The Old Contemptibles, Birmingham
A Peaky Blinders-style cap is balanced atop a straight-backed chair opposite the leathery padded seating that runs around the walls, broken here and there by marble fireplaces or dark-wood panelling.
Chandeliers dangle from an embossed ceiling. Matching maroon curtains are tethered by gold tassels. And decorative bar mirrors gleam below sepia-tinged images of soldiers from the British Expeditionary Force – dismissed as “a contemptible little army” by Wilhelm II. Wrongly, as it turned out.
Brummie survivors of the regiment that “put the kibosh on the kaiser” would have pulled into nearby Snow Hill Station on returning from what was ( just as wrongly) called “the war to end all wars”.
Those “Old Contemptibles” continued to meet up at the Albion Hotel, as the pub was then called. Among them was William Thornton. His grandson Scott Tamplin, 49, is on a “pilgrimage” to see the pub, renamed the Old Contemptibles in 1953. “Great place,” he says, surveying the potted histories on the walls and seeing off his smoked Applewood macaroni cheese, before retrieving his cap and heading out.
We’re in a cosy dining area that would have been the snug in his grandad’s day. Heaven knows what Thornton and his Contemptible contemporaries would have made of this imposing pub a century on from their return from the Western Front.
In their day, it would have been a “fourale bar” – four pumps, two ales, one mild, one bitter. Food, if any, might have run to a pickled egg or a corned-beef sandwich. Any ladies would have had a port and lemon or maybe a gin and tonic.
Now, there are 20 options on the gin menu alone. The food menu has everything from roast shallot and armagnac tarte tatin to a wild boar and chorizo pie. Eight or so hand pumps dispense real ales out of breweries from Cumbria to Cornwall.
I finally settle on a pint of Nicholson’s, a palatable pale ale in peak condition. Well, this is a Nicholson’s house. And, unlike the kaiser, the pub has shown the eponymous Old Contemptibles some respect.
Albeit in retrospect.
Chris Arnot
176 Edmund St, Birmingham B3 2HB 0121 200 3310