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I started at Wadworths in 1950, remembers Ron Tumber. We came from Faversham in Kent and I had been working from the age of fourteen in breweries. I've worked in practically every department, with the exception of the actual brewing itself; in cellars, bottling, packing and the office.
I saw the job advertised in The Kent Messenger. The head clerk, who came here just before me, worked at the same brewery in Kent that my brothers worked in and he had put the advert in the paper. The job was for brewery foreman, in charge of cellars.
I assisted the brewer, Mr Wilson, to work on the brewing for the following week, which we did each Friday afternoon. We worked hand to mouth. The production in those days was much smaller than it is now, we would work out the week's brewing almost to the last half-pint. By Friday afternoon the cellars were empty.
The company was not so strong as it is now and I think it actually nearly went down at about this time. It was very hard work and no one wanted to stop there for very long at that time. I think we only stayed at first because we wanted to get away from Kent!
There were about nine lorries then compared to about twenty now. Trade began to pick up as new people came who had experience of other breweries and modern ideas, but it was very hard work then.
We lived in a house in the yard and I was on twenty-four hour call. If the police saw a light on in the brewery at night they would come and knock on my door and get me up to go and check it.
I went down there one day with one of them and found a gentleman in there, it was the excise officer. The policeman asked, "What's he doing?" to which I replied, "He's entitled to come to this place, twenty-four hours a day, he has his own keys to each department. That's been the rule since I first worked in the breweries. They check to make sure that you're not doing anything that you are not supposed to be doing."
In the 1950's there were beers brewed that are not around now. We had Brown Jack, a strong bottled beer, sold in draught as Old Timer. I think Brown Jack was a racehorse. There was an ordinary bitter sold as draught in the pubs and the 6X was sold in bottles as Green Label with only a small amount sold then as draught.
When I started, bottling was done practically all by hand. The girls carried bottles from the big soakers and put them onto a brush machine, with twin brushes, and then into a rinser and straight to the fillers, all by hand. Seven or eight girls worked all in a row.
A machine did the filling, from a tank into about twenty bottles at a time, with a ball valve to stop them overflowing. It was noisy, especially when something went wrong and bottles went crashing everywhere!
 | From:
Devizes Voices compiled by David Buxton
Tempus Publishing
ISBN 0 7524 0661 2
£9.99
For a complete list of local history books published by Tempus Publishing visit: www.tempus-publishing.com |
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