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                                                       BY GEORGE IT WAS GOOD! 

THE VERY LAST PINT OF OFFILERS’ ALES WAS BREWED IN DERBY IN 1966. PETER SEDDON LOOKS AT THE HISTORY OF THE FIRM WHICH WAS PART AND PARCEL OF LOCAL LIFE FOR NEARLY A HUNDRED YEARS.

Beer was being brewed in Derby centuries ago. Thanks to a number of talented local entrepreneurs, it still is. But the last large independent brewer in Derby ceased production in 1966. The firm was Offilers’, which is a name still familiar to many Derbyshire people who may never have actually sampled the product.

The huge ‘OFFILERS’ ALES’ advertisement on the Popular Side roof at Derby County’s now defunct Baseball Ground had much to do with that, but so too did oral heritage. ‘Senior’ drinkers around the city and county still swear by a ‘pint of Offies’, and glimpses of the brewery’s architectural and ephemeral legacy remain for those who seek them out.

The brewery’s founder was George Offiler, born in 1837 in Old Basford, just north of Nottingham, to Samuel and Newton Offiler (nee Morley). At age 14, George was ‘higgling coal’ (selling it) from a horse and cart, but he was encouraged by his Uncle, George Marshall, a brewer in Hyson Green, Nottingham, to consider the beer trade.

At the age of just 21, George started brewing at William Street in Basford, and by 1871, then aged 34, he was landlord of the Shoulder of Mutton on Radford Road, Nottingham, now the site of a McDonalds. There was Derbyshire blood in the family too (his grandmother Mary Offiler (nee Campion) was from Trusley), and in 1876 George renewed the link by moving to Derby, where he ran the Vine Inn at 37-38 Whitaker Street, in the thriving Rose Hill area of Litchurch.

With the locality heaving with thirsty workers, it was a perfect time to start brewing. In 1877 George began selling The Vine’s surplus beer to other outlets, and that date is generally taken as the founding date for Offilers’ Brewery. In 1884, as sales grew, George expanded what was still known as the ‘Vine Brewery’ by buying the premises of The Star Tea Company on Ambrose Street, off Normanton Road, which had been built as an Ordnance Depot in 1806, then converted into a silk throwsters in the 1820s.

Beer was less explosive than weaponry, as smooth as any fine silk, and more efficacious than the humble ‘cuppa’. Business boomed, the plant was extended to the other side of Ambrose Street, and in 1890 the brewery went public with capital of £50,000 and became known as the Offilers’ Brewing Company Limited. In that year they produced 509,000 gallons of ale, owned 14 Derby pubs, and 26 others scattered around South Derbyshire, Leicestershire and the Belper area. Quite a number still stand – foremost amongst them is the Victoria on Cowley Street, in Derby’s old West End, which in 1895 earned the lasting distinction of being the first purpose-built new pub erected by Offilers’.

Living at ‘Brooklyn House’, Charnwood Street, George was ever on hand to oversee his thriving operation, and by the time he died on 3 November 1899, aged only 62, he had laid the foundation for a brewing empire of both local and national renown. Derby’s most celebrated brewer is buried in Nottingham Road Cemetery.

George’s son, Henry Offiler, who lived at ‘Salisbury House’, 23 Salisbury Street, just yards from the ‘Old Depot’ brewery in Ambrose Street, continued the business. Henry was actually born John Henry Mark Scott in May 1861, the son of Mary Scott, with whom George had a liaison while still married to his first wife Eliza (nee Smart). John Scott took the name Henry Offiler only when George married Mary Scott in 1872. It has to be said that the Offilers are rather a nightmare to genealogists, for when Mary died in 1885, George married a third time, this time to Mary Ellen Slater!

The brewery flourished further under Henry, becoming a large employer and part of Derby’s daily routine and social landscape. Offilers’ men started work at 6 a.m. with a pint of beer, and were allowed four more during the working day. The company’s own horses, which were stabled and grazed on the site of what in 1909 became Normanton Park (some of the Victorian buildings still survive), pulled the delivery drays, while Offilers’ sales representatives toured the area in horse-drawn gigs.

In 1914 the first steam-powered Offilers’ wagon came into service, and petrol-driven lorries soon followed. The fleet’s proudest moment came on Tuesday 30 April 1946 when a gaily festooned eight ton Offilers’ dray conveyed Derby County’s triumphant FA Cup winning team from the Blue Peter at Alvaston to a civic reception at the Police Buildings in Full Street.

The Blue Peter was an apt starting point, for it was one of three bang up to date Offilers’ public houses built in the modernist art deco ‘Ocean Liner’ style in the mid-1930s. The others were the Blue Boy in Chaddesden and the Blue Pool in Sunnyhill, each designed by George Morley Eaton and all still standing, although much altered.

How many draught pints and bottled beers bearing the Offilers’ name have passed the lips of Derby drinkers is impossible to guess. But the brewery’s heyday and very name itself was destined to become mere history, for Offilers’ brewery became a victim of its own success. Expansion had involved them in takeovers – Hill’s of Cromford had been acquired in 1914, followed by the Cavendish Bridge brewery near Shardlow in the 1920s, and John Hair and Son of Melbourne in 1954- so it was ironic that Offilers’ themselves later became a target.

Henry Offiler’s eldest son, Harry Cecil Offiler (1896-1971), had inherited the business by the time the London-based Charrington United Breweries effected a takeover in 1965. They acquired the Ambrose Street plant, 238 public houses, a long tradition and a fine name. But although Charrington’s urged all Offilers’ workers to ‘regard this as a merger’, they had announced within a year that ‘economical modernisation of the Derby plant is not viable.’

Charrington’s were in turn ‘absorbed’ by Bass, and the last pint of Offilers’ Ales was brewed in Derby on 30 September 1966. Many of the workers genuinely mourned the brewery’s passing. While on active service during the Second World War, Noel Richins, a cooper, had kept a cherished photograph of the premises in his pocket. That survived, but the bricks and mortar were destined to be destroyed. The Ambrose Street premises were demolished on 6 March 1970 to make way for a Kwik-Save supermarket.

A brief nostalgic revival occurred in May 1996 when the Bass Museum brewed a tribute ‘Offilers’ Golden Bitter’, but enthusiasts for the original Offilers’ must now be content with memorabilia such as beer labels, mats and trays. The Falstaff pub in the Normanton area of Derby, close to the original brewerey, has an Offilers' room displaying some evocative ephemera, and hawk-eyed enthusiasts at the Rowditch Inn on Uttoxeter Road might spot some original Offilers’ pump-clips in a nostalgia-laden display case.

The Popular Side roof at the Baseball Ground, which had carried the brewery’s advertisements ever since the 1930s, made way for the brand new Ley Stand in 1969, but isolated vestiges of Offilers’ livery still survive in a number of Derby hostelries, etched on window glass or painted on flaking brickwork. In time they too will go.

Offilers’ passing was a debatable sign of ‘progress’ in a changing age. Fortunately, the firm run by three generations of the same family gave Derby folk a thirst for good beer which is still raging and being well satisfied today.

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County:  Derbyshire

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