling beer accounting for 60% of all our sales. It was a cask ale and Sheffield Brewery didn’t produce any cask ale. All their beer was sold either in keg form, or was delivered by road tanker into five-barrel cellar tanks. To make matters worse, Richardson’s Brewery had never made any keg beer, they had only ever produced cask ale and Richardson’s pubs accounted for over half of the tenancies I was responsible for. When you combined their former pubs with ours it came to 82 in total, leaving me with just four pubs that had always been tied to Sheffield Brewery.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, the problem was com­pounded by the name of the company’s main product. It was Yorkshires Best. Now there were two ways in which you could interpret that name. The brewery, of course, meant that it was the best bitter in Yorkshire. In Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, it was interpreted in another way. There, people took it to mean that we were telling them that Yorkshire was a better county than the one they lived in.

  Sales in the pubs I looked after plummeted as a result of all these negative factors. People who’d been drinking in them for years, generations even, suddenly switched to other hostelries. I had publicans phoning me on a daily basis to complain that their drinkers didn’t like Sheffield beers. Many of them handed the keys to their pubs back and left. Some of them were licensees that I’d known since I was a boy.

  For the first time that I could remember, I was struggling to find new tenants and even when people did express an in
terest, they wanted to pay a much lower rent than the brewery were prepared to accept. Consequently by the autumn of 1967, I had temporary tenants in a third of all of my pubs, many of them paying minimal rent purely to keep the doors open.

  My fellow Regional Directors, of course, didn’t have any­thing like the number of problems I had. Their regions were all in Yorkshire where Yorkshires Best sold really well.

  The region I was looking after was the worst performing in the brewery by a country mile. It was the worst perform­ing no matter what you measured it by, volume, profit, or turnover of licensees.

  Phil Yates was initially very understanding, but when he started to come under pressure from his boss, his under­standing ended. At my appraisal in October, he graded me as ‘poor’ and warned me that, unless I turned everything around in the next three months, he would replace me by somebody who could.

  I was not enjoying my new job at all. At Goodyear’s the only person I’d ever had to answer to was my father. Now I was a small underperforming cog in a well-oiled machine. Well, it would have been well oiled if anybody had been allowed to have a drink.

  If this wasn’t bad enough the personnel director at Sheffield Brewery was Barry Matthews. This was the same Barry Matthews I’d sacked from Goodyear’s following both our affairs with Jane Carghill. After leaving Goodyear’s, he got a job as a personnel manager at Sheffield Brewery. He now had a fearsome reputation and had acquired the nick­name of ‘Barry the Hatchet’ due to the number of people he’d sacked. He was just the type of person who did well at Sheffield Brewery and pretty soon he found himself pro­moted to head of department with a seat on the board, the same grade as my boss.

  In reality, if it hadn’t been for me, he’d probably still be an office manager in a small brewery in Chesterfield, but I guess he didn’t see it that way. In fact, any suggestion that he was prepared to let bygones be bygones was quashed immediately during our first meeting.