Visit the Shut up about Barclay Perkins site

One of the weird fallouts of WW I was an area where the brewery and pubs were state-owned. An influx of workers to the important munitions-producing area around the England-Scotland border close to Carlisle during WW I caused some problems with drunkenness. The solution was to nationalise the breweries and pubs to bring them under state control.
For whatever reason, state-ownership didn't end with hostilities. But trundled on well past WW II. Only being brutally ended by Ted Heath's government in the early 1970s*.
Still, reading about the State Management scheme in WW II is still a bit odd. As an investment by the government, it certainly paid off. It mad a profit every single year of its operation. Which wasn't the case of every capitalist brewing operation.
These were their profits in the early war years:

State Management Scheme net profits 1938 - 1942
Carlisle £ Gretna £ Cromarty Firth £ total
1938-39 70,018 3,400 6,540 79,958
1939-40 101,897 3,800 12,148 117,845
1940-41 147,434 5,260 15,324 168,018
1941-42 176,371 10,359 20,983 207,713
total 495,720 22,819 54,995 573,534
Source:
The Brewing Trade Review, August 1943, page 261.
To put that into context, these are the profits of Barclay Perkins, a considerably lager operation that the Carlisle State Brewery:

Barclay Perkins profit 1939-1942
Year net profit
1939 £213,432
1940 £225,000
1941 £166,444
1942 £199,246
Sources:
Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer - Thursday 22 June 1939, page 15.
The Scotsman - Saturday 15 June 1940, page 4.
Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer - Thursday 28 August 1941, page 5.
Birmingham Daily Post - Thursday 30 July 1942, page 4.
The Scotsman - Friday 13 August 1943, page 2.




* Back then, Ted Heath was seen as being one of the worst post-war Prime Ministers. He's fallen right back in the field in recent years. It's not his fault. Back in the 1970s, no-one could have anticipated just how crap politicians would get.



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