Somerset Standard - 21 December 1973

INN BREWED ITS OWN BEER - AND IT MATURED FOR THREE YEARS!

Local historian ERIC WESTMAN has come across the written recollections of John Watts, a local worthy who paints a vivid picture of life in North Somerset more than a century ago.

Conditions were so different then that this story seems like the description of another world, as well as of another age. Only some of the place names remain the same.

JOHN WATTS, who was a was a tinsmith, was born at Paulton in 1844 in the corner shop of the square by the Paulton Inn. This square is now the Red Lion car park and the inn itself is presumably the Red Lion.

Between 1914 and 1916, towards the end of his life, he wrote down some of his early memortes, and from them this article is compiled. His son Reg and his grandson Stan were well-known Paulton residents long kept a hardware shop in the High Street.

As a boy John Watts watched the Paulton inn pulled down and rebuilt. The original inn was very old with a thatched roof and oak-framed windows with leaded lights. The thatch was or three or four feet thick.

Behind the inn stood the brewery and it had four large cellars. At that time he beer was kept for two or three years to mature before it was sold. The large barrels, or "pieces" as they were properly called, had large square holes to enable a man to go down into them by ladder and clean them out before they were refilled.

Air-tight

After filling, a cover was put on each barrel and it was pasted around the joint to make it airtight. Then the top was covered with sand to keep the beer cool.

The beer was cooled in large trays about sixteen feet square and six inches deep. it was of a superior quality and was supplied to the Clutton Hill Coal Works.

One of John's uncles who came from London was so impressed by the beer that he bought a small barrel of it to take to America with him.

Dr Curtis, a local gentleman noteworthy for the Sunday school he organised in what was previously a Dame's School tried the beer and declared it was the best he had tasted for years and another gentleman said there was not a better quality beer to be obtained in Paulton.

It was assumed that Paulton's pure soft spring-water was responsible for the excellence of the brew: the water was obtained from the old Pithay. Joab Derrick was the brewer at the Paulton Inn in those days.

Shrewd

At the time that the Paulton Inn was rebuilt (about 1850), it was kept by Mr John Wilcox. He was a shrewd man with an eye to business, and if there was a quiet evening with no-one in the inn, he would push the stools about until someone would look in to see what all the noise was about. Then he was all right for the evening.

He kept a brass tobacco box on the table, and customers would put a halfpenny in it to fill their long church-warden pipes. When the box was closed. it required another halfpenny to open it again.

The pipes were kept in an oblong tray on the table. To cleanse them, they were burnt in a baking oven before the fire was taken out for baking bread.

They were placed In an iron cage which had a ring at the top into which the long poker could be put to pull them out of the oven after they had been sufficiently burnt. The pipes were thus always fresh and smoked easily.

Mr Willcox made a lot of money in Paulton - he told John Watts' father that he made a pound every day he was there (the average miner's weekly wage was 12 shillings). He originally came from Shepton Mallet. His wife died one November day after bearing a child, presumably prematurely. This occurred through shock at hearing a cannon being fired in the Inn Square by Josiah Gregory - the report seemed to shake the whole village. The child was brought up by a woman called Nancy Bartlett

The Law

There were no uniformed policemen in those days, although constables were chosen every year at the annual Vestry meeting.

Generally, six men were appointed, the principal ones being Mr Ward, Joshua Watts and Alfred Purnell. They used to take Sunday morning walks around the village to see that no beer was being sold and that there was no drinking during prohibited hours.

Mr Ward, who owned a saddlery business, was a tall, thin man of military appearance. One day he was called upon to quell a disturbance at the Paulton Inn, and one of the crowd caught hold of him and held him up.

With unconscious humour he called out, "Aid and assist me in the name of our Queen Victoria - if you don't put me down I will take you up."

The lock-up, or "blind house" as it was called, had within it some iron rings about three-and-a-half inches in diameter built into the wall at the back and front.

When a couple of fighting drunks were arrested, they were put into the blind house and handcuffed to the iron rings. There they were left until they cooled down.

A long bench with a raised portion at the top end about six inches high and forming a pillow, enabled them to rest their aching heads.

A carter called Bill Jones, who came from Cameley, was employed to haul timber to Mr C D Purnell's premises, formerly a timber yard. He told John Watts that he once stole a sapling oak, was found out and transported to Tasmania for seven years.

A popular trade In Paulton was that of sawyer, and the best known names in it were Perry and Bartlett. The coalpits required a lot of timber, but as no circular saws existed, the wood was all hand sawn.

As mentioned earlier, a Mr Ward had a good saddlery business, which employed his two sons and two other men.

Saddlery was a good trade, for there were several carriages and pairs kept in the district, and three coalpits which employed underground ponies as well as surface horses.

Coal was hauled by horses pulling heavy tram wagons from the bottom of Simon's Hill, around Wallenge, and along to the Somerset Inn. There the wagons went down an incline by means of a rope around a drum.

As the full wagons ran down to the dock of the canal, where the coal was loaded into barges, they pulled up the empty ones. A man called Smith kept the dock and repaired and painted it.

Chandlery was a thriving trade. There were candle factories at Radford, Brittens, and at Mr Heal's general shop in Paulton village.

The factory at Brittens, next to the Flying Dutchman, was burnt down when John Watts was a boy. He saw the flames of the fire from Winterfield as he came home from school in Midsomer Norton. The owner of the factory was called Vowles. After the fire he came to the village and had a chandler's shop in Little Lane.

Diddled

He bought tallow in large casks and on one occasion he was "diddled." The cask contained a sack of sand with tallow around it. The sack must have been put in in Russia as it was Russian tallow, and it happened just after the Crimean War.

The smell of boiling fat caused a nuisance, so Vowles took a shed at Ham and only made candles at the Little Lane shop. Unfortunately, the flue caught fire and then the thatch so that the shop was burned down too.

There was also a good malting trade. John Watts could remember a man called George Brassey who used to grind the malt. He had leprosy, and his arms and hands were always peeling. They had brown and white marks on them.

A market was held every Saturday night in the centre of the village. On one side of the street were butcher's stalls owned by Joshua Watts. John Whippey, John Carfter and a butcher from Frome.

On the other side, near the inn, were Butcher Brown from Ston Easton and George Dix. Alongside them were a boot and shoe stall and, occasionally, a quack doctor's stall. In the angle space opposite the saddler's shop were a crockery stall and several fish stalls.

Fights

The public houses kept open until twelve o'clock on Saturday nights and there was generally a fight which sometimes ended in the combatants being lodged in the blind house.

A fiddler called Barrington, together with his wife who played the tambourine, provided the music every Saturday night in the Tap Room of the Paulton Inn.

They often went to the Dove at Winterfield, and Barrington was so accustomed to sitting in the same place and bumping out the time to the music with his heel, that he wore a hole in the stone half as deep as a teacup.

There was a piece of level road in the centre of the village opposite the Paulton Inn and there the young men used to play marbles. They had a iron boss taw and four or five used to play there with a ring about six feet in diameter.