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British Beer Exports in Pictures

Ron Pattinson at Shut Up About Barclay Perkins has recently been mining data to tell the story of British beer exports in the 20th century. We thought we’d compliment that with some pictures from our collection of in-house magazines.

The pictures come from editions of The Red Barrel, The House of Whitbread and Guinness Time, mostly from the 1960s and 70s. (Yes, Guinness is Irish, but had it’s corporate HQ and a huge brewery in London from 1932.) It’s pretty well content free but we have plans to write something more substantial about all this at some point in the future.

Belgium
A Belgian pub.
Whitbread’s Taverne Nord, Boulevard Adolphe Max, Brussels, c.1933.
A portrait of a man in an office.
C. De Keyser, Whitbread’s Belgian sales manager from 1937.

A Whitbread advertising sign.
A sign advertising Whitbread outside the Gare du Nord, Brussels, on Place Rogier.
An acvertising hoarding.
“The Company now has 3-D posters in Belgium. This example in Brussels was one of the first to be set up.”
A tanker delivering beer.
Watney’s delivering beer to Brasserie J. Delbruyère, Châtelet, AKA Watney’s SA.
Germany
Several posh men in a pub.
The Victorian, a pub in Düsseldorf.
The Guinness pub at 'Green Week' in Berlin.
A temporary bar.
A German bar.
The Riverboat, a joint project between Watney’s and Dinkelacker, in Stuttgart. The pub was decorated with material salvaged from SS Hanseatik.
The Cloud Puncher, at the British Army NAAFI Club in Dortmund.
A barmaid pulls a pint of Red Barrel.
America
A group photo in a warehouse.
“Inside the New York warehouse.”
A woman polishes a lamp-post while a man watches.
“One of our distributors in New York gets an assistant to polish the Liverpool lamp-post outside his warehouse.” 1968
Drinkers in a New York bar.
“In the Liffey Tavern, New York.”
A fake pub.
The British Exhibition in New York, 1960.
And Elsewhere
A man unloading crates from a ship.
One of the first deliveries of Watney’s beer into Finland is unloaded at Helsinki in late 1964 after restrictions on imports were lifted.
Christiane Sibellin, Miss France 1965, drinks Watney’s Red Barrel.
A pub in a van.
Watney’s English pub on wheels serves rugby fans at the France v Wales rugby match in Paris, March 1965.
Two women with Watney's beers.
A British trade event at the Istanbul Hilton.

3 replies on “British Beer Exports in Pictures”

Oh my god, this brings back awful memories, for example:-
Watney’s Star Light.
Watneys Straight 8 (the beer that does not die in the glass). Actually, it was dead already. They had a bloke with a big nose advertising on TV and his nose would get stuck in the head.
Whitbread Tankard ‘helps you excel, after one you do anything well…’
Love the look on peoples faces, smiling as the awful keg stuff of the era was pulled, and the Watney’s tanker… No wonder they want us out of the EU – people have long memories of the rubbish we sold overseas. Watney’s Red Barrel and the later Red (join the Red Revolution it replaced Red Barrel and was weaker so Watney’s could pay lower duty and make more money. A trick InBev have made a living out of. Speaking of them, I am sure they are trying to make a single generic beer which they can put any label on and market around the world to the tastebudless masses.
Great article, thanks.

Loved this collection of photos. I never even knew they exported or had pubs abroad. Strangely I wonder if any of those bars/pubs are still going and what they are/sell now.

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