HOPE you’re enjoying these skips down memory lane.

As a non-native Warringtonian, I’m finding it fascinating scratching the surface of our local history.

It’s wonderful that so many of you are sharing your memories. In recent weeks we’ve recorded for posterity some fascinating material about legendary jockey Steve Donoghue, writer Richard Curtis and his family links to Crosfields, which in turn has given us the opportunity to look at some of the characters associated with this major town employer.

This week I thought I’d look at Greenall’s. Now there’s a local name that’s indelibly embroidered into Warrington’s past!

I first became aware of the brewery thanks to the Greenall Whitley TV adverts in the 1980s. Do you remember them?

‘Oh I wish I was in Greenall Whitley land…’ But we need to go back, much further back, to look at the origins of the Greenall’s story.

Thomas Greenall set up his first brewery in St Helens in 1762. He’d learned the trade originally from his in-laws.

Thomas was a bit of an Alan Sugar. He had his finger in many pies. Besides brewing ales, he also dabbled in coal-mining, making nails and yarn-spinning.

It was brewing, however, that was always at the heart of his enterprise, and it became a truly family business when sons Edward, William, and Peter started working for him.

Greenall went into partnership with William Orrett and Thomas Lyon in 1788 and bought the Saracen’s Head brewery on Wilderspool and Greenall’s long-standing relationship with Warrington had begun.

As their empire grew, they moved into buying up pubs and inns.

At this time (around 1800), there was much competition, with lots of small, independent breweries on the scene.

Many pubs and inns owned by bigger breweries like Greenall’s were shackled to their masters, thus were known as ‘tied’ houses and could sell only beer made by those breweries.

This slowly killed off much of the competition and awarded more power to operators like Greenall’s.

A colourful character in the story, Sir Gilbert Greenall enters the scene in 1840, a grandson of Thomas Greenall’s. He was a famed Conservative MP who spent much of his time on Parliamentary business but, nonetheless, proved a successful overseer of the Greenall’s operations. It was he who brought in nephew John Whitley to run the Wilderspool operations.

Greenall’s flourished and Gilbert resided at Walton Hall (more of which in a future column).

But as the dawn of the 20th century loomed, stormy times lay ahead.

More of which next week, when I’ll continue the Greenall’s story.