Metadata
WORK ID: NEFA 22088 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| VAUX COMMERCIAL: BERESFORD ARMS WHALTON | 1965 | 1965-01-01 |
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Details
Original Format: 35mm Colour: Black & White Sound: Sound Duration: 42 sec Credits: Organisations: Vaux Breweries, Erwin Wasey Ltd Individual: Kent Walton Genre: Advertising Subject: Sport Rural Life |
| Summary A 30 second television advertisement for Vaux Breweries filmed at the Beresford Arms, Whalton near Morpeth in Northumberland where Newcastle Evening Chronicle reporter Roy Maddison enjoys a pint of Vaux Beer with ITV sports commentator Kent Walton. The two men go outside and offer a pint of beer to the leader of the local hunt watching over his dogs. |
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Description
A 30 second television advertisement for Vaux Breweries filmed at the Beresford Arms, Whalton near Morpeth in Northumberland where Newcastle Evening Chronicle reporter Roy Maddison enjoys a pint of Vaux Beer with ITV sports commentator Kent Walton. The two men go outside and offer a pint of beer to the leader of the local hunt watching over his dogs.
The film opens on the pub sign for the Beresford Arms Inn at Whalton. Outside the entrance stands a small crowd plus a pack of hunting dogs. A...
A 30 second television advertisement for Vaux Breweries filmed at the Beresford Arms, Whalton near Morpeth in Northumberland where Newcastle Evening Chronicle reporter Roy Maddison enjoys a pint of Vaux Beer with ITV sports commentator Kent Walton. The two men go outside and offer a pint of beer to the leader of the local hunt watching over his dogs.
The film opens on the pub sign for the Beresford Arms Inn at Whalton. Outside the entrance stands a small crowd plus a pack of hunting dogs. A man, the leader of a local hunt, pats one of the animals.
Title: Roy Maddison Evening Chronicle Newcastle
Inside Roy Maddison stands at the bar and is joined by Kent Walton. The film cuts to show a bottle of Vaux Light Brown being opened and poured into a glass. Roy smiles as he is offered the pint and takes a drink. Roy and Kent turn and leave the bar.
Outside views of the dogs seen previously plus the leader of the hunt being offered a pint by Kent and Roy. Views of both Roy and the second man taking gulps from their beers.
The advertisement ends on a tankard of beer with the Vaux logo on the front and male voices singing “Vaux beer brewed in the North by people who love good beer”.
Context
This is an example of a cinema advertisement for Vaux Brewery, one of ten commercials sponsored by the brewery in the mid 1960s preserved at North East Film Archive. Vaux Brewery operated in Sunderland from 1806 up until 1999 when it was closed due to advice from London based financiers.
The founder of the company was Cuthbert Vaux, who produced the company's most infamous drinks, the Vaux’s Stout and the Double Maxim, both of which are featured in the advertisements and were the most...
This is an example of a cinema advertisement for Vaux Brewery, one of ten commercials sponsored by the brewery in the mid 1960s preserved at North East Film Archive. Vaux Brewery operated in Sunderland from 1806 up until 1999 when it was closed due to advice from London based financiers.
The founder of the company was Cuthbert Vaux, who produced the company's most infamous drinks, the Vaux’s Stout and the Double Maxim, both of which are featured in the advertisements and were the most common drinks they brewed. The first brewery location for the company was on the corner of Matlock Street and Cumberland Street. However, they were forced to move when the land was purchased for the Central Railway Station,their second location on Castle Street from 1875, where they would stay until the company’s dissolution. They also held another brewery in Union Street for thirty years from 1844 until the 1870s. The Vaux & Co. brewery was a family owned business. After Cuthbert Vaux died in 1878 the company was passed on to his sons, John and Edwin. John Vaux’s sons, named Cuthbert and Ernest, would go on to join Edwin in the brewing business after their father’s passing. Even parts of management were family members. Frank Nicholson, who joined as a manager in the late 1890s, married the daughter of John Vaux, Amy, and became director. Upon becoming director, Frank Nicholson oversaw a variety of big changes for the brewery. Vaux expanded into a bigger company under Frank; he organised a union with North East Breweries Ltd., creating the second largest brewers in England, with Vaux and Associated Breweries Ltd. Brewing companies were also purchased in Sheffield, and in 1972 Vaux expanded overseas, with the acquisition of Fred Koch Brewery in New York, but this venture only lasted three years. In the 1990s they also made their fatal expansion into hotels, which would ultimately lead to the end of Vaux Breweries. The Vaux breweries were closed in 1999 and the company then turned to focus on its investments in hotels and restaurants, under advice from London financier Alex Brown. This was a shock to many in the area, even some within the company itself, as the brewing sector was very successful with profits of £50 million. The Chairman of the company, Paul Nicholson, was so displeased with the news that he resigned from his post. Ultimately the closure would leave 700 out of a job and a hole in the spirit of the city. After rebranding as Swallow Group plc., the new company did not last very long on its own. In 2000 the company was taken over by Whitbread. From here the Swallow Hotels became Marriott hotels and the pubs were turned into brands such as Brewers Fayre. In 2003 the Swallow brand itself was purchased by London Inn Group, however, by 2006 this went into administration. In 2014 the last hotel located in Glasgow had closed. The Vaux Breweries were closely linked to the culture and community of Sunderland. They served as the team shirt sponsors for Sunderland AFC from the mid-1980s until the brewery’s closure in 1999 and the headquarters on Castle Street in central Sunderland, played a big part in its architectural landscape. This headquarters was demolished in 2008 and as of 2014 it has been a discontinuous construction site for a new base for Sunderland City Council. Their advertisements were made firstly to promote their products, but also served to highlight their chain of local pubs and bars around the North East. Their adverts commonly featured their trademark dray and horses, symbols of the Vaux Brewery. At the end of the adverts the company jingle would play out, ‘Vaux Beer brewed in the North- for people who know good beer’. These beer adverts were narrated by famous sports commentator Kent Walton, who became famous for commentating on tennis, football, and most notably on wrestling coverage on ITV’s ‘World of Sport’. Usually the adverts would also feature other celebrities enjoying their drinks with the locals, showing that everyone could enjoy a Vaux beer. Vaux sponsored sporting events throughout the north east and Scotland, such as the Vaux Gold Tankard Handicap at Redcar Racecourse and the Grand Prix Cycle Race at Wolsingham, commissioning the Newcastle firm of Turners Film Productions to document them annually in the 1960s. (For example http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/film/vaux-encourage-all-sports-1966 ) As a brewer of alcohol, its links with the sports world promoted a healthy image of the company brand at odds with its product. Many British MPs would prefer to ban this type of corporate sponsorship, promoting links between sporting performance and drinking. At the Beresford Arms in the rural idyll of Whalton, celebrity endorsement for Vaux appears in the form of the well-known, (and recently appointed in 1962), Evening Chronicle chief sports writer and Newcastle United reporter Roy Maddison, who also spent five years as a newspaper editor in nearby Morpeth. Born in Hartlepool, Maddison would spend a lifetime in journalism, starting out at 15 years of age in 1953 as an ambitious apprentice compositor with the Northern Daily Mail (now the Hartlepool Mail). He worked nationally for tabloids, the Sun in Manchester and the Daily Sketch in London, dining with Ingrid Bergman and interviewing variety stars Eric Morecambe and Tommy Steele along the way. He returned to the north east to join the Evening Gazette, Middlesbrough, in 1971. Maddison worked at The Journal in Newcastle when modernist poet Basil Bunting was a reluctant sub-editor there in order to pay the bills. Former Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler (who worked with Bunting as a copy boy at the Chronicle) described him in the song Basil: Ancient blue sweater, too old for the job Bored out of his mind With the Colins and Bobs The Beresford Arms was built in the heart of the Northumbrian village of Whalton in the mid-1800s and is still around to this day. Whalton is one Northumbrian village that still indulges in the weirdly eccentric pagan ritual known as Baal Fire Day, one of those strange folkloric customs celebrated, or disassembled, in film-maker Paul Wright’s flickering archive odyssey through England’s stranger seasonal customs, Arcadia. The annual event continues a tradition from the Middle Ages that celebrates the success of bringing the wheat (corn) harvest home. The last of the corn gathered at each year’s harvest was used to create the Harvest Queen, or ‘Kern Baby’, a human size effigy (or corn dollie) dressed in fine clothes and crowned with flowers, which was then thrown on the fire. In 1901 the Whalton Kern Baby was captured on film in a powerfully strange picture by a passionate amateur photographer and collector, Conservative MP Sir Benjamin Stone, son of a local glass manufacturer in Birmingham, who wandered the country recording rustic characters, ancient customs and festivals in Victorian England. Stone was a deeply patriotic antiquarian and revivalist who saw these links with the past as ‘historic expressions of national values and identity’. He was affectionately dubbed by the press ‘Sir Kodak’, ‘Sir Snapshot’ and ‘The Knight of the Camera’. It certainly seemed, as one Birmingham newspaper noted, that ‘his ruling passion for photography…swallowed all the rest’ as it is rumoured that he spent as much as £30,000 on photography during his lifetime: the equivalent of well over £1 million pounds today. 17,000 surviving glass negatives for the photographs Stone took himself are now archived with Birmingham Libraries. Benjamin Stone's work fell into a period of obscurity until rediscovered in the 1970s by photographic historians and a new generation of documentary photographers. Stone's project, and that of the National Photographic Record Association that he founded, has been updated by contemporary photographers such as Homer Sykes who captured the Whalton Baal Fire in 1971 or 1972 with a much more dynamic approach than Stone's cumbersome plate camera allowed. After its demise, the spirit of Vaux Brewery was continued by two of its former directors, who would go on to form the Maxim Brewery, buying the original recipes of their classic drinks, including Double Maxim. More recently, as of Easter 2019, there has been a revival of the Vaux Brewery name. An attempt to open another Vaux Brewery with a more modern take on the Vaux name is trying to fill the void left in the city by the original closure. References: https://www.sunderlandecho.com/news/legendary-vaux-brewing-name-set-for-sunderland-return-1-9590081 https://www.sunderlandecho.com/news/timeline-the-history-of-sunderland-s-vaux-brewery-as-it-prepares-for-city-rebirth-1-9590412 https://boakandbailey.com/2015/05/gallery-vaux-beer-mats-1970s-80s/ https://www.sunderlandecho.com/news/former-vaux-breweries-boss-will-be-delighted-if-new-sunderland-brewery-succeeds-1-9591489 https://www.sunderlandecho.com/our-region/sunderland/1960s-vaux-beer-advert-shot-at-once-popular-sunderland-pub-released-in-search-for-lost-film-gems-1-9333908 https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/history/17521521.those-were-the-drays-memories-of-vaux-brewery-20-years-after-its-closure/ https://wearsideonline.com/vaux-brewery/ https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/sunderland-council-vaux-civic-centre-15262298 https://www.theberesfordarmswhalton.co.uk/about-us https://www.morpethherald.co.uk/news/news-man-roy-maddison-dies-at-69-1-1511287 https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/info/50165/birmingham_connection/1601/benjamin_stone_collection https://homersykes.photoshelter.com/image/I0000ElRyRiBoBrM https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/basil-buntings-poem-briggflatts-50-10636468 Related Collections: http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/film/vaux-commercial-shepherd-and-shepherdess-beamish http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/film/vaux-commercial-copper-beech-darlington http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/film/vaux-commercial-fairfield-arms-stockton http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/film/vaux-commercial-pennywell-comrades-club-sunderland http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/film/vaux-commercial-middlesbrough-co-operative-club http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/film/vaux-commercial-thorney-close-sports-club-sunderland http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/film/vaux-commercial-windmill-cowgate |
