Categories
Beer history Generalisations about beer culture

What is the evolutionary advantage of booze?

A fun question to ask of any apparently irrational human behaviour is “What’s the evolutionary advantage?” Consider drunkenness, for example.

Ray recently read William Golding’s 1955 novel The Inheritors. It’s about a band of Neanderthals struggling for survival in the forests of prehistoric Europe as a new threat emerges – Homo sapiens, AKA modern man, AKA us.

It’s an extremely thought-provoking book in many ways as Golding attempts to demonstrate that the seeds of modern human behaviour, from war to capitalism, have long roots. But of course the thing that stood out for Ray, and that got us talking, is its treatment of drinking.

The Neanderthals (who think of themselves as “the people”) don’t drink alcohol because they don’t have the technology to make it, sophisticated as they are in many ways.

When “the new people” turn up, however, two Neanderthals, Lok and Fa, observe them as they gather round their campfire at night after a day’s trekking. We see what’s going on through Lok’s eyes:

His nose caught the scent of what they drank. It was sweeter and fiercer than the other water, it was like the fire and the fall. It was a bee-water, smelling of honey and wax and decay, it drew toward and repelled, it frightened and excited like the people themselves… The girl Tanakil was lying in front of one of the caves, flat on her back as if she were dead. A man and a woman were fighting and kissing and screeching and another man was crawling round and round the fire like a moth with a burnt wing. Round and round he went, crawling, and the other people took no notice of him but went on with their noise.

They’re drinking some form of mead from beakers – which the Neandarthals, who don’t even have the simple technology of cups, conceive of as round stones. This orgy of drunkenness continues for several pages until the humans drift off to their caves, or sneak off to shag in the woods.

It’s easy to imagine Golding making observations, and taking notes, in the pubs of Salisbury on Saturday night. He was also an alcoholic and had plenty of personal experience of how it felt to binge yourself silly.

Later in the book, Lok and Fa find a jar of mead abandoned in a human camp and get drunk themselves. Golding reiterates the point that the liquid is repellent and attractive at the same time. It burns, but in a way that is strangely addictive.

Having previously been peaceful, rather gentle creatures, the mead also immediately makes them aggressive, competitive, bold, and – this seems important – visionary. Lok finds himself having big ideas, and envisioning great success, the limits of his mind having expanded.

Unfortunately, he also finds that he cannot walk in a straight line and that the trees themselves have become unstable. And the next morning, he has his first hangover: “Lok opened his eyes and yelped with pain for he seemed to be looking straight into the sun.”

Why did we evolve to get drunk?

Golding’s book is fiction, and it’s old. To answer this question we sought some more recent, more academic texts.

Unsurprisingly, it’s been much discussed, often with a focus on understanding why people today (like Golding) might be driven to drink so much, and so often, that it becomes harmful.

This paper from 2023 describes it as an ‘evolutionary’ mismatch: something that was useful in the early days of the species, when resources were scarce, is less helpful in an age of abundance.

This is also the argument for why we crave sugar and fat, both of which are bad for us. In the deep past, we evolved to consume as much as sugar and fat as possible, when it was available, to see us through winter, or periods of famine.

In the case of booze, the suggestion is that perhaps we evolved to be attracted to the smell of ethanol because it might help us find rotting fruit, and so find the trees from which it had fallen. Or, related to the point above, eating rotten, alcoholic fruit might have given us the munchies, stimulating our appetites, so we would consume even more fat and sugar.

Another suggestion is that the ability to process ethanol was itself an evolutionary advantage, meaning that some of our ancestors could eat the ‘bad’ fruit that had fallen on the ground. 

Individuals who could “metabolise ethanol” could eat more, and continue to function while pissed. So, at a very fundamental level, we learned to associate drunkenness with pleasure and satisfaction.

But what about getting drunk together, as a social activity?

But why did we evolve to go to the pub together?

One paper from 2017 suggests that there are multiple benefits attached to getting drunk deliberately, together:

[There] is an implicit assumption that its hedonic (physiological reward) and anxiolytic (reduction of anxiety or stress) properties are the main reasons for its universal use. However, alcohol also plays an important role in social contexts by reducing our social inhibitions, as well as being a potent trigger of the endorphin system… In other words, it functions much like the many other behavioural mechanisms (including laughter, singing, dancing and storytelling…) that are used to trigger the endorphin system so as to facilitate large-scale (i.e. communal as opposed to dyadic) social bonding. The other possibility is that alcohol in some way affects our social or cognitive skills in ways that allow us to function more effectively in social situations.

We think this can be interpreted to mean that societies which drink together become stronger overall, as a unit, and so gain a competitive advantage over other ‘tribes’.

From our own perspective, as generally well-behaved, rather uptight 20th century specimens, there’s something in this.

When we’re tipsy with friends and relatives, we express our feelings more freely. It helps us resolve conflicts and strengthen connections.

And, of course, we know many couples who got together after, in effect, drinking mead together around the campfire before sneaking off into the woods.

Main image adapted from the profile of the restoration of the head of a Neanderthal man via the Wellcome Collection.

Categories
Beer history pubs

The Iron Duke and the battle for a union for bar staff

For an ambitious politician in 1930s Liverpool, wealthy brewers were a tempting target, and underpaid bar staff a potential source of power.

When we’re trying to understand what life was like in pubs and breweries in the past local working class histories can be an excellent source.

For example, there’s My Liverpool by Frank Shaw, published in 1971. It contains a hundred or so individual entries, each under their own headings, reflecting the author’s memories and impressions of life in the city during the 20th century.

On a recent dip into this book, which has no index and no real structure, we came across a passage about a local Labour politician and later Lord Mayor of Liverpool, Luke Hogan.

If we measure it by 21st century standards, Hogan is something of a forgotten figure: his Wikipedia page is barely more than a stub. That makes Shaw’s rambling, personal, first-hand observations all the more interesting.

First, he tells us, Hogan was known as ‘The Iron Duke’ not because of his aristocratic bearing, though he was apparently lordly, despite his upbringing in the slums, but simply because it rhymes with ‘Luke’.

He then goes onto say:

When I first met him in the Thirties he was working on the marvellous but hopeless task of organising barmen and barmaids in a union.

Shaw then rambles away from this intriguing point for a while, giving us a broader portrait of Hogan as a sharp political operator with street smarts – like a character from The Wire or, dare we say it, Peaky Blinders.

He then loops back to explain Hogan’s particular interest in pubs:

The licensee [of The Maid of Erin] was the brother of Luke who was a powerful man on the local Watch Committee, well liked by all policemen… Yes, Luke’s defunct school of politicians never missed anything. We could drink after hours because Luke was a magistrate and on the licensing committee. Police, pubs and schools he saw from the outset to be the sources of power and personal repute.

The battle for a barmen’s union

For more detail on Hogan’s campaign to establish a union for bar staff we have to dig around in the newspaper archives. A piece in the Belfast Telegraph from 8 October 1935 has Hogan speaking at a joint meeting of the National Union of Distribute and Allied Workers (NUDAW) and the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union (Barmen’s Branch):

Alderman Luke Hogan… described the distributive trade as the biggest sweated industry in the British Isles. Since the year 1922, the workers in this class of industry had increased by over 50 per cent, and of the total number more than 50 per cent were under the age of 21. The industries were expanding, and every big firm, combine and trust was making profits of a phenomenal character. But despite those features, the tenure of employment was shorter, for it was a “blind” occupation into which thousands were brought in at 14 and discarded when they became 18… In a reference to the men and women engaged in public houses, Alderman Hogan, said that if they had barmen as strong as the liquor they sold was weak it would not be long before they took a great step forward in bettering their conditions.

In 1944, Shaw mentions in passing, Hogan angered members of the local Brewers’ Society by surveying NUDAW members employed in their pubs. There’s more on this incident in the newspapers, too: they took Hogan to court.

The questionnaire asked pub managers for details of wages, living conditions, weekly sales, and the number of staff. As far as the brewers were concerned, this was commercially sensitive information, and confidential.

At a hearing in April 1945 Hogan’s defence counsel said:

It is simply an attempt… to uphold and maintain the policy of the brewers to oppose the formation of a trade union. It has been an effective step, and has resulted in the temporary obstruction of the union, and they may feel some justification in that. But I submit this action has no legal foundation. This is the kind of action against which the unions are protected by the Trade Disputes Act.

Hogan’s own testimony (Liverpool Daily Post, 27 April 1945) helpfully fills in some gaps in the story:

[He] said at various times he had attempted to build up an organisation among the workers in the brewing industry. Other unions had made similar efforts, but all got tired of wasting money… Dealing with the effort to establish a Joint Industrial Council, witness said the suggestion was that machinery should be set up to deal exclusively with the on-licensed trade, covering all employees in the trade. The invitation to join in the effort was sent to the plaintiff companies, with the exception of Bent’s, who had always been hostile to organisation in the trade, and it was thought it would be a waste of time to trouble with them. Nothing developed in the way of forming an Industrial Council. In November 1940, there was a largely attended meeting of public-house managers and barmen and others to interest them in the formation of a trade union.

In May 1945, the court declared that Hogan was wrong to ask for information about turnover and staff costs, and shouldn’t do it again. If he did, the brewers could come back to court for an injunction. But he was free to continue to ask individuals about their pay and conditions. (Liverpool Echo, 16 May 1945.)

Bobbing about (we’ve put this in clearer order than it appears in the book) Shaw tells us that after World War II, and after his stint as Lord Mayor, Hogan continued his association with pubs and booze:

I was in Luke’s company in the Forties with other heavy drinkers in the home of a prominent Liverpool businessman. The businessman was temporarily out of the room. His wife, much younger than he, clearly resented his generosity to us, though she must have known, as we did, that he wouldn’t give anything to anyone for nothing. She said: ‘I think you gentlemen should pay for your drinks.’… Luke, elegant as ever, carefully put his drink down and looked down at her, murmuring softly: ‘Madam, you forget. I am a magistrate. If you charge one penny for a drink in this unlicensed room I shall have to summon the police.’

In 1971, Shaw had this to say about the long-term effects of Hogan’s campaign on behalf of bar staff:

[They], especially the barmaids, in Liverpool, remain among the poorest paid workers.

Half a century later again, there are unions bar staff can join, and an active campaign to encourage them to do so. But it remains an ongoing battle.

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Beer history bristol pubs

Pubs and breweries in Bristol Archives

After almost seven years in this city, we finally made it to the Bristol Archives in January 2024, to see what they had on pubs and beer.

When we were researching 20th Century Pub in particular we visited archives in a number of cities, looking in particular for information about the construction of pubs and social housing in the interwar and post war periods. 

Sometimes, we’d also stumble across other interesting titbits, particularly in brewery minutes.

Once, Jess even found an ancestor of hers mentioned in the board minutes of Barclay Perkins, although the story wasn’t particularly relevant to the book.

We knew from some pre-visit enquiries that the Bristol Archives does not hold brewery records for Georges (Courage) or any of its predecessor breweries.

There were some bits and pieces relating to Smiles brewery, which will add to our incomplete but growing history.

We also enjoyed looking at huge rolled-up plans for post-war council estates indicating the locations of pubs, and there’s perhaps a story to be told sometime about the pubs that were planned but didn’t get built.

It looks as if there was a fourth pub planned for Southmead, for example, but we don’t know anything more about it at this stage.

Possibly the most colourful material we found were various police and licensing records.

There’s a lot there and the organisation of the material is a little confusing. This is not the Archive’s fault but a result of the police divisions in Bristol seeming to switch about and alter their systems of recordkeeping every five minutes.

Even so, we found lots of interesting nuggets around investigating licence complaints, including quite a few records of the police dropping in, just in case.

When were you last in a pub when a constable turned up on his rounds?

We were also reminded that the police also took notice if you were not open during your licensed hours, recording instances of pubs being slow to open in the morning:

“Sergeant Edward Midwinter… reports that at 11:10 am 22nd December 1913, he observed that the Pilgrim [public house] New Thomas Street, Saint Philips, was closed for the sale of intoxicating liquor.”

What we’re not clear on is why.

Nothing we’ve read so far suggests that pubs could get in trouble for being late to open. Generally, the emphasis is on them staying open after they’re meant to be shut, or opening earlier than their permitted hours.

Paul Jennings’s article ‘Policing Public Houses in Victorian England’ from 2013 is a good piece on this.

From our brief glance over the Bristol records, though, we got a faint impression that being late to open was perhaps an indicator of a generally unruly house.

Why might they be late to open? Perhaps because they’d been late to close the night before.

Anyway, we’d be all for the police keeping notes on pubs that fail to open when their Google profile says they will. Throw the book at ‘em! (Because this is the internet: we are obviously joking.)

Most frustrating was confirmation that the Courage records do exist but were withdrawn from the Archive in the 1990s. We contacted the person who withdrew them (their contact details are in the catalogue) and they confirmed that these papers are in “deep storage” and inaccessible to researchers.

We feel pleased that we finally made it to the archive and found it very friendly and helpful, and might make a return visit sometime with more focus.

We’ve got copies of 20th Century Pub for sale at £12 including UK postage and packing. And you get a free Pierre van Klomp zine with each one, too. Email us to sort out payment, inscriptions, and so on.

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Beer history london pubs

The best London pubs of 1850

If your unreliable TARDIS dumped you in London in 1850, where would you go for a pint?

We’ve come across an old guide book that, for once, gives a straight answer.

Peter Cunningham’s Handbook of London was first published in two volumes in 1849, then condensed into a single volume in 1850.

First, it recommends hotels, including:

“…among the old inns, the Golden Cross, at Charing-cross, and Gerard’s Hall Inn, Bread-street, Cheapside.”

The beer and wine vaults at Gerard’s Hall via the Yale Center for British Art.

Gerard’s Hall Inn sounds fascinating – might we, through 21st century eyes, think of it as a pub?

It doesn’t quite feel like it from what we’ve been able to read. But you certainly get a pint there.

What really interested us was a section titled ‘Breweries and Beer in London’.

First, the author first lists great breweries:

  • Barclay Perkins, Southwark 
  • Meux, Tottenham Court Road 
  • Combe Delafield, Long Acre
  • Whitbread, Chiswell Street
  • Truman, Hanbury & Buxton, Brick Lane
  • Goding, Lambeth
  • Reid, Liquorpond Street (!)
  • Calvert, Upper Thames Street
  • Elliot, Pimlico

He adds this suggestion:

“The visitor should exert his influence among his friends to obtain an order of admission to any one of the largest I have named.”

Brewers, how would you feel about a bunch of top-hatted toffs turning up at your premises for a nose around?

Then, finally, we get a list of four pubs.

Two are suggested for the “best London porter and stout in draught”:

  • Cock Tavern, Fleet Street
  • The Rainbow Tavern, opposite

And two more are those which “Judges of ale recommend”:

  • John O’Groats, Rupert Street
  • The Edinburgh Castle, Strand

The latter was famous as the founding place of Punch magazine.

Of the four, only The Cock survives.

You could go there for a pint this weekend if you wanted, although whether you’ll find any draught porter is hard to say.

Categories
Beer history pubs

Thomas Walker, Victorian London’s “female barman”

It was only when barman Thomas Walker was arrested in London in February 1867 that anyone who knew him learned he had been born Mary Anne Walker.

Let’s pause here to say that writing about historic cases of gender nonconformity can get complicated. We don’t know whether Thomas Walker was a trans man, although it does seem likely based on the available evidence. And Thomas Walker was only one of several names by which he went. But we’ve chosen to use he/him, and the name Thomas, throughout this post.

Thomas’s story has been written about quite extensively by scholars of LGBTQ+ history, alongside other historic examples of people who did not conform to the gender norms of the period.

But there’s something quite pleasing about the fact that we learned about it from a 19th century printed ballad sheet of much as we might have done at the time.

The one we read was in a reprint of Curiosities of Street Literature by C.J. Hindley, which collects rare surviving examples of ballad sheets. It is also available online as part of the Bodleian Library’s online collection.

The Bodleian explains ballad sheets like this:

Broadside ballads, printed cheaply on one side of a sheet of paper from the earliest days of printing, contain song-lyrics, tunes and woodcut illustrations and bear news, prophecies, histories, moral advice, religious warnings, political arguments, satire, comedy and bawdy tales. Sold in large numbers on street-corners, in town-squares and at fairs by travelling ballad-singers and pinned on the walls of alehouses and other public places, they were sung, read and viewed with pleasure by a wide audience, but have been handed-down to us in only small numbers.

They tended to focus on the gruesome, titillating and apocryphal, and the ‘The Life and Career of Mary Ann Walker the Female Barman!’ is no different. It gets much mileage from the phallic qualities of beer pump handles, for example, in line with the general tendency of the time to sexualise barmaids.

For anything like facts, however, we need to go (relatively) upmarket and look at the newspaper archives. Here’s how the story was reported at the time:

A female barman A well-dressed and smart-looking person, who gave the name of Thomas Walker, was placed at the bar at Southwark Police Court, charged with stealing money belonging to Mr. Frederick Brown, landlord of the Royal Mortar Tavern, London Road, Southwark, the master of the accused… The prosecutor deposed that the prisoner entered his service as a barman three months ago, having a good character. Latterly, however, witness had occasion to suspect his honesty; consequently, he marked several half-crowns, shillings, and sixpences and placed them in the till and on the sideboard. In the course of Friday morning, he missed money from the latter place, which induced him to send for a constable, and give the prisoner into custody… Mr. Keene, the governor of the gaol, had an interview with his worship during the day and shared that when the prisoner was brought to him, he was ordered to the bathroom with the other men. On the passage there he declined taking the bath and, on being questioned, said that ‘he’ was a female… She admitted to him that she had donned the male attire upward of three years, and that before becoming a barman she had been a ship’s steward two years… Mr. Woolrych remarked that he had not the slightest suspicion of the prisoner’s sex. He took her to be a young man.

Numerous newspapers including Kentish Chronicle, 23 February 1867

The pub at which Thomas Walker worked for three months is recorded in the vast and comprehensive Survey of London, available online via the UCL school of architecture:

At the corner of Plumstead Road and Woolwich New Road, where a milestone marked ‘IX Miles from London’, there was another public house, first built as the Mortar soon after construction of the New Road. Used for the Royal Artillery officers’ mess before their barracks mess room was built in 1783, it came to be called the Royal Mortar Tavern. It was rebuilt in 1842 with a curved corner and, to the east, a house with a baker’s shop that survives, little altered, as 2 Plumstead Road. A low range facing the New Road was replaced in 1890–1 with the Royal Mortar Hotel…

As an aside, whenever you research a Victorian pub you’re bound to find an advertisement or two like this:

The Plumstead & Woolwich FANCY RABBIT SOCIETY… The summer show of the above Society will take place on Monday, October 4th, 1858, at the Royal Mortar Tavern, Beresford Square, when some of the longest eared rabbits ever exhibited by any Society will be produced…

Kentish Independent, 2 October 1858

At the time, Thomas Walker tended to be talked about as a rogue and adventurer, living an outlaw life. With hindsight, we can sense that it was a pretty desperate existence.

He moved constantly from job to job, from name to name, with constant threat of ‘discovery’ by prying landladies or acquaintances.

Once he had become famous, this became more difficult. Throughout the late 1860s, newspapers delighted in reporting that ‘the female barman’ had been found out again, and taken to court.

Eventually, he made some attempts to capitalise on his reluctant fame. In 1870 he went into business with one Solomon Abrahams with the idea of being the celebrity landlord of a pub in Shoreditch. Walker ended up in court again after a dispute over the takings with Solomon. (Lake’s Falmouth Packet and Cornwall Advertiser, 15 January 1870.)

Eventually, perhaps having run out of options, in the 1870s, Thomas began performing as Mary Walker, “the original Female Barman”, on the music hall stage.

By the end of that decade, traces of Walker in the newspaper archives peter out. The last account, from 1879, suggests that he had taken to working in pubs as a novelty attraction:

A Walsall innkeeper has published an announcement in which he states that he has made special arrangements with Miss Mary Walker, the renowned female barman, to serve behind the bar from and after Monday, the 7th April next, until further notice…

Monmouthshire Merlin, 11 April 1879

Difficult as Walker’s life might have been, it doesn’t sound as if he ever really compromised.

We’ll finish with a newspaper report from 1870 about life on the notorious New Cut behind Waterloo Station. It’s a nasty, sneering piece, whose authors encounter Walker serving in a neighbourhood pub:

All have heard of Mary Walker, the Female Barman. On the occasion of our visit we betook ourselves to a house to gaze on this romantic being. Oh! delicious sensation, to receive a brandy and soda from her delicate fingers, and to witness the fragile form of one of the gentler sex, attired comme nous! We were waited upon by a coarse, brewer-like potman, with upturned sleeves, short crop, arms of beef-steak colour, using language quite in character with the district, and learned afterwards, to our disgust, that we had been gazing on the Female Barman for at least 10 minutes without being aware of the fact. The blissful illusion was dispelled.

South London Press, 1 January 1870

For all the disgust the writers intend to display, doesn’t that sound to you like someone being, against the odds and despite expectations, completely themselves?