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.