WHEN John Young was asked how long he intended to hold on as chairman of the brewery that his family had bought back in 1831, he used to quip that his grandmother died when she was 112 and he had every intention of emulating her. Sadly for Young’s, for British brewing and for the business world, Mr Young could not match her for longevity: he was 85 when he lost his courageous battle against prostate cancer.

Mr Young leaves behind an enviable legacy after 44 years as chairman. He was widely known for his showmanship — the Young’s annual general meeting had drama to it thanks to Mr Young’s appearance one year in boxing gloves, another accompanied by a Dorset horn ram, another dressed in a beekeeper’s hat and, often, driving a horse-drawn dray. It is a credit to his charisma that people came for more than just the beer.

But there was soul and savvy to Mr Young, too. He was ahead of his time in his attitude to staff, setting up one of the UK’s first profit-sharing trusts. In the 1960s, before Camra had been founded, he led the battle against lager, or “gassy beer” as he called it, and was a passionate advoctae of real cask ale.

It is ironic, therefore, that his death came in the same week that Young’s ales are being brewed for the last time in Wandsworth, on a site where brewing dates back to Elizabeth I. Young’s is moving away from congested Wandsworth to have its beers brewed in a joint venture with Charles Wells in Bedford.

The move to Bedford and, discreetly, out of brewing was a triumph of “head over heart”, Mr Young said. The proceeds of the sale from Wandsworth could have been funnelled into a new brewery, of course, but Mr Young had come to appreciate that Young’s pub estate is where the real value lies. It includes some of the best pubs in London, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by the market, which yesterday marked the shares sharply higher on speculation that its chairman’s death could spark bid interest. Given the scrapping last year of the company’s B shares, which made it bid-proof, such a scenario is looking more and more likely. The shares closed last night at £30.56; when Mr Young became chairman, they were just under 22p.

After 175 years, Young’s may soon move out of family ownership, but, thanks to the extraordinary leadership of John Young, at a price he could not have contemplated when he was summoned to the family business in 1955.

Pension off

BRITAIN’S biggest pension fund, the BT Pension Scheme, is to sell £3 billion of traditional British shares in favour of alternative assets, such as hedge funds and private equity. The decision is significant, not just for BT, but for the relationship between pension funds and privately held capital in Britain.

An awful lot of advisers and fund managers are dreaming of a pension fund rush into alternative assets, given the prospect of additional fees. A lot of trustees will be reassured that a big name such as the BT scheme is doubling its exposure to the asset class from 7 per cent to 15 per cent.

But unlike any other fund, most of the £38 billion liabilities of the BTPS are underwritten by taxpayers under a recently revealed deal made at the time of the BT privatisation in 1984. When pondering a pioneering move into new territory, it must be comforting to know that even in the unlikely event of BT going bust, the Treasury is there as a backstop.

After several months of negative or pedestrian returns by the hedge fund industry, the argument for moving pension fund money into hedge funds has eased slightly, too, even if the rationale — returns uncorrellated with traditional asset classes — remains intact. Yesterday’s bloodbath for one hedge fund, Amaranth Advisors, underlines how hedge funds are not for the faint-hearted.

If the exodus of pension funds from UK shares picks up, the impact might be softer than feared. Hedge funds, through the equity derivatives markets, and private equity funds, via listed company bids, continue to boost share prices. The redirected billions will be recycled and could still help to underpin traditional shares.

Shut the SBS

ALISTAIR DARLING’S great political skill is to take a controversial issue and make it boring. His reform plan for the Small Business Service (SBS) does the reverse: he has taken consensus and found controversy.

The Comptroller and Auditor General, the Public Accounts Committee and the CBI have all agreed that the SBS does not work. The National Audit Office deemed it ineffective, tucked away in the DTI and spawning ever more support schemes. A British Chambers of Commerce survey said it is failing on six of its seven targets.

The Darling plan only trims the organisation, regionalises some of its work and moves it “closer” to the Treasury. It should just be shut down. Small business is vital to Britain, but the Government has made this political point and then failed to deliver effective assistance. Boring as it sounds, what business needs from Westminster is lower corporate taxes and better education.

• The Bishop of Bolton has complained that Britain’s big supermarkets are promoting the “dark, negative” side of Hallowe’en. Now, he may have a point about the exploitation of our innocent young, the corrosion of their milk teeth. But the creation of need is the genius of retail. Thanks to the supermarkets, we now have a “tradition” that is fun for the family and good for the community. Roll on Grandparents’ Day, which is Saturday, September 23.

  jamesharding@thetimes.co.uk

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