AFTER spotting a want-ad for bottles and labels for the OBJ beer that used to pour from the old Dutton's brewery in Blackburn, reader Mr Jim Hilton sent Looking Back this 42-year-old pub price list showing the cost of it and the other drinks sold in its chain of more than 500 pubs.

As it reveals, OBJ was a premium-priced tipple. For, selling at 1s 5d (7p) for a half-pint bottle, it still cost tuppence more than a whole pint of bitter.

Note, though, that the prices of the draught beers are for those bought in the vault - the no-frills tap-room that's hard to find on today's pub scene.

Elsewhere in the house, they would have been a penny dearer.

But what made OBJ more expensive? A clue to the answer comes in the considerable 2s 2d (11p) that drinkers had to pay for a pint of Dutton's Old Ben, costing more than twice the price of a pint of mild.

It was the draught version of the bottled OBJ and was a really strong old English ale. And, having such a high gravity, it extracted lots more in excise duty from the drinkers' pockets.

Indeed, the high alcohol content was such that the beer would last ages without going 'off'.

For, as well as boasting that Old Ben was made by exactly the same process as it was when Dutton's was founded in 1799, the brewery's records showed that 52 barrels of the ale were delivered once a year to Lovely Hall at Salesbury, near Blackburn, and that the supply lasted the household for 12 months.

Old Ben as OBJ - short for 'Oh be joyful' - followed as demand for bottled beer grew and, according to a 150th anniversary souvenir history of Dutton's, drinkers who served in the Army during the First World War would recognise that the phrase "a drop of Oh be joyful" meant beer.

Bottles of OBJ also quenched the thirst of soldiers serving in the Far East during the Second World War.

Down the years, restrictions and regulations reduced the strength of Old Ben and OBJ, but in 1949 Dutton's was boasting that the beer was still more than four-fifths as strong as it was 30 years earlier.

The OBJ emblem, seen on the 1959 price list and more clearly in the neon sign of the demolition-doomed Lord Nelson Hotel in town-centre Salford, opposite the brewery - became a trademark that symbolised the entire Dutton's business. . .to such an extent that in 1961 the new company car supplied to managing director Clifford Bowman, a velvet-green Rolls-Royce (see picture) had an 'OBJ 1' number-plate.

But if OBJ and Old Ben were dear but strong beers, how pricey were they in today's terms? Amazingly, they were not. For the 2s 2d that it cost drinkers for a pint of Old Ben in order to quench their thirsts in that memorably scorching summer of 1959 is equal to only £1.54 now and the 1s 3d they paid for a pint of lower-strength bitter is worth the equivalent of 89p now, while a shilling's worth of Dutton's mild back then is worth less 71p at today's rates. Try getting a pint of mild, bitter or super-strong ale at anywhere near those prices today and you'll find it a sobering task. And what of lager back in 1959? Evidently, there was no call for it.

Dutton's brewery produced its last beer in 1978 when all its operations were switched to the giant brewery at Samlesbury of the Whitbread group which acquired the Blackburn company in 1964. The brewery was demolished in 1986 and is now the site of Morrison's supermarket.