From Chaucer to Del Boy, the British have always met in the pub
As landlords finally prepare to reopen, Chris Harvey raises a glass to a cultural institution Fictional pubs have captured the lives of ordinary people through the ages
In ‘Life’, Richards recalled the Stones’ first rehearsal at the Bricklayers Arms
Picture the scene. A man walks into a bar. Tim, Hugh, Rose and Griff the Welshman are already there, along with the usual crowd. Betty the landlady is pouring the local ales. Everyone’s having a laugh. A bloke called Clem, who mends shoes for a living, is trying to sell his own coat to the other customers. Our man downs eight pints and is on his ninth before offending everybody by farting loudly and staggering off to the loo. He realises it’s time to go home. Sadly, he only gets as far as the door before falling over and being sick.
Sound like the first night back after the pubs reopen? Actually, it’s from The Vision of Piers
Plowman, written in about
1370, by the Middle English poet William Langland. If you needed proof of how closely entwined pubs are with daily life on this sceptered isle, you can find it everywhere you look in our stories, poems, plays, films and television, for century upon century, from The Boar’s Head in Eastcheap frequented by Falstaff to The Bull in Ambridge.
Of course, Langland’s example is presented as a cautionary tale. The guy who had been sitting in the alehouse all day was actually on his way to church when he bumped into Beton the Brewestere, who talked him into stopping off for a drink. And with a name like Gloton – Glutton – who was he to refuse her?
Yet for the great majority of us, the great British pub isn’t a place to feel guilty about and has been dearly missed for the past three months. As far back as early April, barely a fortnight into lockdown, a friend cracked and went on Twitter to open an imaginary auction: “What would you pay for a pint right now? Your favourite pub, your favourite pint, one mate, 40 mins. I’ll start: £50.”
This shimmering mirage in the desert brought some prompt responses: “£250 if I can bring my dog,” one woman replied; “£500 if there’s a lock in after with the bar staff,” added a thirsty fellow; “Life is cruel,” lamented another.
Nearly three months on, that tantalising vision is almost within reach, even if it may not yet include perching on a stool at the bar: with a great deal of checks and balances in place, we are nevertheless promised that pubs will open next weekend. Pubs and restaurants rank second only to “seeing friends and family” in surveys of our mostmissed things, and it’s no surprise that people have been getting misty-eyed about them, even though they’re not exactly home-grown. Their origins lie in the roadside tabernae that the invading Romans put up as they pushed ahead with their extensive roadbuilding programme in the 1st century AD. Of course, they sold wine, probably a little on the warm side.
Think of an event, highbrow, lowbrow, or worse, and someone has done it in a pub. In 1953, Francis Crick strolled into The Eagle in Cambridge and announced exultantly that he and James Watson had “found the secret of life”, after unlocking the structure of DNA. The rules of association football were thrashed out in The Freemason’s Arms in Covent Garden in 1863. And in 2017, Hugh Grant drank beer out of a shoe in his old college bar in Oxford. All human life is here.
Actors, poets, painters and musicians down the ages have supped in pubs, sometimes with unhappy results. The official coroner’s report has the Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe stabbed to death after a row about the bill after spending all day at an upmarket establishment in Deptford. What’s the betting someone had the nerve to utter those eternally baneful words: “Shall we just split it equally?”
At other times, less salubrious hostelries have been the crucible that brought something great into being. In
Life, Keith Richards remembered: “I went to the Bricklayers Arms, a seedy pub in Soho, for the first rehearsal for what turned out to be the Stones. I think it was May of ’62, lovely summer evening. Just off Wardour Street. Strip Alley. I get there, I’ve got my guitar with me. The pub’s just opened. Typical brassy blonde old barmaid, not many customers, stale beer. She sees the guitar and says ‘Upstairs’.”
In fact, pubs and rock music are so inextricably entwined that they even have their own genre – “pub rock”, which in the Seventies spawned Dr
Feelgood, The Stranglers and Ian Dury’s Kilburn and the High Roads.
Meanwhile, fictional pubs, inns and taverns have captured the lives lived by ordinary people through the ages. In The Canterbury Tales, written around 1392, we meet Chaucer’s storytelling pilgrims, who have fallen into company by chance on their way to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. They set off from the Tabard Inn in Southwark – fast by The Bell, Chaucer tells us, and serving strong wine. The Tabard was a real inn, built in 1307, burnt down in the blaze that destroyed medieval Southwark in 1676, 10 years after the Great Fire of London, but immediately rebuilt as The Talbot and not finally demolished until 1873.
Chaucer fills his pub with a diverse cast of characters – 29 “sondry folk” – and thereby creates a template for every soap opera to follow nearly 600 years later. In fact, the very concept of community in Coronation
Street, EastEnders, Emmerdale is represented by their respective pubs, The Rovers Return in Weatherfield (Salford), The Queen Vic in London’s Albert Square, and The Woolpack in the Yorkshire Dales. The same can be said for The Nag’s Head in Peckham in Only Fools and Horses. Just don’t lean on the bar.
Elsewhere, pubs play many roles. More than a century passes between the hunt for buried loot that begins with a map found in a chest at the Admiral Benbow Inn by the Bristol Channel in Treasure
Island (1883) and Richard E Grant’s Withnail demanding “the finest wines known to humanity” at The King Henry in Penrith (actually filmed in Buckinghamshire) in
Withnail and I (1987).
In between, murder is afoot in Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn
(1936), the regulars sing a bawdy toast to the landlord’s daughter (Britt Ekland) in The Green Man on a Hebridean isle in The Wicker Man
(1973), and unsuspecting hikers get a thoroughly frosty reception at The Slaughtered Lamb in An American Werewolf in London (1981). I’m not sure I’d fancy a visit to any of the above.
Actually, I’ll meet you in The Duke of Burgundy, the pub in the 1949 Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico.
There’s always music and dancing in there. Come to think of it, though, given the plot – Pimlico proclaims itself a part of the ancient dukedom of Burgundy, exempt from postwar rationing, and with its own independent laws – it was probably never in lockdown at all. I’ll get the first round.