Barclay Perkins Brewery and Memories of Park Street
The girls in the Bottling Hall with their Green scarves on their heads, green overalls and clogs, sometimes I had to walk through the Bottling Hall, I was very young and there was lots of invitations to do things with them.
The barrels were wooden and washed out with jets of water, to check the cleanliness, the workers had a gas light on the end of a long metal tube.
Sometimes barrels were rolled along the road down slopes and round corners guided by what looked like broomsticks, but very skillful.
The smell of the brew which was almost permanent.
I remember Elizabeth Taylor and her husband making part of a film around Park Street and they went to lunch at the Anchor PH at Bankside
The lodge was just inside the front gates shown on a picture on your website.
During my 42 years with the Company lots of changes happened now the Companies no longer exist.
When I started work at Barclay Perkins,I was a messenger on the " Front Gate" lodge.
My job was to take the post and collect the post from all the offices. The telephone at the time was very old fashioned, it was the upright type. I spent four months in the lodge before being transferred to the Surveyors Department as a Junior Clerk (Office Boy) my time there was spent on passing on orders to Builders for repairs to the Pubs as well as filing, making afternoon tea and being the general dogsbody.There was a large fire in the Lager bottling area approx 1951. The office I was in backed onto this building but work carried on as usual, outside there was lots of water running down the road.
Whilst on the front gate I used to take buckets of spent grain or spent hops to a Company called Bryant and Harman for testing. The buckets were quite heavy and I had to walk.
I left in 1952 to do my two years National Service and returned in 1954 to the same job. I decided it was time to improve myself, so I became a trainee Architectural Assistant.
In time I moved up the ladder and became a Surveyor.
Barclay Perkins merged with Courage in 1956.I was transferred to Horselydown in 1956 and back to Southwark in 1957.
In 1958 I went back to Horselydown until I went to a new office in Purley in 1976.
D.Bostridge. West Chiltington, West Sussex.
|
the
Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs