Early Berkshire Ginger Beer Bottles

I thought that is was probably about time that I researched some of the earlier Ginger Beer Bottles from Berkshire.  The information I am putting together is based on a combination of fact and my interpretation of the information I see and is open for debate of course!  Here is a list of the earlier ones which I am researching with links to each individual page about them:

Initially I am using the special collections online published by Leicester University.  My eternal thanks goes to them for this information.  This has some really good information to access easily without leaving my house during this lockdown period due to COVID-19.

Here is a list of the directories that I am using from their archives:

1)  Berkshire Commerical Directory, 1833 (70 pages)

2)  Pigot & Co.'s Directory of Berks, Bucks ... , 1844. [Part 1: Berks to Glos] (486 pages)

3)  Kelly's Berkshire Directory, 1848 (81 pages)

4)  Slater's Directory of Berkshire, 1852 (69 pages)

5)  Slater's Directory of Berks, Corn, Devon ..., 1852-53 (1,070 pages)

6)  Post Office Directory of Berks, Northants ... , 1854 (796 pages)

7)  Webster's Reading Directory, 1874 (298 pages)

8)  Harrod & Co.'s Directory of Beds, Bucks ..., 1876 (1,364 pages)

These are the only ones they have covering early periods of Berkshire.  From this I can then be pointed to other areas of research that is appropriate to the information gathered.

Summary of my findings:

Please read this part in combination with the individual pages.

One of the amazing things that I have discovered is that ALL of the earlier ginger beer bottles that I have looked at belonged to chemists.  Whether this applies across other counties I am unsure.  Further, most of them also dealt with Insurance as an "office agent" for things like fire coverage.  I guess that the chemists would have been particularly literate relative to others of that period and so it should not surprise me about the Insurance aspect as this would have required official written documentation.

Initially I expected the early Berkshire ginger beer bottles to have been produced at the request of traditional brewers that diversified into a parallel product stream, but, I had forgotten that Ginger Beer production used a different type of yeast to 'normal' beer brewing and cross-contamination was possible due to it's airborne nature.  Due to this, ginger beer had to nearly always be brewed on a different premises unless a brewer had a very large or very strictly segregated premises.

For local town brewers this would be unlikely due to there size, particularly before the dawn of large scale manufacturers in the second industrial revolution around 1870.

So, for early ginger beer brewers, it was unlikely that they were the 'regular' beer brewers at all.  This also suggests why of course many mineral water manufacturers diversified into ginger beer production, because there would have been no need to have such strict segregation during the production process.

This really suggests to me that Berkshire chemists led the way in the shape and form of the early Berkshire ginger beer bottles until their (pretty much) stardardisation of shape from about 1870 onwards when production of the ginger beer bottles was outsourced less locally to major manufacturers who probably already had bottle template shapes to suggest to potential purchasers.

I would say that it is probable that James Hodson's ginger beer bottle is the oldest of the ones I have looked into.  I cannot definitely affirm this but we do know for certain that it has to pre-date 1856 and is probably much older.  It is also probable that the Poulton & Co. ginger beer bottle is pre-1856 although probably not long before this.  The S. Collier one is likely to post-date 1852 because of the Broad Street address. The Fidler ginger beer is very likely to post-date 1848 and cannot pre-date 1844.  With regard to the Ryott ginger beer fragments, although Ryott was around pre-1844 the shape of the second fragment does not suggest to be particularly early and of course Ryott's were still around as a chemist after 1876 when bottle shape standardisation started to take place.  As for the King ginger beers, we cannot be sure of what happened to him after 1854 but there is no mention of him in Newbury in 1876.  The shape (and number in peoples collections) of them suggests that they are perhaps around the date of the second industrial revolution of around 1870.

Perhaps the ongoing questions that I have revolve around Samuel Poulton.  Was he the same Samuel Edward Poulton, photographer/stereoscopic artist (1819-1898) who took photos of people like Charles Dickins?  The time frame fits exactly.  I found an interesting article linking Samuel Poulton Photographer to Reading as below.  To me it looks like he was probably the same person.  An early link between chemists and developing photographs like they still do.