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Beer history opinion

Pub Tenants in Revolt

Watneys barrel.Serious discussions are underway about state intervention in the pub company (‘pubco’) business model, and pubco tenant landlords are organised and on the move with the Fair Deal for Your Local Campaign.

Forty years on, what we are actually seeing is the final phase of a slow motion response to the 1969 Monopolies Commission report on the brewing industry, and the 1972 Erroll report into pub licensing, and the Fair Deal campaign is a continuation of a battle publicans have been fighting for years.

Back in the seventies, it was the big breweries from which the pubcos evolved which bore the brunt of similar protests, and Watney’s had particular difficulties. When, in 1970, they attempted to replaced eighty tenant publicans with pub managers, the National Federation of Licensed Victuallers (NFLV) — the pub tenants union, in effect — called for its members to boycott Watney’s products wherever possible. Hotels, bars and freehouses stopped taking Red Barrel and the story of the plucky underdogs made headlines. Eventually, though they weren’t able to prevent the rise of the managed house, the NFLV did win compensation for the tenants in question, and improved terms for those taking on tenancies thereafter.

That wasn’t the only kind of protest, though, and this kind of showboating was particularly emotive:

Mr Jim Lewis recently had a wake at his pub, the Bridge Inn, near the hamlet of Skenfrith, Monmouthshire… The guests’ merriment could be traced to a real sense of loss, for the wake was for the pub itself… Whitbread and Company, the brewers who owned the pub and the two others within a radius of about two miles, had decided to withdraw the license… (The Times on 12 June 1971.)

Mock funerals and wakes are still happening, of course, as at the Black Lion in Kilburn, North West London, only last week.

We’re still learning about Erroll, and we’ve barely begun our reading on the tremendously complicated consequences of the Beer Orders of 1989, so we’re cautious to opine, but what does seem likely is that if pubcos sulk and withdraw from the market, and the model collapses, it might take twenty years for things to settle down again. In the meantime, the change would be painful for almost everyone, but perhaps worth it in the long run.

Categories
Beer history Blogging and writing real ale Somerset

More Dregs from the Drip Tray

Truman's London Stout.

These are a few bits and pieces that didn’t warrant a blog post of their own.

  • Mini book review: Beers of Britain by Warren Knock and Conal Gregory (1975). This oddity was recommended by Michael ‘Beer Hunter’ Jackson in the intro to his book The English Pub in 1976. A slim paperback, it takes the odd approach of reviewing pubs by region in prose, rather than, Good Beer Guide style, with alphabetical entries. Worth reading for (a) an informed but view that isn’t CAMRA propaganda; (b) to find out what beer in your town was like forty years ago; and (c) for the occasional nugget, e.g. St Austell didn’t pasteurise their keg bitter in the seventies. A little dry for our tastes, though.
  • An account of election time in the eighteen-thirties, from Recollections of Old Taunton by Edward Goldsworth (1883): ‘The elections in Taunton were a disgrace to all England. The first candidate’s arrival was made known by several hogsheads of beer being rolled on the Parade. It was then drawn off in buckets, pitchers, and jugs, and most of it consumed on the spot; the effect of which was soon both audible and visible, by singing, shouting, swearing, and fighting among the men, and screaming, cap-tearing and hair-pulling by the women… The second candidate would do as the first, and in addition would issue tickets for obtaining beer at public houses…’ As a result, when asked by the Poll Clerk how he had decided who to vote for, a local called Simon Duffer replied: ‘I hear they gives away the most beer.’
  • We were pondering the ages of CAMRA chairs in the early days. We don’t know how old Chris Holmes or James Lynch were The first, Michael Hardman, was 25 when he took the job in 1971. Christopher Hutt (1973) was 26. Gordon Massey (1974) was 27. Chris Holmes (1975) was 30. Chris Bruton (1976) was 31. James Lynch (1978) was 32. Joe Goodwin (1979) was 31. Tim Amsden (1980) was 29. When did CAMRA last have a chair under the age of 35? It would take a pretty ambitious character to pull it off today. (UPDATED after correspondence with James Lynch, July 2013, and further research.)
  • You all saw this long post we wrote on West Country brewers Starkey, Knight & Ford, didn’t you? Good. Just checking.
  • We’ve been posting some things which are too short to blog but too long to Tweet over on Facebook, by the way.
Categories
Beer history

What’s Brewing? Same as 40 years ago.

Header for CAMRA's What's Brewing letters page, mid-70s.

Tom Stainer, editor of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) newspaper What’s Brewing?, once pointed out, while under fire, that there aren’t many arguments about the Campaign’s policy that haven’t already been played out, often repeatedly, over the course of forty years. Going through old issues of What’s Brewing, we suddenly saw what he meant: there were entire letters pages from the mid-seventies that, if printed in the next issue of WB, wouldn’t seem incongruous.

Some people would drink oil served by handpumps. January 1975. ‘In view of CAMRA’s strong emphasis on the mode of dispense of beers should it not be renamed the Campaign for Unpressurised Ale? Surely the major emphasis should be on what goes into the beer and what it tastes like?’

Why I’m thinking of leaving CAMRA. March 1976. Correspondent feels the Campaign is drifting away from its founding principles of battling keg. Refers to CO2 as ‘tear gas’.

It’s not muck. Same issue. ‘Fanatics of all kinds always annoy me and I must therefore comment on your correspondent… who wrote of his CAMRA colleagues drinking “pressurised muck” at their local as if they are on a level with Judas Iscariot.’

A narrow-minded approach to beer. April 1976. Chairman of Ruddles brewery says: ‘There are times when I feel that all draught beer [cask] is automatically good and all keg, bottled and canned beer is automatically bad, in the eyes of CAMRA. This is surely a very narrow-minded attitude.’

Purism wins. Same issue. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see the day when I would read a spirited defence of fizz from a CAMRA member [‘It’s not muck’, above]… I despair at the idea of any CAMRA member regularly drinking fizz because it is sometimes inconvenient to drink real ale… It is the very fanaticism (purism would be a better word) of many CAMRA members that has held back the tide and retained real ale for us.’

And who started the endless bloody sparkler debate? Two chaps from Sheffield, with the following letter from March 1979.

‘Tight head’ give same results as air pressure. ‘To add a new dimension to the air pressure debate, we would like to argue that a difference in taste comparable to that produced by air pressure is produced by the universal Northern practice of pulling beer through a tight sparkler, thereby thoroughly agitating the beer and mixing it with air, resulting in the characteristic northern “head”… This has the effect of disguising the flavour of the beer, of obscuring the distinction between real ale and bright beer, and of giving the average Northern drinker a spurious criterion by which to judge a good pint…. when we have been able to drink local beer “flat”, is has seemed to excel in body and flavour.’

Categories
Beer history

Beer bellies or blazers?

Fat CAMRA member cartoon.In a 1975 issue of its newsletter, What’s Brewing (WB), The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) ran an advertisement: T-shirts bearing their logo were being made available in extra large for the benefit of ‘members like the poor bloke on the left’. So, it seems, one of the earliest digs at CAMRA members and their supposed tendency towards beer bellies came from within the Campaign itself. (Note, though, that he has no beard…) But that wasn’t the only stereotype in play at the time.

An article entitled ‘Class Conscious CAMRA Must Use Every Available Weapon’, from WB in April 1975, was illustrated by in-house cartoonist John Simpson. His drawings depict two ‘types’ of CAMRA member — a bearded, apparently foul-smelling hippy on the one hand; and a bunch of middle class, blazer-wearing, loud-mouthed ‘connoisseurs’ on the other. (Yes, CAMRA pretty much invented the Real Ale Twats, getting in well before VIZ.)

The article itself, by Dave Bennett, addresses anxieties over CAMRA’s middle class membership:

The plain fact is that working-class drinking patterns are on the whole different from the various strands that make up the middle class. CAMRA members, especially the students among us, are resisting the middle class trend of drinking, if at all, in one’s own home… resisting the trend does not, however, make our drinking habits identifiable with those of the working class.

John Simpson's depiction of middle class student CAMRA members, 1975.
John Simpson’s depiction of middle class student CAMRA members, 1975.

A correspondent in the October 1977 issue wrote disdainfully of a number of CAMRA members as ‘trendies who seem to believe that they belong to some sort of Freemasonry’, and complaining of a real ale destination pub in Durham where ‘a suit and an Oxford accent are a must’.

There was something in that generalised view: Chris Bruton, CAMRA’s chairman from 1976 to 1978, was always pictured wearing a suit. With his dark hair cut short and neatly styled, he resembled a spare member of Kraftwerk. Bruton made a point of being reasonable and diplomatic at every turn: ‘There’s nothing nasty about keg ale, it’s just characterless.’ Not everyone bought into his clean-cut ‘brand’, though. Speaking to us recently, a long-time CAMRA activist rolled his eyes and growled disdainfully ‘Oh, you mean DOCTOR Bruton.’

Updated 28 March 2013. In November 1980, What’s Brewing ran the results of a survey which included the following summary of how CAMRA members were perceived.

The most popular model of a CAMRA member was the ‘poseur’ type, which centred around the idea that CAMRA was a trendy club, comprising mostly of young (under 25) smartly-dressed types with plenty of money to spend on beer, and plenty of spare time to spend it in. Most were called James, many drove W-reg cars and frequented free-houses which charged “exorbitant prices”… The second popular model was of ‘beer bores’ or ‘beer swilling oafs’. These are a little older than the ‘poseur’ model, less well dressed and with beard and beer gut.

The problem is, well-spoken, moderate, neatly-dressed people don’t make front pages, and CAMRA’s publicity machine couldn’t resist exploiting images like this portrait of a branch treasurer from October 1976.

Garth Nicholls, Sheffield branch treasurer, What's Brewing, October 1976.

The beards, beer bellies and and Morris Dancing image eventually won out but, if it hadn’t, members and activists would probably now spend their whole time saying ‘Oh, we’re not all clean-shaven, suit-wearing professionals you know — many of us have novelty waistcoats and facial hair!’

With thanks to CAMRA, and Tom Stainer in particular, for allowing us to access the What’s Brewing archive at head office in St Albans.

Categories
real ale

Life on the margins

From the 1974 CAMRA Good Beer Guide.

One of the best things about old books is finding inserts — scribbled notes, bus tickets, clippings — and annotations.

Recently, Boak’s uncle very kindly let us borrow several early editions of the CAMRA Good Beer Guide. They are well used and, like many copies of the GBG we’ve seen, feature ‘ticks’ against the names of pubs and breweries in Biro ink. There are also numerous scraps of paper containing detailed handwritten updates — a sign, perhaps, of the speed with which new breweries and ‘real ale’ pubs were appearing between editions in the mid- to late seventies?

The annotation pictured above, from the 1974 GBG, caught our eye, though, because it tells a story in three words: LIKE THE PLAGUE.

This was the first commercial edition of the GBG which, at the last minute, was censored by its publishers, Waddington’s, who feared a legal challenge from Watney’s. After some angry exchanges, CAMRA agreed to rewrite the text to read ‘at all costs’, but, clearly, members on the ground were annoyed at the idea of being bullied by the loathed Red Empire, and some preferred the text as intended.

The word PUKE written across the entire entry is Uncle’s own contribution, and is a fair summary of how ‘serious drinkers’ felt about Watney’s at the time.