For Shropshire author and historian Allan Frost his spell working as a cellarman’s mate at the Wrekin Brewery in Wellington almost cost him the end of a finger, but there were compensations - he used to get through up to 13 free pints of beer a day.
And it is the brewing heritage of the town which is in the spotlight in his latest book.
“Breweries & Bottlers of Wellington” is being launched at W.H. Smith in Wellington on March 22, between 10am and noon.
Other local authors are also coming along to sell their own books to make it a store books day.
Mr Frost, who hails originally from Wellington, relives memories of the days when O.D. Murphy was the local brewery king with the Wrekin Brewery, and also the town’s Pop Works, but also looks at some of the largely forgotten breweries in the town like The Shropshire, The Mill Field, The Red Lion and The Union.
He himself worked once at the Wrekin Brewery in Market Street, during his summer holiday of 1968, just a year before the brewery closed forever.
“I was a cellarman’s mate, until I nearly lost the end of a finger. There was blood everywhere. Whereupon I got assigned to be a maintenance fitter’s mate.
“When people came for a firkin of ale for a private party or wedding we used to bring it up from the cellar using a hand-cranked winch with exposed cogs. The handle slipped and my finger went into the cogs.
“I never got compensation for that. I have reminded Duncan Murphy about this, who was a director at the time!
“A maintenance fitter’s job was to go round the pubs making sure the taps worked properly and make adjustments to whatever needed to be done.”
During his days at the brewery he would get quite a few “free” pints.
“I drank 10 to 13 pints every day in the cellar. You wouldn’t believe this, but you sweat it off, even though it was freezing cold. It was free, of course.
“It was largely acquired when we had to take out beer that had been stored in the casks. We had to take out a quantity of beer by siphoning along the row of barrels with stomachs upwards.
“We knocked out the bung in the middle and siphoned out so much beer from each one and replaced it with finings before it went to the pubs.
“Finings are non-vegetarian products - they contain some sort of fish extract - and I’m a vegetarian. It put me off beer for years, except when I worked there, because I knew the stuff I was taking from the barrels did not have these finings in them.
“The beer was kept in buckets. We helped ourselves to it - it would have been thrown away otherwise.”
Mr Frost says he owes a debt of gratitude to Nick and Duncan Murphy in helping with his research for the book.
“Duncan is O.D. Murphy’s grandson, and Nick is Duncan’s son.
“O.D. (Owen Downey) Murphy is, of course, a name everybody knows in the area for the Wrekin Brewery and the Pop Works. That only represents the last 50 years of the story.
“I have to say it’s been the most difficult book to research, finding information about the other breweries in the town, because there’s so little information on them, just the odd photographs people have loaned me which have given me the leads to start digging in newspapers.
“It’s been very difficult to ascertain their history. Fortunately earlier gaps have been filled in with things like property sales particulars.
“I’m also grateful for the many people who have let me borrow things like bottles which have helped me make sense of certain parts of the story. Bottle development showed how fortunes progressed or declined.
“The bottles have been most informative, with the technological developments in bottle manufacture from corks, glass marbles, screw corks, crown corks and so on.
“There are quite a few photographs in the book that have never been published before, for example, of the Red Lion Brewery in King Street.
“There was a photograph taken in the First World War where, quite coincidentally of a little procession showing off a captured piece of German artillery, there is in the background a view of the building with Red Lion Brewery on the top of it. When I saw that I knew exactly where it was. I had seen it in maps, but it’s nice to see a photograph. That used to be the Mill Field Brewery which then became the Red Lion Brewery.
“The Red Lion Brewery got its name from the Red Lion public house in High Street. There’s a very rare bottle that somebody loaned me which says ‘Red Lion Brewery, High Street.’
“Interestingly, the original Wrekin Brewery started off in a building down Market Street now used by Shipley entertainments. The building still stands. You can see architectural features to do with the original brewery.
“As time went by the brewery prospered and they decided to build a new one further down Market Street. The old brewery became Ensor’s mineral water works. Ultimately O.D. Murphy bought out Ensor’s. They were the major pop producers in the town.”
Breweries & Bottlers of Wellington is softback, 127 pages, and costs £12.99. It has been published by Tempus Publishing.
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