A GLASS ACT

THE TEST OF TIME

EMBOSSED ON EVERY BOTTLE OF CASTLE LAGER IS THE NAME OF A MAN MOST PEOPLE KNOW VERY LITTLE ABOUT. CLIFFORD ROBERTS REVISITS THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CHARLES GLASS.

It’s astonishing how little it sometimes takes to become famous; how circumstances appear to conspire in raising certain individuals to greatness. Some people dedicate their entire lives to the exercise and never achieve it. For Charles Glass, it took less than 10 years to get his name immortalised on the bottle of Castle Lager.

Who was this man? How did he do it? How do we so easily stand and raise our mugs to the memory of someone we know so little about?

The infuriating thing about history is that questions invite more questions and before long, a search begins to look like reflections in a hall of mirrors. With the internet, information explodes even further and truth becomes distorted by myth.

For the cursory investigator, Charles Glass’s story begins with his departure from India to South Africa. He hailed from Kent originally and had been in Asia apparently to make beer for British troops. Upon his arrival on the Witwatersrand via Durban in 1884, we make the acquaintance of his wife, Lisa. With the help of financiers, they set up Castle Brewery only to sell some eight years later having taken the first steps in the creation of the quintessential South African beer. The story goes that Glass left for England, returning briefly to South Africa in an attempt to take on Castle before leaving permanently and later dying in his home country in 1919.

There are a number of intriguing angles to this story. So it’s thus best preceded with context because the Glass couple were launching a brewery at one of the most dramatic periods of transformation in South Africa’s history.

Leading up to this point, the Cape Colony had burst its banks with the move of colonists, missionaries and Afrikaner farmers migrating northwards, one lumbering ox-wagon at a time. Other migrations were also underway – this was the time of the Mfecane, forced migrations of black communities resulting from fundamental changes in socio economic conditions and conflicts across the southern continent. Then, in 1851, the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) was established in the Transvaal region with Pretoria appointed capital four years later.

Describing the ensuing period in Geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika (Tafelberg, 2012), historian Jackie Grobler writes that between 1850 and 1900, SA underwent dramatic change due to cultural, economic, political and demographic

Remember this guy? Charles Glass... or the character presented as him in South African Breweries’ adverts of him three decades ago.

events. “In 1850, farming was the predominant activity for South Africans, and there was nothing resembling a healthy monetary system. By 1900, mining had been well established and there were stock exchanges, banks and 10 000 wage labourers.

“In 1850, Cape Town was the biggest town in South Africa and the only metropole with more than 10 000 residents, while most people lived on farms or in small communities. By 1900, some 17% of the total South African population had urbanised and Johannesburg’s population had grown to more than 100 000.”

Fascinatingly, in 1850 most people used ox wagons to get around on a few bumpy roads, but by 1900 railway lines had been rolled out and the motor car had made its appearance. The first was apparently a Benz Voiturette, imported from Germany by one John P Hess, a Pretoria businessman, and exhibited to Republic President Paul Kruger, in 1897.

Of course, contributing to much of this change was the discovery of diamonds and then gold. The first diamond was officially discovered in 1867 in the district of Hopetown, setting up a diamond rush that eventually saw Kimberley become SA’s first mining town. Then, four years later, gold was discovered on a farm near Polokwane, followed in 1886 by the discovery of the world’s richest gold reef on the Witwatersrand.

By then, Castle Brewery had been up and running – its castle facadelogo steadily growing in popularity. But in those days, Johannesburg and its neighbouring mining towns were very different places. The brewery, it is said, was importing many of the ingredients it required from the UK. Of life in the area, Grobler writes that a shanty town had sprung up “like mushrooms” and the diverse backgrounds of people converging on the reef led to conflicting lifestyles and world views. Cultural and political differences led to substantial friction, especially with the thousands of uitlanders – specifically British citizens like Glass, who had settled on the Witwatersrand. Late in 1886, a correspondent for the Eastern Star newspaper reported: “To those who, for their sins, ever find themselves landed at Barberton, my advice would be to get out of it as quickly as the means at their disposal will enable them to do. They will find there a lack of everything.

To this story is added another interesting dimension, highlighted only a couple of years ago in a book by UCT professor Anne Kelk Mager entitled Beer, Sociability and Masculinity in South Africa. Her research points out that it was in fact Lisa Glass who was the main brewer at Castle Brewery, but that Charles fit an SAB marketing agenda long after Charles had left the scene. “It is evident that Glass’s brewing career was short,” writes Mager. “It was also marred by ... constant bickering with his brewer wife.

“The advertisers’ rendition of Glass’s physical image and sensuous personality sits uneasily with the historical evidence of an irascible hustler of beer in the mining town.”

Glass must have regretted the sale of the brewery once he realised the gold boom was no flash-in-the-pan. A simple search reveals precious little of his life thereafter and his return to England, or what became of Lisa.

The Glass story went relatively cold for SAB it seems, until 1974 when marketers required an angle to boost Castle. The tale of Charles Glass was woven into the brand. For his legacy, Charles Glass has brilliant marketing to thank for his place in history and his ties, though short, to one of the world’s biggest brewing traditions. His is truly the name that has stood the test of time.

OTHER FAVOURITE SA BREWS THROUGH THE YEARS:

Who can ever forget Lion Lager, in the red and gold label? “Icy cold, rich and gold, down a Lion – feel satisfied!” they used to sing – and now again, you will too. Remember those guitar notes twanging? First brewed in 1889, it rose to be the biggest SA beer of an 80’s and 90’s generation before it was dramatically revamped and eventually culled in 2003 due to declining sales. Still, in a 2006 Markinor/ Sunday Times survey it still ranked as one of the top three brands that South Africans missed most. (But it is back now, with quarts selling at R10.)

Remember Ohlsson’s Lager, another giant rooted in our earliest beer traditions that lasted until the 1990s?

How about the brand with the strapline: The Beer Natal Made Famous? “Lion Ale hasn’t been spotted in these parts for decades,” writes an avid collector in the Eastern Cape, in a 1995 entry on an online message board.

“But I’ve got some tins in my collection, together with such long gone rarities as Schafft (as in “Sink a Schafft”), Luyt Lager (yes, the same Luyt as in Louis and SA rugby), Sportsman, Kronenbrau 1308, Kronenbrau Gold, Colt 45 (a Luyt beer, countered by SAB with Stallion 54) and Rogue (the impressive black and gold tin featuring a rampaging elephant with totally unimpressive contents).”

Incidentally, the last brewer at SAB to brew Lion Ale was Andy Mitchell, former brewer at Mitchell’s and Birkenhead breweries. Lion Ale came to an end in 1981.

Luyt Lager was a product of the late Louis Luyt’s brewery first established in 1972, which moved to Ballito, KZN before closing down. The former fertiliser magnate was also behind Kronenbräu, and apparently the purchase of a 14 th century brewery in Bavaria in pursuit of authentic heritage for the brand. The annual agricultural shows in platteland towns were the poorer for the passing of Kronenbräu as each year a team of beautiful glossy chestnut Clydesdales used to pull a German-style wagon of wooden beer barrels in annual parades of trompoppies, local marching bands and revving tractors and combine harvesters!

Somehow, one can’t be surprised that the 70s were also high times for Colt 45. Which kid didn’t have a tattered poster of Bruce Lee’s Fists of Fury, Dirty Harry or Magnum Force hanging on the bedroom wall? Colt 45 too carried the Luyt signature - made in the US and introduced into SA through his firm, Intercontinental Breweries (ICB).

Rogue was a brand introduced by SAB in the late 1960s, to take advantage of a government reduction on excise, writes UCT historian Anne Mager, in a 2005 paper entitled One beer, one goal, one nation, one soul: South African Breweries, heritage, masculinity and nationalism 1960–1999.

And Schafft? The beer went the same way of the dinosaurs, but its label series lives on in the catalogues of hoarders like Bernd Schaumann, the genius behind “Bernie’s Beercan Paradise”. (It really says something about the internet that dredged up stuff resembles what one might snag in an inner-city river, but no slight intended on Bernie or other members of the Brewery Collectibles Club of America). And what about the biggest beer brand in South Africa?

The answer is Carling Black Label which arrived on our shores in 1966 when Carling USA licensed South African Breweries to produce the beer. Its genesis however lies in Canada. The brewer re-named one of its beers in honour of a newly appointed boss, one J Innes Carling. As the age of corporate breweries took hold, so Carling Black Label grew in border-spanning stature.

By the time South African Breweries was granted the license to brew Black Label, it had an established “American” image so no surprise that it was launched here as “America’s lusty, lively beer”.