Place Name
Thomas Mawson (died 1714), founded what was to become Fuller’s Brewery. He was living in Chiswick by at least 1685 when he subleased property from the heirs of Thomas Urlin or Erland who had died three years earlier. Urlin himself had leased the land behind Bedford House from a Thomas Plukenett, and sometime between 1664 and 1671 started a brewhouse. In 1699 Mawson took on the tenancy and acquired the George inn, later the George and Devonshire, and two adjoining cottages for £70. And in 1701 bought the Bedford House, Chiswick Mall brewhouse. By this time the business was probably managed by his eldest son Thomas. In 1715 Thomas junior commissioned the construction of today’s Grade II listed five-storey buildings, known as Mawson’s Row, on Chiswick Lane South. In 1740 the lease passed to William Harvest of Brentford and later to Matthew Graves, who also leased many local inns. By 1745 it was known as the Griffin Hock brewery (the name purloined from another Griffin brewery that had gone bankrupt) and was a thriving business enriching the family who had maintained their business interests, so much that Thomas Mawson’s younger son Matthias (1683 – 1770), could afford to became bishop of Ely and benefactor of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Matthias’s niece Amy married Charles Purvis, who in 1791 sold the brewery to John Thompson of Chiswick, whose sons Douglas and Henry in 1829 took on another partner, Wood, and secured new capital from John Fuller of Neston Park, in Wiltshire, when the business ran into trouble.