PC brigade has pub history in sights
Look to your pints, men of Britain: they’re coming for our pubs. As if it wasn’t bad enough that up to 29 are closing every week, it seems that even the survivors are under attack.
This time the enemy is not high taxes, low prices in supermarkets or demographic changes but something more insidious – the forces of right-on-ness.
Animal rights group Peta has taken exception to an eighthcentury local in St Albans and is campaigning for the pub to change its name from Ye Olde Fighting Cocks to the altogether more PC Ye Olde Clever Cocks.
It is actually serious. Peta director Mimi Bekhechi said: ‘‘Changing the name would reflect today’s rejection of needless violence and help to celebrate chickens as the intelligent, sensitive and social animals they are.’’ Because, of course, what drinkers in St Albans really want is not the sense of tradition, history and British values that supping their pints in a building over 1300 years old gives them . . . but to do so in an atmosphere that won’t offend the delicate sensibilities of any passing roosters.
It is not the first time pub-goers have been frowned upon by the humourless.
For almost as long as there have been pubs (and Ye Olde Fighting Cocks is recognised by Guinness World Records as Britain’s oldest standing tavern) there have been those who have wanted them closed (or watered) down.
But to suggest that pub names should be censored is surely a step too far.
If the pub is the historical focal point of the British community – and it is, from Hogarth’s happy drinkers in Beer Street (as opposed to the dissolute of Gin Lane) to the Rover’s Return and the Queen Vic – then they are also a vibrant reflection of our colourful island history.
Drinkers at The Hung, Drawn and Quartered by Tower Hill in London can enjoy their pints in roughly the same place where crowds would come to cheer public executions.
The Swan Inn at Woughton on the Green in Buckinghamshire was the base for the highwayman Dick Turpin.
And just off Fleet Street is Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, where Samuel Johnson compiled his English dictionary between drinks.
A century or so later, the writer Charles Dickens found literary inspiration in the same watering hole.
But married to the communal, historical, cultural and social importance of the humble boozer is the right of a pub to call itself what it likes.
To the priggish and puritanical some might sound offensive, but each has a story that is wonderfully, uniquely British.
There’s the Bucket of Blood in Hayle, Cornwall, so named after an incident 200 years ago when the landlord drew up a bucket of blood from the pub’s well.
Further investigation revealed its origins in the mutilated corpses of local smugglers.
And there’s the Black Bitch in Linlithgow, West Lothian, surely a nightmarish name for any rightthinking person except that it derives from the 17th century, when a Thomas Kirk described the city’s coat of arms as looking like ‘‘a black bitch tied to a tree on a floating island’’. Which, to be fair, it does, rather.
Dirty Dicks near Liverpool St in London sounds gratuitously offensive but it’s in honour of a legendary filthy warehouse in nearby Leadenhall St.
The name becomes still more fascinating when you learn that the Dick in question was one Richard Bentley, an 18th-century dandy with a reputation for extreme untidiness and the supposed inspiration for Miss Havisham in Great Expectation .
Ye Olde Fighting Cocks is so named because – you’ve guessed it – there was a rich history of cockfighting in the area. Of course it doesn’t happen now, but it is important to know that it once did.
Likewise, The Bucket of Blood, the Black Bitch, Dirty Dicks and innumerable other saucily named pubs across the country: they all have something to teach us about our cultural and social history.
Change the name and you lose the history. Lose the history and we are all impoverished.
The future is bleak enough for our pubs as it is – members of the Lost Pubs Project have documented over 28,000 closed pubs, at the rate of four every day.
We should cherish those that remain. And the weirder and more wonderful their names, the better.
In Winscales, Cumbria, there used to be a pub called The Legend of Oily Johnnies, which sounds utterly bizarre but was actually in honour of a man called Johnnie, who used to sell paraffin oil there a century ago. Now? It’s a gastropub. And it has been renamed Oily’s.
The food may be lovely, but a little bit of history has slipped through our grasp.