1929: Bessie Lee and the Brewery
November 5, 2022
By AHNZ
Today in history, 5 November, 1929, with heads held high, shining eyes, and an air of strong resolution and purpose, over 80 women marched from the Baptist Church at Otahuhu, Auckland, to invoke Divine intervention against the opening of the new Waitemata brewery. They were led, as per usual, by a bourgeoisie woman of independent means and a double-barrel name: Bessie Lee-Cowie (image, left.)
On the receiving end of this quiet riot was Morton Coutts whose Waitemata Brewery had quite suddenly managed to be granted a brewing license in a very controlled market. Coutts is a famous man in New Zealand history, especially when it comes to beer. Aged 25 at the time of his brewery and the ‘pitch’ invasion, Coutts had come of age during the Great War and was of his generation: Innovative. When Morton Coutts was just 12, he built himself a fully functioning x-ray machine. The next year he built himself a two-way radio station.¹ Unlike other men for thousands of years past, Coutts did not take yeast for granted in the brewing process but investigated it. Out of this came his world-leading contribution to the art which we call ‘the continuous fermentation brewing process’.
Coutts’ enterprise’s problems had not ended with overcoming the large hurdle of entry to market. Now Waitemata had to contend with the incumbent monopolist, New Zealand Breweries which had become the beer colossus in 1923. To be allowed market entry I assume Coutts’ must have had friends in the new United Government led by Prime Minister Joseph Ward or, since he was a sick old man by now, his handlers. Within a year Coutts’ would fail to launch and have to team up with Henry Kelliher to form Dominion Breweries Ltd. in April 1930. For the meantime, on launch day, Coutts’ had to deal with Bessie Lee and her 80 or so Woke Women and their ambitions of transmutation…
“In 1929 the Coutts brothers were given a licence for a new brewery at Waitemata, to the disgust of the temperance movement. When it opened, these members of the movement prayed for the building to be turned into a flour or woollen mill.” – Protesters outside the Waitemata Brewery, 1929, Encyclopedia of New Zealand
“…over 80 women marched from the Baptist Church at Otahuhu this morning to invoke Divine intervention against the opening of the new Waitemata brewery…. Mrs Cowie called for Divine intervention. Amid the rumble of brewery machinery and the occasional rattle of bottles Mrs Cowie pleaded to God that the brewery should be converted into a flourmill, a milk factory, or even a church…In a large semi-circle the women knelt in the dust of the roadway in fervent prayer.” – Otago Daily Times, Papers Past
“But, in 1929, the prospects for the brewing industry were looking better than they had for fourty or fifty years, with prohibitionised support falling away a little in the 1928 triennial poll…And then, quite suddenly, a new major brewing company arose. With a long-time presense in New Zealand brewing, the Coutts family was granted a brewing licences and built their new Waitemata Brewery at Otahuhu.” – p70, McLauchlan (1994)
“In New Zealand Bessie Lee Cowie…soon became involved in prison reform and in socialist initiatives. She supported the formation of housewives’ unions and in 1912 was a foundation member of the United Labour Party of New Zealand. Representing women workers, she served on the first dominion executive.” – Encyclopedia of New Zealand (1996)
“…that yeast could be properly controlled if you looked on it as a human being with a brain. It has so many enzyme mechanisms to call upon to react to whatever is necessary for its survival. Instead of looking on the final product I always took notice of the yeast as an organism that produced whatever you ended up with.” – Morton Coutts, Wiki
It’s remarkable how every time you scratch the surface of Wokesters or Wowsers like Bessie Lee-Cowie there’s a hard-leftist and wealthy woman underneath. Bessie, rather than mind her own family, minded everyone elses. Like the mother in Mary Poppins, she was always going out the door to ‘save the world’ and could rely on her husband to bankroll her efforts. Bessie traveled all around New Zealand, Australia, and the entire world as part of her cause. She came to push socialism, rescue prison inmates from their lot, and stop people from being able to drink alcohol. I’m sure she would have been up to her neck in trying to get votes for women too had not her fellow Social Justice Warrior of the previous generation, Kate Sheppard, stolen that thunder back in her own day.
As usual with Victimhood Culture politics, the cry was to an Alpha male, Prime Minister Ward, to take action by revoking the license. Ward, or his flying monkeys, were not going to do that! The ink was not yet dry on the political deal they had clearly put into the works here. According to McLauchlan (1994) they did promise that there would be no more such licenses offered but that was an easy assurance to make since it’s doubtless the same thing they told the brewers! ‘Dominion’ was Ward’s political brand so it’s very interesting that this is the name adopted by the new mega-brewery given political patronage on his watch. It was Ward who re-made New Zealand in as The Dominion of New Zealand in 1907 to the chagrin of his political and cultural opposition. It was Ward’s new era the same way that Aotearoa New Zealand is a new and Left-Wing era being stamped on 2020s New Zealand without consent or consensus.
The duopolistic brewing competition was now set with no more licenses to brew issued for more than 20 years to come.
“The drug of alcohol was used as a proxy to bring down the old establishment which was the true target of what they called ‘Prohibition’. The bourgeois class sought to take hegemony over New Zealand and eliminated the nervous system of the working class community in the guise of denigrating their drinking habits.” – 1866: Charleston, AHNZ
It’s all quite ridiculous of course but that’s the hilarious nonsense of New Zealand history.
On one hand we’ve got government officials controlling something as basic and primal in human society as our civic right to let yeasts metabolise sugar. By stopping the competition in this Mercantalist economy it meant Dominion Breweries and New Zealand Breweries had a license to print money. And on the other hand we have the foolishness of Bessie and her Wowser Prohibitionists telling other people what to do in the name of God. And, calling on the power of Jesus to turn Otahuhu’s new brewery into a flower mill or possibly a woolen mill depending on what Christ thought best and so as not to be pushy and give The Lord multiple choice options for interceding! I’m not sure if these people really were that brain-dead religious as to believe in such miracles or were they abusing the church as a political gimmick? Nor do I know which would be worse!
At any rate, the Prohibitionists faded away to rise another day. Betsy rode out the rest of her activist career on more world tours thanks to the funding of her latest husband. Dominion Breweries survived the summoning of God to Otahuhu and continued the Waitamata branding well into the War as we see by the use of Adolf Hitler in their advertising…
This beer advertisement (image, right) was used many times by Dominion Breweries Ltd. but the first one I can find dates from the Auckland Star of 23 July 1934.
Nazi Germany at this point did not alarm New Zealanders and some of us even thought fascism was an example worth emulating. Ref. 1934: George Bernard Shaw Visit, AHNZ
It took Wartime propaganda to polarise Kiwis against Nazi regalia and symbols. A jumpy zealotry still with us today. In 1934 we could still be relaxed about Der Fuhrer and laugh at him and use his image to flog booze to ourselves. The Overton Window was soon to close.
So, today is a special day in New Zealand history. It was a joust between a rising power (Waitamata/DB) and the down-going power of the prohibitionists. The result of that clash set our country on a new historical direction as rival groups sought to control each other in new ways using the proxy war of controlling what substances they could consume.
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1 DB History, db.co.nz; Note: As the State made it illegal for any but children to develop radio technology it is possible that Coutts was aided by older tutors pulling the strings who would have been prosecuted had their identities been known. Our Government tends to ban new technology in preference to their being in control of it.
Image ref. Bessie Lee, Encyclopedia of New Zealand (1996)
Image ref. Waitemata Ale advertisement from WWII era. Image courtesy of the Kiwi Vintage Gasoline series, Graphics Express; History Always Repeats: Remembering New Zealand, Facebook (2015)
Image ref. DB Draught sticker, AHNZ Archives (1990s)
Ref. The Story of Beer, Gordon McLauchlan (1994)
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