Tag: 1930s

Categories
Beer history pubs quotes

QUOTE: Annual Booze-Ups

“These special customs, and especially those associated with the annual booze-ups of New Year’s Eve (when you may kiss almost anybody in public), St Patrick’s Eve, Whitsun, Oak Apple Day, Trinity Sunday, June Holiday and Christmas, are a simple part of the pattern of the year, its pre-industrial, pre-Christian even, background. A background of sowing and reaping, winter death and spring rebirth, a rhythm that, like the rhythm of the week, determines so much of behaviour… now dominates Worktowners who never think what it’s all about or know the difference between wheat and barley.”

Mass Observation, The Pub and the People, 1943.

Categories
beer in fiction / tv

Film Review: Cheer Boys Cheer (1939)

Cheer Boys Cheer, produced by Michael Balcon at Ealing Studios in 1939, is a romantic comedy set against the backdrop of the battle between technology and tradition in brewing.

Ironside Brewery as seen in Cheer Boys Cheer, 1939.

Ironside Brewery is a technological wonder, staffed by efficient white-coated technicians, resembling something from The Shape of Things to Come — rocket-like fermenting vessels reach to the sky, and everything is gleaming metal. (It is cleverly constructed using a mix of matte paintings, models, and, we think, shots of somewhere like Acton Lane power station.)

Nonetheless, in the words of a rebellious new members of its board:

The beer isn’t worth drinking…  You’ve rationalised the taste out if it… What’s the use of machinery that can produce ten million bottles a minute when you can’t offer one of them to your friend?

Old Mr Ironside (Edmund Gwenn) and his ruthlessly scheming son John (Peter Coke) don’t care about that: they want to expand for the sake of expansion. But where will they sell all the extra beer they produce? Their search for lebensraum leads them to the rural Greenleaf Brewery and it’s ‘100 first class houses’. (That reference to Nazism isn’t glib: Old Man Ironside is actually shown leafing casually through Mein Kampf later in the film.)

The Greenleaf Brewery, from Cheer Boys Cheer, 1939.

Greenleaf vs. Ironside… The symbolism in this film is not subtle. Ironside is metal, electricity, lorries and sharp suits; Greenleaf is wood, steam, horses and rumpled tweed. Taste is everything at Greenleaf and the head brewer, Matt Boyle (Jimmy O’Dea), first appears proudly brandishing a glass of the latest batch of his XXX for his colleagues to try. When he sees buffoonish brewery worker Albert (Graham Moffat) kicking a cask of XXX across the room, he reacts furiously: ‘You’ll bruise it!’ He would no doubt today be described as ‘passionate’ about brewing.

Later in the film, high on his own supply, he produces his grandfather’s tattered brewing book and boasts:

He could brew a beer for any purpose. A beer to make you happy, a beer to make you sigh, a beer to make you laugh, and a beer to make you cry.

A stereotypical drunk comic Irishman, Boyle is nonetheless the film’s most engaging character, and O’Dea certainly knew how to make a beer look tasty on screen, smacking his lips, widening his eyes and sighing contentedly with each draught of dark, foamy mild.

A predictable plot gives the film its rather flabby shape: young John Ironside inveigles his way into Greenleaf’s and seduces the owner’s daughter (Nova Pilbeam), but their simple, honest ways and truly delicious beers win him over. Proving himself to be a good egg at heart, he joins them to fight back against his increasingly gangsterish father and his gangs of violent goons: ‘Gone idealist, eh?’ sneers the old man.

It is expert brewing which saves the day when Boyle produces a batch of his grandfather’s masterpiece — a beer containing ‘all the sorrows of Ireland’, the ‘tears of Deidre’. It is literally so astonishingly brilliant that it causes grown men to cry when they drink it.

The humour throughout is of the ‘Ooo, yaroo! It’s on me blinkin’ foot!’ variety, and the double act of Graham Moffat and Moore Marriot, familiar from the films of Will Hay, has not aged well. Frankly, if this film had been about, say, the dairy industry, we would probably not have enjoyed it half as much.

Though nicely done, the pubs and breweries featured are either studio sets or paintings, so there isn’t much to be gleaned in terms of useful historical detail, either.

The value of Cheer Boys Cheer is as an early expression of a point of view that would later inform the founding of the Society for the Preservation of Beers from the Wood and the Campaign for Real Ale, and which arguably underlies the ‘small is beautiful’, ‘buy local’ trend of the last forty years: dispassionate technicians in a factory cannot possibly make really satisfying beer.

Cheer Boys Cheer features is included in the two-disc, four-film set The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Volume 9, from Network DVD. Our copy cost £10.

Categories
Beer history pubs

A Night in a 1930s Pub

Mr Crinnion behind the bar, The Malting House Public House, Felling, 1930, from Gateshead Libraries photo archive.
Mr Crinnion behind the bar, The Malting House Public House, Felling, 1930, from Gateshead Libraries photo archive.
  • What’s Yours? T.E.B. Clarke, 1938 = TEBC
  • The Pub and the People, Mass Observation, 1943 = MO
  • The Local, Maurice Gorham & Edward Ardizzone, 1939 = MG
  • ‘Pubs’, William Cameron, Picture Post, 26 November 1938 = WC

[Pubs] are all different. Old and brand new, large and small, prosperous and neglected, smart and shabby; pubs in select neighbourhoods catering for a ‘nice class of people’, pubs in frowsy neighbourhoods frowned upon by the Licensing Bench. [MG 39]

The State, since it took over the liquor trade in certain areas in England and Scotland in 1916, has put the improvement of the public house in the forefront of its policy… Nevertheless, there are still large numbers of houses, particularly in industrial districts, which are poor and cramped in structure, gloomy, often insufficiently ventilated, and sometimes even deficient in standards of cleanliness. [Royal Commission on Licensing 1929-31, 1931.]

The pub isn’t much different from other houses in the block, except for the sign with its name and that of the brewing firm that owns it, but its lower windows are larger than those of the others, and enclosed with stucco fake columns that go down to the ground; and the door, on the corner, is set at an angle; it is old-looking, worn… The door opens with a brass latch, disclosing a worn and scrubbed floor, straight bar counter brown-painted with thick yellow imitation graining on the front panelling; at its base is a scattered fringe of sawdust, spit-littered, and strewn with match-end and crumbled cigarette packets. [MO]

Vault — Vault, Public Bar, Saloon Bar. [MO]

Like all Gaul, the English pub is divided into three parts: the Saloon bar, the Private bar and the Public. So that we shall not have to descend in the social scale, let us start by looking in at the last of the trio… The Public is, of course, just as much a bar as either of the others, but, in accordance with its inferior status, it lacks a double-barrelled name. It lacks, too, certain other refinements that may be found beyond its wooden partition, such as potted plants, padded seats and free lumps of cheese on Sundays. [TEBC]

Get yourself a gill of wallop after the jump → “A Night in a 1930s Pub”
Categories
pubs quotes

Publican as Pusherman, 1931

“Judging from some of the evidence, one would conclude that the publican was a person whose only ambition in life was to persuade the customers to drink beer and nothing but beer until they are too drunk to drink more, in the most squalid surroundings, and who has no interest in sobriety or inclination to improve his establishment. Those people imply that that if a man gets drunk it is because he was deliberately pressed by the publican to take more than he needed and that if a house is not improved and brought up-to-date it is solely because the tenant or landlord lacks the enterprise characteristic of the ordinary tradesman.”

The Licensed Victuallers’ Central Protection Board responds with irritation to the report of the Royal Commission on Licensing, 1931.

Categories
homebrewing recipes

Starkey, Knight & Ford Family Ale, 1938

Detail from Starkey, Knight and Ford brewing log, 1938.

We’ve been meaning for some time to formulate a recipe for mild based on the 1938 Starkey, Knight & Ford brewing log we photographed at the Somerset local history archive.

The recipe is below, but getting there proved rather frustrating.

SK&F Brown Ale label, 1948.1. Which one was the mild?

We spent a little while working on something we thought was logged as ‘M3’ only to realise, with help from a few people on Twitter, that it was actually ‘MS’ — Milk Stout. (The inclusion of lactose ought to have been a give away. D’oh!)

Based on the ingredients, another called something like ‘JA’ looked more likely. That some of each batch was also bottled as ‘brown ale’ made us feel more certain.

Then we worked out that it was actually ‘FA’ (stupid old-fashioned handwriting…) which probably stands for ‘family ale’ — not exactly mild, but close enough.

2. Ingredient puzzles

Proprietary brewing sugars — grrr! How are we supposed to know what ‘MC’ is? Our best guess is that it’s some kind of caramel… or is it ‘maltose caramel’? Or ‘mild caramel’? Or something completely different? For the purpose of our recipe, we assumed it was a dark sugar with some fermentability, which got us to the correct original gravity (1036). We’ll probably use something similar to Invert No. 4.

The original recipe used some ‘Oregon’ hops: we’ll try to get hold of Cluster, but, for the small amount used, Cascade will probably do the job.

3. Too bitter?

With around 1lb of hops per barrel, this beer seemed to be too hoppy ‘for the style’, but there are milds in Ron and Kristen’s 1909 Style Guide (notably Fuller’s X ale) which appear similarly heavily hopped.

* * *

So, with those caveats, and with questions and corrections very much welcome, here’s what we’ll be brewing next time we fire up the kettle.

Recipe: SK&F ‘FA’/Brown Ale

[beerxml recipe=https://boakandbailey.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/SKFBrownFamilyAle.xml metric=true]

Notes
  • Assumes efficiency of c.85%.
  • We don’t know much about Starkey, Knight & Ford’s yeast so we’re going to use whichever standard British ale yeast we have at hand.
  • Though this was brewed in Tiverton, we do know that the sister brewery in Bridgwater used water blended with stuff from a well at Taunton which was harder than anything from Burton.