This really is the footnote to end all footnotes but it interested us because it answered some lingering from this long post about women in the world of British beer.
Back in 2013, we emailed Andrea Gillies, who edited two editions of the Campaign for Real Ale’s Good Beer Guide in the early 1990s, but she wasn’t especially keen to talk about her time at CAMRA. Now we think we know why.
After a period of apparently reasonably friendly relations with her former employer during which she wrote a challenging guest column about bottled beer (WB, November 1993), in December 1993, this happened:
Though Mr Evans’s response was fairly diplomatic it’s hard not to suspect that some persistent resentment in St Albans influenced this review of Ms Gillies’ own book released in 1995:
We weren’t there, and we don’t know the people involved, so it wouldn’t be right for us to pick sides. It was pretty forward-thinking of CAMRA to appoint Ms Gillies in 1988, though, and it’s a shame it all got so nasty.
4 replies on “Artyfacts from the Nyneties #3: Editors at War”
I don’t know if you have a copy of Andrea Gillies’ book – I have one and to be honest I think the What’s Brewing review was very fair.
I’ve got a copy of it as well (cost me 50p several years back) and yes it is rather ho-hum but on the other hand it stands out because very few beer books then were reviewing all beers, not just cask or world classics, where else would you get cantillon and carling in the same book in 1995?
That’s very true. In some respects is was ground-breaking but I think was overshadowed by the less good aspects of the book.
Lynne Pearce came to a sticky end too, as you yourselves have reported. As I commented, my recollection is that her What’s Brewing column wasn’t up to much.