Beamish Sheets Got Y2Ked

Shawn Day, of the DHO, showed some inspiring visualisations at last weeks digital humanities  seminar in the Boole Library which he’d done in his work on the brewing industry in Guelph in the nineteenth century. I have made several runs at turning all or parts of  my old MA thesis on the history of Beamish and Crawford but it keeps getting pushed down the list. However, I pulled up my old spreadsheets to have another go at them, and found they have been slightly Y2Ked. The brewery, of course, closed down a few weeks ago, having been in continous operation in South Main St since 1792.

The original research, which was part-funded by Beamish & Crawford, was done so long ago that I entered the data in a spreadsheet called Perfect Calc which was first written to run on CP/M and ported to DOS. Thankfully, I moved the sheets into Excel somehow, sometime because I don’t fancy making Perfect Calc run some sort of DOSbox un XP. The data runs all the way back to the foundation of the brewery in 1792, and when we rolled past Y2k,  many of the date formatted cells changed. As a result, the sheet for the 1799-1800 Cashflow now looks like this

which is actually easy enough to fix.  The full set of these figures showing porter sales and barley purchases week by week, did not survive which is a pity. If it did, we could reconstruct from the dates of barley purchases some picture of the barley market in the C19. I think it is odd that the barley purchases in 1799 really pick up and peak in November which suggests about a 2 month lag between harvesting and selling into the brewery for malting.

Other interesting, but not irreparable. changes happened in the import from Perfect Calc to Excel. These are the first few year end ‘rests’ when the brewery closed its year and did end of year accounts. These are clearly from the first few Private Ledgers (labelled by letter in the first column, with the page reference under ‘folio’) Some these these were not dated exactly in the PL, and went into my sheets as Aug-93 or Aug 94. Obviously though the 1797 ‘Rest’ was taken on 29th July, and 1798 on 28th July.  I presume these dates were noted exactly because they were early, but entered as dates (29/7/97)  rather than text field meant that they were chopped oddly in transferring the data. These are easily fixed, with a little time, but because they are not predictable, we wont try to do this with a macro – this will be a manual fix on the 20 or so dates that are wrong.

For those of you who are interested (and who isn’t interested in porter brewing?) the other columns are the cost of barley, the amount paid in duty and the revenue from Porter sales, and, of course, the usually healthy balance. Cork experienced a business boom during the Napoleanic wars, providing provisions for the Royal Navy and for British expeditions overseas. There were 8 major breweries in the city then, but most folded and many were bought up by Breamish & Crawford in the years before Murphy’s arrived on the scene in the mid-nineteenth century. That, of course, is naother story which is partly covered in Donal O’Drisceoil’s book on Murphys.