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Beer history pubs

Gastropubs of 1951

Detail of book cover: The Good Food Guide 1951-1952.

“It’s gone all foody,” people used to grumble in the nineteen-nineties when a pub started offering meals. “It’s a restaurant now,” they’d mutter, “not a proper pub… knives and forks… smimble…”

Is the idea that food is something essentially ‘un-pubby’ a post CAMRA Good Beer Guide idea? A recently acquired pocket-sized gem of a book, The Good Food Guide 1951-1952, certainly suggests quite a different point of view.

First Rule. — If you are in a strange town, without any guidance from a friend or an entry in this list, always prefer a clean and brisk-looking public house… [You] are more likely to find there than in teashops a survival of the older English tradition of solid eating. In both cases the cooking may well be, at the best, unimaginative, but in a pub, at last, you are not expected to peck like a sparrow.

Perhaps, then, it’s only pretentious food which is un-pubby?

And what about women in pubs, inhibiting the farting and sexist banter? That’s a new thing, too, right?

[A] clean-looking British public house with a menu outside is a place where any respectable woman can go for her lunch without any disquiet… She should not go into the Public Bar, which may be rough, but into the Saloon Bar or the Lounge; nor need she drink beer, for lemonade and such are sold equally willingly. She should also, by the way, ignore the statement… that “British beer should be drunk warm”.

Still, one thing we know is new are the terrible pressures under which pub licensees find themselves compared to the halcyon days of old. Oh, wait…

[The] proprietors of licensed houses are having a difficult time, and deserve the support of all the benevolent people. they pay heavily for their licences, and the disproportionate taxes on beer have driven away their customers.

And yet, sixty years on, there are still pubs, and there are still customers.

One reply on “Gastropubs of 1951”

My memories of pubs only really go back to the mid-70s but I would say pubs then served as much lunchtime food as they do now, possibly even more in view of the general decline of lunchtime pubgoing. Many town and city pubs did a good trade from local workers, much of which has now gone. On the other hand, pubs served far less evening food.

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