Richard John Saunders: The Brewer Behind Wallington’s Local Ales

Richard John Saunders was born in 1885 into a family already closely connected with one of Wallington’s best-known local businesses: the Wallington Brewery.

The brewery stood at the bottom of Drift Road and had been operating since the nineteenth century. Fareham Borough Council records that the well-known Saunders Brewery was owned and managed by H. H. and R. J. Saunders and supplied many pubs in the surrounding area.

Richard inherited the business alongside his brother Herbert Henry Saunders. Licensing records show the two brothers as owners by 1905, following the death of their father. Together they continued running the brewery through the early decades of the twentieth century.

The brewery was more than a small workshop. Surviving descriptions record a substantial complex with a brewhouse, maltings, cellars, boiler house and chimney. One of the principal brewery buildings carried the initials of the Saunders family and the date 1888.

Its beer was sold through a network of local public houses, making the Saunders family part of the everyday social life of Fareham and the surrounding villages. Long before national brewing companies dominated the market, breweries such as Wallington supplied pubs that were closely tied to their own communities.

The business continued through two world wars, but in 1944 Herbert and Richard sold the brewery and its associated public houses. Brewing at Wallington ended shortly afterwards.

Richard lived until 1972.

His memorial at St Peter & St Paul preserves the name of a man connected with one of Fareham’s vanished industries. The brewery itself has gone, but some of its buildings survive in residential use at Wallington.

Through Richard John Saunders, the church is connected with a time when beer sold in Fareham pubs could have been brewed only a short distance away beside the Wallington River.