THANKS to a reader who lends Looking Back a history put out by the firm 50 years ago, the 200th anniversary of the founding in Blackburn of what became one of the biggest brewing empires in the North can be marked - although now only hop-flavoured memories remain of Dutton's.

According to the official history, put out by the company in 1949 when it had a chain of more than 500 pubs stretching from Lancashire and the Lake District to Yorkshire and Wearside, the company was established in 1799 at now-gone Bow Street in the town centre by Clitheroe-born Thomas Dutton and his son William.

But another record has the pair being in partnership in 1807 in a brewery in Windham Street known as Park Place and which stood near the canal bridge at Lower Audley - and evidently also in a bust-up with its owners, Edward Duckworth and William Clayton

For in May that year, they advertised in the town's newspaper that they had sacked the father and son pair as managers of their brewery and would not be answerable for any of their debts.

It is known that the following September Thomas and William entered into a partnership with a George Haworth, so it may be that it was in that year that their Salford Brewery enterprise really began though the 1949 history suggests that their apparently brief association with Haworth may have been to provide the capital for the purchase of the land on which the Duttons' brewery had been built.

Whatever, it was a risk venture - as the town already had 14 other breweries and, with Napoleon menacing England from across the Channel, the times were uncertain. But about this period, Thomas Dutton realised the value of the "tied house" system that guaranteed brewers a monopoly in their own pubs.

The first he bought was the Golden Ball at Blakey Moor, which stood where the town's magistrates' courts now are; the next was the Hare and Hounds at Lammack which still stands unlike the others - the George and Dragon in Northgate; the Lord Nelson at Salford and the Good Samaritan in Grimshaw Park - that were also among the first links in the eventually-enormous Dutton's pub chain.

Thomas Dutton died in 1815 and William in 1827 but for most of the rest of the century the business they founded was run as a family affair and real prosperity and expansion did not commence until after the First World War by when it had become a limited company and struggled through some difficult times. In 1928, Dutton's bought the Blackburn Brewery Company whose Swan Brewery - demolished in the 1960s and now the site of Larkhill Health Centre - had already absorbed Horsfall's of Brierfield and Crabtree's of Clitheroe. Eight more northern brewers were taken over in the following 30 years, helping the company to acquire more than 700 pubs and 100 off-licences, but throughout all that time one thing that hadn't altered was the brewing process for Dutton's old English ale, known as Old Ben - and later in bottled form as Oh Be Joyful' or OBJ - though its strength was reduced down the years. It was a business that made Dutton's a ripe target for one of the mega-brewers emerging in the 1960s and it was the huge and even older Whitbread Group which captured it in 1964 with a £8.3 million takeover bid.

So it was that when the Salford Brewery, which had been vastly expanded in the 1950s and 1960s, produced its last drop in 1978 as all its operations were transferred to the group's giant brewery at Samlesbury, it was of a Whitbread brand - Mackeson stout - rather than of OBJ or the light mild for which it had been famed.

And though it was revived on some of the group's beer and pubs, Blackburn's last link with the name of Dutton's disappeared when the brewery was demolished in 1986 after standing empty while the planning fight for it to become the site of Morrison's supermarket dragged on for years.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.