Brewery owner who disliked pubs made bottled beer instead
Village plaque to be unveiled
Ralph Fremlin’s obituary in The Wateringbury Parish magazine of April 1910 recorded the loss of “one of the most faithful Christians and one of the staunchest supporters of the Church and its work”.
He supported the Red Hill Mission Services and ran an adult night-school in a cottage in Old Road.
The story of Ralph Fremlin is to be recorded by a blue plaque placed on the side of The Wardens.
It is one of seven plaques to be unveiled by the Wateringbury Local History Society on a walk through the village on Saturday, September 9.
The other plaques record six other famous villagers: Matthias Prime Luca, a Lord Mayor of London; John Beal Jude, founder of the Kent Brewery; astronomer William Rutter Dawes; Lady Lena Campbell Login, whose husband arranged for Queen Victoria to receive the Koh-iNoor diamond from the Sikh Maharajah Duleep Singh; admiral Sir Henry Ruthven Moore and actress Dame Ellen Terry.
All are welcome to join the walk which starts at 10.30am at the gates to Wateringbury Place in Tonbridge Road. From noon to 4pm, there will be an exhibition about the people commemorated by the plaques in Wateringbury Church. There are probably a great many who go shopping in Fremlin Walk in Maidstone today who haven’t a clue why it is so named.
On the other hand there are certainly plenty of older readers who remember the delicious bottled beers – with their distinctive Elephant logo – that used to be made there.
Ralph Fremlin is the man who established the Fremlin brewery in Maidstone. He bought the site in 1861, taking over an earlier brewery that had been there since 1790.
Ralph Fremlin was born in 1834, the eldest of 11 children, to James Fremlin and Ann (nee Jude) at The Wardens, Wateringbury.
His father was described in the 1871 census as a miller, a farmer of 350 acres, and a brickmaker, employing 43 men and eight boys.
The Wardens stood close to two breweries in Bow Road and the Fremlin family were linked by marriage to both owners, the Leneys and the Judes.
Ralph went to Sutton Valence School, leaving after two years in 1848 at the age of 15 to become a clerk for the Jude family at their Kent Brewery.
No doubt this gave him the grounding to establish his own business.
His difficulty was he was a highly religious man, and disapproved of the lewd behaviour sometimes to be witnessed in public houses.
He sold off all the pubs associated with his newly bought business and concentrated on the production of bottle beers for home consumption.
The firm later changed this policy and developed an extensive chain of pubs, but not until after Ralph Fremlin’s death in 1910.
Ralph was a very hands-on owner, doing the accounts himself,and even selling beer door-to-door from a horse and cart.
He was a success and his brewery became the first to mass-produce bottled beer – one was called the National Temperance Ale, which sounds like a contradiction in terms.
He ran Bible classes for employees, donated generously to Maidstone’s churches and was chairman of the school board. He was a churchwarden at St Luke’s Church and founded the Maidstone Social Purity Society.
The company logo of an elephant reflected the family’s connections to the East India Company.
Ralph married Mary and moved to Heathfield House, Heathfield Road, Maidstone. They had a daughter Alice.
After his death, the company was run by his brother Richard until his death five years later. It then became a private limited company, Fremlin Bros.
A period of expansion followed. The firm absorbed the Harris Browne Brewery in Barnet, the Adams Brewery in Halstead, Essex, and George Beer & Rigden in Faversham, and eventually in 1960 took over Frederick Leney & Sons of Wateringbury, close to Ralph Fremlin’s birthplace.
In 1967, Fremlin itself was bought by Whitbread, which closed production at Maidstone in 1972. The site remained as a depot until the 1970s. It was partly demolished to make way for St Peter’s Bridge in 1978.