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Home  About the Brewery History |
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Walter Hicks first registered as a maltster, working at Trenance on the north-eastern fringes of St Austell, but by 1861 he had moved to Church Street, a few doors down from the White Hart, and was also trading as a wine and spirit merchant.
| His rapid success soon drove his initial competitors (six maltsters and three wine and spirit merchants in the St Austell area) out of business, and within three years he was already starting to buy shares in new premises - the old London Inn in Market Square - and planning to build a brewery. |
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| In 1869, the complicated purchase complete, Walter Hicks built a 'steam brewery' and grand dwelling house on the site of the inn, the two of which came to be known in later years as Tregonissey House and still grace the expanse of Market Street, opposite the church, today. At the same time he acquired property running up to No. 8 Market Hill for use as offices and a malt house. The new brewery was described in 1873 as 'an extensive building, chiefly of granite, and fitted with all the modern appliances suitable for carrying on a large business.' |
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Because he was the first and the only major brewer to set up in the boom town of St. Austell, Walter Hicks ensured for his company a secure foundation from which the business could only flourish. Such was the brewery's rapid success that it outgrew its new buildings within twenty-five years of their opening. In 1893 a new site was found: two open fields beside Tregonissey Lane on high ground above the town with spectacular views over the broad sweep of St Austell Bay.
On 23 June the St. Austell Star reported that: ' Mr Walter Hicks, of the St. Austell Brewery, has accepted the tender of Messrs A. R. Lethbridge and Son of Tracey Building Yard, Plymouth, for the erection of a new brewery at St. Austell. Messrs Inskipp and Mackenzie, of London, are the architects, and the amount of tender is between £7000 and £8000. Operations will be commenced on Monday next, and the building is to be completed in twelve months.'
Over the years since then there have been alterations and improvements, but the essential 'brew house' of 1893 is still the working heart of the brewery today. Only too aware of its exposed situation, Walter Hicks took care that the buildings of his new brewery should be worthy of such prominence. With its glorious mixture of 19th century grandeur and Cornish huddle, the Brewery actually enhances the scene, and it rides the St. Austell skyline with the audacity and assurance of all great Victorian buildings.
Throughout its history, one of St. Austell Brewery's greatest strengths has been that it is in essence a family business. Not only in ownership and management, but in all aspects of the Brewery's operation, one generation has followed upon another (often as not, with several members of a family working together), so that over the years a rich tradition of service, of strong family loyalty and pride in the company has grown up.
The tradition began, of course, with Walter Hicks himself and his eldest son Walter junior, who had been born in Church Street in 1865 and with whom he ran the Brewery from 1890 onwards. By that time, the Hicks family had come a long way from the yeoman farmers of Lower Menadue. Father and son alike were pillars of the local community, involved in all manner of civic and parochial duties. Walter junior lived with his wife Kattie at the Brewery House, alongside the first brewery, whilst his father moved out to The Brake at Trenance, a distinctly grand house as befitted his new role as a prominent businessman. In 1893 the St. Austell Star reported that 'at a recent festive board, (the St. Austell Local Board, a forerunner of the town council, of which Walter Senior was then the chairman), Mr. Hicks humorously referred to his trade as a 'poor down trodden one' at which everybody had a kick. The 'mayor' of St. Austell is not without his humorous moods. This must have been one of them.'
In 1910 father and son decided to register as 'Walter Hicks and Company Ltd', and at the first AGM in April, Walter Hicks was appointed Governing Director and a share capital of 10,000 shares was divided between Walter and his ten offspring. All seemed to augur well for the new company, but just one-year later tragedy was to strike the family and Brewery with the death of Walter junior following a motor-cycle accident at Helston.
Muffled peals were rung in St. Austell church (Walter had been Captain of the Tower) on the evening when the family brought his body home. Of the funeral, held three days later on Monday morning, the St. Austell Star reported that it was 'one of the largest ever witnessed in the town. Crowds of spectators watched the sad procession. About fifty employees of the St. Austell Brewery preceded the hearse, and at the church gates formed a bodyguard. The Brewery was closed all day and business in the town was practically suspended during the internment.'
The Brewery was strong enough to survive but for old Walter who had to return to running the company at the age of eighty-two, it must have been a devastating blow. His only other son, George, was not suited to a life of business and was clearly not about to take the place of young Walter.
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Astonishingly, it was one of his married daughters, Hester Parnall, who rose from the ruins of Hicks family to take charge of the Brewery, holding the position of chairman from the death of her father in 1916 until her own death in 1939. In this work she was ably assisted by her brother-in-law R.G. Barnes and the company secretary Alfred Ashton, but even today she would clearly have been a towering figure in her own right, and in small-town Cornwall in the years before the Second World War she must have been a very remarkable woman indeed. |
Within the Brewery she was considered to be a bit of a dragon, and stories still abound today of her fearsome qualities. The first person to spot her chauffeur-driven Daimler arriving in the brewery yard of a morning would tap out a message of warning on the water pipes which would then be telegraphed right around the Brewery in a flash. Clifford Hockin, as office boy then, before going on to be company secretary, can remember having to lay out fresh sheets of white blotting paper upon the desk in the Board Room for her two Pekingeses to sit on during her working hours.
On the evening of 12 June 1939 a dramatic incident in the history of the Brewery occurred when fire broke out in the L-shaped building which then enclosed the yard to the south and east and housed the garages, the carpenters' and painters' shop, the fitters shop and the timber store, with a gate cottage at the western end. Reputedly started by the overheating of a Thornycroft lorry, the Cornish Guardian reported that: 'In the earlier stages of the fire, the bursting of the petrol tanks and the explosion of the bottles had been reminiscent of the early stages of a bombardment in warfare and the flames were too fierce to approach to within 50 feet.'
Nevertheless, six brewery employees, helped by cricketers from the nearby ground who had abandoned their game, were able to rescue furniture from the cottage along with one lorry, a light van and two private cars from the longer wing of the building.
It was the first outing for the town's new fire engine 'Ruby', but not a particularly auspicious one since the low water pressure from hydrants in Trevarthian Road could produce no more than a trickle from the hoses. Eventually, water from the brewery reservoirs was used to get the fire under control.
In the cold light of the following morning, the full extent of the damage could be seen. In addition to the total loss of the garages, shops and stores, four lorries were destroyed, along with many valuable and irreplaceable brewery records which had been stored in boxes in the upstairs rooms.
Upon Hester's death in 1939, she was succeeded as chairman by Egbert Barnes, the only son of R.G. Barnes and Mary Hicks, and thus the only surviving grandson of Walter Hicks. In complete contrast to Hester, Egbert's was a benevolent reign and he is remembered with great affection and respect by everyone who worked at the Brewery during his forty years as chairman. After the war he was joined by George Luck, who was Managing Director for over thirty years, and together they gave to the Brewery a much needed stability; steady hands at the tiller to guide the company through the difficult post war years when so many small independent brewers were swallowed up or went out of business. It was a time of survival and consolidation, an essential prelude to the subsequent development of the modern St. Austell Brewery.
Today nearly all of Walter Hicks' numerous descendants are involved in the Brewery as shareholders, and some more actively as directors and employees. Of today's board, three directors, including the Chairman Piers Thompson, are descended directly from Walter Hicks through his daughter Mary, whilst the present Managing Director, James Staughton, is Walter Hicks' great-great grandson.
One of the Brewery's strengths is that dynastic records such as that of the Hicks family are not restricted to the board and management only but are to be found throughout the company, in every department. The most impressive of the Brewery's many proud family traditions was started back in 1924 by Tom Stephens, and went on to involve a total of fourteen members of the Stephens family who, between them, have so far contributed over 200 years of family service to the Brewery. This extraordinary record (which is only an extreme version of what was commonplace, with over thirty such family networks running through the Brewery's history and continuing today) nearly did not begin at all, for Tom came from a strict Wesleyan family to whom the Brewery was considered to be a den of iniquity. When young Tom was offered a job in the unloading shed and wash-house (earning a 'boy's wage' of 7/6d a week), his parents summoned the local minister and spent many hours in prayer before allowing him to go up the hill to work amongst such temptations.
If great family networks are not restricted to management, neither are they confined to the Brewery itself; there are many cases to be found amongst the public houses as well.
Willie Warren, who died in 1980 at the age of 79, still holds the Brewery record for the longest-serving landlord, having run the Radjel inn at Pendeen for 59 years. Furthermore, he had been born in the pub and had taken over the licence from his grandmother - all told, Willie's family held the pub for an astonishing 99 years. To honour Willie on his 72nd birthday, on March 29th 1973, the pub's name was officially changed from the Boscaswell Inn to the name by which it was always known - the Radjel - which means a pile of stones where a fox makes its home and which had been the nickname of Willie's great-great-grandfather.
St. Austell Brewery truly is an Independent Family Brewery as the strength and support of dozens of individual family histories have become interwoven, over the years, with the history of the Brewery itself, and continue to enrich the fabric of the company today.
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