The Campaign for Real Ale was founded in St. Albans by four young beer-loving journalists over a few pints of traditional beer on 16th March 1971 and became one of the most successful consumer pressure groups in Europe.
The Tyneside branch of CAMRA had its inaugural meeting upstairs in Balmbra’s pub on the Cloth Market in Newcastle, followed shortly after by a well-attended social in the Crown Posada pub on The Side, Newcastle, where we just about drank them out of Draught Bass.
Local radio presenter Paddy MacDee was one of our founder members, as was my old friend Len Winters who at the time worked for Stewarts Tea in Byker. Len, who died aged 89 about 5 years ago, wrote many interesting articles and poems for our local CAMRA newsletter.
I recall Len telling me that when he returned to England with his Regiment from France in 1945 at the end of the war, the Shepherd Neame pubs in Kent had signs outside stating ‘Free beer for our Troops’.
In the 1970s the Crown Posada public house, being in close proximity to the old Newcastle Crown Court, was frequented by many learned members of the legal profession, including my pal Wilf Steer, QC, from Tynemouth, who also drank at the Tynemouth Lodge until he passed away not that long ago. Wilf loved his Bass.
In these early days of CAMRA, Scottish and Newcastle Breweries was the biggest player on Tyneside but had taken all real ale out of its huge estate of tied pubs.
I was given the unenviable job of being the first CAMRA Brewery Liaison Officer for S&N, which at the time seemed like an uphill task.
It’s been said that the North East was a beer desert in the 1970s, but not true as outside of the S&N estate of pubs there was plenty of Bass ales, Tetley Bitter, Camerons ales, Lorimer’s beers from Vaux and Sam Smith’s Old Brewery Bitter (just over the water in Jarrow and South Shields) – and as just one or two handpumps on a bar was the norm in those days, the real ale was usually in good fresh condition.
On a technical level – it is now not uncommon to see beer/lager lines being cleaned (using a potentially lethal caustic solution of line cleaner) by staff when bars are trading in these supposedly enlightened times, but, and give them their due, if an S&N or other big brewery manager or tenant was seen to be doing this by an Area Manager during opening hours in the old days, the penalty was instant dismissal, as this practice was and still is extremely dangerous. It defies common sense that it has not been legally banned on public Health & Safety grounds to protect unsuspecting customers from possible life-changing accidents, if cleaning fluid were to be ingested in error. The message is quite simple : beer lines should only be cleaned outside of trading hours. One would never ever see a beer line being cleaned while drinking in a pub in the 1970s.
The two errant brewers in the North East when CAMRA Tyneside started up were S&N and also the Federation Brewery, as neither supplied a drop of real ale to their large tied estates of pubs and clubs. At least we knew that when we saw an illuminated S&N blue star sign outside a pub it was one to pass by on the other side.
It’s not long to the 50th Anniversary of CAMRA so maybe time to reflect through misted glasses :
There were very few privately run free houses in Tyneside in the 70s and not many pubs served any hot food. There was also a very limited choice of the real ales that were available.
Pub trading hours were 11-3 and 5.30 to 10.30 on weekdays and 12-2 and 7 to 10.30 on a Sunday, with an extra half an hour on weekdays at the ‘coast’ for 3 months in the summer. The two hour session on a Sunday lunchtime was the busiest of the week in most pubs, as no shops were open and there was no live sport on TV.
Football players were not paid much in those days and it was not uncommon for an ex-professional player to sign up for a brewery tenancy when he retired. Vaux Brewery of Sunderland took on a lot of former football and cricket stars in their tied estate, as their celebrity status was good for trade.
Northern Real Ale Agency and Legendary Yorkshire Heroes sprang up in Newcastle as real ale wholesalers run by Dick Attlee and Tony Brookes respectively and did sterling work sourcing ales from far and wide in the early days of the Tyneside real ale revival.
The first few CAMRA Newcastle Beer Festivals were in the historic Guildhall on Newcastle Quayside with the beers were being drawn by gravity straight from the barrels, which were racked on scaffolding. We couldn’t start moving beer into the hall until a day or two before the festival as annual Chartered Accountancy examinations took place in there.
I can remember having a last few pints of ‘Burton Union’ brewed Bass in the Crown Posada after working on the bar at an early beer festival, as after that the old Burton Unions were mothballed by Bass & Co and Draught Bass, produced by a more modern process, has never been quite the same.
Since CAMRA Tyneside was founded most of the major North East breweries have ceased trading, including Castle Eden (formerly Nimmo’s), Vaux of Sunderland, the Northern Clubs’ Federation Brewery and Scottish & Newcastle Breweries, with the loss of many thousands of good jobs.
S&N is now owned by the Dutch company Heineken and their beers are delivered by the Swiss global transport company Kuehne & Nagel. Crazy times ?
The Federation Brewery, set up after the Great War to provide affordable beer primarily for working men, was originally in a prime site behind the Central Station in Newcastle and was owned by the CIU clubs of Tyneside. That site would have been worth a fortune now, but the brewery sold out and moved to a small drab site near the Metro Centre in Dunston in 1980. This brewery uniquely had the name of their Chief Executive on the side of all of their lorries and the Original Gravity of all of their beers and lagers was clearly stated on their beer fonts. It all went a bit pear shaped years ago when their CEO was involved in a scandal which hit the press, so plenty of work for their signwriter.
In 2004, the now failing Federation Brewery was bought by S&N, who had announced the closure of their huge Gallowgate brewery and it continued trading briefly as the Newcastle Federation Breweries until it was closed by Heineken in 2010.
Vaux Brewery of Sunderland, founded in 1806, ceased trading in 1999 on the advice of their financial advisors. They had supplied excellent real ales from their Lorimer & Clark brewery in Edinburgh, which they had bought in 1946. Vaux however ceased brewing there in 1987 and tried unsuccessfully to have the city centre site cleared for lucrative redevelopment, but it has survived to this day (having been protected by being a Listed industrial property) as the Caledonian Brewery. I recall being told on a brewery visit that this was the last coal fired brewery in the UK.
The old Vaux Brewery site in Sunderland was flattened having been bought by Tesco. At the time of closure they still employed a number of ‘Horse Drivers’, for the few old fashioned drays that they kept until the end, but fortunately the magnificent heavy horses went to a good home and not to a supermarket.
One long-term survivor is Camerons Brewery of Hartlepool, established in 1865, it is now the largest brewer in the North East. It has had a chequered history, losing its independence to Ellerman Lines in 1974, acquired by the secretive Barclay Brothers in 1983, then by Brent Walker in 1989 who spun off most of their pubs into a separate company called Pubmaster, which was acquired by Punch Taverns in 2003. Camerons still has a small tied estate of pubs and is the ninth largest brewer in the UK, with most of their production being contract-brewing, including big brands such as Fosters Lager, for the multi-national companies.
In the 1970s it was common to see Camerons excellent real ales dispensed in their pubs using electric metered see-through cylindrical glass units on their bar tops into outsize pint glasses, which effortlessly produced a lovely big head and exactly 20 fluid oz of ale. Strange that this efficient and speedy system has not survived.
At local CAMRA branch level, the first edition of Canny Bevvy was produced in 1979, the Editor being Andy Chapman, who had just finished at university in Bristol. I was also editor for while and did a stint as Social Secretary, organising many brewery visits.
Fast forward to 2019 and it’s good to see so many small real ale breweries in the North East and it is healthy for the trade that new pubs of all shapes and sizes are opening here, there and everywhere.
As there are so many shops and other business premises closing, the planners seem to have thrown the formerly strict rule book away when it comes to granting permission for new bars.
I can recall that in about 1980 a large empty bank premises on the corner of Park View and Marine Avenue in Whitley Bay was refused change of use to a pub as it had no car park – but today it would have been rubber stamped.
The fight to preserve real ale goes on, as history is repeating itself – but instead of big faceless brewers going over to fizzy filtered keg beer, many micro-brewers in recent years have done exactly that, under the guise of it being ‘craft ale’ as the noun ‘keg’ had fallen into disrepute.
The big incentive for them, just like the Big Six national brewers of old, is that keg/dead beer keeps for weeks, is idiot proof as takes no looking after, so not many ‘returns’ of sour beer from bars and more profit for the brewery, but I for one have never enjoyed drinking keg beer. An old CAMRA produced T-shirt stated that ‘The chemical formula for Keg beer is K9P’.
Some of this modern keg beer is even supplied in sturdy one-trip plastic kegs, so no empty barrels for the brewers to pick up but absolutely no guarantee that this plastic gets recycled, so arguably these containers should be banned as the beer could easily be supplied in reusable stainless steel casks which last for decades.
For my money there is still nothing better than a fresh pint of a decent quality real ale.
Hugh Price (Tynemouth Lodge Hotel)