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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).

Chapter header by Osbert Lancaster from London Night & Day.
Chapter header by Osbert Lancaster.

The author also attempts a taxonomy of pub types coming up with (a) the alehouse ‘which follows the functional tradition in its use of solid carpentry, scrubbed wood… and “grained oak” or “teak” paint’; (b) the city tavern where ‘wines and spirits and bottled beers tend to take precedence over beer-in-cask’; (c) the gin palace — ‘the great Victorian contribution to the architecture of drink and… one of England’s most prized possessions’. Half a page is then given over to raging about the damage being done to such pubs by magistrates (the loss of ‘intimate little bars’ in the name of supervision) and brewers who ‘are putting in jazz wallpapers [and] chromium bars’ as a ‘beastly development of genteelism’.

The main event is a six-page listing of notable pubs. These being tourists attractions and recognised heritage buildings even then most are still standing, and trading, and retain some of the atmosphere described here. (The bar staff at The Antelope on Eaton Terrace probably don’t wear white coats these days, though, and the Hole in the Wall at Sloane Square Station is long gone.) There’s plenty of meat here for anyone wanting to take on a Will Ranner or Des de Moor style pub-crawling challenge.

The book was updated and reissued several times (it might be interesting to see how the pubs section changed over the course of a decade) and original paperbacks of later editions can be found at quite reasonable prices. Because we wanted the 1951 text we got hold of a lovely 2014 reprint by Old House, RRP £5.99, which we don’t hesitate to recommend as a stocking filler for the London-o-phile in your life.

14 replies on “BOOKS: London Night & Day, 1951”

Interesting to unearth a basic schema that, except for the recent gains of lager, was in place pretty much to the jot when Michael Jackson first started writing. He simply took each beer type mentioned and use a blend of history and high journalistic skills to create an aura for each . E.g. that brown ale is a “cloth-capped beer”, that bitter reflects a variety of palates and can belie its name, that mild can be light or dark and discussing its stronghold areas.

Since that time, i.e., up to about 1980, the basic schema, under pressure from craft brewing developments, imports and the steady rise of lager, started to change.

I wonder if even “bitter” has the same sense it did 20 years ago.

Gary

Another point I’d like to make, is that yet again in materials from before the 70’s, we see a reference to a half-pint. This truly was the default measure and reflects a time when many occasions when people who took a beer didn’t call for sinking pints or even one. Beer was a beverage to accompany a sandwich or for a quick refresher and a half was enough. Both cost and more I think the need for sobriety impelled this.

Another example is, I was reading a recent interview with Paul McCartney. He described day long sessions at Abbey Road when at lunch the band would go to a pub. They didn’t get hammered, they had “half a bitter and a cheese sandwich”. They had work to do and full 10 ounces was enough to refresh and lightly stimulate without defeating its purpose.

I’d doubt people regularly order just a half when in a pub for any occasion, but maybe I’m wrong. If the new schooner glasses start to take over, still they are taking in more than in the 50’s and 60’s in one go. And beer is stronger now.

Gary

Never trust an Englishman when he refers to going to the pub for “a half”. Especially (although this doesn’t apply here) if it’s “a swift half”. A swift half in my experience is always a pint and usually two.

By the time that I started drinking in pubs in about 1972 the pint was the norm and although this was in Lancashire, it was the same in Norwich when I moved there in 1974. In the Boddington pub near my parents you told them how many you wanted and would get bitter in pints unless you specified otherwise. I think that it was in the 70s that Whitbread Trophy was advertised as “the pint that thinks it’s a quart”. I wonder if the book is talking about the more genteel sort of pub where the visitor wouldn’t feel intimidated? However, for many years it was normally assumed that a lady would want a half unless otherwise specified.

Nowadays, there are some pubs where asking for a half marks you out as a ‘ticker’, although I’ve seen several tickers who buy two halves at a time to save repeated visits to the bar. I have a local pub which uses schooners, but only for stronger and more expensive beers only sold on keg.

People certainly had less money for beer in 1951, but it would be interesting to see what impact wartime and postwar shortages had on beer. Perhaps films from the 50s and 60s would give some clues? Many had scenes in pubs.

Ian

In the book “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”, set in 1950’s Nottingham, the hero is at one point drinking quarts. As all the pubs mentioned in the book really existed, Im tempted to believe this might be true.

(Typos corrected):

That is a very fine book, one of the best post-war novels of England, or best novels of England, period.

There is also a passage where Arthur Seaton complains of beer quality and has trouble getting his plaint addressed, which adds to his frustration; “plus ca change, plus c`est la meme chose“. (It is either in this book or The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner).

Alan Sillitoe was a very talented writer and he didn`t allow his background to blind him to the nature of oppression or injustice no matter who the practitioner was, even if it put him on the wrong side of the zeitgeist. For example, he spoke firmly against Soviet abuses of human rights when touring the country in the Sixties, which took great courage.

Gary

Sorry, when I said (the effect) ‘shortages had on beer’ I meant beer drinking habits.

There’s a bit more on pints/halves/gills in our post on Mass Observation:

The pint, as we all know, is the one true measure — the only proper way to drink beer — and it has ever been thus. Except that’s not true, and The Pub and the People in fact devotes quite a bit of time to the strange phenomenon of those few oddballs who drinks pints, especially Irish navvies in their dirty, spit-and-sawdust, near-segregated pubs. Most Boltonians in 1937, especially the manliest of men, in fact drank ‘gills‘.

And in the book review I posted the other week:

One thing that is particularly striking is how often Procter portrays hard, hard-drinking, manly manual labourers drinking halves — there’s no compensatory compulsion to be seen to drink only pints.

People did drink pints of course and there are plenty of photos and films of people doing just that but, equally, there doesn’t seem to have been any *shame* attached to ordering halves. I’ve got friends who, even now, won’t buy me a half if I order one in a round. Bizarre.

Further to Gary’s point on MJ (“He simply took each beer type mentioned and use a blend of history and high journalistic skills to create an aura for each “), perhaps his other great idea was to take Hugh Johnson’s World Atlas of Wine and use it as a template for his beer writing. If you look at an early 70s ed. of HJ’s book, you can clearly see the influence it had on the World Guide to Beer. I think he acknowledged this, but at times in the early days it feels as if MJ was overplaying /massaging beer styles to make beer fit the WAoW model.

Excellent point. I wonder too if he and Johnson had the same publisher since the characteristic layout and design of a house can influence its stable of writers. But in any case he did indeed learn from Hugh Johnson.

Gary

They were both published by Mitchell Beazley and Jackson was explicity commissioned to produce a beer version of Johnson’s book.

Ah, I didn’t know that. And here we are drinking the results of that publishing idea 40 yrs later.

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