Tag: books

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20th Century Pub

The English pub on the cusp of war

The New Inn, Gloucester, with its galleried courtyard.

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.

Categories
Blogging and writing

BOOK REVIEW: The Devil’s in the Draught Lines

The cover of the book showing women in brewing through various periods of history.

Christina Wade has written an accessibly scholarly book about women in beer that offers a refreshingly different lens on the world.

It tells us, with overwhelming heaps of evidence, that women have always been involved in brewing, and still are.

But more than this, it shows us that it’s possible to write a 180-page book almost without citing or talking about men at all.

Women are the centre of the stories told. Academic texts by women are cited in every other paragraph – many of them, more than most of us could digest in a lifetime. And when punditry and insight are required, Wade is able to call on a cast of sharp, experienced experts, all of whom are women. It feels effortless, too, and natural. Who else’s opinion or experience could possibly have more weight or authority?

Despite its clear focus, as a result of when it was researched and written, this is also a vital text about brewing and hospitality during the pandemic. Wade draws parallels between COVID-19 and historic plagues, which also affected the brewing industry, and women’s roles in it.

One particularly eye-opening argument is that the Black Death reduced the population, increased wages, increased demand for better beer, and thus gave men an incentive to muscle into the brewing trade, displacing the women who’d dominated it for centuries. Then, whoosh, we’re back in the 21st century and Wade asks, will COVID-19 have a similar effect? Post-pandemic trading conditions, she suggests, favour larger, better-funded breweries… which happen to be run by men.

One of Wade’s hobby horses, explored in blog posts and articles, is the muddled mythology around brewing and witchcraft. That is, the pervasive story that ‘alewives’ inspired the modern image of the witch. Fun and empowering as these stories might be, and easy as it would no doubt have been to sell a book on the strength of these stories, Wade is as rigorous in debunking them as Ron Pattinson and Martyn Cornell have been in correcting the popular understanding of the histories of porter and IPA.

Structurally The Devil’s in the Draught Lines resists the simplicity of chronology. Instead, each chapter covers a different angle and whizzes us back and forth through hundreds of years, from the mediaeval world to the 21st century.

There’s also room for stories around race, culture, gender identity, with names and faces unfamiliar to us, like Lizzie and Lucy Stevens of Closet Brewing, and Apiwe Nxusani-Mawela of the Tolozaki Beer Company. In fact, there’s the equivalent of about 25 Pellicle articles hidden throughout the book – and we mean that as a compliment to both parties.

This helps leaven the wholemeal archival research that underpins the book. Any time we start to suspect we’re being fed a chunk of thesis we’re given an interview with a woman working in beer today. These are often cleverly chosen and placed to underline what has changed since the historical examples were recorded – and what has not.

It’s clear Wade put a lot of effort into finding the balance between academic style and plain language – something she’s practised rather brilliantly on her blog for many years. Sources and authorities are named in the text, but not with scary foot- or endnote numbers. Then more detail for each is provided at the back of the book.

If you want to understand the deeper history of brewing in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, it’s a readable survey of previous research. And it’s a must-read if you want your world view shaken up a little – something which is good for all of us to do from time to time.

We bought our copy from CAMRA Books for £15.99 delivered with a member discount.

Categories
pubs

Portraits of pubs, perfect and imperfect

An old engraving of a fish from a book on salmon and trout.

It’s rare to read a memoir, local history or folklore text without finding mention of beer and pubs. Here are some we collected recently.

First, let’s look at The Valley by Elizabeth Clarke, published in 1969. It’s a memoir of life in a Welsh valley between the wars and has a few interesting mentions of pubs and beer.

There’s a story told by Emrys, a shepherd, about poaching salmon:

One night, he told us, in the rough and ready days of his boyhood, when agility and boldness counted above prudence, they went to a pub by the river one night, and talked about what they were going to do to the water bailiffs if they came along.

The landlord was sitting by the fire.

“Tip he in head first, boys,” he said, before they went down to the river.

Emrys had held a stick with a bag wrapped round it, soaked in paraffin, and he sprinkled a few drops more… to make it flare. The rest had rabbit snares to tail the fish.

Soon they had four salmon on the bank. Then Emrys saw a policeman coming along the path.

“Look out, boys!” he shouted, and they grabbed two of the salmon and ran. He dropped his light, and they left two fish on the bank. When they went back those had gone. A day or two later they returned to the pub.

“How many salmons did you get, boys?” the landlord asked.

“Two more than we had, without you,” they said. For one of them had seen the policeman’s coat and helmet hanging in the passage, though the landlord said indeed he kept them there to scare away tramps.

The author also remembers carnival day in the local market town when small boys…

could earn a penny or two running errands such as fetching beer for the blacksmith, who gave them threepence a time and rewarded them further by letting them see him pour it down his throat in one swallow.

And the singing in pubs on funeral days:

While we climbed the hill for home, knots of men were already on their way to compensating for the day’s hardships in making a night of it. As the evening wore on in the pubs in town, one by one they would break into the music, not of massive choral hymns like Cwm Rhondda (for wherever they are, Welshmen sing as though they were in chapel) but the nostalgic tunes learnt at firesides – “Come home. Come home. Calling, Oh sinner! come home.”

We found our 1972 Faber paperback for £2 in a bookshop in Pembrokeshire but there’s also a modern reprint.

A 19th century sketch map of a pub bisected by a parish boundary.
A map used in court in the 19th century reproduced in The Pattern Under the Plough.

The Dolphin in two counties

We’ve mentioned George Ewart Evans here on the blog before in relation to workers migrating from Suffolk to Burton on Trent to work in the brewing industry.

Evans was a collector of folk traditions and oral histories. His 1966 book The Pattern Under the Plough records traditions in rural communities in East Anglia.

He includes the story of a legal dispute over The Burgate Dolphin, a pub in Suffolk which straddled parish boundaries.

As well as a 19th century court case which rested on determining whether a pauper lodging in the pub lived in one parish, or the other, Evans shares this local story:

There is a tradition in the villages of Wortham and Burgate that the ambiguous position of the Dolphin has been brought to notice on another occasion. Some years ago the Wortham constable was about to arrest a man who had gone to earth in the inn after a poaching or similar minor offence. As it happened the wrong-doer was in the Wortham part of the house when the constable approached; but receiving warning he quickly slipped into the bar on the Burgate side, thus putting himself outside the constable’s jurisdiction.

There’s a modern edition of this, too, from Little Toller.

A pen and ink drawing of a half-timbered village pub behind a gnarled old oak tree. Two men are talking, possible conspiratorially, next to the pub.
A detail from one of Joan Hassall’s illustrations for Portrait of a Village, 1937.

A portrait of a village pub

We buy almost any book like Portrait of a Village by Francis Brett Young, published in 1937, and now have quite a collection.

Portrait of a Village is actually a sort of novel set in Monk’s Norton, Worcestershire – a village the author insists is fictional, and based on no real village.

The fictional pub in the fictional village is The Sheldon Arms, run by three generations of the Perry family, of which the landlord, Fred Perry, is extremely proud:

If he no longer, as did his forbears, buys malt and hops and brews his own beer, the house is still free and no man is his master: when the brewers’ travellers arrive he is able to deal with these tyrants on equal terms and to speak his mind. In the conduct of the house he is no less independent. The door of the public bar opens and closes on time; no customer who has not proved himself able to carry his liquor is served, and none dare dispute the decision.

In other words, he was free to buy guest ales from whichever suppliers he liked – probably uncommon then, and certainly a dream for many publicans today.

As for the Sheldon Arms itself, though the house is old-fashioned-a rambling, low-ceiled building of warm brick and timber, with floors of foot-worn flags and surprising variations of level that trip an unsuspecting tread the interior is a paragon of order and cleanliness, permeated by vague alcoholic odours of beer and spirits and cider which give its air a faint antiseptic tang. The public bar, in which the commonalty sit, is as austere, with its table and benches of scrubbed oak, as a monastic refectory. The bar-parlour, behind whose mahogany counter Mrs. Perry sits sewing or knitting, and which communicates with the other by means of a hatch, is the cosiest room in Monk’s Norton. In Summer its open casements, commanding the ‘cross,’ admit wafts of cool air: in Winter a brisk fire burns perpetually on the hearth, its clear flames reflected in gleaming brass and dull pewter, in the coloured ranks of bottles of spirit and liqueurs that stand on the shelves, in the lustre jugs and in the polished glasses whose crystalline clearness is Mrs. Perry’s particular pride. The small room is panelled and furnished with shining black oak, and the walls are undecorated save by four coloured prints of cock-fighting scenes (“worth a mint of money”), a carbon photographic enlargement of Fred Perry throwing out his chest in his sergeant’s uniform, a chromo-lithographic seedsman’s-almanac portraying a Derby winner, auctioneers’ bills announcing current stock-sales, and a number of cards (which Mrs. Perry’s delicacy regret- fully tolerates) proclaiming the prowess and fees of shire-stallions at stud.

This strikes us a rural rival to Orwell’s The Moon Under Water. A composite, perhaps, of several pubs Brett Young knew, and which were maybe already gone at the time of writing.

There doesn’t seem to be a modern reprint of this one but original 1930s copies are affordable and have (a) lovely heavy pages and (b) beautiful illustrations by Joan Hassall.

Categories
real ale

BOOK REVIEW: Cask by Des de Moor

The cover of Cask by Des de Moor.

With Cask: the real story of Britain’s unique beer culture, Des de Moor has found a new angle, rather to everyone’s surprise. Why hasn’t CAMRA published a book like this before?

It’s not a beer or pub guide but an attempt to think about cask from every angle: its history, the culture that surrounds it, the science, and the appreciation of the beer itself.

It is largely successful, pulling together numerous sources as it grapples with big questions like why, exactly, so many beer drinkers prefer cask ale to any other form.

The author hasn’t simply relied on books and online archives. He has travelled up and down the country speaking to publicans, cellarkeepers, brewers and other experts. They’re often not the usual suspects, either.

Alice Batham, the next generation of the Midlands brewing family, is a particularly insightful voice. Her account of being fed teaspoons of yeast from the brewery as a child is the kind of detail that adds magic and romance to this story.

Several wooden casks on racks with a complicated system of pipes and tubes.
Wooden casks in the cellar of a Benskin’s pub.

Cellar keeping in particular is made to sound delightfully complicated, more of an art form than a process. He uses the phrase “creative cellar keepers” at one point, highlighting just how much room there is for the beer to change between brewery and glass.

In particular, there’s the idea that a good pub will let cask ale sit for around a week before it is tapped, and then aim to sell it within a few days, depending on its strength and durability.

Mark Dorber, who perhaps does count as a ‘usual suspect’ at this point, gives a fascinating account of sourcing his own hop plugs for dry-hopping Bass in the cellar when the brewery decided to abandon this practice.

The flipside of this is a tension between commercial aims and the romance of variability. De Moor explains how breweries have continued to try to find ways to sell beer that is technically cask ale while being shipped in an essentially stable state.

And, of course, for every “creative cellar keeper” there are perhaps a hundred careless, poorly-trained or lazy ones. Do we want them to have any influence on the beer before we get to drink it?

Lovers of the arcane language of beer and brewing will enjoy the way interviewees and correspondents talk about cask ale. The idea that it can be “tired” is an important one.

And we especially liked the suggestion that Scottish air pressure dispense creates beer that is “smoother, more knitted together”. We think we know what that means!

Why is cask better?

As the book winds on, de Moor’s argument begins to cohere: what makes cask special, he argues, is its lower carbonation and slightly higher temperature. And that’s about it.

It should never be flat and he suggests that the perfect pint should “effervesce on the tongue” without being fizzy.

Unfortunately, most cask ale isn’t sold in this condition, and de Moor has the stats to back it up based on analysis from beer festivals. (Admittedly, not cask ale’s ideal habitat.)

He suggests that it’s a problem in pubs because too many publicans find it easier to handle beer when it is flat, without all that troublesome foam. What they don’t consider, he adds, is that “they’ll likely end up pouring it less frequently as fewer customers will want to drink it”.

Two other lesser factors are acknowledged as influencing the distinctive character of cask ale. First, one of his experts says that “The absence of filtering also makes a difference”, contributing flavour complexity and more proteins, making the beer “richer, more mouth-filling”.

Then staling, our pet theory, gets a passing mention via brewer John Keeling, formerly of Fullers, who says that some drinkers of London Pride prefer it when it is just beginning to show the early signs of oxidation, after day two on the bar.

When it comes to the thorny question of sparklers, he deploys words like ‘slightly’, ‘some’, and ‘typically’ to gently argue that, really, there’s not much in it, and it should probably be up to consumers to choose, if they’re really that bothered.

Though clearly a passionate fan of cask ale, he isn’t an unquestioning cheerleader and points out that it doesn’t work well for every style. American-style IPAs and sour beers, he argues, rarely benefit from cask dispense.

He comes right off the fence when it comes to the price of cask ale:

[If] cask beer is to have a sustainably healthy future, its average price will have to rise in comparison to the pub prices of other drinks… One argument for cheap cask is that it helps drive sufficient turnover to keep the product fresh, but that effect has surely reached its limits when price becomes a barrier to maintaining quality.

For balance, he quotes others who disagree, and who worry about cask ale becoming an expensive, niche product, rather than an everyday pleasure.

As a reference guide, it’s likely to be our go-to whenever we need information on the technicalities of dispense, types of beer pump, cellaring, and so on.

A tighter focus on cask

The book isn’t perfect, though. It’s more than 300 pages long and might have been better with a sharper focus at 200.

The bloat comes from sections we’ve read time and again in other beer books. We don’t need another account of how beer is made, how to taste beer, glassware, how to pair beer with food, and so on.

These sections are to some degree tailored with cask beer in mind but often feel as if they’ve come from a more general book about British beer.

And, most crucially, the book feels as if it’s missing a passionate opening essay to help readers understand why they should care.

By the end of the book, the case has very much been made, but the casual or sceptical reader needs their imagination firing from the off.

Even in its current form, we suspect it might inspire some publicans to take cask more seriously and reflect on how they can turn good cellar practice into a selling point.

We bought our copy of Cask from CAMRA’s online shop for £14.99, including delivery, with a member discount.

Categories
Blogging and writing

BOOK REVIEW: Desi Pubs by David Jesudason

The attractive, colourful cover of Desi Pubs by David Jesudason.

Desi Pubs by David Jesudason provides a new angle on pubs (and British culture) and acts as a practical guide for finding good grub.

It opens with a long essay (or a series of short ones) synthesising, sharpening and developing award-winning articles the author has written for various publications.

If you’ve been following his career for the past few years, you’ll already know many of the arguments and stories from this section.

Tied together, though, they present a unified account of the British-Indian experience, with pubs as a powerful lens through which to view it.

We’ve observed a tendency to talk coyly about ‘demographic change’ as one of the challenges facing pubs. Jesudason challenges this from multiple angles.

First, he asks us to think about what Asian means. It’s a word that covers a whole range of different cultures, religions and nationalities. He explores the meaning of Desi, of British-Indian, of South Asian, of brown and black, providing an informal crash course in the language of race and ethnicity in the UK.

Secondly, he makes one point very clearly: if British-Indians don’t visit pubs, it’s at least in part because they haven’t been made welcome.

From racist ‘banter’ to colour bars, white publicans and drinkers have said, “No, you do not belong here.” (We touched on this ourselves in a 2016 blog post.)

Thirdly, Jesudason introduces us to a whole cast of British-Indian people who love pubs, and enjoy drinking. Not as a stunt. Not as a protest. As part of everyday life, as natural as breathing.

The Desi pub, he argues, is neither new nor contrived. The earliest example he has been able to pin down dates back to 1962 and was opened by Soham Singh, a working class crane driver.

There is also one final, more hopeful challenge: why can’t everyone feel at home in these pubs, and even feel pride in them?

“When I first visited Smethwick in the West Midlands, I was taken aback, not only by how this was an Asian-majority town dealing with a post-industrial world, but how the white population loved their – and ‘their’ is crucial here – desi pubs… They lived lives far removed from gentrified areas, with many friends who were Asian, and even knew a smattering of Punjabi. Instead of running away or complaining about ‘immigration’ these ordinary people embraced change and discovered their lives could be enriched by it.”

We saw something similar first hand when we visited the Island Inn in West Bromwich, where both white and Asian people go to (a) watch football together and (b) eat great, good value food.

If there’s a problem with this book, it’s a sense of an author struggling with his own feelings about the topic. Has he quite worked it out in his own head yet?

He is scrupulous about balance, almost as if engaged in an argument with himself.

And, at times, with critics whose comments he is anticipating, such as those who might query why CAMRA Publishing is promoting pubs that serve mostly lager.

That provides credibility in terms of journalism and history, but conflicts with the celebratory tone the book otherwise strives for.

It works for us – this is a book we can trust, exhibiting depth of thought – but don’t read it expecting tweeness or surface-level cheery-beery jollity.

As a guidebook, it’s exciting, adding a new layer to cities we thought we already knew.

It makes you itch to visit Southall, Smethwick or, closer to home, Fishponds, and go somewhere new. Perhaps somewhere you’ve previously ignored because the signals it sent weren’t ones you were primed to read.

Each guide entry tells a story about the origin of the pub – how did it become ‘Desi’, why, and when? (Jesudason is a journalist and is strong on the 5Ws.)

We get stories from the publicans, from the punters, and from Jesudason himself.

And, of course, we get detailed notes on the food. From momos (dumplings) to scarily spicy fries, there’s an endless parade of enticing dishes that you probably haven’t seen on the menu at your more traditional local curry house. (Just don’t get him started on the subject of ‘authenticity’ in British-Indian food.)

Overall, this is one of the most exciting books about beer and pubs to have been released in recent years.

We hope for, and expect, a new edition every couple of years, as more Desi pubs are found, or founded.

We bought our copy direct from CAMRA for £12.99 with a member discount.