We’ve developed the bad habit of annotating films as we watch them, both of us with mobile devices in front of the TV reading different bits of Wikipedia. (“Huh, fancy that — Basil Rathbone was an intelligence agent in World War I and once disguised himself as a tree to get near to the enemy lines.”)
Last week, Film 4 showed Michael Powell’s first real feature film, The Edge of the World (1937), set on a fictional archipelago beyond the Outer Hebrides. That led us to look up St Kilda and the story of its evacuation in 1930. Of course what leapt out to us was the mention of ‘the Puff Inn’, which must be the most remote licensed premises in Britain.
The Puff Inn isn’t really called the Puff Inn. In fact, it’s not really a pub and that’s official. It’s a stormproof shed where the military personnel who are now the islands’ only residents can go to drink and eat. Someone ought to write a book about the influence of the British armed forces on beer culture. Where they go, beer goes, it seems.
Its decor hints at ‘pubbiness’, and there is beer, but tourists who’ve made the journey across the open sea to visit the National Trust-owned islands shouldn’t expect a ploughmans and a pint of mild.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the country, near us, there are several pubs on the far less remote and much balmier Isles of Scilly, the residents of which seem to relish their reputation as “2000 alcoholics clinging to a rock”.
The film was great, by the way, despite the typical 1930s all-purpose RADA Irish/Scottish/Welsh lilting accents.
Picture by Gajtalbot, via Flickr Creative Commons.
4 replies on “The Pub at the Edge of the World”
Have you read Ian Marchant’s The Longest Crawl? He goes from a pub on the Isles of Scilly to an RAF bar on Unst. Good book: http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/aug/12/travel.travelbooks?cat=books&type=article
No, we haven’t — thanks for the tip. I’ve stuck it on the wish list.
The Isle of Man has often been described as “50,000 alcoholics clinging to a rock” – especially in the days when, unlike the mainland, its pubs could open all day.
My dad worked on St Kilda for many years. He was a radar technician and would spend a month on the island before coming home to Uist for a month, so the Puff Inn was effectively his local and there is guy in the picture there who from behind looks suspiciously like my old man.
Unfortunately I have never had the opportunity to go to St Kilda myself.