The Story Of Donald Smith

DESPITE barely touching a drop of alcohol in his 91 years, Donald Smith has lived and breathed Tennent’s all his life. In fact, his association goes back to when he was just glint in his parents’ eyes. Like his father, grandfather and mother before him, he spent his working life at the drinks giant, starting out as a 13-year-old “barrel scraper” – cleaning inside giant wooden beer barrels – on its Wellpark site in 1941.

He was even conceived there, he says. “But by the time I was born, my parents had moved from the stable foreman’s house to a nearby tenement on Park House Lane because of a vermin infestation.”

A lot of the archive material in The Tennent’s

“I learned much from Pows

Story has been supplied by Donald, who officially opened The Tennent’s Story heritage centre at the end of last year.

He worked his way up from the factory floor to board level, retiring in 1989. He had a gap from 1945-1948, during which he undertook National Service with the RAF in North Africa, were his father had been killed in 1943 serving with the Royal Army Service Corps.

“Between training classes and repatriating prisoners of war (Pows), National Service provided my education,” he says. ”I learned everything about distributing people and goods from German Pows – which I later put into action at Tennent’s.”