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Berkshire Archaeological Journal 71, 1981-2
THE OLD BREWERIES OF BERKSHIRE, 1741-1984 1
T.A.B. CORLEY
INTRODUCTION
In the years since the classic article of 1906
in the Victoria County History, 2 surprisingly
little seems to have been written on past
brewing and malting activities in Berkshire.
Although the abbeys, mills and other
historic buildings have received some attention
in the Berkshire Archaeological Journal,
virtually nothing on its breweries has
yet appeared, apart from one or two
individual studies, by the present writer, on
the Simonds and Dymore Brown breweries
of Reading. 3 A check-list of Berkshire
breweries, from local directories and other
original sources, by an industrial archaeologist,
Derek Herbert, regrettably remains
unpublished. No study comparable with
M. F. Tighe's well documented and illustrated
'A Gazetteer of Hampshire Breweries'
has yet appeared for Berkshire. 4 Yet
the brewing and malting trades were of
signal importance in a county that, up to
1939 at least, relied heavily on agriculture
and ancillary trades such as the processing
of agricultural products. The following
account attempts to go some way towards
filling this gap in our knowledge.
I. MALTING
As the account in the Victoria County
History of Berkshire made clear, 'Brewing
and malting have been for many years the
staple industries of the county', the extent
of its eighteenth-century malting trade
being described as 'considerable'. 5 The
reason was the accessibility of the main
Berkshire towns to the rich barley-growing
region of the upper Thames basin. That
barley was transported to Reading, Abingdon
or Wallingford and converted into
malt. While much was used locally, large
quantities were shipped down the Thames
to the large London brewers. In the early
1760s less than a third of this malt ended up
in beer brewed for sale within the county;
the remainder went for private brewing or
for use in the London breweries.
Private brewing was then a very thriving
activity, as Berkshire had a fair number of
largish country houses 'whither many
builders of London fortunes migrated to
enjoy landed leisure', 6 as well as many
prosperous farmers. Both these groups
normally went in for home brewing.
Itinerant brewers used to go from house to
house in order to brew whatever was
required; one mansion in Beenham owned
a copper that held as much as 80 gallons. 7
For the London breweries, Berkshire was
by no means the sole supplier of malt, since
for most of the eighteenth century Hertfordshire
seems to have been the principal
source. However, Berkshire's share increased
as its costs of malt production and
transport fell during the latter part of the
century. The Thames navigation was
improved after 1772 and coal for the
malting process became much cheaper in
the county once the Oxford canal was
opened in 1790 and provided direct access
to the coalfields of the midlands and
northern England. Berkshire maltsters also
sought to economise in transport costs by
using barges of considerable size. Whereas
in the 1720s barges could carry only 130
quarters (of 8 bushels) at a time, by the
1760s ones of 100-120 tons dead weight for
79

THE OLD BREWERIES OF BERKSHIRE, 1741-1984
1000-1200 quarters of malt were being
regularly used: the largest that could be
physically handled on the Thames. 8
Curiously enough, malt was more expensive
to transport to London than the
barley would have been, since its bulk
exceeded the equivalent weight of the
unprocessed barley. The coal for malting,
too, cost more in Berkshire than in London,
even after 1790. However, the metropolitan
brewers lacked the room to produce
on the spot the substantial quantities of
malt they needed and therefore relied on
provincial sources of supply. How long
Berkshire maintained this very profitable
trade with the capital is not known exactly,
but the pattern of malting outlets may have
changed even before 1800.
At any rate, in 1741 the Reading collection,
or revenue area of the Excise
Department (now part of the Customs and
Excise), was the third highest source of
revenue from the malt duty in England and
Wales, contributing £25,302 compared with
the £31,058 of Suffolk and £29,288 of
Bedford; Hertford was £20,288. By 1760-2
it had become the highest, its revenue up to
£36,676 whereas Suffolk, Bedford and
Hertford remained almost constant at
£31,351, £29,808 and £21,556 respectively.
Put in terms of population sizes, Bedfordshire's
malt duty revenue in 1741 was by far
the highest, at nearly 53p per head, compared
with Berkshire's 29p, Hertfordshire's
26*2p and Suffolk's 19p. By the early 1760s
Berkshire's 43p per head was catching up
on Bedfordshire's 54p, with Hertfordshire
and Suffolk well behind at 28p and 20p
respectively. 9 To translate these figures into
actual quantities of malt, it seems that in
the 1760s at least 110,000 quarters of malt
were dutiable in Berkshire.
A further complication is that the excise
boundaries did not coincide with that of the
old (pre-1974) county of Berkshire, nor is it
known exactly how they were altered over
the years. In the absence of any maps, the
area can only be defined from the divisions
and 'rides' that made it up. All these
divisions were within 25 miles of Reading
and therefore allowed excise officers to
keep in easy touch with area headquarters.
As Berkshire was somewhat in the shape
of a boot, certain parts of the old county
had to be assigned to neighbouring collections;
these included Wantage (25 miles
from Reading), Hungerford (25) and
Lambourn (29). At the same time Henley
(8), Great Marlow (14), Kingsclere (17),
Watlington (17) and High Wycombe (18)
were administered from Reading. A further
difficulty is that some time between 1796
and 1832 Maidenhead (12) and Colnbrook
(22) were added to the Reading collection,
and Windsor (18) also. 10 Since the collection
therefore included some important
breweries outside Berkshire such as
Wethereds of Marlow and Brakspears of
Henley, while omitting areas of the county
that had low population density, the figures
quoted above probably overstate the
county's brewing and malting activities of
the day. The discrepancies between the
various boundaries thus need to be borne
in mind.
In 1801/2 the quantity of malt charged to
duty in the Reading collection was 112,000
quarters. By then other areas of the
country, notably Surrey as well as Bedfordshire
and East Anglia, had overtaken it, in
Suffolk and Bedford by well over 50 per
cent. 11 A larger proportion of Berkshire
malt was going to the local brewers than
had gone forty years before; even so,
substantial amounts were still being sent
out of the county. During the year 1809,
for instance, 10,000 quarters of malt were
despatched from Reading to the London
market. Then by the 1830s the malt trade,
in Reading at least, was reported to have
been in decline for some time, even though
nearly 20,000 quarters a year were being
demanded from Wallingford. 12 A further
change by the end of the eighteenth
century was that some maltsters, such as
William Simonds of Reading, had started
80

T.A.B. CORLEY
brewing for themselves, while others were
becoming specialist suppliers to the large
breweries that were growing up in Berkshire,
such as the Windsor Brewery.
II. BREWING
Turning now to commercial brewing in the
county, in 1759/60-1760/1 a yearly average
of 58,049 barrels of stong beer and 30,394
of small beer were taxed for sale in the
Reading collection. 13 Assuming that the
population in that collection area was
comparable with that of the county, 5 pints
per week of beer on an average were being
consumed by every man, woman and child
in Berkshire. No wonder that some brewers
were making large fortunes. Elizabeth
Burd of the Castle Brewery, Reading, died
in 1748 worth £24,000 and William May of
the Mill Lane Brewery, Reading, in 1763
worth £50,000, while Henry Isherwood of
the Windsor Brewery in 1773 left his son
£8-9000 a year, the brewery being later
sold for £70,000. Even larger fortunes were
amassed in the nineteenth century. William
Stephens of the Aldermaston and Mill
Lane, Reading, breweries left £180,000 in
1829 and Thomas Wethered of Great
Marlow £100,000 in 1849, although some of
their wealth came from non-brewing
activities. 14
The citizens of Berkshire on the whole
saw their living standards rise between 1790
and 1815, due partly to the agricultural
boom during the long drawn-out war with
France and partly to the growth in trade
that followed the construction of the
Oxfordshire and Kennet & Avon canals.
The extra purchasing power no doubt
contributed to the annual output of strong
beer in the Reading collection doubling
from 58,000 barrels in 1759-61 to 125,000
barrels in 1814/5, while the population
increased by no more than one-third. 15
Home brewing was also on the decline.
Local demand for strong beer then followed
the national trend in falling gradually
until the early 1820s and then enjoying a
moderate boom later in the decade. However,
we also have reliable evidence that
many beer drinkers in Berkshire were then
being deliberately prevented from obtaining
reasonably priced and good quality beer
by the concerted action of the big brewers,
who had secured a hold over the majority
of the main towns' tied houses.
Berkshire was by no means the only
county to suffer, although in counties to the
west, from Wiltshire onwards, most taverns
continued to brew their own beer. In
London nearly half the public houses were
controlled by brewers, and those in the
principal towns and along the highways of
Hampshire had been similarly 'organised'.
As to Berkshire, out of 68 public houses in
Reading only two — the main posting inns
— were free houses, the remainder being in
the hands of brewers, distillers or wine
merchants. In Wallingford, 12 or 13 out of
18 were controlled by the large Wells
brewery, while throughout the Newbury
area the brewers' monopoly was said to be
complete.
In 1822 some citizens of Maidenhead
petitioned the House of Commons to
complain that, apart from two inns, there
was no free house within some miles of the
town; their hardship was greater because of
'very few houses in the town having
conveniences for brewing'. The strict licensing
laws then in force made it virtually
impossible for the authorities to allow any
new public houses to be opened. Those
existing ones that came on the market were
therefore snapped up, generally at inflated
prices, by prosperous brewers who took full
advantage of their power over the market
by joint fixing of beer prices and conditions
of sale. Brewers in the east of the country,
including Windsor, used to meet regularly
once or twice a month. To the west they
were less well organised but met whenever
they judged price changes to be necessary.
Most of the above information comes
81

THE OLD BREWERIES OF BERKSHIRE, 1741-1984
from the testimony of John Adams, a spirit
dealer and hop merchant of Reading, to
two parliamentary committees of 1817-8 on
the Police of the Metropolis and Public
Breweries respectively. 16 He claimed that
in Reading the quality of the beer had been
getting steadily worse for several decades.
There were then four common (wholesale)
brewers in the town, compared with six
some twenty years earlier; all but two put
private profit before the common good. In
1795 the publicans tied to the Reading
brewery formerly owned by Adam Smith
(d. 1772) and later by Sir James Patey had
gone in a body to see the proprietor. He
promised to see that they were supplied
with better beer, but did nothing about it.
When they went a second time, he refused
to see them and gave them all notice to
quit. Before they could be evicted, a
relative of the Smith family and a former
partner in the Castle Brewery, Thomas
Sowdon, took over the brewery and worsened
the tenants' plight by forcing them to
pay a premium of 2s. 6d. to 3s. (12 1 2-15p)
a barrel on all the beer sold in their houses,
and also to buy all their wines and spirits
from his own business. That brewery in fact
soon afterwards ceased production.
The last obstacle to the brewers' domination
in Reading vanished when Stephen
Flory, the only one to stand out against the
cartel, died in about 1801. That was
according to Adams, who said that even so,
one brewer's beer was in 1818 better than
that of the others. The exception was
clearly William Blackall Simonds, son of
the William Simonds the maltster who had
taken up brewing in about 1760. The son
had moved to an extensive riverside location
at Seven Bridges, Reading, and in the
course of the 1790s had an up-to-date
brewery designed by Sir John Soane, with a
Boulton & Watt engine that was one of the
two earliest to be installed in a Berkshire
brewery, the other being at the Windsor
Brewery. Simonds, as a relative newcomer
with only a few public house outlets, lacked
the resources to resist his powerful rivals
and by 1814 was so disillusioned that he
intended to sell the brewery and give all his
attention to his banking activities. Instead,
his son Blackall Simonds took over the
brewery and kept it going until a change in
legislation at last allowed it to compete
fairly with rival firms. 17
Some parts of the county must still have
had good beer that was much in demand.
The Windsor Brewery, for instance, had in
the mid-1780s been producing about 10,000
barrels a year, but after its Boulton & Watt
engine was installed in 1797, it succeeded in
trebling its output. Most of the extra
production may have been exported from
the county, for in 1805, together with some
smaller breweries in the town, it was said to
be sending over 15,000 barrels of porter
annually to London. 18 Even so, public
pressure was building up for the stringent
licensing laws to be eased. In 1822 some
Reading inhabitants in their turn petitioned
the House of Commons and suggested that
this should be done by transferring beer
licences from premises to individuals , 19
Not until 1830 did the government of the
day pass into law the Beer Act, which in
the event took a far more drastic form than
had earlier been anticipated.
III. THE BEER ACT OF 1830 AND
ITS CONSEQUENCES
What the Beer Act did was to abolish
altogether the beer duty and allow beer
houses to be opened at will, subject only to
the payment of a small licence fee. According
to some contemporary observers, an
outbreak of drunkenness and disorderly
behaviour ensued throughout much of
Britain. Although people in Berkshire
seem to have complained less than elsewhere
about the effects of the Act on local
health and morals, the statistics show the
enormous increase in outlets. Before the
Act the number of 'victuallers' (mainly
82

T.A.B. CORLEY
public houses) in the Reading collection
had been below 700, but by the mid-1830s
had risen to over 800 and had topped the
thousand mark by the early 1860s. In
addition, after 1830 there were almost the
same numbers of 'persons licensed to sell
beer' either on or off the premises. Yet in
terms of output the most important category
remained the breweries. Table I
Table I Reading Collection: Numbers and
Sizes of Breweries
1821/2
1831/2
1835/6
1841/2
1850/1
1860/1
1870/1
1880/1
1890/1
1899/
1900
No. of
Breweries
30
34
46
43
48
39
53
59
57
54
Average Malt
Consumption
per Brewery
(quarters)
1644
1848
1342
1062
1014
1300
1618
1617
1960
2118
indicates how the number and average size
of these changed during the rest of the
century.
The numbers thus tended to increase until
the mid-1870s, with no fewer than 62 in
1875/6, after which there was a gradual
decline. The new breweries being set up
must have been very modest in size until
the 1850s, judging by the marked reduction
in the average amount of malt used, but
later on that figure increased once some of
the top breweries grew to considerable size
(see Table III).
How, more precisely, did the Beer Act
affect the principal breweries in the Reading
collection? Fortunately, a contemporary
return for 1830/1 to 1842/3 has
survived. To permit comparison with Table
I, figures in Table II are given for 1835/6
and 1841/2. 20 In the former year, seven out
of the 46 breweries appear to have accounted
for 46 per cent of the total malt used
locally. Wethereds of Marlow and Brakspears
of Henley were outside the county,
but of the others two were in Windsor, two
in Reading and one in Wallingford. By
1841/2, seven out of 43 (only one being
different) consumed 57 per cent of the
malt.
Table II Reading Collection — Largest Breweries 1835/6 and 1841/2 (quarters of malt)
Wethered, Marlow
Windsor Brewery
Simonds, Reading
Jennings, Windsor
Wells, Wallingford
Brakspear, Henley
Mill Lane, Reading (a)
Strange, Aldermaston (b)
Notes: (a) 1390 in 1841/2 (b) 1413 in 1835/6
1835/6
(46 breweries)
7470
5492
4142
3700
3250
2165
2009
28228
= 46% of 61727
184112
(43 breweries)
6222
6675
2943
3389
3250
1967
1405
25851
= 57% of 45680
83

THE OLD BREWERIES OF BERKSHIRE, 1741-1984
How this process of industrial concentration
developed during the remainder of
the century is not known exactly. Table III
gives the only figures so far obtained, from
internal archive sources.
Table III Reading Collection — Large
Breweries 187011-189911900 (quarters of
malt)
18JOI1 1899/1900
(53 breweries) % (54 breweries) %
Simonds, Reading 14850 17 38348 34
Wethered, Marlow 5924) 9425)
11
Brakspear, Henley 3284 \ 3442)
Wells, Wallingford 3781 4 4201 4
Simonds must have established itself as the
largest brewery in the Reading collection
during the 1880s; by 1900 it accounted for
over a third of total production. It was in
every way a model enterprise. The Simondses
were a very extensive family, and only
the ablest were chosen to enter the brewery.
They conserved funds, for instance by
paying pensions to retired partners, rather
than allow them to withdraw large sums of
capital. On the production side, they
pioneered a number of new products to
meet changing tastes in beer, such as pale
ale (for home sales and export) from the
1830s onwards and a lighter type of ale
known as SB in the 1870s. They sought to
remain in the forefront of brewing technology,
their laboratory being one of the
earliest to be set up in the industry. In the
1880s they introduced a new system of
fermentation, known as the Burton union
method, and by then had improved storage
by erecting a concrete beer and wine store
of novel design.
On the marketing side, from the 1850s
onwards Simonds was building up its
reputation as a supplier of beer to the
British army, partly as a result of Aldershot's
establishment as the home of the
army. This trade led to a number of branch
offices being opened in different parts of
England; later on other branches were
established overseas in Malta and Gibraltar.
A further type of outlet was the railway
refreshment room, the firm securing the
contract for several lines on what is now
the Southern Region of British Rail.
By contrast, the growth of other breweries
in the county tended to be far more
modest in scale. Unlike Simonds, which
grew by internal expansion, some of them
sought growth be merger. As Table II
showed, the most substantial in the county
during the early 1840s was the Windsor
Brewery, which had been bought in 1837
by Nevile Reid, a member of a distinguished
brewing family later to become cofounders
of Watney Combe & Reid. He
had acquired Abraham Darby's brewery in
Cookham during 1837 and then Jennings'
at Windsor in 1852, the former being put to
use as mailings and the latter closed down.
Unfortunately, data on its output no longer
survive, so that we cannot chart when it
was overtaken by Simonds. On a smaller
scale altogether was the absorption of the
Mill Lane Brewery, Reading, by the Castle
Brewery there in 1857.
A noteworthy series of mergers occurred
also at Abingdon, where in 1809 Child's
Abbey Brewery had been the only large
brewery for beer and porter. The Morland
family had been brewing at West Ilsley ever
since 1711, and from the 1790s onwards
successive members had also been solicitors
at Abingdon. Apparently through this
important legal contact, during the 1860s
some of the Morlands acquired both the
Abbey Brewery following a bankruptcy and
the Eagle Brewery after the controlling
family had died out. They then concentrated
production on the former site and
during the 1880s moved the West Ilsley
operations to Abingdon.
The succession of firms that entered the
industry after the 1830 Beer Act was passed
can be seen from Table IV, derived from
the check-list of Berkshire breweries. As
84

T.A.B. CORLEY
this was drawn up from directories, which
until the 1840s were not published annually,
the exact timing of the earlier
foundations is approximate. Even so, the
chronology may be of interest.
Table IV Berkshire 'Breweries' Founded
and Closed
1830 and earlier
1831/40
1841/50
1851/60
1861/70
1871/80
1881/90
1891/1900
1901/10
1911/20
1921/30
1931/40
After 1940
Founded
48
19
25
18
19
5
9
1
1
—
—
—
—
Closed
15
8
20
17
16
5
6
10
13
17
2
12
2
Total 145 143
Note: Not entirely comparable with Table I. (a) Table
I covers Reading collection, while Table IV covers
pre-1974 Berkshire, (b) Some 'breweries' listed in
directories may have been merely outlets for their
breweries.
Some came in during the 1830s because goahead
publicans took advantage of the
Beer Act to become retail brewers and
then common (wholesale) brewers. An
example was James Dymore Brown at
Reading in 1831. Charles Butler of Reading,
who started up at the same time, soon
abandoned brewing and remained — as the
successor outlet does today — a beer
retailer. The Cannon Brewery also started
in the 1830s, with one public house, but in
1872 it was acquired and closed down by
the temperance-minded Huntley & Palmers,
which in any case needed the site for
expanding its biscuit-making activities. 21
It might have been expected that all
breweries would mechanise in order to
meet the increasing competition from new
producers and outlets: Tables I and IV
show how the number of breweries founded
had increased between the 1840s and
the 1870s. In fact, there seems not to have
been any concerted move towards mechanisation.
Firms setting up for the first time
or transferring to new sites tended to install
steam engines, but others, faced with a
cycle of low profits, an absence of investment
funds, and therefore low or zero
investment, appear to have managed without
them. Those situated by a river could
use water power, as the Mill Lane Brewery
at Reading had and Strange (formerly
Stephens) at Aldermaston did, while the
Castle Brewery, Reading, apparently continued
to use a horse-wheel up to the time
when it was damaged by fire in 1888, or
possibly even later. Such breweries with a
purely local market that were not much
troubled by competition could continue to
produce by outdated methods and still
make what their owners considered a
reasonable living.
This lack of progressiveness among many
brewers meant that there was for many
years little incentive to form limited companies.
The first in the county was the
Berkshire Brewery Ltd. of Reading,
originally founded in 1847 and incorporated
in 1865. It went into voluntary liquidation
in 1881. The Wantage Brewery Co. Ltd,
founded in the early 1870s, survived until
1920, when it was taken over by Morlands
of Abingdon. The giants did not follow suit
until the general move among breweries
towards incorporation began to get under
way in the 1880s. H. & G. Simonds Ltd.
was founded in 1885 and Morland & Co.
Ltd. in 1887. In both cases control remained
with members of the family concerned.
Thereafter they were able to raise
debentures and thus join in the general
drive to acquire public houses and other
outlets that went on until the end of the
century. 23

THE OLD BREWERIES OF BERKSHIRE, 1741-1984
IV. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Since 1900 the brewing scene in Berkshire
has been dominated by the progressive
reduction in the number of its breweries
from 54, or so, to two. The pattern of
amalgamations and closures that occurred
is therefore of some interest. The companies
that took the main initiatives were
naturally the two survivors of today: Morlands
of Abingdon and Simonds of Reading,
now Courage (Central) Ltd.
For Morlands, the various mergers in the
1860s and the setting up of the limited
company in 1887 have been mentioned
above. Then in 1889 it resumed its policy of
amalgamation by acquiring Saxby & Co. of
Abingdon and Field & Sons of Shillingford.
Soon afterwards one of the most noteworthy
twentieth-century brewing entrepreneurs
in Berkshire, Thomas Skurray
(1868-1938), joined the company, of which
he became a director in 1899 and managing
director in 1906. 24
Skurray was kept busy not only with a
number of brewery directorships outside
Berkshire, but also with efforts to rationalise
the operations of some small and
ailing breweries in the locality. In 1899
Morlands acquired control of Ferguson &
Sons' Angel Brewery at Reading, and in
1911 Skurray amalgamated the interests of
Dymore Brown of Reading and H. Hewett
& Co Ltd of Waltham St. Lawrence. As his
board colleagues did not support the latter
amalgamation, he personally took a controlling
interest in the two firms, which did
not become subsidiaries of Morlands until
1927. By then the company had also
acquired the Wantage Brewery Co. Ltd. It
completed its mergers in 1928 by taking
over Belcher & Habgood of Abingdon.
By training a chemist, Skurray set up the
first laboratory at Abingdon. Originally he
owned it jointly with Morlands (since his
fellow directors were more cautious than he
was) and only later was it taken over
entirely by the brewery. There he developed
a new method of preparing a malt
extract that was to be of great importance
in Morlands' subsequent growth. This
emphasis on technical progress helped to
raise production from 23,000 barrels in
1923 (the earliest available figure) to 75,000
barrels in 1945. It had come very late to the
brewery, although it had been vital to
Simonds' development throughout the later
part of the nineteenth century.
The Reading Brewery in its turn had a
remarkable entrepreneur, Frederick
Adolphus (Eric) Simonds (1881-1953). 25
Although not elected chairman until 1938,
he had already been for many years the
driving force behind the company, which
he had joined in 1902. Until 1919 Simonds'
growth had been entirely from within, as
already related. After that date, on his
initiative, it began to expand rapidly by
merger.
Its acquisitions between the wars were
mainly in the west country, as far afield as
Devonport and Bristol, but did in 1936
include the South Berks Brewery Co. Ltd.
of Newbury, which had itself taken over a
number of Berkshire breweries, including
the Castle Brewery at Reading in 1913. As
an authoritative work on the industry at
that time has put it, 'under the impulse of
efficient management and brewing, with
the use of road transport, Simonds became
a leading brewer in the South and West
. . . These "regional" brewing companies
became more and more typical of the
industry during this period'. In 1938 it
produced just over one per cent of the total
beer brewed in England and Wales, namely
279,000 barrels; Morlands' figure at that
time was 58,000 barrels.
Apart from these two, by 1945 there
were virtually no breweries of any consequence
left in Berkshire. Some had already
gone to competitors outside the county,
which themselves were becoming regional
or national in importance. Nevile Reid &
Co.'s Windsor Brewery had in 1918 been
acquired by Noakes & Co. of Bermondsey,
86

T.A.B. CORLEY
bringing with it 140 public houses; two
years later Noakes also secured Canning's
Royal Brewery at Windsor. It was itself
taken over by Courage & Co. of London in
1930. Ushers Brewery Ltd. of Trowbridge
in 1928 took over Wells' Brewery at
Wallingford. After the second world war
Simonds made no further acquisitions of
breweries in the county. It was Strong &
Co. of Romsey Ltd. which in 1949 acquired
Wethereds, which itself had taken over
Birds of Reading in 1913, and a year later
acquired Strange of Aldermaston. In 1953
it added Higgs' Lion Brewery at Reading;
the three Berkshire breweries could muster
between them only some 67 public houses.
It was in company with Courages that
Simonds embarked on the next stage of its
development. In 1959 it concluded a
trading agreement with Courage & Barclay
Ltd., a recently created combine of Courages
and the other London 'giant' Barclay
Perkins & Co. Ltd. The following year a
full-scale merger of interests took place,
and the new company was registered as
Courage Barclay & Simonds Ltd.
Out of all the breweries in the county,
then, it was this one which gradually
emerged from local to regional and then to
national status. At the time of the merger
Simonds had net operating assets of £9.8
millions and controlled some 1200 licensed
houses: four times the number it had
owned before embarking on its merger
policy in 1918. Of these outlets 320 were
situated in Berkshire itself. The brewery is
now (1984) the headquarters of Courage
(Central) Ltd., itself a subsidiary of the
Imperial Group, with brewing operations
on a new site south of Reading. By
contrast, Morlands was somewhat smaller,
having in 1960 net operating assets of £1.4
millions and about 240 houses, mostly in
Berkshire. About a third of its equity
capital was owned by Whitbread Investment
Co. Ltd.
NOTES
1 My thanks are due to Derek N. Herbert, the
Customs and Excise Library, Reading Public
Libraries, Reference Section, the directors of
Courage (Central) Ltd. and Mr J. Dymore Brown
and Mr B. G. Harrington of Morland & Co. Ltd.,
for help over the years.
2 The Victoria County History of Berkshire (ed.
P. H. Ditchfield & W. Page, 1906) i,404ff.
3 T.A.B. Corley, 'Simonds' Brewery at Reading
1760-1960', B.A.J., 68 (1975-6) pp. 77-88, and 'A
Small Berkshire Enterprise: J. Dymore Brown &
Son 1831-1944', ibid. 69 (1977-8) pp. 73-80
4 Proc. Hampshire Fid. Club Archceol. Soc., (for
1970) XXVII (1972) pp. 87-106
5 Victoria County History of Berkshire i, 404,407
6 L.S. Pressnell, Country Banking in the Industrial
Revolution (1956) p. 84
7 Victoria County History of Berkshire i,407
8 ibid, i,407, Doran, The History and Antiquities of
the Town and Borough of Reading (1835) p.239
9 P. Mathias, The Brewing Industry in England
1700-1830 (1959) Table 22, p. 394, and discussion
pp. 393 ff. The proportion used for brewing in the
collection has been deduced from the data in BM
Add MSS 38382 f.5 for 1759/60 and 1760/1. Those
for 1754/5 are given in Mathias op. cit. p. 540.
County population estimates from P. Deane &
W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth 1688-1959
(1967) p. 103
10 The earlier data of 'rides' (in 1789) are taken from
Customs & Excise Library, Customs 47/363, and
for 1832 and 1849, ibid. Surrey Collection (Brentford
Division) General Letter Book, various dates
11 Mathias p.539
12 Victoria County History of Berkshire i,410,409
13 See n. 9 above
14 Burd: local collection in Reading Public Libraries;
May: Gentleman's Magazine 1763 p.518; Isherwood:
Mathias p. 255 and n. The probate grants of
1829 and 1849 are from the wills in the Public
Record Office.
15 Data for 1814/5 to 1899/1900 are taken from the
periodical returns in British Parliamentary Papers.
Berkshire population estimates based on Deane &
Cole (see n. 9) p. 103 and for 1815 on B. R.
Mitchell & P. Deane, Abstract of British Historical
Statistics (1962) p. 20
16 B.P.P. 1817 VII, Evidence from Select Committee
on Police of the Metropolis, and 1819 V, Minutes
of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee on
Public Breweries. The Maidenhead petition is in
Journal of the House of Commons Vol.77, 1822/3
p. 263
17 For Simonds see T.A.B. Corley's article cited in
n. 3 above
18 Mathias p. 150
87

THE OLD BREWERIES OF BERKSHIRE, 1741-1984
19 Journal of the House of Commons Vol. 77, 1822/3
p. 224
20 Wells' output, not available from the same source,
was estimated from the brewery book for 1861-96
(in private hands). This indicates that Mavor's
figure, in General View of the Agriculture of
Berkshire (1809) p. 467, is probably double what it
should have been. Similarly, his figure for the
production of Stephens' brewery in Reading (ibid.
p. 465) is wildly exaggerated, perhaps as much as
three or four-fold
21 T.A.B. Corley, Quaker Enterprise in Biscuits:
Huntley & Palmers of Reading 1822-1972 (1972)
p. 79
22 Victoria County History of Berkshire i, 410
23 J. Vaizey, The Brewing Industry 1886-1951 (1960)
p. 17
24 For Skurray, see T.A.B. Corley, 'A Small Berkshire
Enterprise', referred to in n. 3 above
25 For F.A. Simonds see the entry, by the present
author, in Dictionary of Business Biography IV
O-S (London, Butterworth, 1985, forthcoming)
26 J. Vaizey p. 30