G. & H. Hall Lda.

G. & H. Hall Lda. was a British-owned company, believed to have been founded in 1891, which manufactured carbonated drinks in Lisbon. It transferred to the Santa Apolónia area in 1898 taking over a plot north of the railway line and including the disused Fort of Santa Apolónia, which has now been converted into a horticultural garden. The land was formerly part of the Quinta do Manique and the Halls purchased it from the Counts of S. Vicente. It became popularly known as Quinta dos Pirolitos, because of the drinks sold by the Halls.

The Hall family in Lisbon goes back to at least 1864, when two infant children of George Alexander Hall (1832-1917) and Mary Anne Hall (died 1907) were buried in the British cemetery. A Thomas George Hall married Clara Hale at St. George's Church in 1858 and may have been related. George and Mary's son, another George Alexander Hall (1859-1924), who was married to Jane Margaret (1866-1953), appears to have been the original owner of the factory and he later passed on the company to one of his brothers, Henry Malpas Hall (1869-1938). After Henry’s death in 1938, the factory remained in the possession of the widows of George and Henry and of three children of the founder; Violet, George (died 1969), and Cecil (1907-1970). In the 1960s Cecil was still in the drink business as the managing director of CIREL – Conçórcio Industrial de Refrigerantes Portugueses, which made both fizzy drinks and fruit juices, and seems to have been formed as a result of a merger between Halls and other companies. The surname of Hall is still found in Portugal.

Halls produced lemonades, tonic waters and pirolitos. It was customary for young people to go to collect lemons free of charge from the factory after they had had their peel removed for use in the manufacturing process. The pirolitos used the invention of Hiram Codd (1838-1887) who, in 1872, patented a bottle filled under gas pressure, which pushed a glass ball against a rubber washer in the neck, creating a seal for the contents. The bottle had no cork or cap. To take a drink you had to push the glass marble down to release the gas and allow the liquid to escape.

These became known as Codd bottles and were widely used in Britain and Portugal, where the bottles produced in factories in Marinha Grande were sent to drink producers in Aveiro; Barreiro; Estremoz; Espinho; Coimbra; Sesimbra; Marinha Grande: and Lourinhã, to name but a few. However, in the late 1950s they were declared to be a health hazard as the bottle design made it very difficult to clean the bottles that had been returned to the drinks factories. Many of the soft-drink manufacturers closed in the early 1960s as a consequence, despite the fact that they enjoyed considerable protection under the Estado Novo, Coca-Cola not being allowed in Portugal until 1977. Not only did young boys lose their fizzy drinks but they also lost a common source of balls to play the game of marbles, as they had often broken bottles to get the marbles.

The Codd bottle provides one suggested derivation for the origin of the word codswallop (lies, rubbish or nonsense, for the benefit of our Portuguese readers). Wallop was a slang term for beer, thus Codd’s Wallop, or lemonade, was seen as an inferior product to beer. This derivation is widely disputed, but no other more convincing origin has been found. What is clear is that it was popularised in an episode of Hancock’s Half Hour in 1959, although the writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, said that it was commonly used at the time and they did not invent it.

Sources: Several sources were consulted. A special thanks to Pedro Ferreira for the photograph and particular thanks to our member, John Pead, for information about the British Cemetery records, as well as to Bruce Dawson and Edward Godfrey.