In 1900, there were 6500 breweries — 30 of which are still around today. Adnams is still independent and still flourishing, handed on to the next generation. It’s a good company: small, independent, and successful. And that’s the proudest legacy I’ve left the world: that, after my 37 years there, I’ve handed on to a new generation a good company. They have done extremely well in the last eight years . . . even better.
My grandfather and his brother, Jack and Pierse Loftus, finished a career in brewing in South Africa in 1902 and bought a stake in Adnams, which was needing investment. They bought 50 per cent of the equity, and stayed till September 1914. I started work there 50 years later, on 1 October 1964, and retired on the last day of the last century. I eventually became managing director, and so I’ve been part of Southwold for 37 exceedingly happy years.
It is a very, very talented team of people. They excel at making beer, importing wine, and running hotels and good pubs, some of which are in very rural areas which other companies wouldn’t make profitable.
We are most renowned for our famous bitter. (Though the Adnams wine director is extremely well thought of, too.) We make a lovely, light bitter, which is a perfect balance of flavours, served cool not iced, delicately bittered, full of hop aromas, a tangy bitterness mingled with a hint of sweetness from the malt, a touch dry, which leaves you smacking your lips and with the desire to have another.
We celebrated our centenary as a company in 1990 by forming a One Percent Club — a United Nations initiative — to give one per cent of our profits to charity. The charity’s income is about £40-50,000 p.a., which we give exclusively to local charitable endeavours. I was chairman of that for many years.
Yes, I see the effects of alcohol more than most. It’s a good friend when you want to celebrate something, but it’s very, very dangerous when you become addicted to it. Abuse of anything good is wrong.
It’s deeply worrying, the awful behaviour of binge drinkers at weekends, particularly. We’re very soft on them, as a nation. It now seems to be a way of life. But as the emotional problems among the young increase, it’s not surprising that it’s getting worse. I was very conscious of that, and was very involved in education and initiatives.
I was once invited to Blundestone Prison to give a lecture on alcohol, but the officers were so often hit over the head with the evils of drink they begged me to lecture on the benefits. Although our prisons are all absolutely “dry”, I was allowed to bring some samples in — but the prison officers took them all home.
I’ve also just retired from working with the homeless in Lowestoft for 33 years, setting up a housing association with a really professional staff. It’s a town with huge problems after the loss of industry, particularly fishing. There were 40 to 50 men and three women sleeping on the streets then, and enormous local hostility. One councillor said we ought to put them all in a boat, send them out to sea, and pull out the plug. That hostility has gone now.
We housed them in an empty church, until that was pulled down, and then we moved them into the school building at the back. So we were effectively squatters, which caused no little embarrassment to the C of E authorities. But eventually the local authorities started to take us seriously.
Britain has this extraordinary system of giving government support to voluntary bodies. In the past ten years, government policy has become more enlightened, and we are able to allow people to stay for long enough to do serious resettlement work. Before that, we were under a lot of pressure to move people on. Now we have five hostels, housing 200 people at a time, and we can help people with issues like hygiene, food, budgeting, and finding help and medication so they can be re-housed in time.
I also founded Breakout, a workshop for teenagers who were disaffected with school. It’s very well used: there are large numbers of school-excluded children in the area. There’s an enormous breakdown of relationships, and many youngsters get mangled in the system, and end up in homes where they aren’t the children of either partner. When they become 18, they have two ways to go: straight, or into the cycle of drugs and crime.
There’s another thing that’s enormously needed: I run a counselling practice which helps people cope with traumas like mental or sexual abuse or injury, so they can regain their own lives and live at peace. Canon Ronald Smythe, a hugely gifted priest, set up three different services, two of which survive, and we have trained 30-40 counsellors over the last 17 years.
I was born, brought up, and baptised as a Roman Catholic in Ireland, where we said the rosary and other prayers by the fire every night, and the Angelus when we heard the bells strike 12 and 6. It was a prayerful, quiet community. And I spent 20 months in Glenstall Abbey as a novice before going to Dublin University.
I got involved in the Charismatic renewal movement in 1971 —brought in by a Baptist and an Anglican. I loved the atmosphere of Christians seriously at prayer together. I enjoyed that renewing Spirit, which brings all sorts of new gifts, one of which was reading the Bible.
I read the Bible every day now. I love the story of our Lord joining the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and it says: “Their hearts were burning within them.” I love to ask the Holy Spirit for that sense of excitement when reading the Bible.
If I have a favourite passage, it might be John 10.10: “I came that you might have life in all its fullness.” I’m aware of what that means. I’ve had Adnams, the night shelters, 42 years of marriage to my lovely wife, Oonagh, three lovely children, rugby . . . So many people don’t have that fullness, and I have a burning desire to help them share what that means.
I was really pleased that Gordon Brown should come to Southwold on holiday. He was in Shadingfield, actually, near where I live, which is a beautiful, rural area. And Prince Charles came to visit the new brewery, and a local pub which has taken over the traditional post-office facilities.
There are five local churches which all get on extremely well. As a Roman Catholic, I’m sometimes invited to preach in other churches, which I like, and we are seen to be loving one another, and working together.
I tend to live a simple life of prayer, mass on most days, and get on with my work. That’s the diet of Christian life that suits me. It’s a special privilege to be involved with social concern. I am also chairman of our local Victim Support group, and work with the RC Commission for Social Concern, which also works with people of other faiths.
Though I’m retired, I live an active life in the community, and visit people, including some of those who were in the housing trust. I grow a garden full of organic fruit and vegetables. I’m licensed to take eucharistic services, and take the eucharist to the sick.
Like Edith Piaf, je ne regrette rien. I’ve done my best in most things.
I get angry with the terrible dishonesty of politicians, or army chiefs, who decide what they should tell us, and don’t tell us the truth — for example, the shootings in Northern Ireland. (The Commission eventually brought out the truth about that.) So I get angry all the time.
If I were locked in a church with anyone, I’d like to be with Cardinal Basil Hume. As he was a member of a Benedictine order and used to silence, we wouldn’t have to spend time talking to each other.
Bernard Segrave-Daly was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.