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Beer history london pubs

Apartheid in London pubs

Dog Star Brixton, aka the Atlantic, by Ewan M.

In the 1950s and 60s, pubs in London frequently refused to serve black customers, and thus became the focus for protests.

Enrico Stennett, who came to Britain from Jamaica in 1947, took part in several organised protests around Brixton, Camberwell and Peckham. Writing about it in 2010, the year before he died, he recalled provoking landlords in to revealing their racism by sending in a white companion, who would get served, and then trying to buy a drink himself, only to be turned down. At this point, picketing would commence.

In 1963, a group of protesters (ten white and one black) were charged with using threatening words at a protest outside the George Inn in Brixton.  Not only were they were cleared but the magistrate described the ‘colour bar’ in operation as ‘revolting and repulsive’. ‘The magistrate wants to come and live down here for a few weeks before criticising,’ said the landlord. ‘I don’t operate a colour bar, but I am making sure the blacks don’t take over my pub like they have some in the area.’ (Daily Express, 7 December 1963.)

There is a detailed account of 1965 protests against a colour bar at the Dartmouth Arms, Forest Hill, Lewisham, on this blog. On that occasion, the Mayor of Lewisham joined the protesters and walked out of the pub in protest when they refused to serve him because he was accompanied by Melbourne Goode, who was black. The landlord, Harold Hawes, was defiant: ‘The funny thing is that I am not against coloured people. I have taken a consensus of opinion of the people that use the saloon and they don’t want to have coloureds using it… I feel that my trade has increased because people know that they won’t find coloured people in my saloon bar.’

In 1965, it became illegal to refuse to serve someone because of their colour, but that didn’t stop landlords doing so grudgingly and then, for example, making a big show of destroying glasses from which black customers had drunk.

The Atlantic in Brixton, however, is an example of where protests paid off: at some point before 1963 (though we can’t find precise dates or a reliable account of what happened) protesters appealed to the brewery over the landlord’s racism and he was kicked out. His replacement was from the West Indies. By 1974, Martin Green and Tony White were recommending the Atlantic in their Evening Standard Guide to London Pubs: ‘with its recent, much-needed facelift and live, spontaneous jazz, the Atlantic is a predominantly West Indian pub, with its customers spilling out of the bars and on to the pavement. The nearest thing in London to a New Orleans bar.’

Geoff Parker says that, after that, it came to be known as ‘Brixton’s most visible black pub’, until the gentrification/regeneration of Brixton got underway in the nineties when it refurbished with the help of a government grant and renamed Dogstar. The intention was, in Parker’s words,  ‘a white clientele’, while commenters here put it more bluntly: it was transformed ‘from an old black geezer’s pub into a fashionable white kids’ hangout’.

It burned down in riots in 1995 and, after yet another refurbishment, is now part of the Antic chain.

Picture of Dogstar, aka The Atlantic, Brixton, by Ewan.

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Beer history

Geeky bubble, overpriced beer

Sign advertising real ale in London, 2007.

People sometimes criticise ‘craft beer’ for being a bubble or niche; for being the preserve of a small group of geeks, obsessed with obscure, strong beers; paying outrageous prices for them in trendy, specialist outlets; and not interested in ‘normal’ drinking in their local. Now, why does that sound familiar?

…the Fox in Hermitage… [boasts] a battery of beer pumps that would keep a CAMRA-man boring away for hours… Three brews from Courages, Lowenbrau lager on draught, Worthington, Morlands and even John Smith’s Yorkshire bitter at 36p a pint. That’s just a sample and I’d not even heard of some of the bottled varieties… The pints in the White Horse — a less pretentious and more typical village pub — are from Morlands. Better kept in my opinion than at beerarama down the road, and only 29p for bitter in the public, as against 34p in the saloon in the Fox.

The Daily Express, 6 August 1978.

The Goose and Firkin found a ready market, predominantly young, affluent and mobile with most customers coming from outside the area. The Campaign for Real Ale called the pub ‘too crowded, too noisy and too expensive’. Prices were certainly aimed at the top end of the market, with beers such as Mind Bender and Knee Trembler made at much stronger levels than most national brands.

The Financial Times, 24 February, 1982.

Only 33 per cent of those questioned had heard of CAMRA… and 70 per cent said they would not go out of their way to find a pint of ‘real ale.’

NOP Market Research: The British Pub 1977, as reported in the FT, 29 July 1977.

The Campaign for Real Ale… achieved considerable publicity and was largely responsible for forcing the brewers to re-think their marketing strategies. However, of the 78 per cent of beer sales classified as draught, only about 14 per cent is accounted for by ‘real ale’. This share is likely to be maintained but it is not expected to expand greatly.

The Financial Times, 21 March 1979.

In the Shires Bar opposite Platform Six at London’s St Pancras Station, yesterday, groups of earnest young men sipped their pints with the assurance of wine tasters… There were nods of approval for the full bodied Sam Smith Old Brewery Bitter, and murmurs of delight at the nutty flavour of the Ruddles County beer… In one corner sat four young men sipping foaming pints. They were members of CAMRA… and prove their dedication by travelling three nights a week from Fulham in South West London — four miles away. One of them, 22-year-old accountant Michael Morris, said: ‘This place beats any of our local pubs.’

The Daily Express, 03 April 1978.

The real ale champs launched a bitter attack on greedy pub landlords yesterday — and ended up over a barrel themselves… The Campaign for Real Ale slammed pubs that cashed in on the craze then admitted that its own London pub charged at least 10p too much for an extra-strong brew.. the beer that caught CAMRA’s experts on the hop was the 70p-a-pint Theakston’s Old Peculier served up at the Nag’s Head in Hampstead… But landlord Steve Ellis was quick to scotch claims that he was profiteering… “We have to buy Old Peculier through an agency and it costs us a lot,” he said… [Roger] Protz said several pubs in Central London had been barred from the guide for cashing in on the real ale revival… One Whitehall pub charged 51p for a pint of Ruddles County and another in the West End sold Fuller’s London Pride for 44p. Both beers cost up to 9p less elsewhere, said Mr Protz.

The Daily Mirror, 18 April 1979.

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture opinion

Craft Fish Guts

Sturgeon by David Torcivia, from Flickr under a Creative Commons License.
There was a bit of a to-do the other week when a UK TV show about food production suggested that isinglass finings represented some kind of ‘dark side’ of the brewing industry. (We didn’t see it — we gathered this from the miniature Twitter storm that ensued.) Isinglass is made from the swim bladders of fish, so we’ll acknowledge that there is a certain ‘ick’ factor, but it’s been used in British brewing for a long time and isn’t something we have any problem with at all.

This 1978 article from CAMRA’s What’s Brewing, however, suggests that not only is isinglass harmless, but that brewers could be going a little further and making it part of their ‘craft’ schtick:

On the first floor of Godson’s Brewery… head brewer Rob Adams takes what looks like a large flat sea shell from a sideboard drawer… It is the dried bladder of a sturgeon fish… Mr Adams makes his own finings from sturgeon bladders, bought at £7 a pound and mixed with water in a large plastic dustbin.

Do any brewers these days make their own isinglass from scratch? And would a really ‘crafty’ brewery perhaps go a step further and have a saltwater pond full of fish in the back yard…?

Ian Mackey, author of this very useful book, has very kindly provided us with a treasure trove of useful clippings from this period, so expect a few more nuggets in weeks to come.

Picture by David Torcivia, from Flickr, under a Creative Commons License.

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Blogging and writing

Previously on Boak and Bailey’s Beer Blog

BBC test card.

We’re having a couple of days off blogging because of annoying real life deadlines and commitments so, in the meantime, here are a few things you might have missed from the last month or two.

CAMRA et al

Places

Beer and brewing

Miscellaneous ponderingsand silliness

See you on the other side….

Categories
Beer history Generalisations about beer culture opinion

Barmaid as Sex Object

Detail from the cover of London Pub Guide, 1968.
Detail from the cover of London Pub Guide, 1968.

In, we think, around 1970, Cyril Hughes entered and won a competition in left-wing magazine The New Statesman. His contribution was this couplet:

Not turning taps, but pulling pumps,
Gives barmaids splendid busts and rumps.

It is very much a product of the era when sexy barmaids were a marketing asset, and entered the beer geek’s arsenal of ‘beer quotations’ fairly promptly.

Beric Watson, first publisher of the CAMRA Good Beer Guide, made it the basis of his preface to a 1971 book called Hand-Pulled Beer and Buxom Barmaids; Christopher Hutt quoted it in his The Death of the English Pub (1973); as did Richard Boston; and Michael Jackson, too. It was generally used as an illustration of the all round earthy splendidness of traditional draught beer, as opposed to the sterile coldness of big brewery keg.

In 1975, The Daily Mirror quoted Watson as a representative of CAMRA saying: “Pulling pints develops the chest muscles… Girls who serve beer from a pump are going to wind up with better bosoms than those who press a button or throw a switch.” The response from Watney Mann? “We can produce barmaids any time with busts of more than 38 inches–without them ever having pulled a pump.”(ADDED 17/10/2012.)

Michael Jackson expanded further upon the subject in 1976:

…there are two basic types of barmaid: surrogate mothers and surrogate bedmates. The types are quite distinct, though the pub-goer who drinks too much may eventually confuse them, especially if the barmaid in question is of the buxom mould characteristic to her occupation. Not only does beer inflame lust if taken to excess: heavy-beer drinkers are often male-chauvinists. In the days when Nice Girls Didn’t, it was popularly thought that barmaids did… Now that Nice Girls are out of style, so are blousy barmaids. Happily, there are still a few pubs which bulge with anachronisms.

The English Pub

Michael! Eew! (And let’s not bring Freud to bear on those opening lines…) It does seem to be true, however, that the role of barmaid was, in the nineteenth century, not so far removed from that of a sex worker, specifically a clip joint hostess:

Barmaids are a seductive study — a charming institution. Barmaids are born, otherwise they fail… B begins barmaid and B begins beautiful, but it does not therefore follow that all barmaids are beautiful — some are even plain… See the custom a good barmaid attracts!… how clever she is, and what a talanet she shows in making these swells provide her with… chains, rings, brooches, lockets and bracelets… what jealousies and heartburnings she causes among the golden youth by her guileless indecision in the matter of “Sundays out!”.

Fife Herald, 15 February 1872.

Do women working behind bars still feel the gaze of horny, half-legless customers? Probably, but less often, and it’s no doubt more discreetly done. Are they still expected to flirt? If so, then it’s more often couched these days in terms of ‘providing a welcome’, and male bar staff are expected to perform, too. Do publicans still hire  bar staff based on how they look? We suspect that the answer is yes, sometimes, but that having the right hairstyle might have become more important than large breasts.

Pete Brown’s appreciation of a barmaid in Wales suggests that in some places, however, the idea of the ‘sexy barmaid’ lives on, and that where it does, male customers, and male beer writers, are still paying attention.