The English pub on the cusp of war

A book researched in 1939 and published in 1942 offers glimpses of British beer and pubs at a time when national identity became more important than ever.

H.V. Morton, the author of I Saw Two Englands, was an English patriot but also, it emerged many years later, a Nazi sympathiser.

The motivation behind this book was the knowledge that war was coming and a desire to see the country as it was before bombs began to fall.

I’ve been dipping in and out of it for the past couple of weeks, sharing bits and pieces on BlueSky.

But I’ve been saving the bits about beer and pubs for the blog, of course.

One of Morton’s first destinations, in the early summer of 1939, was Kent and its hop gardens in particular:

Kentish hops were beginning to climb the poles to the strings above. They were a beautiful fresh green colour, because they had not yet been covered with the vine-spray, called Bordeaux Mixture, which turns them into an iridescent coppery green… Not far from Maidstone, I found myself in a world of hops. They stretched in straight avenues on each side of the road… I think hops are unquestionably the most picturesque crop we grow in this country… Neither the vine nor the olive is as beautiful as the hop: and I have never seen on the Continent, or in the East, a vineyard or an olive-grove that could for a moment compare with the beauty of our Kentish hop-gardens.

This section of the book is also interesting because it might be the earliest use of the specific phrase ‘real ale’ with something like its modern usage (my emphasis):

The real old drink of England was ale, which was an entirely different brew. We use the words ale and beer interchangeably to-day, and even our most sincere consumers would find it difficult to define the difference between them. Ale was a thickish, sweet drink, rather like barley water in consistency, which was made from malt. Barley malt was said to make better ale than oaten malt or any other corn… Probably the last real ale is brewed to-day at Queen’s College and Merton College, Oxford, and at Trinity, Cambridge.

OK, so it doesn’t quite have the same meaning as in the Campaign for Real Ale… but it sort of does.

As in, proper beer, like they used to make, not this modern, foreign, mechanised muck.

The true Parliament of England

After war had broken out, in autumn 1939, Morton stayed at a small pub-hotel somewhere in Surrey. Its bar, he wrote, “attracted all the local tradesmen and worthies until you could hardly see the buxom barmaid, known to everyone as Violet, behind the smoke-screen”.

Morton’s reports of meetings with ordinary people often seem too good to be true and his work doesn’t always stand up to fact checking. Still, this passage is quite moving, whether it’s fact, fiction, or somewhere in between.

Sitting silently in the corner, Morton observes the conversation, and reflects on the pub as a haven of open, friendly debate:

Sitting in a corner silently, as became a stranger, I thought that of all English institutions the English inn is perhaps the most satisfactory. Parliament may be criticised. Democracy may not be what it is supposed to be. The Freedom of the Press may be suspected, even by the most innocent, to be qualified in some measure by the opinions and interests of a proprietor and his advertisers, but the English inn is really and truly what it claims to be: a common meeting-place for all types and classes, where any man may say exactly what he likes without being clubbed by political opponents and dragged off to jail. Eccentricity and oddity, which have always delighted the English, come into their own when the inn opens its doors in the evening, and the queer characters, the local jesters, the men with the fads and fancies who give English life its salt and flavour, are always present, although their fame is strictly local and the outsider rarely considers them as funny or as witty as their own villagers or townsmen do. Above all, perhaps, humour, the best of humour, has its home in the English inn. It deflates the pretentious, it corrects the erroneous, and it deflects the dangerous. The qualities of laughter are nowhere more noticeable than in the true Parliament of England, which goes by the name of the Green Dragon or the King’s Arms.

It’s become difficult to talk about free speech and the concept of the open forum without it sounding like a contribution to the culture war debate. This does, however, sound rather idyllic – and, dare we say, healthy.

Unlike online debate, these conversations (about Ribbentrop, among other topics) were face to face, eye to eye, and synchronous. And if people wanted to continue drinking together, we suppose they had to be able to compromise and listen.

Morton (who, remember, was secretly sympathetic to Nazism) goes on:

I thought of the black-out beyond the door, symbolic of the black-out of freedom and of free speech that seeks to conquer the world, and as I looked at the ordinary common English-men with their tankards and glasses, small tradesmen, farmers, and the like, I thought how surprised they would be if I rose up and told them that, as they stood there arguing in loud, fearless voices about national and local affairs, they represented nearly everything we are fighting to preserve in England.

His final observation from this particular pub is that many of the barroom politicians and debaters are, like him, veterans of the First World War:

Under the influence of a pint or two they talked the kind of talk one heard so often in the early ’twenties of Ypres, Festubert and Neuve Chapelle, of “Jerry,” of rations and of sudden death and horror. It was like putting back the clock twenty years. Those warriors, men of my generation, seemed to have aged considerably, and I wondered whether I looked as old as they did.

Evacuees, news on the radio, and blackouts

In brief descriptions of pubs elsewhere in England, Morton provides small details of pub life almost in the style of Mass Observation.

There are radios in taprooms and public bars turned on for news of the war, read by announcers who, to Morton’s astonishment, suddenly had names: “…and this is Frank Phillips reading it.”

In a village inn somewhere near Bath there was griping about dirty, ragged evacuee children from the cities, and the awful behaviour of town-folk relocated to the country:

[Strange] women from the cities were in the habit of coming into the tap room in the evening and drinking half a pint, or even gin, like a man. Such a thing had never happened before in the village, and no one liked it… I became aware of a strange breach between town and village. A youngish man related with obvious gusto and pleasure the fact that certain townsfolk billeted in a neighbouring parish were worse than beasts in their habits.

In Stratford-on-Avon, he found everyone gathered in the bar of a large inn, saying farewell to a barmaid nicknamed ‘the Captain’ who was leaving to get married:

She was plump, cheerful and tremendously capable. Every glass and bottle obeyed her hasty movements. As she pulled down the beer handles she gave back chaff for chaff, and everybody agreed that her prospective husband was a lucky man.

And at The New Inn in Gloucester, Morton found himself lost in the black-out and the fog, groping his way through heavy curtains to get into the “warmth and good cheer” of the pub.

Decline and fall

The final section of the book looks back on 1930 and early 1940 from the grim perspective of 1942.

After several years of war, Britain has become quieter, poorer, and hungrier – a backwater bankrupting itself for the right reasons.

Pubs don’t get a mention in this section, perhaps because their “warmth and good cheer” had gone, and their ale was less plentiful, and less real than ever.

We picked up our copy of I Saw Two Englands for a fiver. It was a Christmas gift from Betty to Tom at Christmas 1942.