| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

CrowleyofAlton

Page history last edited by PBworks 15 years, 11 months ago

THE DOG & PARTRIDGE

 

Crowley & Co. of Alton

 

After hundreds of years of fulfilling the dual role of being Yateley's main "entertainment centre", whilst providing alms for the poor and needy, the parish church council decided to sell the Dog & Partridge by auction and the property went to a brewery, Crowley & Co of Alton in 1898. The proceeds of the sale were added to the existing Yateley Charities and Funds, which had been regulated by the Charity Commissioners in 1886. The story of the D&P did not of course come to an end, since the pub took on a new lease of life as a tied house.

 

The history of the Crowley brewery of Turk Street, Alton goes back to James Baverstock Senior, who established the brewery in 1763. Just as Reading was one of the main brewing centres when Baverstock was brewing, so Alton subsequently became one of the main brewing towns in Britain. After 1750 Londoners had acquired the taste for Porter, the dark brew for which Samuel Whitbread became famous. Burton on Trent developed a different style of beer called Pale Ale. The Burton breweries, including the two biggest, Bass and Allsopps, had developed extensive export markets in Scandinavia. But the Napoleonic blockade of their markets caused them to take entrepreneurial action. They developed India Pale Ale (IPA) for export to India and, as soon as rail reached Burton, they attacked the London market. Pale Ale became very fashionable and eventually swept the London market, leaving London brewers like Whitbread, Courage, Trumans, and Watney to make different marketing responses. Pale Ale was all down to Burton's water, which gave such a clear sparkling colour when brewed as a light coloured beer. Whitbread responded by adding gypsum to the London water and continued brewing in London. Others like Ind Coope decided if they could not beat the Burton brewers they would join them, and opened in Burton in 1858. From 1830 onwards the sales of beer from Burton soared.

 

However there was another solution: find a place where the water was similar to Burton's. Alton was one such place. And it had other advantages. It was in the heart of the Hampshire barley belt. There were extensive hop plantations around Alton, including of course those in Yateley and Cove. Alton was also conveniently connected to London by rail. Courage, one of the big London brewers, had been buying in its lighter beers, first from Flowers of Stratford-on-Avon and then from Fremlins of Maidstone, both with suitable water. To enable it to brew its own pale ales and bitters Courage purchased in 1903 the business of G. Hall & Company of Alton who had also been supplying Courage for some years.

 

Small wonder then that Crowley & Co, capable of producing the new fashion of pale ales, prospered. A Quaker family, the Crowleys had been brewing beer near Croydon for 200 years when they bought Baverstock's business in 1821. In 1871 the Crowley family sold out to Joseph Burrell and his partners, who kept the trading name. Burrell went out on a take-over spree and, from 1878 to 1902, took over 7 breweries. Purchasing the Dog & Partridge in Yateley must have seemed "small beer" in comparison.

 

Crowley & Co pulled down Yateley's old Church House in 1912 and built a new emporium in the style which Mitchell and Butler and Ansell had introduced into the Midlands. In the run up to the first World War the temperance movement had its effect and beer sales had declined. The marketing response of brewers was to upgrade their tied houses so that they were no longer the cottage front parlours produced by the 1830 First Beerhouse Act. In the early twentieth century public houses should be modern roadhouses to attract the disposable income of the new middle classes.

 

Back to 1997 Exhibition: Inns, Alehouses & Maltsters of Yateley

 

NEXT page in 1997 Exhibition


Page written by P J Tipton for the Yateley Society's 1997 Exhibition: Inns, Alehouses & Maltsters

Additional research by Richard Johnston & Elizabeth Tipton

Original page may now have been revised to include the Society's latest Research

RHJ correction of date and method of sale in 1898 18.4.2008

(c) The Yateley Society, 1997 & 2008

 

Page Exhib.1997.8

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.