UK breweries after WW II

In the 1950s the first truly national brewing companies began to form. As the coalescing groups bought more rivals, it inevitably whittled down the number of active breweries. Purchasers were rarely interested in the brewery itself, only the pubs that it owned. With new licenses almost impossible to obtain, about the only way to expand the number of outlets was to buy another brewery.

The process of amalgamation was kicked off by Canadian Eddie Taylor, who had already built a national brewing group in his homeland. Using Yorkshire brewer Hammonds at its core, he embarked on a buying frenzy across the North of England and Scotland.

By the late 1960s, seven brewing groups dominated the industry: Allied Breweries, Bass Charrington, Courage, Watney Mann, Whitbread, Scottish & Newcastle and Guinness. They were usually referred to as the Big Six, Guinness being left out because it owned no pubs. 

No. of UK breweries
Year	No.
1945	708
1946	680
1947	648
1948	625
1949	602
1950	567
1951	539
1952	524
1953	501
1954	479
1955	460
1956	426
1957	416
1958	399
1959	378
1960	358
1964	295
1965	274
Sources:
Brewers' Almanack 1955, p.68
Brewers' Almanack 1962, p.67
BBPA Statistical Handbook 2003, p. 92

Amalgamation was often a complex affair. Bass Charrington was formed by the merger of Charrington United Breweries and Bass, Mitchells & Butlers. The former itself the result of a merger between Hammonds United Breweries and Charrington. The latter, created when Bass and M & B merged. Hammonds United Breweries was itself the result of a series of takeovers.

Between them, the Big Six controlled over half the UK’s pubs. As most beer was consumed in pubs and those pubs could only sell beer from the brewery that owned them, that gave the big brewers a stranglehold on the beer trade.

Ironically, this hold started to be broken in the 1980s when supermarkets started to shift large quantities of beer. It’s ironic because the big brewers dumped beer at ridiculously low prices to the supermarkets to gain market share. All the really did was devalue their pubs as assets.

The Big Seven 1963 - 1967
	1963			1967
Company	Tied estate	Nominal capital	Market value	Company	Tied estate	Nominal capital	Market value
		£m	£m			£m	£m
Allied	9,300	90.4	177.3	Bass Charr	10,230	80.7	243.2
Watney Mann	5,500	43.8	103.5	Allied	8,250	128.1	234.7
Charr Utd	5,000	43.1	92.7	Whitbread	7,376	104.8	127.8
CB&S	4,800	45.3	76.3	Watney Mann	6,667	84.8	144.7
BM&B	4,100	33	96	CB&S	4,418	57.1	94.4
Whitbread	3,500	40.6	95.2	S&N	2,076	64.8	127
S&N	1,700	44.9	92.1	Guinness	2	26.5	102.2
Guinness	2	19.5	94
Total	33,902				39,019
Total pubs	67,450				66,373
* Guinness's tied estate = Castle Inn, Bodiam and Guinness Club House, Park Royal.
Key:
BM&B Bass, Mitchells & Butlers
Bass Charr Bass Charrington
CB&S Courage, Barclay & Simonds
Charr Utd Charrington United
S&N Scottish & Newcastle
Source:
The British Brewing Industry 1830 - 1980 by T.R. Gourvish and R.G. Wilson, 1994, page 472.

There was also consolidation on a regional level, where breweries like Greene King, Greenall Whitley and Marstons bought up rivals for their pubs and closed their breweries.

At a much smaller level, most of the remaining home brew pubs closed between 1945 and 1965. There had still been around 2,500 publican brewers at the outbreak of WW I, but large numbers gave up in the interwar period. By 1965 they were just a handful. 

This is an excerptfrom from my overly detailed look at post-war UK brewing, Austerity!

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/austerity/23181344