Tolly Cobbold: Gone but not forgotten

UNEXPECTED discoveries can bring the memories flooding back.

Take some pictures of royal visitors at Cliff Brewery. Peter Scully, former head brewer at Tolly Cobbold, chanced upon them by accident at his home outside Ipswich and thought the EADT might like a look. We did.

His find was serendipitous - and, once we'd thought about it, full of intriguing coincidences involving the month of July and round-number anniversaries.

It's thus a good time to remember, and mourn, the passing of a household name. For instance:

Had Tolly Cobbold not bitten the dust, 2006 would have marked the 260th anniversary of large-scale brewing in Ipswich.

It was on July 14, 1989, that the axe swung over Tolly Cobbold, with owner Brent Walker trying to hatch a plan to demolish the riverside Cliff Brewery in Ipswich and build a marina and leisure centre. It was shut for about a year. Luckily, executives managed to stitch together a management buyout and, a year later, were able to again hoist the Tolly Cobbold flag above the landmark building.

Then, in July 2002, the axe fell again - and this time there would be no 11th reprieve. A proud 256 years of brewing in Ipswich was coming to an end, it was announced - leaving the town without a brewery for the first time in the recorded history of the trade.

Tolly Cobbold - its brands, estate and distribution contracts - would be merged into TD Ridley and Sons, of Hertford End, near Chelmsford.

That wasn't the end of the July anniversaries. Last summer, in a move rich in irony, Ridley's was itself sold: to Greene King - formerly Tolly Cobbold's Suffolk competitor. The £45.6 million deal included the brewery, bottling line and head office at Hartford End, and a distribution centre in Ipswich.

It's instructive, in fact, to compare the fortunes of Tolly and its neighbours. This July - that month again - Greene King announced a huge leap in profits - including a first-time contributions from

Ridley's. Operating profit grew by 21% to £190.9million.

Adnams, meanwhile, continues to forge ahead - its character defined by some stylish marketing. (Peter Scully concedes that the Southwold-based brewer “has a mystique, which we never had”.)

Let's throw in a few more round-number anniversaries, while we're about it: Peter Scully's father, Rodolph, took over as head brewer at the Tollemache brewery in Ipswich in 1926. And, for good measure, Peter and wife Marielle celebrate their diamond wedding this year.

Even those photographs he unearthed manage to get in on the act. The Duke and Duchess of Kent visited in 1973 - no prizes for guessing which month - to help celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Cobbolds as a brewing family.

Their bright red Wessex helicopter of the Queen's Flight landed in the sports field beside Cliff Lane. The royals enjoyed a tour, beginning with the Copper Room - home to one of the original copper vessels used in Cobbold's brewery at Harwich, before it moved to Ipswich.

Attention also focused on the new £140,000 bottling plant imported from Belgium - capable of washing, sterilising and refilling up to 1,500-dozen bottles an hour.

Peter Scully is the man explaining to the duke and duchess exactly what's what.

“She was a sweetie, an absolute sweetie,” he remembers. “She put me at my ease immediately - and so did he, for that matter.”

Peter comes from a family steeped in the industry. One uncle was a head brewer. Another uncle, who was killed in the First World War, was a brewer at Bullards in Norwich. His grandfather was head brewer at Salters of Rickmansworth.

Peter's father was originally a junior brewer at the Tollemache brewery off Upper Brook Street, occupying land where Woolworth's now stands. Peter was born at Brook Street nursing home, within 100 yards of the plant where his dad worked.

“The story goes that he was told he was in possession of a bonny bouncing boy. He rushed down the stairs from the brewing room and fell over a horse in the yard!”

Peter saw action during the war, being badly injured by a German mine. He met his wife to be in Egypt and married there in May, 1946.

When he came out of the army he was taken on at the Brook Street brewery “as a kind of dogsbody pupil, going up to London University about three times a week, bashing the books like hell.” He also worked as a shift brewer at the famous Truman Hanbury & Buxton brewery in Brick Lane. “I was a bit worried; I had a wife and a baby on the way - and then I qualified in 1950, got my degree and Diploma of the Institute of Brewing.

“Then I got a job as the second brewer at a big brewery in Salford, for four-and-a-half years. Then John Tollemache asked me to come back and take over from my father. They were starting to run down the Brook Street brewery. So I came back in '58 and it was merged into Cobbold's. It was a very unpleasant business, actually. It took four or five years to get the place into some sort of shape.”

Economics, inevitably, made the merger inevitable. The days when villages could support both a Tolly pub and a Cobbold pub came to an end.

Peter explains: “Agriculture being what it was, whereas a farm once had 20 labourers, it went down to about two. You just hadn't got the trade, so one pub or the other had to be closed. In Coddenham, you had The Crown, which was the Cobbold pub, and the Duke's Head, which was the Tolly pub. The Crown is closed - it's now a private house.”

The Tollemache operation had started in 1888 when the brewery was bought from Charles Cullingham by the Hon Douglas Tollemache in partnership with two of his brothers. It became Tollemache's Ipswich Brewery Limited in 1896.

Brewing in those days was still a bit of a rule-of-thumb skill and there was always uncertainty about whether or not the next brew would be as good as the last. Douglas Tollemache, insisting from the outset that quality was crucial, used first-class materials regardless of cost.

The Cobbold side of the equation was begun in 1723 when Thomas Cobbold, who came from a long-established Suffolk farming family, began brewing in Harwich. Because the Essex water was too brackish, he shipped crystal-clear water from Holywells in Ipswich, in special sailing vessels. Twenty-three years later the business was moved to Cliff Brewery in Ipswich.

Some time after its operations were merged with the Cobbold brewery in the late 1950s, the Tollemache buildings were demolished.

Peter Scully remembers they were left with virtually with two of everything, including two head brewers.

In a special publication published 10 years ago to mark 250 years of brewing in Ipswich, he explained: “I produced a redundancy plan which I put before the board and I shall never forget what I was told by John Cobbold. He said 'Peter, you are dealing with human beings.'” Peter knew then that the company was skating on thin ice. Overmanning and fleets of company cars for managers threatened to prove a drain on finances.

Peter, head brewer at Brook Street, became deputy at Cliff Brewery until the incumbent retired and he took over.

The days of drawing usable water from the ground were long gone by that stage. The site was close to the river and water quickly went brackish. Tolly Cobbold used, instead, town's-water ­- treating it to add or take away salts as necessary.

Peter most enjoyed his latter years at Tolly Cobbold, when he was completely in control and able to organise things. He mentions key colleagues Jack Stratfield, chief engineer, and Peter Kent, the bottling manager. One of the projects that sticks in the memory is devising new plant at Cliff Quay. “The plant had become very antiquated - late 19th Century - and you had to modernise and automate.” Interestingly, it was based on the set-up at the Ovaltine complex at Kings Langley in Hertfordshire. “The process is fairly similar - up to a certain point.”

In 1977 Peter said goodbye to Tolly Cobbold when he was headhunted to produce lager in Nigeria. Although sad to leave, it was an offer he couldn't refuse - and he could see the way the wind was blowing.

Life in Africa was “interesting”.

“The corruption was absolutely appalling. You had to go on from day to day,” he explains.

“We had a new boiler delivered, and it went over the side in Lagos harbour. It was pulled out and was unfit for use. You just had to use your initiative. We had a vertical boiler that had been delivered to us by mistake - it was going to some sweet factory or other - and I grabbed it and installed it! I had to; our boiler had gone 'phut!'

“They came looking for it. I said 'I'm very sorry . . . I'll do what I can . . . tomorrow.' And tomorrow, of course, never comes. You've no idea what it's like. Let's put it this way: it's an experience I would never have missed, but I would never want to do it again.”

When Peter returned to England, he worked as a brewing consultant for a time.

Tolly Cobbold's fortunes, meanwhile, were dipping. It was sold in 1977 to the Ellerman Lines shipping company for £5.7 million. Later, when Ellerman itself fell on hard times, it (including Tolly) went to the Barclay Brothers for less than £50m.

In 1989 came the Brent Walker takeover. Tolly Cobbold executives Bob Wales and Brian Cowie threw their energies behind saving Cliff Brewery, and sought assistances from Ipswich council. The buildings, plant and machinery were listed within 48 hours - helping to block redevelopment.

A year later, a management buyout was completed. On July 14, 12 months to the day after Cliff Brewery closed, the two partners and chairman Peter Strutt were able to hoist the Tollemache & Cobbold flag above Cliff Quay once again.

In 1992 Tolly featured on national TV as part of the Troubleshooter series that examined businesses standing at a crossroads. Presenter Sir John Harvey-Jones, former chairman of ICI, advised the partners to give up brewing and concentrate on the profitable distribution business. They fought shy of that idea, however - opting to continue brewing and injecting a dash of humour by producing a Tollyshooter bitter.

A decade later and it was all over. Bob Wales explained the writing had been on the wall for some time; the industry was highly competitive and globalised, and the sale of numerous Tolly pubs by Brent Walker 13 years earlier had left the new owners with their hands tied behind their backs to some extent.

It was all, says Peter Scully, “a bloody shame - because that brewery should be going full steam ahead”.

The business side wasn't his corner, he says, so he's not going to venture an opinion about how Tolly Cobbold was managed down the decades. But as a specialist with a chemistry background he insists its products were “better than anyone. The actual production of beer - how we were doing it, how we were bottling it, how we were bottling Carlsberg - was perfectly OK.

“Brewing beer is the easiest thing in the world. Anyone can do it. Seriously. You extract your barley malt, or your working material, and you add yeast to it and fermentation starts.

“But” - he leaves a telling pause - “then you've got to preserve that, it's got to remain sound, there are a million bugs waiting to bite it and so on. The main thing is that every harvest is different; so you've got to get your colours right, your extract right, and so on.

“That is the difficulty - not the basic production of beer. That's going to be the same in 2,000 years' time and was the same in the pharaohs' time. It's nature; simple biology. But the way you do it . . . it's similar to wine. French wine was awful, and they had to go to Australia to see how they did it. What was the secret? Sterility. Stainless steel tanks. Get rid of the wooden casks that were absolutely filthy. You could never sterilise them.

“That's the sort of thing you've got to think of.”