Experienced in Cuxhaven

Message in a bottle ?!

Teachers take holidays too, from time to time anyway, and this autumn we were driven to the North Sea, precisely to Cuxhaven-Duhnen. It's a suburb right by the sea, with a beautiful beach promenade and, because I'm a "camper", lots of very nice campsites right on the beach.
You can't really call it a beach, because at this time of year the water is actually too cool for swimming, and besides, I feel very uncomfortable in swimming trunks. But the main problem is that the water is not there half the time, because then it's low tide, and you can walk for miles out into the mudflats, wearing only rubber boots (or barefoot, if you dare). Anyway, at low tide (!!) we often walked very far out into the mudflats, on some days about 7-8 km, just straight ahead. You are in the fresh sea air, you can feel the endless horizon and you can switch off so wonderfully (that's exactly why I was there...) Well, and on one of these tours I found it, an old glass bottle, full of barnacles and covered with silt.
It was closed with a screw cap and I already thought of a message in a bottle with a call for help from a shipwrecked man or at least a treasure map.

 But unfortunately the bottle was empty. But on the outside I could decipher some letters under the barnacles like "North Shields" and on the back the name "WA Wilkinson". After the holiday, I went on the internet and did some research. North Shields is a coastal town in the north of England and on the town's website I learned that there must have once been a Wilkinson brewery.

So I wrote an email to the city administration and got the following answer the very next day:

Hello Mr. Schirmer

It is very interesting to hear from you regarding the Wilkinson Factory
bottle that you have found in Germany.
Unfortunately we have no records for this company in our stock and we believe that they do not survive at any
location. It is only a few years ago that we approached a member of the
family for information to be told that they know of no surviving company
records.

The company of W. A. Wilkinson operated in North Shields on the River Tyne
from late 19th century until 1941 when the building was, to all intents and
purposes, destroyed by the Luftwaffe in an air raid accompanied by a great
loss of life.

I do not believe that the company reopened after World War II.

Yours faithfully

Alan Hildrew

Local Studies Centre
Central Library
Northumberland Square
North Shields
Tyne & Wear

NE30 1QU

And then he added two more pictures, a picture of the brewery after the bombing and another advertisement of the company from an old newspaper (1901).

So this old beer bottle could have an insane age if the company hasn't brewed beer since 1941 because the German Luftwaffe destroyed the factory in WWII. And now, as a German English teacher, I found this bottle....

"Light of the North Sea Beach"

"Fountain of Youth