As a historian of beer I am, of course, delighted that Guinness is progressing with its latest Open Gate project in Covent Garden, London, bringing brewing back to the site of the former Woodyard brewery, once one of the biggest porter breweries in London. But if I read once more that porter got its name because it was “popular with the porters of Covent Garden, Smithfield and Billingsgate”, I am going to slap someone with a malt shovel.

I thought I’d shot and killed that canard more than 20 years ago, with a book called Beer: The Story of the Pint. In there I detailed how the porters after whom porter is named were not the small number who worked in the capital’s produce markets, but the thousands more who earned a living as what were known as fellowship porters and ticket porters (so called because they wore a pewter “ticket”, or badge), loading and unloading ships on the Thames and carrying parcels, letters and goods around London’s streets. I also wrote about the fellowship and ticket porters on this blog back in 2007.

The trouble has been that the fellowship porters and ticket porters, and all the other sub-divisions of porterdom, including deal porters, stave porters and tackle porters, disappeared in the late 19th century. The Society of Tacklehouse and Ticket Porters looks to have held its last meeting in 1871. The Fellowship of Free Porters of the City of London was dissolved by Act of Parliament in 1894.

By the middle of the 20th century the ticket and fellowship porters had been completely forgotten, and the only London porters anyone knew anything about were those surviving porters at the city’s markets: Covent Garden for fruit and veg, Smithfield for meat and Billingsgate for fish, famous for walking about with towering baskets of cod or cauliflower on their heads. This meant that when people read in Frederick Hackwood’s Inns, Ales and Drinking Customs of Old England, first published in 1909, that porter got its name because it was “the favourite drink of London porters,” they thought he must be talking about Covent Garden, Smithfield and Billingsgate.

A history of Watney’s brewery published in 1949 said porter received its name “from the fact of its being largely consumed by the Covent Garden porters.” Michael Jackson, in his hugely influential World Guide to Beer, first published in 1977, said that “the most popular explanation” for the name porter was “the popularity of the drink among porters in the London markets.” That became the received wisdom – and it appears my efforts have done nothing to stop people repeating the “market porters” myth.

My new book on the history of porter and stout, due out early next month, has more that 2,000 words on the story of the porters of London, who they really were, and just why porter was named after them: they drank huge amounts of it. A doctor in 1826 wrote that it was “no uncommon circumstance” for porters “to consume six, eight, ten and 12 pots of porter a day, besides gin and a full allowance of animal food,” a pot being a quart, or two pints, 1.14 litres, meaning one porter might drink three gallons of beer in perhaps 14 hours. Drinking so much beer was a pragmatic solution to the problem of acquiring enough energy to keep going in an arduous occupation: the calorific value of ethanol is almost 75 percent greater than that of carbohydrates.

(There are also more than 6,000 words in a chapter demolishing the three-threads myth, the idea that porter was invented to replace a mixed drink called three-threads, which first appears in 1802.)

I would assume the “popular with the porters of Covent Garden, Smithfield and Billingsgate” line that can be found in all the stories about the Covent Garden Open Gate brewery venture that appeared last week was put out there by Guinness’s PR people, or more likely the PR people from Diageo, Guinness’s parent company. I am going to have to have a word. I really, REALLY don’t want to troll up when the £75 million new project, which includes a microbrewery and two restaurants, finally opens later this year and find this myth repeated on any wall displays or the like.

There’s plenty enough fascinating stuff to say about the site, where Guinness has been talking about opening a brewery since 2022, to match other Open Gate Brewery ventures in Dublin, Baltimore and Chicago. A business called the Woodyard, or Wood Yard brewery developed on the site, the rectangle between Long Acre, Langley Street, Shelton Street (then Castle Street) and Neal Street (then Cross Lane) in the first half of the 18th century – though again there are some egregious errors around about THAT – which grew into a considerable concern, producing 500,000 barrels of beer a year by the end of the 19th century.

You will find plenty of sources that declare that the Woodyard brewery was founded by a man called Thomas Shackle in 1740, though this is easily disproved nonsense (the claim seems to date back to no earlier than the end of the 19th century, and first surfaces in Alfred Barnard’s Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland, yet more proof that just because it’s in an old book, that doesn’t make it true, or mean that you don’t have to check it.)

In fact, the first known mention of the brewery is more than 20 years earlier, in December 1719, in a newspaper called the Post-Boy, where anyone with a property “convenient” to be turned into “a Publick House” is urged to contact “Mr William Gifford, Clerk to a Brewhouse in Wood-Yard, Long-Acre”. The actual owner of the Wood Yard brewery seems to have been a man named John Shackly, or Shackley, who was a freeman of the Brewers’ Company, and also, supposedly, a timber merchant, whose other business had given the name to the Wood Yard premises. He died in 1722, and the brewery was continued by his son, another John.

John junior died in 1738, and was buried at St Martin in the Fields church, a third of a mile or so south of the Wood Yard brewery. The brewery was continued by the Shacklys’ former clerk, William Gifford, or Gyfford, who took into partnership his brother Joseph. William, or Joseph, was wealthy enough buy 1749 to have “a country seat at Hendon”, six or seven miles from the Wood Yard brewery, at a time when Hendon was indeed in the country, and not part of the vast northern sprawl of suburban London.

In 1760 the Wood Yard brewery was the sixth biggest in London, on 41,410 barrels a year. William Gyfford died “immensely rich” in March 1762, aged 73, and was buried in Holy Trinity church, Nuffield, Oxfordshire, presumably where he was from. His brother Joseph died in June 1763 at his home in Hanwell, aged 66, but was also buried in Nuffield. Joseph’s son Anthony, who had carried on the business, died in 1769, just six years after his father – he, too, was buried in Nuffield. Anthony’s widow, Ann, kept the brewery going, in partnership with Peter Hamond, the brewer at the Wood Yard brewery, Thomas Richardson and Henry Evans. She died in May 1779, when the Wood Yard brewery was the third biggest in London, on 81,200 barrels a year, behind only Samuel Whitbread on 96,400 barrels and John Calvert at the Peacock brewery, Whitecross Street, St Giles, on 98,400 barrels.

Peter Hamond, who was born in 1731, ran the brewery for the next eight years, during which time it was known variously as “Gyfford’s” and “Hamond’s”. By 1787 the Wood Yard brewery had drifted back to sixth largest in London, though output had risen 13 per cent to almost 92,000 barrels. That year Hamond, Richardson and Evans sold it for £90,000, equal to a comparatively modest £14½ million today, to a partnership consisting of the wealthy sugar refiner and malt factor Harvey Christian Coombe, then aged 35, George Shum, another sugar refiner, Joseph Delafield, a brewer at Whitbread’s brewery, William Packer, the brewer at the Wood Yard brewery, and Hamond’s son Edmund.

Within a year “Giffards” had risen to be the fourth largest porter brewery in London, making 95,222 barrels between Midsummer 1788 and Midsummer 1789, behind Samuel Whitbread on 171,461 barrels, Felix Calvert at the Hour Glass brewery on Upper Thames Street on 140,605 barrels and Thrale’s Anchor brewery in Southwark on 123,938 barrels.

Harvey Combe was elected an alderman of the City of London in 1790, and an MP for the City in 1796 (and Lord Mayor of London in 1799), and associated himself with the Whig politicians that surrounded the Prince of Wales.

The Prince of Wales was guest of honour when, in May 1805, Harvey Combe revived the tradition once, apparently, common among the great London breweries of entertaining distinguished people in the brewhouse with a dinner of steaks cooked at the stokehole of the brewery copper by the stoker, and served up on a malt shovel. Other guests at the dinner included Charles James Fox, the great Whig politician, and friend of the Prince; a couple of Whig peers, the Duke of Devonshire and the Duke of Norfolk, another good friend of the Prince of Wales; Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the playwright, Thomas Erskine, Lord Robert Spencer, John Calcraft, General Richard FitzPatrick, Colonel John McMahon and Lord John Townshend, all seven, like Combe and Fox, Whig MPs; and the Irish politician Henry Grattan.

A second royal brewhouse dinner was held in December 1805, the guests this time including George III’s second and seventh sons, Prince Frederick, the Duke of York and Prince Adolphus, the Duke of Cambridge, plus Sheridan, again, and Sir John Shelley, good friend of the Duke of York and the Prince of Wales, who was to become an MP himself the following year.

A full description of this dinner was recorded in the Calcutta Gazette, of all publications. The tablecloth was made up of hop sacks nailed to the table, the plates were flat wooden trenchers, the salt cellars wooden, the pepper castors made of Tunbridge-ware, or inlaid wood, the spoons made of bone, and “the only articles of a superior kind were good horn-handle knives and silver three-pronged forks”. The accompaniments were bowls of “sallad”, raw onions, cucumbers and pickled onions, and the only drink was porter. A starter of turbot and salmon-trout was served first. The stoker, dressed in a white cap and jacket for the occasion, then cooked the steaks, carved from “the finest rumps of beef which the market could afford”, on the flat piece of iron, polished to a shine, normally used to break up the cinders in the fire under the copper. The cooked steaks were then carried to Combe, who cut out the centre-piece from each one and handed them, on a pewter plate “as hot as it could be held”, to each guest in turn.

After the steaks, the dinner guests were shown round the whole brewery, before travelling by coach to Combe’s home in Great Russell Street, a third of a mile or so to the north, where they enjoyed “a most sumptuous cold collation”, followed by “a most delicious dessert”.

The Prince of Wales returned for the third royal brewhouse dinner in May 1806. With the brewery in full operation, and malt being mashed, before dinner he was given a tour of the premises by Combe and Shum, “with which he was extremely entertained.”

The business was still “commonly termed Gyfford’s Brewhouse” in 1807 when Harvey Combe threw another “royal brewhouse dinner” featuring steaks cooked at the stokehole of the brewery copper. The Prince of Wales and his brothers the Duke of York and the Duke of Cambridge, were invited, but only the dukes turned up, together with the Duchess of York and, again, a set of Whig politicians.  

A fifth dinner “in the usual style” was held at the brewery in June 1808, with the Prince of Wales making it along this time, together with the Duke and Duchess of York and the usual politicos. This time “a crowd of persons gathered around the gateway” of the brewery, “greeting the Prince with loud huzzahs”. That appears to be the last of the Woodyard brewery royal dinners: though if Guinness doesn’t revive something similar when it opens the Open Gate brewery in Covent Garden and put “stokehole steak” on the menu, it is definitely missing a good trick.

As might be expected of a wealthy friend of the Prince of Wales, Harvey Combe was fond of gambling, and there is a good story showing his smartness at repartee when twitted by someone who won a large sum off him playing the dice game hazard – “twelve ponies” according to one account, 300 guineas, equal to more than £30,000 today. Unfortunately, there are two different versions of the tale, one featuring George “Beau” Brummell as the target of Combe’s wit, the other with Charles James Fox in that role, which casts some doubt over whether the exchange ever happened. The best version has Brummell pocketing the money and saying: “Thank you, alderman; for the future I shall never drink any porter but yours,” to which Combe replied: “I wish, sir, that every other blackguard in London would tell me the same.” In the Charles James Fox version, the politician is supposed to have called Combe “old Mashtubs”, which, since Fox was the elder by four years, seems unlikely.

Combe died in 1818, aged 66, and was followed as head of the brewery by his son, another Harvey, then 24. Harvey junior had a far lower profile than his father, although he was for a while, like his father, Master of the Old Berkeley Hunt, the pack of foxhounds that hunted all the land from Wormwood Scrubs to past High Wycombe, and which had a considerable following among Victorian Cockneys. (The first syllable in “Berkeley” is pronounced to rhyme with shirk and kirk, and the slang expression “berk” comes from Cockney rhyming slang.)

Harvey junior died unmarried in 1858, and the brewery passed to two nephews. It continued until 1898, at which time it was brewing 500,000 barrels of beer a year, when it merged with Watney’s Stag brewery in Pimlico and Reid’s Griffin brewery in Liquorpond Street (now Clerkenwell Road) to form Watney Combe Reid. The Wood Yard brewery closed in 1905, though bottled stout continued to be sold under the Combe name until at least the end of the 1930s. Again, if Guinness doesn’t revive the name Combe’s London Stout, another trick will have been missed.