Last week I looked at the distillery which used to be at Deptford Bridge and its development from around 1800. I mentioned the ownership of it by George Wheelhouse, then William Holland and then Alfred Kirby and its eventual sale to Seagar Evans in the 20th Century. This week I wanted to look at the brewery which was more or less on the same site as the distillery but doesn’t seem to have been part of it.
I said last week that it would be interesting to know a bit more about the earlier history of this site – before George Wheelhouse . I think it is very likely that there are people out there who have researched the site and I would be interested to hear from them. It is very unclear exactly to me what was happening here before 1800. Clearly this is a most important site on the main road from between Dover and London at the point at which the Dover road crosses one of the few major rivers on its route through Kent. Clearly the road had to cross a much bigger river in the Medway but nearer to London the Ravensbourne is the main river likely to cause caused a problem to travelers. The distillery and brewery were on the southern side of the bridge at this key site and it’s difficult to believe that there wasn’t some sort of human activity here from at least Roman times -- and probably earlier. It’s assumed, I think, there was a ford over the Ravensbourne here before the bridge was built and if so this has to be a site of interest going back many, many millennia.
Looking at the site post 17th -18th century, I am far from clear what was there except for some sort of alcohol producing establishment. Some references are to a distillery and some to a brewery or some related activity. I am very grateful to the Kentish Brewers and Breweries of Kent Facebook page and for information which they have sent me which includes a list of several dozen names of men who described themselves as brewers and/or distillers in Deptford in thr 18th nad 19th centuries. Where were they all were based? I know that I missed one brewery when I wrote about the maltings on Hope Wharf – I now know there was a Hope Brewery there too. There must also have been many others – and some of those names must be of men who worked at the Deptford Bridge brewery and distillery.
The Kentish Brewers’ earliest reference to the Deptford Bridge site is to a Sir Henry Hicks whose son was operating a brew house at Deptford Bridge in 1752. He is associated with a ‘famous dray horse’ which he had there in 1737 and which is described in an article in the Transactions of the Royal Society. It apparently had a large stone present in its abdomen and there is a description of the horse galloping about and rolling round in a field. The land attached to the Deptford Bridge distillery/brewery then stretched back as far as Loampit Hill and included fields where horses could have been kept. Hicks' son is said to have had a two brew houses there, as well as a yard, a counting house and a mill house. The titled ‘Sir Henry’ sounds a bit too aristocratic to be involved in a Deptford brewery – but he certainly lived in Deptford and apparently died at the brewery itself and is buried in St Paul’s church. His son, Thomas, who seems to have inherited the brewery, was storekeeper at the Royal Dockyard – a post for which having your own brewery might be useful and profitable. Hicks had inherited the brewery from his father in law – another Knight, Sir Thomas Snelling. This involvement in the 17th and early 18th centuries of members of the actual aristocracy in this Deptford brewery is unexpected – and I am not sure of it implies that brewing was an aristocratic occupation - it was certainly very lucrative – or perhaps these knights weren’t as aristocratic as they made themselves out to be. Brewing is definitely ‘trade; although apparently it also seems to lead to knighthoods.
The brewery later owed by Mr. Lambert was called the Gloucester Brewery. Why? Deptford is nowhere near Gloucester.. It appears that the Hicks family had bought a castle for themselves in the Gloucestershire village of Beverston and thus named the brewery after the location of their castle. Its one of those smallish castles in a village street.
The Hicks appear to have passed or sold the site to a Joseph Salway who describes himself as a ‘timber merchant’ and who had a timber yard on site. He is also described as a sugar refiner. In this period there was a big expansion of sugar refining businesses in east London - with some very obvious links to slavery. Refining may have involved using equipment for boiling and processing sugar in much the same way as a distillery might have needed to deal with hot and dangerous liquids. Many of these site notices about owners and operators mention 'brew houses' rather than a 'distillery' and the first actual distiller seems to be George Wheelhouse who I described last week. There are also mentions of mills and milling equipment and occasional maltings.
In 1806 the site of the Brewery/distillery is advertised for sale by a Mr. Weller and a Mr. Bury who are said to be the owners. Mr. Bury is described as a maltster and it’s very possible that there was a separate maltings there at one time. He is described as having at Deptford Bridge ‘a spacious brick dwelling house’ with some shops in front of it and also a wharf and a dock on the Ravensbourne. I could have a few doubts about exactly where Mr. Bury's house was but the advertisement quite clearly says ‘at Deptford Bridge’. Furniture from the house for sale includes a pianoforte as well as ‘brewing utensils’ and also stocks of ‘faggots’ and ‘coals’ and ‘carts’ and much else necessary for a ‘malt house’.
Jess Steele in her history of Deptford ‘Turning the Tide’ says that the distillery had previously been called the ‘Vine and Still’ but I can find nothing about that at all However Darryl Spurgeon in Discover Deptford’ says it was owned by a Mr. Goodhew – and following up that clue I found that that following the death of a William Goodhew in 19813 the site was for sale in 1813 along with a considerable amount of land which was sold for what we today would describe as ‘development’ sites for shops on Deptford bridge. Goodhew seems to have been prominent locally and extremely wealthy. The distillery house is described as his ‘residence’ although it clearly was also very large industrial establishment. It included what is described as a ‘very capital still house’ with, shops, warehouses, a counting house, still rooms, a horse mill, a granary, stabling for eight horses, and much, much more along with some housing for workers - all of it ‘newly built’. There was also a small jetty on the Ravensbourne riverside ‘for the convenience of water carriage’. Now that sounds like a a big distillery and probably a brewery as well.
This sale in the early 1800s seem to mark a division between the brewery and the distillery. Last week I talked about the owners of the distillery– Mr. Wheelhouse followed by William Holland and thenAlfred Kirby. As I said earlier I need to write about the brewery which seems to have been on the western part of the site abutting onto Brookmill Lane. I am afraid that what information I have on the brewery has is brief and rather boring.
From the 1830s the brewery seems to have been owned by a Mr. Lambert. He had originally been the partner of a Mr. Harris. Mr. Lambert was a well-known local citizen who lived in South Greenwich South Street and had a daughter. However the only reference I have found to him personally is a report that once when he was riding across Blackheath at night his horse was frightened by rocket from ‘near the residence of Princess Sophia’ and the animal ran amok. Mr. Lambert was thrown to the ground and badly injured although his hat seems to have them saved him from serious head injury.
From the 1840s Mr. Lambert employed a Thomas Norfolk as his brewer at Deptford Bridge and eventually Norfolk took over the business having married Mr. Lambert’s daughter.
Thomas Norfolk came from Bromley in Kent and had been at school in Greenwich where he was a friend of John Penn the engineer and local factory owner. He had originally begun work for solicitors in central London who, when he decided to leave, offered him a partnership. He took an interest in brewing and became the manager of Mr. Lambert's Deptford Bridge brewery. In 1829 he married Lambert’s daughter and subsequently acquired ownership of the brewery which was thenceforth known as ‘Norfolk Brewery’. He was a prominent local politician and for 20 years was a member of the Greenwich District Board of Works, chairing it for most of that time. I think we should ignore the constant discussions the Board had throughout this period with bodies like the Kent Turnpike Trusts. This was ahout widening the road on Deptford Bridge which would of course have meant that some of Mr. Norfolk’s brewery premises would have to be moved or demolished. When he retired the Board of Works gave a public banquet to celebrate his work as Chair with speeches and toasts about how conscientious he was. At his death in 1887 he was buried in the presence of at least 1000 people alongside his wife and mother of his ten children.
When he died the brewery included 46 freehold pubs and six leased ones. The business was taken over by his two eldest sons, Edward and Charles, who clearly were not really interested and who immediately began to look at ways in which it could be transferred into some sort of corporate ownership. In 1894 the partnership between them was ended and the company and the business were sold to the Dartford Brewery. They continued to run it for a short time, the last brew there was in 1905 and it was sold to a development syndicate who developed the site as shops and other businesses in conjunction with the then Deptford Borough Council . The Brewery buildings eventually became part of Seager Evans distillery
In looking for things which happened at the Brewery under Lambert and Norfolk perhaps I should describe one the numerous floods to which Deptford Bridge seems to have been very much subject. Water from the floodgates of the Kent Waterworks came in a torrent going through Mill Lane to the Broadway and damaged a vast amount of malt, flooded basements and shops. There is a lot of detail about it in the Kentish Mercury which is not surprising as their building was particularly badly flooded.
More cheerful is a report of an 1870 beano. The brewery was then under the management of Thomas Norfolk. The workforce set out in a four horse bus and drove through picturesque parts of Kent while listening to performances on the cornet by the band master of the Blackheath Volunteers. They drove through Farnborough to get to Biggin Hill where Mr. Blake of the Black Horse pub had provided a substantial ‘old English dinner’ to which they paid ‘hearty respects'. The countryside trip hadn’t damaged their appetites and there were lots of toasts to all sorts of people and then lots of games with handicaps and a horn pipe danced by the landlord of the Black Horse with a Mr. Finn. And they all went home to get back to the Fountain pub in Deptford at 11 pm. I am not sure that that was a legendary drink-up in a Brewery but something like it.
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