Colin Anderson interviewed by Mark Bilbe, An Oral History of the Wine Trade, 2004, catalogue reference C1088/26. © British Library Board.

Transcript

Friary Meux got taken over by Allied Breweries, they got actually taken over by Ind Coope, which was one of the breweries which formed Allied Breweries.  And in those days, the brewers were the power behind the wine trade, the brewers owned the wine merchants and they funded the wine merchants.  I think there were very, very few totally independently funded wine merchants of any size.  There were independent agencies, by all means, but not retail chains.  Roundabout 1960, I think Allied Breweries was formed, of Ind Coope, Tetley Walker and Ansells, those were the three breweries, which were all big Burton breweries.  Ind Coope had a wine merchant called Grants of St James.  So Grants of St James became the flagship centre of the wine arm of Allied Breweries.  Grants’ head office was, surprise, in Burton-on-Trent, it wasn’t in St James’s, but we did have an office in St James’s.  And it was always a bit of a fudge and a dodge to say we were Grants of St James’s, we never even had an office in St James’s.  Bury Street we had one in, round the corner.  And they had Victoria Wine, which by then had taken over Tyler’s, which had taken over George Peters.  So you think of this succession of fish, each with a slightly bigger mouth, eating the one in front.  So the big fish in the end was Victoria Wine as far as the retail companies were concerned, and the big wholesaler was Grants of St James.  I was buyer, Friary Meux, buying then for Tyler’s shops.  They amalgamated Tyler’s into Victoria Wine and needed somebody in the Ind Coope office, which was in Clerkenwell, where they were doing all the Grants of St James London bottling.  They had bottling plants all over the country.  There was one in Burton, one in London, one in Liverpool.  They’d by then closed the others down, so those were the three big bottling plants.  So the Grants’ buying office in London was at Clerkenwell, and that was where Stanley Dennis, the buying director, was.  And he had two assistants.  One was a chap called Ian Cottle, and he had me.  I transferred to London to help on the buying side of things.  And Ian Cottle and I were young, much the same age, I suppose, at that time.  How old were we?  Twenty-five, twenty-seven, something like that.  And we used to come into the office in our bowler hats with our umbrellas, that was what you wore.  And the great trick was to spin your bowler off your head – flick! – onto the hatstand.  And I could do it and Ian couldn’t.  

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Colin Anderson (Consolidation among brewers - the power behind the wine trade)

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