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london pubs

BOOKS: London Night & Day, 1951

London Night & Day, edited by Sam Lambert and (the headline act) illustrated by Osbert Lancaster, was intended to help visitors to London during the Festival of Britain and, of course, contains a section on pubs.

It is written for complete newbies and so explains in minute detail things which would probably have seemed obvious at the time. To readers 65 years on, however, this detail is extremely helpful. For example, though the pint is very much the default measure these days, our anonymous advisor says:

You order… by asking simply for a bitter, a mild or a Burton and you will be given a half-pint. If you want a pint you must say so.

The default type — what you get when you ask for just ‘beer’ — was, apparently ‘mild ale, which is also called “wallop” and is the cheapest and weakest… and maybe not what you expected’.

There is the usual breakdown of the main types of bar within a pub (public, saloon, jug-and-bottle) and of the most commonly found beer in bottles (light ale, brown, Guinness, Bass, White Shield Worthington).

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Beer history featuredposts pubs

Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Pubs, 1965

As promised, we’re continuning to plough through those 1960s Batsford pub guides underlining interesting nuggets: this time, it’s the turn of John Camp’s Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Pubs.

Pub guides aren’t really designed to be read, and long stretches of this one are pretty dry, but there was just enough salt in the caramel to keep us going to the end.

Part 1: Oxfordshire

The Lambert Arms, Aston Rowant: ‘Special drinks’ include Courage’s E.I.P.A. — would that be East India Pale Ale? The beer index at the back doesn’t elaborate and this is the only pub in the book serving it.

The Inn Within, Banbury: ‘It is a free house, but might better be described as a “free-for-all” house. Victorian in design, one of the several barn-like bars is decorated almost entirely with mirrors, the result being an impression of being in the centre of a long series of identical rooms stretching away into the void.’ An early use of ‘barn-like’, there, now frequently applied to Wetherspoon pubs and similar. Was this Scaramanga’s Fun House arrangement not confusing to drunks? ‘At various times one may enjoy roller-skating, all-in wrestling, or simply relax and watch a boxing match!’ (There’s more on all this at the Banbury Guardian.)

The Reindeer, Banbury: ‘The great glory of The Reindeer was, at one time, the Globe Room… [with] magnificent plaster ceiling and panelling said to have been designed by Inigo Jones. Ceiling and panelling were removed and sold to an American collector, but before this act of desecration could be completed an enlightened corporation bought them back, and happily they remain in this country… Unhappily there were not re-installed in the Globe Room.’ A rare bit of good news: eventually, they were.

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Beer history quotes

QUOTE: A Rat in the Mash-Tun

“One thing is certain: once a beer of a particular character has found its market, it is important that the uniform standard be maintained; and it was no doubt with this in mind that an old and wise craftsman is said to have given one last piece of advice to his pupils. He said to them, ‘If when you take up a new job you find a rat in the mash-tun, leave it there. The customers may like the flavour!’”

Sydney O. Nevile, Seventy Rolling Years, 1958.

(PS. Note that usage of ‘craftsman’…)

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Beer history pubs

BOOK REVIEW: The Pub Crawler

We stumbled upon Maurice Procter’s 1956 novel by a roundabout route while searching for something else and, when I realised it was available for Kindle, I made an impulse purchase.

When I’m not obsessing about and over-thinking beer, I sometimes obsess about and over-think crime fiction. This book struck me as a weird hybrid of the American ‘police procedural’ (Ed McBain, Hillary Waugh) mashed together with British ‘angry young man’ social realism. In practice, that means the crime is grubby and small, the setting seedy, and the principal police characters a bit more psychologically complex than usual. (But only a bit.) Bill Knight, a burly undercover constable from Sheffield, is embedded in a working class community in fictional ‘Airechester’, where he struggles to balance ambition with his tendency to impulsive violence, and to manage his love life under circumstances which mean he cannot be or behave as himself. When the landlord of a local pub is killed, he finds himself involved with a rough local family whose son, the sinister Gunner, is the chief suspect. There aren’t many other suspects, in fact, or lots of twists — this isn’t a fiendish golden age whodunnit — but, as a crime novel, it’s compelling enough.

But what about the pub stuff?

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Beer history london pubs

Pub Entertainment, 1926

Looking for one thing, we found another: an essay by H.V. Morton entitled ‘Pub Crawlers’, published in The Nights of London in 1926.

In this context, the crawlers are not drinkers as in modern usage but hawkers relying on ‘human nature in its most expansive moments’, (i.e. pissed, in the pub) to earn a few pennies selling boot laces, matches, or performance art:

Most remarkable of all the bar visitors is the Young Man with the Paper Shapes… He slips into a bar silently, and he stands by the door. Somehow the people become aware of him. Mrs Jones, with her veil on her nose, pauses in mild alarm, with her second glass of stout poised above her ample bosom, as she says, sotto voce:

‘Oo-er; look at ‘im! What’s he after?’

They see a pale young man gazing round the bar from beneath the brim of an old felt hat. He is fumbling with wads of folded newspapers contents bills, with which his clothes are padded. Quickly, he makes little tearing movement, he pinches ovals and oblongs and stripes from the folded bill, he teases it and pulls it, and then opens it, displaying four perfectly modelled filigreed figures cut in the paper.

A delighted murmum rises from the bar! Isn’t it clever? How does he do it? He ought to be on the halls!

From Houdini's book 'Paper Magic'.
Diagram from Houdini’s  ‘Paper Magic’, 1922.

For his next trick, the Young Man extends a paper ladder to the ceiling — perhaps learned from Harry Houdini’s 1922 book Paper Magic?

When Morton talks to him he discovers that he is well-educated and well-spoken but has been working at this trade for fifteen years. He’s evidently down on his luck, though his ‘wife’s people’ are paying for his son to attend a top public school.

It’s not quite clear how much of this is truth and how much fiction, and Morton does not seem to have been a nice bloke, but, still, it’s a lovely vignette. If we ever get to compile that anthology of writing about beer and pubs we sometimes dream about, this piece will be a shoo-in.

Main image: detail from ‘Posters in the Strand’ by Yoshio Markino from The Colour of London, 1907.