Boiling the Wort and Cooking the Books: the thread about the Great Edinburgh Beer Duty Fraud
It was 3AM on Christmas morning 1933 when – after a long and cold stakeout – not Santa but three agents of His Majesty’s Customs & Excise entered the renowned Bell’s Brewery on the Pleasance and caught the brewers in the act of working illicitly. They didn’t yet know it but the trio had just uncovered the UK’s largest ever duty fraud, one with a record that would not be broken for decades to come. So ended the Great Edinburgh Beer Duty Fraud, and so also begins its story.
A deliberate, systematic and wicked fraud, carried out with great cunning
Lord Aitchison, Lord Justice Clerk, summing up after the trial of the Fraud’s perpetratorsThe Pleasance. 1959, but little changed since 1933. The entrance to Bell’s Brewery was by the low garage building in the middle distance. It was in this vicinity that the agents of HM Customs & Excise would stake out the brewery in December that year. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.
Edinburgh has a long association with the brewing trade and by the latter 19th century had come to totally dominate the Scottish industry; it one third of all breweries in the country (thirty-two); 45% of all men employed in the trade and produced over 80% of all beer by volume. This supplied not just the city or the Scottish market but England too (particularly the northeast) and all corners of the British Empire, in which it can be considered third only to Burton-on-Trent and London as a brewing centre. There were a number of reasons why this had come to be; the Lothians provided ample supplies of malting barley and coal; the Port of Leith’s provided ready access to east coast trade in Newcastle and London; but primarily it came down to water. The city sits atop a geological feature called the Charmed Circle, a fault giving esay access to both soft water well suited to old-fashioned Scotch Ales but also hard water, chemically similar to that of Burton-on-Trent, which was perfect for brewing the Pale Ales then much in vogue. This explains why so many breweries came to be concentrated in the south and east of the Old Town.
1890, W. & A. K. Johnston town plan overlaid with the 24 breweries in central Edinburgh at that time (there were more at Gorgie, Roseburn and Craigmillar). Those in red are the subject of this story. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland
The decade of the 1880s was a time of rapid change in the industry and beer production in Scotland (and therefore mainly Edinburgh) almost doubled. Practices were modernising and commercial competition was increasing; the big players were getting bigger and the smaller and provincial operators were being squeezed out. It was a time of growing investment speculation around brewers with big names listing as limited companies on the stock exchange. One of the Edinburgh’s biggest, William McEwan & Co., floated in July 1889 with a capital of £1,000,000 (about £112 million in 2025). With average annual profits of £92k (£10.4 million in 2025) it offered investors a five percent dividend and provided a Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) of 9.2%.
Advertising poster
by J. G. Rennie for McEwan’s beer, 1925. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.
But most of Edinburgh’s breweries were much smaller than McEwans and many were old and antiquated. And so later that same year four of those smaller, older breweries decided to seek strength in numbers with a merger and hop on the stock market bandwagon. The idea seemed sensible on paper, as the prospectus put it “material economies in the expenses should be effected, both of production and distribution“. Brian Glover, in “The Lost Beers & Breweries of Britain“, calls it however “an Alcoholic Haze of Ambition“! With a market capitalisation of £454k (£50.9 million in 2025) and an annual output of 110,000 barrels, the new Edinburgh United Breweries Ltd became the third largest brewer in Scotland (although still only half the size of the mighty McEwan’s).
Heading of the abridged prospectus of EUB in the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, 19th December 1889
The four weel kent names that were joining together were:
Robert Disher & Co., Edinburgh & Leith Brewery, Canongate. Formally known as The Edinburgh & Leith Brewing Co., an old established name from the 18th century. They were well known for a very strong ale, the in(famous) Disher’s Ten Guinea; The Burgundy of Scotland. The name refers to an old Scottish practice of naming beers after the nominal duty on a barrel, therefore equating to their strength. The usual range was from 40 shillings for weak beers up to 90 shillings for strong beers; at 210 shillings Ten Guinea was therefore over twice as strong again and would be close to 11% ABV. It was sold in wee heavy bottles but astonishingly also came on draught in pints; possibly the strongest draught beer that you could buy in the UK at that time?
1893, OS Town Plan centred on the Edinburgh & Leith Brewery. Note that the adjacent plots marked “Brewery” and “St. Mary’s Brewery” are two separate concerns. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland
Robin, McMillan & Co., Summerhall Brewery. An old established firm first set up in 1705 and purchased from his successors in 1862 by Robert Robin and Robert McMillan who greatly expanded the business, increasing the workforce tenfold in twenty years. Like its stablemates in the new company it did much trade in northeast England, but also as far off as the West Indies.
1893, OS Town Plan centred on the Summerhall Brewery. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland
David Nicolson & Sons, Palace Brewery, Abbeymount. A newcomer on the Edinburgh scene only built in 1865 and was also the smallest of the grouping. It was known for its Palace Pale Ale but it seems the brewery’s capacity greatly exceeded its output. It had been purchased in 1870 by a Canongate wine and spirit merchant, David Nicolson, whose wholesale business was included and expected to “yield large additional profits”.
1893, OS Town Plan centred on the Palace Brewery at Abbeymount. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland
George Ritchie & Sons, Bell’s Brewery, Pleasance. Established by John & Hugh Bell in the mid-18th century and purchased from their successors by George Ritchie in 1835, it was the largest in the group. Once known for an old-fashioned, dark and hoppy Scotch Ale called Black Cork, the recipe for this died along with its brewer early in the 19th century. They alone in the group seem to have had “tied houses” (i.e. they owned their own pubs) and did much trade across central Scotland and also in northeast England.
1893, OS Town Plan centred on the Bell’s Brewery at the Pleasance. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland
With combined average profits of £28.4k (£3.1 million in 2025) the Return on Invested Capital was 6.3%, significantly lower than McEwan’s and therefore a less sound financial bet. The prospectus talked up the “rapidly increasing” sales and great benefits to be wrought from amalgamation but the new company was also notably less efficient than McEwan’s by another measure – the latter was making twice the profits per unit of brewery space. The merger was a speculative venture driven by H. Osborne O’Hagan of the London Contract Corporation and the London brokerage of Messrs J. R. Ellerman, who between them were responsible for multiple brewery mergers and listings. It was mainly funded by English investors and three of the seven seats on the Board were initially allocated to English brewery directors, one assumes to keep one watchful eye over the English money and the other on the Scottish brewers.
The financial arrangements were somewhat unusual. £200,000 – 45% – of the company’s capital was not in shares but a type of secured loan known as a Mortgage Debenture. These paid a fixed 5% per annum interest and unlike the dividends on shares could not be reduced or stopped in lean times. They were good for investors but bad news for any company like Edinburgh United that found itself lumbered with a fixed £10,000 interest payment on them every year. The trustees for these debentures were The Commercial Union Brewery Investment Corporation, London; an investment trust formed the previous year by Ellerman. This trust did very well for itself out of such deals, appreciating in value by over 1,000 percent in just nine years. Ellerman would go on to become (probably) the richest man in England.
John Reeves Ellerman, an undated photo, the financial mover behind the creation of Edinburgh United Breweries. Credit: John Ellerman Foundation
The whole deal was therefore a sophisticated piece of Victorian venture capitalism and one stacked in the interests of distant investors! Also unusual was the convoluted manner in which the breweries were acquired, purchased through an intermediary, Mr W. H. Dunn, at a higher price than he had paid for them; the £8,000 difference being his fee. Dunn handled all four sales in this manner from which his cumulative fees would equated to £3,600,000 in 2025, sucking valuable cash out of the new company before it even got going. This arrangement would very soon come back to haunt them.
1919 Edinburgh United Breweries trade advert in an Edinburgh industrial promotion book. Note that at this time neither the Palace or Edinburgh and Leith (Disher’s) were producing (and never would again).
Within eighteen months things had started to go wrong when it became apparent that the profits of the Palace Brewery had been overstated and it was actually loss-making. It had been acquired of of Mr Dunn for £28,500, a valuation based on its profitability and assets. In 1891 Edinburgh United decided to sue the brewery Trustee who had signed the sale to Dunn – James Alexander Molleson – for a reduction in this amount. The case started off badly when the first attempt was thrown out and Edinburgh United Breweries Ltd. v. Molleson did not come before Lord Kyllachy at the Court of Session until 1892. The judge found that because Edinburgh United had no contract with Molleson, only intermediary Dunn, they had no title to sue him. They also found that because Dunn had sold all interest to Edinburgh United he also had no title to sue. There was never any implication that Molleson was involved in mis-stating the profits or had reason to believe they were not accurate, but this fact did not come into it. The decision was appealed in 1894 but this failed and as a result £4868 17s 1d (c. £550k in 2025) was written off not to mention the fact they still had on their hands an unprofitable brewery. To this day it remains a case study in “Reduction impossible after sale to third party” in almost every textbook on Scottish contract law.
It wasn’t just the Palace Brewery that was causing the company problems. At its second AGM, the Chairman’s reported the financial position “was not so good as they could have wished” on account of their important north of England trade suffering badly due to the 1892 Durham Miners Strike. Further strikes in the next few years and an increase in beer duty further depressed trade, profits in 1893 were barely up on the pre-merger position at £29,385 12s. The Chairman remained optimistic however and told that year’s AGM that the transfer of most of the shares from English to Scottish investors was a sign of confidence in them. An alternative interpretation would be that the smart money was getting out…
“At the Gates of Bear Park Colliery: Discussing The Situation”, scene from the Illustrated London News of the 1892 Durham Miners’ Strike, 26th March
A good year was finally had in 1895 with reported profits of £36,694 8s 9d (c. £4.2 million in 2025) and the directors were able to tell the AGM that they were “in as good a financial position as any brewery in the country“. The following year brought further cause for cheer with a gold medal award from the Exposition International of Liberal Arts etc. in Paris for the excellence of their beer and dividends of 8% being paid on the ordinary shares. But economic clouds were gathering on the horizon and after 1897 they would be repeatedly hit with increasing costs of labour, coal, rail transport, malt, hops and duty while all the time facing increased competition in the north of England. Profits would slide for eight consecutive years and dividend payments were repeatedly reduced. These tough trading conditions were not unique to them, it was a bad time all round for brewers, but the Chairman told the 1902 AGM that the company “as a policy” refused to follow the industry trend of lowering the quality of either the raw ingredients or the final product. Ironically they would later use a slogan “Rich In Name And Quality“, as they certainly didn’t find themselves rich in any other way!
“Rich in Name & Quality”. Advert for the “EUB” brand Rich Brown Ale, Edinburgh Evening News, 17th October 1931
By 1903 seemingly endless strikes and wage cuts had badly affected the spending power of the working class man (the key beer-drinking demographic), the Temperance movement was making great advances, new entertainments such as music halls and later cinemas were enticing people away from pubs and a Shilling increase on beer duty as a result of the Second Anglo-Boer War cost them £3,000 (£320k in 2025). The share dividends were now suspended entirely – but the interest on those debentures still had to be paid. Having never really grown since its inception, the company found itself greatly over-capitalised and with debenture interest absorbing what little remained of the gross profits. It was therefore decided in 1907 to start buying some of them back. More radical restructuring action had to be taken in 1910 by deciding to buy them back in their entirety and to reduce the share capital to just £110,000 – a three quarters reduction in total overall. A cost-cutting plan was implemented that saw the Summerhall Brewery closed and sold, later becoming the new home of the Royal (Dick’s) Veterinary College.
The closed Summerhall Brewery in 1911, photograph by A. H. Baird of the Edinburgh Photographic Society before demolition to make way for the veterinary college. The brewery buildings are on the left, the stables on the right of the entrance lane, looking towards the west end of The Meadows. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.
In 1912 the Chairman told the AGM that he had discussed a potential general price increase across the trade to ease the financial pressure but that this “seemed impossible” due over-supply and the ferocity of competition. But still the company remained wedded to not reducing the quality of the beer and instead invested in the plant at Bell’s Brewery to improve it. Sales in the first half of 1914 were promising but of course World War 1 intervened, precipitating a large slump in beer drinking, and the Exchequer upped the beer duty again. War brought the likelihood of a reduction in the quality, availability and affordability of ingredients and a scarcity of manpower as men went off to fight; in 1915 fifty employees joined up when Sir George McCrae of McCrae’s Battallion – the 16th Royal Scots – had a recruitment drive in the brewery.
WW1 recruitment poster targeting civilian workers of all classes to join up as infantrymen. Credit IWM (Art.IWM PST 0318)
In 1916 a Government economy drive saw the forced closure of the Dishers and Palace breweries. The reduction in capacity resulted in a struggle to meet customer demand but closing these inefficient facilities had the unintended upside of improving the overall financial position so much that the company was able to clear off much of the debenture debt and even pay a small dividend on the preference shares.
WW1 left behind a much reduced Edinburgh United Breweries. Of the 122 of its workforce who had joined up, eighteen were killed or missing and twenty-two invalided out. They made no move to re-open the mothballed breweries and instead used it as an opportunity for much-needed rationalisation. The maltings and cooperage of the Palace at Abbeymount were sold in 1919 and the remainder kept only as a hops store. In 1921 an attempt was made to sell the Disher’s to the city Corporation as part of a slum clearance scheme but before this could happen it burned down in a disastrous fire in April 1922 that caused £20,000-30,000 of damage. Instead it was sold to the neighbouring brewery of John Aitchison & Co. who demolished the remains to give themselves room to expand. In 1925 the Palace site was sold to the cinema pioneer F. R. Graham-Yooll who converted it into The Regent picture house.
The Regent cinema in the 1930s. Take away the signs and the entrance doors, and the outline of a Victorian brewery is unmissable. Picture credit Edinphoto.org.uk
This meant that the “united” breweries were that in name only now and were actually a single brewery; Bell’s at the Pleasance. In 1920 a £13,000 investment was been made to expand it further and the product range was slimmed down to a smaller number of lines. They concentrated on a core offering of Pale ales around 3% ABV for the domestic Scottish draught beer market, Brown or Scotch ales around 5% ABV for the north of England and their trademark Disher’s strong ales between 7.5-11.2% ABV.
Alterations and additions for Edinburgh United Breweries Ltd. at Bell’s Brewery, 1919 © HES (Cowie and Seaton Collection ) via Trove.Scot SC1381491
The concerted effort to modernise kept the company in the black despite an increasingly adverse national economic situation and finally cleared off all its old debenture debt. And so it was in 1925, after four decades of near constant struggle, Edinburgh United Breweries could finally tell its AGM that it found itself on a solid financial footing. It must therefore have been with some good cheer that dividends of 5% on the preference and 10% on the ordinary shares were approved.
The rear of Bell’s Brewery in 1927, looking east towards Dumbiedykes. This seems to be a loading bank as well as a store for miscelanneous barrels. From the files of “
Origin, nomenclature and location of various houses and streets in Edinburgh” by John Smith, Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.
But any such optimism would have been severely misplaced as the economic situation was only going to get worse from now on. By mid-1926, with the General Strike recently failed and thousands of minders still unemployed, Edinburgh United Breweries was in financial crisis. In 1927 the Chairman told the Scottish Board of Health that Scottish brewers had lost 25 to 30% of their trade in just two years and most were now barely breaking even. His own share price over the 1920s reflected the dire situation; in 1920 preference shares were trading at 17s 6d but by 1929 they were going for only 7s 6d. He told his shareholders that fully two thirds of the company’s gross earnings were going to service beer duty – £5 a barrel in 1926 – and it was to duty that the company would turn to try and keep themselves in the black. They began the Great Edinburgh Beer Fraud to avoid paying it!
Macpherson’s at 165 Pleasance in 1927 shortly before demolition in a slum clearance scheme. The closest pub to Bell’s Brewery, one of their best customers and allegedly one of the finest establishments the Southside ever knew. The windows advertise Disher’s legendary 10 Guinea Ale in bottles. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.
Several factors make this swindle quite exceptional.
- The scale of it;
- How long it would go undetected;
- That it was carried out under the very noses of the Excise;
- That the Excise would catch them at it but let them slip through their fingers;
- And that everyone in the entire brewery seemed to be in on it!
To perpetrate it they would exploit weaknesses in the duty regime; the Inland Revenue Act 1880 (also known as the Free Mash Tun Act). This legislation had changed duty to a system based on the volume of alcohol that it was estimated brewers had produced. At the time there was no reliable way to directly test for the alcohol, so instead officers of HM Commissioners of Excise would “dip” the wort (the sugary liquid that is fermented into beer) to measure its volume and would test its gravity: the sugar content. From these two values a reference table was used to calculate how much alcohol would result from fermentation and therefore how much duty was to be levied.
Testing the gravity (left) and “taking the dip” to measure volume (left) by Excise officers. Facsimile copy from John R. Pink, 2005,
The Edinburgh Beer Duty Fraud: The Full StoryTwo methods of fraud were employed. The first, which ran for longest and would be responsible for two thirds of the value, was known as Abstraction of Wort. In the brewery the wort was produced in a vessel known as the mash tun from water and fermented barley. It was run through a series of processes until it reached the fermentation vessels where yeast would be added and it would be fermented into beer. By abstracting (removing) some of this wort between the mash tun and the fermentation vessel, the brewer so reduced the volume that the Exciseman would read when making his “dip” and therefore the amount of duty he would levy. This was achieved by simply siphoning quantities into boxes or barrels which would be hidden elsewhere in the brewery; sometimes literally under piles of sacks in the corner, only to add them to the fermenting vessels later once the Exciseman had finished.
The Mashing Room at T. & J. Bernard’s
New Edinburgh Brewery in 1891. The mash tuns are on the first level, to the left, and the copper kettles for boiling the wort after mashing and before fermenting are on the lower level to the right. Engraving from “
The Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. III“
This was of course prohibited by law but there were insufficient controls in place to prevent it should the brewer choose to act dishonestly. Edinburgh United were able to exploit the fact that Excisemen were regular and predictable in their visits and not familiar enough with the brewing process to be able to spot, by eye, when the contents of a vessel had been tampered with. The deception was completed by falsifying entries in the Brewing Journal, a statutory record of all brewing activities. In theory, this book had to be kept in the brewing plant at all times and be on display and available to the Excise at all times. Not having the journal available at any time was in itself an offence carrying a fine of £100. Edinburgh United however kept the actual details of each brew in a secret book and would write-up the official record with fraudulent entries to appear as if all was in order. They successfully got away with this from mid-1926 all the way through to August 1932 during which period it was calculated they had done it 231 times and avoided duty of £22,049 as a result (about £1.3 million in 2025).
Newspaper advert for Disher’s Ten Guinea Ale, late 1920s/ early 1930s, beer that was brewed while the company was busy defrauding the Excise.
Abstraction stopped abruptly on 24th August 1932 when the brewery was caught in the act! Performing an early morning inspection Excise Officer William Cochrane, their usual visitor, found the brewer siphoning the wort from the Copper (the huge kettle in which the wort was boiled with hops to flavour and sterlise it) and into barrels in the cellar. This of course was strictly prohibited and the brewer fobbed him off with excuses about quality control. Cochrane next found that the Brewing Journal was absent only for it to miraculously re-appear with all its entries present and correct. On testing the mash tun he noticed the sugar levels were suspiciously high and found a boy in the yard brushing a “frothy, beery liquid” which he suspected to be the remains of a brew down a drain, even though the Journal stated that brewing had yet to commence.
Banbury Brew, 1950, W. G. Miller. A brewery worker siphons beer into a barrel (legitimately!) Oxfordshire County Museums via ArtUK.org
Cochrane suspected foul play and wrote this in a memo to his superior, the Surveyor, that in his opinion it was “fraud“. The Surveyor wasn’t satisfied either and escalated the matter up to the Collector, R. D. Ryall, the most senior Exciseman in Edinburgh. Ryall passed the matter to Head Office in London, who went so far as to agree with the men in Edinburgh only to inexplicably take legal advice not to follow up and prosecute. Rather, they decided the best course of action was a warning shot to “really put the fear of God into their head brewer” – Collector Ryall was ordered to have a good chat with the brewery Chairman, ask him if he wouldn’t mind awfully making sure that the head brewer was “behaving properly” and issue his company a paltry £50 fine. With this slap on the wrist, London considered the case closed, filed it away and forgot about it.
The Commissioners direct you to add that the Chairman will appreciate that in the event of any further irregularities in the future they would feel very great difficulty in withholding a public prosecution.
Letter from London to the Collector of Excise in Edinburgh, November 1932 (86948/1932)
By this time Edinburgh United Breweries’ financial circumstances meant that fraud was all that was keeping them in the black and so they had to find another method to continue it. They did not have to look far as they already possessed one! In April 1931 they had started to carry out Run Brews, conducting a brew entirely in secret and off the record from beginning to end. This began due to the effect ever greater Abstraction of Wort was having on the beer; it made it overly “fresh” and the customers were complaining. For a company known for the quality of its beer, and which publicly prided itself on it to the point of allowing it to impact their profitability, there was therefore a bitter irony that they had chosen a path to maintain the quality which had ended up reducing it anyway.
The Tun Room at T. & J. Bernard’s
New Edinburgh Brewery in 1891. The fermenting vessels (or tuns) are the large, barrel-like containers lining the room where yeast will be added to the wort to ferment it into beer. Engraving from “
The Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. III“
Run Brews required more coordination and subterfuge to carry out but once again they were able to get away with them – 56 times – because of the predictable behaviour of The Excise. A brewery was required by law to give twenty-four hours notice, in writing, that they intended to brew. Edinburgh United knew that if they didn’t give the notice the Excise never turned up to check that they weren’t indeed brewing. They also knew that in Edinburgh they never, ever, inspected breweries between Saturday lunch time and Monday mornings. They thus had a 36 hour window in which they were completely unmonitored, sufficient to conclude the parts of the Brew that they couldn’t otherwise hide from The Excise. Once again their true brewing activities were covered up with falsified entries in the Brewing Journal.
The swindle was back on and once again the authorities were blissfully ignorant about it. This would remain the case until December 6th 1933 when a man called Peter Sinclair, until recently the head cellarman at Bell’s Brewery for eleven years, stepped into the Excise Office at 3 South Bridge and asked to speak to Officer Cochrane. Much aggrieved at the loss of his livelihood, he spilled the beans about the goings on in his former workplace.
1-3 South Bridge in 1992. The Excise Office at number 3 is the black door on the very far right of the shot, the offices were above the British Linen Bank branch. Trove.Scot, SC 763610
Sinclair’s claim report made its way into the Collector’s in-tray a few days later. Except this wasn’t Collector Ryall, who had recently retired, this was Collector Hugh. R. M. Pollard, an altogether more proactive and industrious man. He brought Sinclair in for an interview during which the man shared a notebook containing records of six and a half years of illicit brewing. From this notebook it was estimated the totality of the fraud might amount to “about £3,500” (about £219k in 2025). Little did they know this was only the tip of the iceberg. The cellarman produced another colleague – Joseph Tudor – who had recently been laid off as witness to corroborate his story. This man had been a watchman and part of his duties included identifying any known Excisemen or unknown visitors to the Brewery at which point he pressed a hidden button that would sound a buzzer in the Head Brewer’s office to make him aware. This bought enough time to clear up anything that shouldn’t be happening and to amend the Brewing Journal as necessary. Signed and witnessed statements from both were taken on the spot, lest the brewery get wind of their disloyalty and try and buy them off, and they agreed to find out when the next Run Brew was to happen.
Pollard took charge of the case personally. In the meantime Officer Cochrane continued his scheduled inspection routine and was directed to keep an eye out but to ask no questions and do nothing that might show he had suspicions. Sinclair came through with a tip-off which was how the three Excisemen came to be outside Bell’s Brewery at 3AM on Christmas morning 1933. On Friday 22nd December, Officer Cochrane made his usual visit to Bell’s Brewery and inspected the Brewing Journal, finding no notice to brew entered in it. Pollard picked a trusted Officer – a man called McLachlan – who would be unknown to the Brewery and had him watch the gate from Saturday 23rd. He and Cochrane joined him at 11PM but saw no signs of suspicious activity. The trio entered the brewery at 3:30AM, finding it deserted. They inspected the Brewing Journal, found it was was still blank for that day and left. The watch was kept up until the following evening when the three assembled again at 11PM and waited again. At 3AM it was the metallic sound of a Mash Tun lid clanging within the brewery followed by the unmistakable warm, sweet, malty smell of boiling wort that confirmed to them that an illicit brew was on. And so was the sting!
An illustration of the Bell’s Brewery later shown in the EUB court case. The dotted line, highlighted red, shows the route the Excisemen took during their sting operation that ended on Christmas Day. After facsimile copy from John R. Pink, 2005,
The Edinburgh Beer Duty Fraud: The Full StoryHeading straight for the Fermenting Room, they found brewing in progress and the workmen unconcerned by their sudden appearance. Directed to inspect the Brewing Journal they found it correctly made out with entries for 23rd December, but having secretly inspected it early the previous morning when it had been blank, they knew that it had been falsely backdated. Making a search of the Head Brewer’s office they found his private brewing journal which, when compared to the the official version, contained multiple discrepancies that confirmed many brews had taken place “off the record“. Realising he had a damning black book in his possession, Pollard decided to take it back to 3 South Bridge for a closer inspection, even though he was without a Warrant to do so.
He spent the best part of Christmas and Boxing Day going through the book line-by-line, cross-referencing it with the official duty records and Sinclair’s notebook. He must have been horrified at the scale of the illicit activities this uncovered; Sinclair’s notebook was accurate but just the tip of the iceberg. There were 18 illegal Run Brews in 1933 alone, almost one a fortnight. For the rest of the year Pollard officially absented himself from the office, but was secretly at work there with his staff briefed to diplomatically rebuff the efforts of the brewery to get the Head Brewer’s book – taken without a warrant – back. This was a calculated gamble; Pollard knew he really shouldn’t have the book but also knew that the brewery were in the dark as to how much he really knew. He suspected that they would eventually give up trying to get it back lest their persistence drew too much attention to it. This proved correct and indeed they gave up. Unsurprisingly the Chairman of Edinburgh United Breweries, himself a Solicitor to the Supreme Court, proved reluctant to voluntarily release the rest of the company’s books for inspection. Pollard therefore returned to Bell’s Brewery on January 11th with a Detective Inspector of Police in tow and removed them under warrant as evidence.
The Excise engaged Professor William Annan, Emeritus Chair of Accounting at Edinburgh University, as an expert witness to establish the true scale of the deception. Annan’s forensic accounting would calculate that £51,901 17s 3d in unpaid duty going back to June 1926 was owed (c. £3.2 million in 2025). He also provided evidence that the brewery:
- purchased more brewing malt that were ever entered as being consumed in the brewing books and sold more beer than they had paid duty on;
- paid dividends amounting to £17,894 (£1.1 million in 2025) which would not have been possible from the legitimate earnings alone;
- avoided, as a result of the fraud, trading losses in the 1931 financial year of £4,410, in 1932 of £4,848 and in 1933 of £6,817.
Professor William Annan, photo from a newspaper obituary in 1952
On February 19th 1934 an immediate demand for full payment of all the avoided duty was issued. When the company could not pay its its assets were placed in distraint (all the brewing materials, equipment and beer stocks were seized). Even the Managing Director’s Rolls Royce was taken, although it was soon returned with an apology when it was found out his wife (who out shopping in it at the time) was the legal owner.
The Director’s Wife, from a set of Happy Families gaming cards issued by Watney’s Brewery in the 1930s
On the 21st, the brewery’s Board of Directors issued a statement denying any knowledge of wrongdoing and that they were applying for a voluntary winding-up order because they could not make the duty payment. The story was now picked up by the press and adorned the headlines from Edinburgh to London and from Liverpool to Belfast.
Headline and subheadlines run by the Liverpool Echo, 21st February 1934
The court appointed John M. Geoghagan as liquidator, who faced the immediate problem that with all the company’s brewing assets and stocks in distraint, he could neither carry on business nor liquidate! Fortunately he was able to persuade the courts to turn these back over to him and he restarted brewing, putting some men back in work (for now) and thereby reducing the outstanding debt by £20,000 and getting shareholders back 10s 8d in the pound.
After a number of delays and false starts the case finally came to trial in the High Court before the Lord Justice-Clerk (the second senior-most judge in Scotland) on March 5th 1935. On trial were the Managing Director William Lawrie and the Head Brewer John Archibald Clark, accused of defrauding Customs & Excise of £31,291 (the balance minus what been recovered by the liquidator). Other more junior members of staff avoided standing alongside them by turning King’s evidence. The indictment related to evading duty on 40,104 bulk gallons of beer; over 320 thousand pints!
The Brewer and The Director, from a set of Happy Families gaming cards issued by Watney’s Brewery in the 1930s
Over eight days the prosecution called a total of 71 witnesses including Professor Annan as their principal expert. Head Brewer Clark made a statement implicating Lawrie as the head of the fraud but did not testify in his own defence and the only witness called on his behalf was his wife. Numerous subordinates testified against him that he had told them the scheme “would help the company. It would also keep us in our jobs“. Managing Director Lawrie had already given Pollard a statement that “if there had been any irregularities they must have been entirely the action of the Head Brewer” and flat out denied any involvement in – or knowledge of – fraud. He maintained his ignorance throughout the trial, trying to portray himself as being uninvolved with the day-to-day running of the brewery and having no actual understanding of the process. His case foundered on the testimony of Clark’s wife about numerous secretive, phone calls to the house from Lawrie on Saturday nights about which her husband was evasive and of assistant brewer David Smith, who told the court he was paid £5 bonus per illicit brew and that he would be given a key to retrieve the Black Book from the Managing Director’s desk where it was usually kept. His damning was completed by the company’s bookkeeper who was keen to testify that Lawrie “took an active supervision in the business” and that he had highlighted irregularities in the accounts to him on numerous occasions which were always rebuffed with “I’ll speak to Mr Clark“.
Daily Record headlines of the court case, March 8th 1935.
The court was told that because Managing Director Lawrie held 1,318 and Head Brewer Clark 820 shares in the company they had financially benefited from the scheme as a result of the dividends payments made. In addition Lawrie had earned £1,000 in “fees” during the period on top of his annual salary. Presented with overwhelming evidence as to the men’s guilt, they were found guilty and Lawrie was sentenced to 21 months and Clark to 12 months imprisonment. Clark accepted this, meaning he lost his 28s a week war pension for having lost his right hand and forearm, but Lawrie maintained his innocence and appealed. This was rejected on the grounds there was clear evidence provided that he had been made aware of the irregularities in his company and that there had been “ample and sufficient reason for the jury to reach the verdict they did.”
Customs & Excise were thoroughly humiliated for their part in having allowed the Great Edinburgh Beer Fraud to go on for so long under their very noses, just an 8 minute walk from the Collector’s office, and for having been “within an ace of discovering [it]” in 1932. Internal reaction was swift. Collector Pollard briefed every Officer in Edinburgh on the details and set them to thoroughly inspecting every single other brewery in the city for any signs of further chicanery. Although he defended the honesty and integrity of his men, he also concluded that there was “a lack of observation, imagination, energy, and initiative” on their part which had contributed to failing to detect the fraud. His predecessor, the recently retired Collector Ryall, had part of his pension clawed back; the local Surveyor, Dowswell, was forcibly retired on a reduced pension; Officer Cochrane reportedly spent the rest of his working career sidelined to a beer warehouse; others Officers found their prospects for pay rises and career advancement severely limited. In retrospect, these punishments were perhaps overly harsh and unfair, all three men had explicitly used the word “fraud” in reference to detecting the Abstraction of Wort in 1932 and had escalated it to London, only for London to decide a slap on the wrist be the end of it. Perhaps London had a vested interest in making scapegoats of these men to protect their own reputations… Hugh Pollard retired in 1943 after 42 years of service to take up a position in the Ministry of Fuel and Power. He was awarded the OBE in 1951 and died in Edinburgh in 1963, aged 82.
“Jeffrey’s Brewery, Edinburgh”, oil on board by Samuel Peploe, c. 1900. This brewery later became the home of Disher’s Ale after Jeffrey’s bought the brands of EUB from the liquidator. Credit, Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museum, ABDGA010714
London undertook a “root and branch” nationwide review of the work and responsibility of Collectors and issued a long series of amendments to operating instructions to strengthen the controls around assessing beer duty.
The object aimed at is the prevention or detection of irregularity or calculated fraud by brewers, through visits made more frequently at unexpected times by the surveying officers.
Board of Customs & Excise circular to Collectors, 1934
These controls lasted until 1993 when the Beer Regulations 1993 act introduced “end product duty“, charging based on the actual measured alcohol content of the final product rather than the century-old system based on extrapolating it from the sugar content of the wort.
Facsimile copy of a further circular to Collectors from London in 1935 in the aftermath of the EUB case
And at Bell’s Brewery, brewing ceased for the final time after over a century of operation in March 1935 when the liquidator laid off all but two watchmen. Over the next few months anything that wasn’t physically nailed down was auctioned off anything and the tied houses, brands and goodwill were sold to another Edinburgh brewer, John Jeffrey & Co. of the New Heriot Brewery in Roseburn, who would continue to brew Disher’s Strong Ale using the same label design as the old Ten Guinea Ale until the 1960s.
Notice of auction of the effects at Bell’s Brewery, Scotsman, June 29th 1935
The buildings of Bell’s Brewery were sold, a covenant of the transaction preventing the site from ever being used for brewing in the future – the Excise were clearly bloody-minded to make sure the place never darkened their door again! It was in turn sold to Dr J. Donald Pollock OBE and gifted to Edinburgh University in 1937 as a future site for a sports and athletics training centre, one it retains to this day. Sinclair, the whistleblower without whom the case may never have been successfully exposed and tried, was officially unrewarded for his efforts and remained unemployed; no Edinburgh brewer would have taken him on as so much as a toilet cleaner. A later Collector allegedly tried to represent on his behalf for a reward on his behalf, but a watchman’s job was all that was offered and it was turned down in disgust.
46 Pleasance, now the Centre for Sports and Exercise of Edinburgh University. The brewery offices were housed in the building with the bay window on the left. Google Streetview
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