Nowadays
Tetley beer is the second highest selling ale brand in the world (after John
Smith's) with volumes of 700,000 hectolitres. It all started from nothing and
there was a man called Tetley responsible for it all. I read he’s called Joshua
Tetley and I found out which cemetery his bones were lowered into. He’s about a
ten minute drive from the centre of Harrogate and I meandered through country
roads to a sleepy quiet village called Hampsthwaite
to take a look. I passed through the church gate I saw a well-dressed man on
bench reading under a Panama hat.
“I’m here to find the famous grave,” I said.
“Who on earth’s that?” he said earnestly
looking up from a thick book. If the Tetley name impressed him it wasn’t shown
on his face. Though Joshua was the founder of the big Tetley's Brewery that
employed thousands there’s no fancifulness about his headstone - a little thing
round the back of the church. A carved stone showing a noteworthy person was
buried here was abutted to the headstone.
Brewing
was in the Tetley blood. Joshua was pushed out into the world into a
middle-class family of malt, wine and spirits merchants from Armley in Leeds. William Tetley had set it all off in the
1740s, his son William expanded the business but it was Joshua who leased a
brewery in 1822 and laid the four main cornerstones that would lead to a
staggering brewing success.
Not
much is known about his early life but he married at 29 to Hannah Carbutt and they settled in Leeds. He was 44 when he
entered the brewing business, quite late for an entrepreneur. Perhaps he was a
master of timing as drinking habits of country were changing: (a) the passing
of the Beer House Act of 1830 allowing ale houses to open between 4am and 10pm
and (b) the Temperance Movement approved beer as a temperate alternative to
spirits which led to the growth of breweries. He seized on this opportunity
like a cat on a canary and started buying up ales houses. He built up over 3000
“tied houses” -
meaning they could only sell Tetley beer.
Sadly
Joshua didn’t see the mammoth animal Tetley would grow into. His wife Hannah
died in May 1857 (aged 72) and he followed two years later. The company grew
and at its peak was producing 185 million pints of beer every year. The brewery
grew physically as well and became a sprawling steaming smoking sweating
crucible of activity employing over a thousand people. As with most successful
family companies they eventually get sold, local colour is bleached out and the
blandness of multi-national companies bleeds into everything. Tetley merged
with Walkers of Warrington to form Tetley Walker and then merged with Ind Coope of Burton upon Trent
and Ansells of Birmingham to form Allied Breweries
(then the world's largest brewing conglomerate.) The mergers didn’t end: in
1978 Allied Breweries merged with J. Lyons to form Allied Lyons, one of the
world's largest producers of cask ale during the 1980s. In 1998 Tetley was
taken over by Carlsberg Group.
I
found Joshua and his wife lying together in the small cemetery behind the
church. A woman with a dog walked by and was looking at the headstone I was
taking photos of. She lived locally and never knew the beer king was there. The
grave is a little way off the path that cuts like cheese wire through the
cemetery so thousands of people have probably walked by not knowing he’s there.
It
was a hot day so I made a boiling coffee in the motorhome and sipped it by the
modest headstone. I wondered what the dead dude here would make the success
that followed his death….nowadays Carlsberg make mega-millions of cash from the
two big canons Tetley's Cask and Tetley's Smoothflow. Sadly there’s not much left of the iconic
Tetley factory that sprawled proudly over Leeds. It was closed in 2011 and
demolished in 2012 (it’s now car park.) If you go to Leeds today there is one
small crumb of heritage left. The Art Deco office block remains and is now
"The Tetley" where over-priced grub is served. I saluted heartily at
the grave, finished the coffee and left. The man who had been sat on the bench
reading the book never came to look at the famous resident.
He was the engine behind this…
The famous Tetley logo…
I could find one war grave in the
cemetery….it was a small village though…
Looking up and down the village…