The Brothers of the Charterhouse are entitled to a glass of beer with their meals. But there was a time when this privilege extended to pupils of Charterhouse school too.

In the following article, published in the Evening News in 1935, the Dean of Westminster pines for the not-so-distant days when a Charterhouse pupil’s diet consisted of bread, cheese and beer.

This, he claims, is what Old Carthusians John Wesley and Baden-Powell would have had not only for lunch and dinner, but also for breakfast. According to the Dean of Westminster, this diet “rarely did anybody any harm”.

Beer was provided as part of the Brothers’ daily diet from the 17th century onwards. By the 1890s the Brothers’ drank beer brewed at the Star Brewery in Romford, a bottle of which features in our museum.