Yahoo Finance How Victorian female brewers broke the (pint) glass ceiling
It’s an industry long associated with men, from the whiskered industrialists of the 19th century to the hipster craft brewers of the present. But women have played a significant role in brewing beer in Britain, and are increasingly running breweries and creating new beers.
A new book, published this week, unearths the pivotal role of women in family breweries. “Beer is often portrayed as a male domain, even though many iconic breweries would not be what they are today if they didn’t have strong women at the helm,” says its author, the veteran beer expert and real-ale advocate Roger Protz.
The Family Brewers of Britain: A Celebration of British Brewing Heritage tells the story of about 30 family firms that, according to Protz, have been overlooked in the current focus on new, small craft breweries that have sprung up in recent years. The family ventures have “survived wars, recessions and all manner of dramas, and are still brewing wonderful beer”, Protz told the Observer.
As he researched the book, he discovered that women have occupied key positions in breweries as far back as the late 19th century. “It was such a male-dominated industry that it was quite a surprise to find women running these very substantial companies so many years ago.”
One was Hester Parnall, chairman of the St Austell brewery in Cornwall from 1916 to 1939, a “matriarchal figure”, who invited the Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson, and prime minister Stanley Baldwin to her country mansion.
“Her presence in the brewery never went unnoticed,” Protz writes. “Clifford Hockin, who rose from office boy to company secretary, described her as ‘ruling the company with the grace of a duchess combined with the aplomb of the successful businessman. All who came into contact with her, and indeed those who did not, were on their best behaviour’. ”
One of her brewery workers recalled: “The first man to spot her chauffeur-driven Daimler arriving in the yard would tap out a message of warning on the water pipes, which could be heard throughout the brewery. She once sacked a chap she caught painting with a fag in his mouth, and she sacked one of the drivers for picking up a passenger. She was a proper dragon.”
But the history of women brewers reaches far beyond the aristocratic Parnall. In Anglo-Saxon times women made beer at home at the same time as baking bread. They were known as brewsters, and the best in the village turned their homes into an early version of a pub.
“Only in the 18th and 19th centuries did we see big commercial brewers dominated by men to meet demand for a new beer called porter,” said Protz. But then [the first world] war came, and the men who managed and worked in the breweries went off to fight, leaving women to step into the breach.
“I’ve seen many photographs showing women doing all the brewing processes in the first and second world wars while the men were away. It was physically very hard work – filling barrels with beer and moving them around takes strength,” said Protz.
Over the course of the 20th century, there was also a shift in the beer-drinking culture. “I remember going into a pub in Middlesbrough in the 1960s with a woman friend, and as we walked in the conversation stopped. No one said a word until we’d finished our beer and left.
“Now pubs are open to everyone, female friendly, family friendly. When I started writing about beer [in the mid-1970s], the only two kinds you could get in this country were mild and bitter. Look at the choice now. And golden ales and lighter beers are very popular with women.”
Among the women that feature in Protz’s book, published by Camra Books, are Jane Kershaw, a director of the Manchester brewery Joseph Holt, who was named Brewer of the Year in 2019. “This is a firm that is famously conservative – if they can make a giant leap, then others can,” said Protz.
Another is Belinda Sutton, who runs Elgood’s brewery in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, with her sister Jennifer Everall. When she started working at the brewery in 1984, Sutton attended a meeting of the Brewers’ Society – now known as the British Beer and Pub Association – where she was the only woman in the room.
“Two of the men asked me to fetch them a drink, and another asked me where the loos were,” she told the Observer. “Now I deal with more women in the industry than men. There’s been a huge cultural change.”
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Family and craft brewers are facing challenging times, said Protz. “The large global breweries are on the march. Sales of bog-standard lager are in decline so they’re looking for more interesting beers, and running the rule over smaller brewers to see if they can take them over.”
The pandemic has piled on additional pressure. “It’s been so hard, but I’m so full of admiration for the way small brewers have been creative, switching to bottled beer and direct deliveries while the pubs were shut,” said Protz, 81, who edited 24 annual editions of the Campaign for Real Ale’s Good Beer Guide and wrote a beer column for the Guardian until 2006.
