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.
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 map used in court in the 19th century reproduced in The Pattern Under the Plough.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 1963 writer Nicholas Wollaston toured England, visiting cities and towns such as Blyth and Burnley. He was naturally drawn to pubs.
We acquired our copy of Winter in England, published in 1966, when Ray saw a copy in a charity shop and fell in love with the cover.
It wasn’t until we sat down (in a pub, of course) and really looked at it that we realised why that might have been: it depicts the quayside in his hometown, Bridgwater, in Somerset, including a Starkey, Knight & Ford pub.
Wollaston’s idea was not especially original.
We’ve got quite a collection of similar books in which a university-educated writer, academic or journalist hits the road to take the temperature of the nation.
There’s sometimes an angle, such as a focus on a particular region, or on small towns, or social problems.
More often than not, though, they feel quite random and organic – the record of a kind of purposeful drifting.
And because they’re supposed to record reality, taking middle and upper class readers to places they perhaps wouldn’t go themselves, pubs feature more frequently than in other types of writing.
When we were writing 20th Century Pub we found ourselves quoting them often.
There’s Orwell on inter-war pubs in The Road to Wigan Pier, for example: “As for the pubs, they are banished from the housing estates almost completely, and the few that remain are dismal sham-Tudor…”
Or J.B. Priestley in Bradford where he finds a pub that has “five or six hobbledehoys drinking glasses of bitter” and annoying the barmaid. “Nothing wrong with the place”, he writes, “except that it was dull and stupid.”
Winter in England, written 30 years on from Priestley and Orwell, is sharply observed, a little sour (“dyspepsia benumbed my appreciation”), and does not flatter its subjects.
There’s a portrait of a Lowestoft herring boat skipper, for example, that might have got Wollaston duffed up if he dared to go back after the book came out.
The book is worth tracking down if you’re at all interested in how Britain felt at this time (through a privileged lens, at least) and not just in the corridors of power. But let’s look at the notes on pubs and beer in particular, that being our beat.
First, at Ramsgill in “Yorkshire’s Little Switzerland”, Wollaston found that the pubs had “fallen to outsiders” – that is, become gentrified:
The Yorke Arms… is probably less of a pub, more of a hotel, than it used to be, with more copper and brass about the place, and a breathtaking upper-class waitress on holiday from a domestic science college… Though some of the beer is still kept in wooden barrels, most of it comes from steel casks or bottles, and I suppose that the customers are not quite what they used to be, either.
At Blyth, in the North East of England, Wollaston found winter in late summer:
Although it was still August coal fires had been lit in the pubs. Men were standing at the bars speaking an unknown language. It might have been better if I could have spoken it too. I asked for a Scotch and the girl gave me an Edinburgh beer… “Oh, you mean a whisky,” she said when I complained. These were foreign parts.
The Fountain, Bridgwater, in 2007.
As hinted at by the cover, there is, in fact, an entire chapter about Bridgwater – a sign that Wollaston was serious in his intent to go to places other writers might have overlooked. Growing up, Ray had the impression that Bridgwater was an unusually well-pubbed and boozy town. Wollaston’s observations support this:
[In one pub] a middle-aged couple was hopping among the tables, while a man punched away at a husky piano. ‘Somebody stole my girl’, they all sang, and the darts were flying wild. When a pint glass crashed to the ground the pianist switched into ‘Marching through Georgia’. A pearly-coloured woman with a bronchial cough, ageless and rather tight, came in; she had been to the pictures, Tom Jones, which was partly filmed in Bridgwater, but nothing had impressed her except the actresses: “They’ve got wonderful bosoms on them, right up here,” and she demonstrated with her own.
His notes on Bridgwater also provide one of those useful reminders that pub culture can be as much about excluding people as making people welcome:
To me the only jarring note in such a genial town was the notice, stuck in the window of almost every pub, “No gipsies served here.” It showed a vehemence quite out of character, and nobody could really explain the reason. “The gipsies, you see,” one man told me cryptically, “come down from the Quantocks,” as though that explained it all; while another man said, “The gipsies, you see, come down from the Mendips.” A third said, “They come for the pea-picking,” and a fourth said, more plausibly, “They get a skinful of cider.”
On cider, he gives an account of a conversation with an old man in the pub next to the town hall (probably The Mansion House) who complains about the decline of cider drinking.
At the age of 14, he says, he was drinking cider with breakfast, throughout the day, and all evening. “One night, for a bet,” Wollaston writes, “he had drunk fourteen pints in an hour and a half, and then bicycled three miles home…”
His own cider was improved by the addition of hunks of raw meat which dissolved off the bone in the vat.
Wollaston seems to have found Liverpool, the only big city on his itinerary, rather depressing, with soot-stained buildings, murky air and everyone exhibiting “the bronchial Liverpool cough”. It’s stuck in the past, he suggests:
This feeling of solid out-of-dateness is reflected in some of the pubs round Dale Street; in the men in bowler hats tucking into shrimps and mussels and plates of red roast beef; in the photos of tall-funnelled steamers on their first voyage through the Panama Canal; in the stout waitress leaning over a balcony and shouting, “Any oysters left, John?”; in the notice, “Gentlemen are re- quested not to smoke before 2.30 pm.”; and in the clusters of plasterwork on the ceilings and marble-topped bars and engraved mirrors, not deliberately preserved as they would be in London, but simply still going strong.
Those with an interest in the history of pop music might also enjoy his account of a city obsessed with The Beatles – and his assumption that they’re a flash in the pan.
The exterior of the Kingfisher and a view of its lounge bar.
Arguably the most interesting passage in the whole book (unless you’re from Bridgwater) is a lengthy depiction of a post-war estate pub at the new town in Corby, Northamptonshire. These pubs weren’t often written about because they weren’t regarded as romantic, historic or symptomatic. But Wollaston rightly spotted that they meant something, even though they were “huge and quite un-memorable, like canteens”:
In the bar of the Hazel Tree, a modern pub in a housing estate called Beanfield, I found myself next to an Ulsterman. He had been a policeman in the colonial service and was now a security officer at the Corby steelworks. He was wearing his uniform trousers and heavy black boots, but had slipped on a tweed coat to come out to the pub.
This individual, an open racist, has a particularly strong hatred for a group of migrants that had come to dominate Corby: Scottish people, whom he refers to as “a lot of bloody savages”, who “brought out their bagpipes at any excuse”. He had also observed their drinking habits: “Six or seven pints a night, he said, was almost a rule.”
Despite the blandness of these new pubs, they were busy. Once again, Wollaston’s detailed, pithily expressed observations would have been handy when we were writing our book:
The bar was packed full. There were people playing dominoes and darts, and young Scotch steelworkers smoking cigars with girls drinking Italian apéritifs. The divisions were not by class but by age-groups; one generation of men wore cloth caps and bicycle clips, another wore belted raincoats and trilbies, a third wore Beatle jackets and winkle-pickers. At a table in the middle were two thin boys in skin-tight jeans, with pale hunted faces and long cavalier ringlets, dirty copper-colour… “The C.N.D. brigade,” said the Cockney. “I bet there’s many a girl’d like that hair.”
In Chertsey in the London commuter belt, he finds a pub that sounds much like you might expect to find there today: food led, rather middle class, “teacups and muzak everywhere, and china ducks in flight across the cream embossed wallpaper”.
Beyond pubs, there are also glimpses of other drinking places and cultures, such as the Viennese Beer Garden at the Butlin’s holiday camp in Skegness, and its twin, Ye Olde Pig and Whistle. We might have found space for this quote in the chapter on theme pubs in our book:
In the Tudor Bar elderly campers yawned under a gigantic plaster tree, or giggled at the plight of a real pigeon that had flown in and was battering itself among the saucy little lattice windows above them. Even the indoor swimming-pool lay under a jungle of synthetic greenery. This obsession with the bogus and the dangling may have served to disguise the architecture of the buildings, and certainly the rain that in places dripped through the roof added authenticity to the picturesque settings, but it was disappointing to find that so few modern ideas of design had been adopted.
There are portraits of working men’s clubs, too. In Blyth it was The Coronation Club:
Clubs, with their bingo evenings and old-time dancing, are more important than pubs in Blyth, and one of the reasons may be that beer costs a shilling and a penny a pint; even ‘cellar’, a stronger brew, is only one-and-fivepence. At Ashington, a mining town a few miles inland with a population of thirty thousand, there are only three pubs, but more than twenty clubs… Each club still had its leek show, and many of the pubs. There were to be prizes of six hundred pounds in one of them.
It’s interesting to read these notes on drinking culture with contemporary novels such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in mind:
Booze, at any rate round the tables in the Coronation Club lounge where women were allowed, was the main topic, as it was also the main preoccupation. The universal aim of the club’s members… was more drink at less cost. The men drank pints of ‘cellar’ – pints and pints of – and the women drank Advokaat, or alternate cherry brandies and tomato juice. When the men had to go to the lavatory they stopped at the bar, where the women were not allowed, for a large whisky or a liqueur before going back to join the women at the tables…
Our overall impression is that what’s changed most is the density of pub life. They were everywhere, and everyone went to them, when they weren’t drinking somewhere else.
What do you think? Would it be fun to go for a night out in the winter of 1963 – or would it be an ordeal?
Your answer might well depend on whether you’re a man or woman, and which box you ticked under ethnicity on the 2021 Census.
