Joshua Tetley (20th July 1778 to 26th August 1859)

 

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…