By Rory Kehoe
Shrimp.Darts.Cup
No, not a What3Words map reference but if it was, it’d take you straight to Thanet, nearly 100 years ago.
How so? To understand this, we need to look at what was happening locally during the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign.
In late 19th century Thanet, if you fancied a pint, off you’d go to the pub, with the odds being that it would be owned and supplied by either Cobb’s Margate Brewery, or their long-standing Ramsgate rival, Tomson & Wotton. However, as the BBC might add: other breweries were available!
In the 1890s, Thanet boasted six small breweries, which did their level best to compete with the major players but didn’t enjoy the commercial benefits of owning large, tied estates to guarantee beer sales. Back then, free houses were thin on the ground and finding new customers must have been difficult. Thus, one by one, they admitted defeat and sold up.
You’d think that Cobb’s might have bought them but they had no track record of brewery acquisition. Tomson & Wotton expanded rapidly in the late 19th century but apart from acquiring Ramsgate’s Cannon Brewery, appears not to have purchased any other smaller rivals.
Enter then, Russell’s Gravesend Brewery. Exactly why a NW Kent brewery would wish to expand into Thanet isn’t known but in 1897 they took over and closed Webb’s Fort Brewery, Margate and just two years later, acquired James Fleet’s Ramsgate Brewery, which they operated until 1919. At a stroke, Russell’s acquired a tied estate in Thanet of some 30 pubs. And their company Trademark was? Yes, a shrimp!
Until just before WWI, darts was considered a game of chance, with most local authorities banning it on licensed premises, along with dice, cards and other gambling activities. The law changed, incredibly enough, when a darts-playing licensee in Leeds was charged with gambling and challenged the Magistrates to a friendly game of “arrers” to prove the skill required.
He won and the case was dismissed, opening the doors to darts becoming Britain’s most popular pub game.
After WW1, local brewers saw potential in darts and started offering trophies, so that customers in their tied houses could vie with each other and in so doing, boost pub trade and beer consumption. Liking this idea, Russell’s Brewery offered “The Shrimp Brand Cup” which their Thanet pubs played for throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.
However, this all came to a juddering halt in 1930, when Russell’s was gobbled up by the vast Truman’s Brewery of East London, which soon closed down the Gravesend Brewery and Shrimp Brand ales were no more. Within a year or so, all Russell’s Thanet pubs were rebranded as Truman’s and the Shrimp Brand Cup was forgotten about. The last winner of the cup, in the 1930/31 season, was the Love Lane Hotel, Margate, which retained it for many years until the pub closed in 1972.
Happily, the cup had an afterlife, as it was given to Michael Goodall (former owner of Bull’s Eye Darts, Margate) who renamed it the Challenge Cup, with Thanet darts teams playing each other, to raise money for charity. Michael is now retired but still lives in Thanet, with Russell’s Shrimp Brand Cup having pride of place on his mantelpiece. I’m indebted to Michael for his time, letting me photograph the cup and for the story of how he acquired it.
If you have any documents, photographs, signs, bottle labels, or other items relating to any of Kent’s old breweries, which could be scanned, copied, or even purchased, please contact me. As a local historian and collector, I’m always keen to expand my breadth of knowledge on the subject of Kent’s brewing heritage. [email protected]
