THIS week in Yester Years we are heading back to a booming time.

Many people outside Warrington 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.

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.