John George Hann was born in 1835 at the Anchor Inn in Stoke Abbott. By the age of thirty he had acquired two mills in Colyton. He lived at the Tanyard and worked as a crop and seed merchant at the Colcombe Abbey corn mill. He married Ann Power in Branscombe in 1867 and they moved to Plymouth where he ran the Durnford Brewery.

Just a few years later the family returned to Colyton where John became a sawmill proprietor, employing 25 men and three boys in the English timber trade. Having set up a thriving corn and barley mill, sawmill and timber merchants’ businesses in Colyton and Ottery St Mary, John George left his eldest son Frederick in charge and moved to Honiton to take over a brewery that he ran with another son Lewis Henry Hann.

He purchased Fair Lawn (later Sudbury Lawn) on the High Street in 1898 for £1600. It was described as brick built house having spacious dining and drawing rooms, library, pantry, kitchen, scullery, offices with gas and water laid on large garden, croquet lawn, and pleasure grounds extending to King Street, a large stone-built stable and grazing land known as Streamers Meadows.

In addition to owning the Brewery in Mill Street, John George also acquired The Anchor, King’s Arms, Black Lion, Globe Inn, Honiton Inn, Awliscombe, Three Horseshoes, White Hart, Colyton, Tucker’s Arms, Dalwood, Royal Oak, Dunkeswell, Old Inn Kilmington, Red Lion, Luppitt and the Alphington Inn.

John George Hann died in Mill Street Honiton in 1925 and during the following year the brewery and ten public houses were taken over by the Dorsetshire Brewery Co (Sherborne) Ltd. By then Lewis Henry Hann had retired and moved to Whipton where he died in 1937. His sisters Kate and Edith Mary moved to Exmouth where they died unmarried in the 1950s. Brother, Sydney George moved to Canada where he worked as an electrician and died there 1937. Frederick Hann stayed in Colyton where he had a successful timber merchant and farming career which he continued with his sons. His sawmill provided the power for generators for the Colyton Electric Light and Power Supply company.