CHAPTER XIII.
PORTER AND STOUT. — CIRCUMSTANCES WHICH LED TO THEIR INTRODUCTION. — VALUE TO THE WORKING CLASSES. — ANECDOTES. — “A POT OF PORTER OH!”
EFORE the Blue Last, an old public-house situate in Curtain Road, Shoreditch, there formerly hung a board which bore this legend:—“The house where porter was first sold.”
Whether this was true or false we cannot say; certain it is, however, that the drink which has made London and Dublin brewers famed far and wide had its birthplace not far from this spot.
It appears that in the early years of last century the lovers of malt liquors in London were accustomed to regale themselves upon three classes of these beverages; they had ale, beer, and twopenny. Many who preferred a more subtle combination of flavours than either of these liquors {366} alone could impart, would ask for half-and-half, that is, half of ale and half of beer, half of ale and half of twopenny, or half of beer and half of twopenny. Others again—and these were the real connoisseurs of malt liquors—would call for a pot of three threads, or three thirds, i.e., one-third of ale, one-third of beer, and one-third of twopenny. The drawer would therefore have to go to three different casks, and through three distinct operations, before he could draw a pint of liquor. But the hour had come—and the man. One Ralph Harwood, whose name is too little known to an ungrateful posterity of beer-drinking Britons, some time about the year 1730, kept a brewhouse on the east side of High Street, Shoreditch. In that year, or perhaps a little earlier, as this great man brooded over the inconvenience and waste occasioned by the calls for the “three threads,” which became more and more frequent, he conceived the idea of making a liquor which would combine in itself the several virtues of ale, beer, and twopenny. He carried the idea into action, and brewed a drink which he called “Entire,” or “Entire Butts.” It was tasted; it was approved; it became the fruitful parent of a mighty offspring; and from that day to this has gone on increasing in name and fame.
Visitors to the great brewery in Brick Lane are shown a hole from which steam issues to the accompaniment of awful rumbling noises. “In there once fell a man,” they are told—“a negro. Nothing but his bones were found when the copper was emptied, and it is said that the beer drawn off was of an extraordinary dark colour. Some say this was the first brew of porter. Oh yes” (this in answer to a question), “we soon learnt how to make it without the negro.” We must confess that we have some doubts as to this account of the origin of porter. We do not believe that brew could have been much darker on account of the accident, though no doubt, under the circumstances, it contained plenty of “body.” A similar tale is told of nearly every London porter brewery, and later on it will be found in verse.
It seems to be to some extent a moot point among the learned how porter obtained its present name, for no record seems to have been kept of its christening. Harwood, no doubt, stood godfather to his interesting infant, but, as we have seen above, he called it “Entire;” and how or when it came to be known as porter is not quite clear. There are several theories on the subject, each more or less plausible. One is that being a hearty, appetizing, and nourishing liquor, it was specially recommended to the notice of the porters, who then, as now, formed a {367} considerable proportion of the Shoreditch population. Pennant, in his London seems, to have held this view; he calls it “a wholesome liquor, which enables the London porter-drinkers to undergo tasks that ten gin-drinkers would sink under.” Another explanation of the origin of the name is that Harwood sent round his men to his customers with the liquor, and that the men would announce their arrival and their business by the cry of “Porter”—meaning, not the beer, but the bearer. Be this how it may, the embodiment of Harwood’s great idea had not attained its majority before it was known far and wide by its present name.
In The Student (1750) is thus related the first appearance of porter at Oxford—. . . “Let us not derogate from the merits of porter—a liquor entirely British—a liquor that pleases equally the mechanic and the peer—a liquor which is the strength of our nation, the scourge of our enemies, and which has given immortality to aldermen. ’Tis with the highest satisfaction that we can inform our Oxford students that Isis herself has taken this divine liquor into her protection, and that the Muses recommend it to their votaries, as being far preferable to Hippocrene, Aganippe, the Castalian spring, or any poetical water whatever. Know, then, that in the middle of the High Street, at the sign of the King’s Arms, opposite to its opposite, Juggins’s Coffee House, lives Captain Jolly; who maugrè the selfish opposition of his brother publicans, out of a pure affection to this University, and regardless of private profit, reduc’d porter from its original price of Sixpence, and in large golden characters generously informs us that he sells
“As the Captain is a genius and a choice spirit he meets with the greatest encouragement from the gown, and sends porter to all the common-rooms. He therefore intends shortly (in imitation of the great Ashley, of the Punch House, Ludgate Hill) to have the front of his house new vamp’d up, and decorated with the following inscription:—
Though we fear the great Harwood does not fill the niche in the Temple of Fame to which he is entitled, yet his praises are not entirely unsung. Gutteridge, himself a native of Shoreditch, has commemorated the discovery of porter in these lines:—
“It is not in my power,” says Pennant in the work we have before quoted, “to trace the progress of this important article of trade. Let me only say that it is now a national concern; for the duty on malt from July 5th, 1785, to the same day 1786, produced a million and a half of money to the support of the State, from a liquor which invigorates the bodies of its willing subjects, to defend the blessings they enjoy. One of these Chevaliers de Malte (as an impertinent Frenchman styled a most respectable gentleman of the trade) has, within one year, contributed not less than fifty thousand pounds to his own share.”
The person to whom the Frenchman applied the title of Chevalier de Malte was Humphrey Parsons, a brewer of last century, and the incident which gave rise to the name has already been referred to.
Pennant gives a list of the chief porter brewers of London at the end of last century, with the number of barrels of strong beer they brewed from Midsummer, 1786, to Midsummer, 1787. Samuel Whitbread heads the list with 150,280 barrels, and among the others may be noted Calvert, now the City of London Brewery; Hester Thrale, now Barclay and Perkins; W. Read; and Richard Meux. Most of the other names, though famous in their day and generation, are not familiar to the modern reader. The total amount produced by some twenty-four of the chief London brewers was considerably over one million barrels.
It is interesting to contrast the state of the Brewing trade a hundred years ago with the proportions to which it has attained to-day. According to a Parliamentary return made in 1884, there are now six brewers of the United Kingdom who produce annually over three and a half million barrels of malt liquor, and who pay to the revenue in Licence and Beer duty nearly one million and a half sterling per annum. {369}