I've been reading Clifford Lackey's Quality Pays... The Story of Joshua Tetley & Son.  It puts into sharp relief how immensely difficult it has become for any British entrepreneur to dream of building an industry from scratch and achieve it without being knocked off the track by people who dream only of making money .

When he founded the firm in Hunslet in 1822 Joshua Tetley's insight was that he could beat the competition because their quality controls were pretty mixed. By going to great lengths to procure only the very best barley for malting and the very best hops, or by demanding the very highest quality malt from malt houses; and by using only the very best brewing equipment and techniques and the very best people, he could make ales of the highest quality and capture the market for supplying inns all over the north of England.  In the age before the development of railways and automobiles he thought nothing of coach and horse journeys taking days to procure the very best - 42 hours there and back to the Retford hop fare for example.

This he achieved with great sucess, sales and profits climbing steadily and his Hunslet brewery expanding by leaps and bounds.  Then one day he noticed that suddenly his sales and profits were collapsing despite there being no change in the quality gap he had established.  Enquiries produced the explanation: his rivals had started buying out the inns and making them tied houses barred from selling Tetley's.  This was not a road Joshua wanted to go down, having always traded on the "Quality Pays" principle, but he had no choice: it was join them or go bust. The result was that he and his successors over the years built up a chain of about 3000 Tetley's houses, his competitors owning many more.

The next thing that happened was that finance houses realised that all this real estate, much of it in city centres and shopping areas, was valued in brewers' balance sheets as inns but would have far greater value sold off for other purposes.  One after the other smaller brewers came to Tetley's proposing mergers because only then would they have the strength to fight off the voracious takeover bids by asset-stripping financiers that would kill them as brewers.  Tetley's never once took the initiative in these mergers; it was always the smaller ones coming to them for protection.

The result of all this was that Tetley's grew enormously in size ending up as Allied Breweries and then as Allied Lyons when one of the mergers also brought in with it the Joe Lyons restaurant chain.  All this just seems to have merely whetted the appetite of the asset strippers however. It's not clear at what point and how exactly Joshua Tetley's descendants lost control of this behemoth but they clearly did, for after a bewildering series of takeovers, mergers, de-mergers and sell-offs involving many of the world's leading distillers and wine and spirit merchants as well as brewers the brewing part of it ended up hived off and owned by Carlsberg under the name Carlsberg-Tetley with all the rest, including all the inns presumably, in the hands of others. Presumably Tetley's would still have lost most if not all of their tied houses as a result of this even if competition law (good old EU again?) had not put a nail in that coffin anyway.

Carlsberg itself did the final bit of asset stripping.  Not being wedded to Hunslet or Leeds or to the history and distinctive Hunslet-brewed tastes of Tetley's ales, and realising the huge development value of Tetley's land smack in the middle of Leeds, it replaced the "Quality Pays" motto with the "A Rose by Any Other Name" motto, made Tetley's just a manufacture-under-licence brand for brewers willing to pay the licence fee, none of whem I imagine would know one end of a Tetley's fermentation square in Hunslet from the other; closed down the brewery and sold off the land.

Thus did Joshua Tetley's dream come to an end. No wonder so few British entepreneurs think trying to live industrial dreams is worth the effort, and we have ended up so massively dependant on crumbs from the tables of financial shysters and overseas manufacturers owning, in reality if not in legal fact, our great brands.

An interesting footnote is that Carlsberg appears to be owned by a trust, which possibly explains how it managed to come out of all this at least holding the brewery part of the parcel in this game of musical chairs.

Why Hotaru no Hikari (蛍の光)?

Why Hotaru no Hikari (蛍の光)?  The words have always had a very special meaning for me.  In days of old caged fireflies - Hotaru- were used in Japan to throw a little light.  Since we all try to throw a little light onto things through our tweets Hikari seemed an appropriate symbol.  The words fill me with nostalgia for they are the opening line of a song sung by all Japanese schoolchildren at their final school assembly to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, and by adults to mark other great sentimental finales - lyrics and translation below.   It was taught to me by my wonderful Japanese teacher Nakazato-sensei.  I have heard it sung countless times and every time it brings into my mind a vivid picture of schoolchildren working in their wintry rooms and celebrating their release as they charge out of their school hall's great wooden door. Funnily enough it also links in to my love of trad jazz because it brings to mind George Melly singing Flanagan and Allen's Home Town backed by John Chilton's Feetwarmers in which the chorus line is: I see an old schoolhouse door, We used to tumble through at four. And there's a small candy store, Where I could go a dozen lollipops and shout for more.

蛍の光、Hotaru no hikari                                                     By the light of the fireflies

窓の雪、Mado no yuki                                                          And the snow at the window

書読む月日 重ねつゝFumi yomu tsukihi kasanetsutsu             We read our texts as the days and months go by.

何時しか年もすぎの戸を、Itsushika toshi mo sugi no to wo    Before we know it the years have gone by too,
開けてぞ 今朝は、 aketezo kesa wa                                      So open the great cedar door, for this morning

別れ行く wakare yuku                                                          We part and go our separate ways.

One Question About Brexit that Baffles Me

There must be a logical flaw in my thinking about Brexit.  Can someone please point it out to me?

The European Commission and the great majority in the Council of Ministers say that it is essential that the UK is not seen to gain from Brexit, so as to discourage others from seeking similar gains for themselves.  Angela Merkel spelt it out with disarming frankness: if the UK is seen to gain from Brexit she said, other nations will just want to do as they please.

Now, by "gaining" from Brexit these EU leaders mean the UK continuing to enjoy tariff-free trade with the other 27 EU nations without being required to allow freedom of movement or make contributions to the EU budget.  This, presumably, is what they fear other EU nations will demand if the UK is allowed to get away with it.

But if they fear that other members will go for it, they presumably think that other members will think that it would be better for them too.  But if that is true for any of them, it is presumably true for all of them, isn't it?  Which surely means, does it not, that if all 28 members left the EU with a deal that gave them tariff-free trade with the other 27, no freedom of movement and no EU budget contributions, they would all be better off than they are now?  They would all feel they had gained, not lost, from doing it.  In short the disbandment of the EU would be a gain for all 28, not a loss, yes?

Where is the flaw in my logic?  Is it that such a deal would only be a gain for some of the members not for all?  If so, which ones would be the losers and why?  Is it that the gains for individual nations would be a loss for them collectively?  That surely can't be so; if all 28 gain individually there can be no collective loss, surely?

Do they fear that the collective loss will not be a material/economic one but, say, a security one? But they have NATO for that surely?  If they fear NATO may not survive, it is surely vastly easier for European nations to sign a mutual defence treaty to replace or run alongside it than it is to try to evolve such a thing through a phenomenally complex melding together of nations into a single federal union.  By the same token, in-depth cooperation on intelligence is vastly easier to do through nation-to-nation cooperation than through such a process. Such cooperation predates the EU anyway.  Ditto scientific research cooperation.  Ditto major project cooperation.

Do they fear that the EU's synchronisation of standards and regulations would disintegrate leading to a loss of efficiency, rising production and trading costs and declines in GDP? Well, comparative global GDP growth figures do not suggest that their existence has so far been a gain.  Moreover each departing member would be at liberty to continue using the old EU standards and regulations if it felt that was the case.

So, can someone please tell me where the logical flaw is in my reasoning that tells me that all 28 members would be better off out of the EU; that the EU's leaders know this is so which is why Brexit bothers them so much, and that the reason they nevertheless want to continue with the EU is that they are fixated on the dream of a single European nation to rival the USA and do not care that its peoples will be worse off, not better off, in it?