Tag: 1920s

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Beer history pubs

Pub Culture: The Lost Art of Spitting

Detail from the cover of "Industrial Town".

One of the weirdest, grimmest things about our recent Big Project has been the amount of time we’ve spent reading about spitting.

We knew it used to be common in pubs from the detailed coverage in Mass Observation’s The Pub and the People but that’s nothing compared to what we found in Industrial Town: self-portrait of St Helens in the 1920s by Charles Forman, published in 1978. The bulk of a small section on pubs is given over to a woman in her sixties recalling life as the teenage daughter of a publican. Here’s what she had to say about spitting (look away now if you’re squeamish):

My sister and I used to do all the cleaning when we left school, polishing the floors… There were spittoons, because they used to smoke a lot of pipes then, and they have had worse chests than we do now. They smoked long clay pipes and dipped the ends into the beer to keep them cool. The spittoons were iron, and terrible to clean out — you used to have to put sawdust in. Imagine cleaning what someone had been spitting out! When the floors were carpeted, they daren’t spit on them and went outside to do it. They used to spit on the fire; you used to have to clean off what stuck on the grate after bad aiming. They always spat on the fire at home.

It seems weird to think this was ever acceptable, doesn’t it? We wonder (nervous to mention it because people do get narky on this subject) if this is how people will think about smoking in pubs in a few years time. Or maybe this is another thing (tuberculosis risks aside) that ought to make a comeback, with a little symbol in the Good Beer Guide?

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Beer history pubs

Pub Preservation: The Railway Hotel, Edgware

Railway Hotel in the rain.
‘Railway Hotel Unloved’ by Matt Brown, from Flickr, under Creative Commons.

We don’t usually get involved in campaigns or promote petitions but this one struck a particular chord with us.

It was set up by Mark Amies (@superfast72) who blogs about history and architecture and has a particular interest in inter-war pubs in the Greater London area. His piece on The Comet, Hatfield, is a particular favourite of ours.

The Railway Hotel in Edgware, North London, the subject of his petition, is another pub from the same period, so few of which are left that the remaining examples have become precious.

It’s a pub we know quite well even though we didn’t make it there on our tour of outer London’s inter-war pubs earlier in the year. It is mentioned in passing in Basil Oliver’s essential 1947 book The Renaissance of the English Public House as a notable example of the kind of ‘imposing inn… quasi timber-framed’ that Truman, Hanbury & Buxton were building at the time. Now, Mark says:

It closed in the early 2000’s and has remained boarded up and unloved since. Last month there was an arson attack which left a portion of the ground floor ruined, as yet no one has been prosecuted for this to our knowledge. The Railway Hotel has has several owners since last year.

These situations can be turned around. A couple of weeks back we visited The Fellowship Inn, a similar premises in South London, which having been listed is now the focus of a well-funded project which promises not only to restore the building architecturally but also to bring it back to life, giving over the pub to experienced chain operators, installing a microbrewery, and turning the derelict dance hall into a cinema.

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Beer history quotes

Microscope as Brewer’s Life Blood, 1924

1899 illustration of brewing yeast.

“As far as the practical brewer is concerned, complete knowledge of the correct use of the microscope is as necessary as his life blood, for it will save him a host of troubles. Indeed, it passes my comprehension how some prefer to take their chance when you hear them say: ‘I never look at my yeast under the microscope. If it is of a certain solidity and smells all right, and is of a good colour, I never worry further about it!’ This kind of thing may not have led to disaster in former days, when the alcoholic content of beers was such that it was an efficient protection, but to trust to such rough and ready methods in these days must surely court disaster.”

‘The Training of an Operative Brewer’, B.G.C. Wetherall, Journal of the Operative Brewers’ Guild, October 1924

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london pubs

Pubs for ‘Men About Town’, 1920s

The Fitzroy Tavern.

F.D. Ommanney’s 1966 autobiographical memoir The River Bank contains a fascinating account of how pubs fit into the London gay scene of the 1920s.

Francis Downes Ommanney was quite well-known in his day as an Antarctic explorer and travel writer who served in the Royal Navy during World War II. This particular book covers in frank detail the period when he realised, as (by his own admission) a rather randy young man, that he was gay.

His account of various cafes and clubs where gay men mingled are entertaining, especially the description of one section of an otherwise bland tea room near Piccadilly Circus which was known as the ‘Lily Pond’, but we’re going to stick to his comments on pubs in this post. First, there is his general view on how pubs had changed since his youth:

In those days pubs were not the elegant establishments that many of them have now, rather deplorably, become with chandeliers, brocade wallpapers, bursts of artificial flowers and high-busted ladies in artificial pearls behind the bar. They were much more down to earth and utilitarian, intended strictly… for the sale and consumption of alcoholic liquors.

Continue reading “Pubs for ‘Men About Town’, 1920s”
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Beer history london pubs

Pub Entertainment, 1926

Detail from Yoshio Markino's 'Posters in the Strand', 1907.

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.