This photograph shows the Phoenix public house in Chantry Street, taken by Charles Wardell in 1967. All of the buildings in view were demolished to make room for the service yard and footpath to the Chantry Way shops, a considerable length of the old street and perhaps more than was warranted.

The Phoenix was a simple alehouse and the brewery that lay behind supplied its beer. The first local directory record of a brewer (and coal merchant) in Chantry Street was John Sanders in 1839 but soon after that the ownership passed to one George Diddams who in 1847 married Mary Nutley. The couple had no children and by 1859 Richard Oram Nutley, a former thatcher, was brewing there, Oram being his mother’s maiden name. The Nutley family hailed from Hurstbourne Tarrant, so doubtless Richard Oram Nutley and Mary Nutley Diddams were related.

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Richard Nutley married Ann Farmer in 1850 and had three children, including William Oram Nutley in 1857, who was to eventually take over the brewery. However, when young William was only seven his father died and, after running the brewery herself for a few years, his mother Ann married widower Reuben Cross in 1868. Curiously, both her marriages took place in Wandsworth, London, though she had been born in Hatherden. In 1872, much of the brewery was re-built which suggests the business was prosperous.

Reuben Cross was a well-known figure in Andover, a stalwart of the church choir who also performed at numerous social occasions around the town. He began as a stone carver who did much of the best carving in St Mary’s church during the course of its re-building in the 1840s. Unfortunately, one day a stray chip of stone took out one of his eyes, which put paid to a promising career. Subsequently, he became high bailiff of the county court, the registrar of marriages, a piano tuner and a teacher of music. To all this, he now added the occupation of brewer.

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However, by 1886, he was suffering bouts of depression and, though seeming in good spirits during the morning of 6 February that year, in the afternoon he took his gun into the back garden of the Phoenix inn and shot himself through the mouth, using an umbrella to push back the trigger.

His step-son William Nutley now took on the running of the brewery. A few years before, he had been a Marylebone police constable but possibly by then he was back in Andover. In 1888, he married Amy Maudrell, with whom he was to have four children.

In both 1917 and 1921, the brewery was offered unsuccessfully at auction but sold afterwards to the Winchester Brewery Co (later Marston’s). William Nutley died in 1921 but his widow remained licensee of the inn itself until 1926, when it was taken over by Archie Sevier who continued to run it until the 1950s. By then the brewery had long closed; indeed, during the 1920s period many small brewers were bought up by larger brewery companies who soon closed them down whilst retaining the real asset, the associated pubs and their customers.

The Phoenix and the adjacent buildings were demolished soon after this photograph was taken; a pity not to have saved the ancient old building to the left which surely, despite development plans, could easily have been saved; but alas, those were different times.