#25: James Squire
Fittingly, it took a convicted criminal to set the standard for Australian brewing
Squire's brewhouse: site of Australia's first top harvest
Beer arrived in Australia with the First Fleet. The Journal of Lieutenant King records how at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788 Governor Phillip and other officers drank four glasses of Porter to toast ‘Their Majesties and the Prince of Wales, with success to the Colony' followed by a salute of musket fire from the marines and three cheers by the assembled men and convicts. Beer had arrived! And so had the man who would pioneer it here: James Squire.
Squire was the son of gypsies. In 1774, he was nabbed fleeing a ransacked house and arrested for highway robbery. Sentenced to be transported to America for seven years, he opted instead to serve in the army and returned to England a free man four years later to manage a notorious den of thieves hotel in Heathen Street, Kingston.
Squire's next heist involved the theft of five hens and four cocks. This time he earned a one-way ticket to the far side of the world for seven years on the 11 heaving galley ships of human tailings that made up the First Fleet. His wife Martha and three children were left in England to fend for themselves.
Separated from his wife and family, Squire met a fellow thief Mary Spencer and conceived a son. But mired in prison, he gave the boy up, enrolling him in the British Army at just 15 months of age. Francis Squire was enlisted into the NSW Corps, officially on the payroll as a drummer on his seventh birthday.
To ward off scurvy and quell mutinies, beer had been brewed aboard the First Fleet from malt essence, with the addition of hops or spruce. But on 5 March 1789, James Squire was hauled before a magistrate, charged with stealing ‘medicines' (namely a pound of pepper and horehound, a herb that imitates the flavour of hops) from the Port Jackson hospital stores. Although he claimed the horehound was for his pregnant girlfriend, the evidence was clear: Squire's first homebrew was underway.
Soon enough Squire was brewing beer for the personal consumption of Sydney's top brass, which explains his lenient sentence of "only" 150 lashes and his grant of 30 acres at Kissing Point on 22 July 1795 once his sentence had been served.
Within five years Squire was the proud owner of 10 sheep, 18 pigs, 35 goats, not to mention a wife, a mistress, six children, four free men and two government serfs. More vitally, he had five acres sown in wheat and another 45 acres ready for planting maize and barley, crops that swelled to 291 acres two years later.
The 1802 revelation that the British Army was trafficking rum created an uproar in the fledgling colony. Governor King was so incensed about rum's corruptive powers, he began to officially endorse the brewing of beer. The prime recipient of the English hops and brewing equipment transported on convict ship HMS Porpoise at the government's expense was Squire.
In 1806, after three seasons toil, he reaped Australia's first hop harvest.
Canny as ever, Squire bestowed his first two bushels of hops on Governor King who was so delighted with the exquisite flavour and quality, he "directed a cow to be given to Mr Squire from the Government herd". This happy heifer became Squire's most fatted calf on an estate that now stretched 881 acres - from the current Gladesville Bridge to the Ryde Rail Bridge and from the Harbour to north of Victoria Road. Squire split his time between there and his mistress Lucy's abode on Castlereagh Street.
As the 19th century gained momentum, so did Squire. After the Rum Rebellion in 1808, he diversified his businesses and opened a bakery in Kent Street, a butchery supplying meat to the colony, a neck nectary called The Malting Shovel on the Parramatta River and also a credit union where his fair play as a lender and a philanthropist to his poorer neighbours saw him named the ‘Patriarch of Kissing Point', a title he enforced with gentle persuasion as constable of the East Farms district.
"Had he not been so generous," observed colonial artist Joseph Lycett, "James Squire would have been a much wealthier man". He was "universally respected for his amiable and useful qualities as a member of the lower class of settlers... his name will long be pronounced with veneration by the grateful objects of his liberality."
Squire's death in 1822 was marked with the biggest funeral ever held in the colony. He was buried at a Devonshire St Cemetery on the site of the current Central Station, but was later moved to Botany Cemetery and interred beneath a headstone too faded to identify. His epitaph proclaimed: "Having come hither in the first fleet in 1788, none ever more exerted himself for the benefits of the inhabitants than the deceased. Squire was the first that brought Hops any perfection."
Though the original brewery closed in 1834, the Squire name today lives on via the Malt Shovel Brewery in Camperdown and the quality brews that bear his name.
Lifeline
1754 James Squire born December 18
1774 Arrested for highway robbery, serves as army man instead
1785 Charged with stealing, transported to Sydney on First Fleet
1789 Busted stealing brewing ingredients.
1792 Freed. Granted 30 acres at Kissing Point
1798 Opens Malting Shovel tavern
1806 Squire cultivates the first Australian hops
1813 Buries his friend Bennelong on his property
1822 Dies on 16 May, aged 68
1999 James Squire reborn as a range of beers
You've read what we think. Now tell us what you think.