Friday’s ad is for Whitbread, from 1952. The illustration features an illustration of a man pouring a pale ale, and he’s wearing a very odd expression on his face, his smile seemed forced (or just plain creepy). But what strikes me as strange is a statement in the copy that “they do all their own bottling.” Was that something uncommon enough in the 1950s that they’d use it as a selling point?
Given the shortage of land space in England, I find that entirely plausible. It’s quite possible that Whitbread had space for a bottling line that other breweries didn’t; those shipped barrels to centralized bottling facilities & probably didn’t do a lot of QC, thus making purchase of their bottled products somewhat of a “crapshoot”.
Maybe one of your readers who has good knowledge of the subject will enlighten us further.