by Albert Jack
The final version of the Flying Dutchman legend (made into an opera by Richard Wagner in 1843) dates to 1680 or 1730, depending on who you believe. This tells of a Captain van Godfearing who insulted the devil who then condemned him to sail the oceans for ever, leaving him with one small glimmer of hope. Only through the love of a faithful woman can he be released from the curse. And so Captain van No Hope returns to the shore every seven years in search of a faithful woman. Well, good luck with that in Cape Town, captain.
The Foresters’ Arms
A FRIENDLY SOCIETY IN NEED…
Now known as the Foresters Friendly Society, the Ancient Order of Foresters was officially formed in 1834. An even earlier version, the Court of the Ancient Order of Foresters, is acknowledged to have existed in England in 1790, though no official records were kept because mutual or friendly societies were outlawed in Britain at the time. Fearful of a French-style revolution of the working classes, the government had prohibited membership of all unions ( see THE ODDFELLOWS’ ARMS). The Foresters claim to have first evolved from the craft guilds of the Middle Ages, and that is quite possibly true but, like the Oddfellows and most other friendly societies, there are no records of membership or articles of association from that time to prove it.
It was after the Norman Conquest that the forests of England were first categorized. The earliest written reference comes from 1079 when William the Conqueror reserved an area of land in south Hampshire for royal hunting and called it the New Forest. Other royal forests still exist, including the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire and Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire (see THE ROBIN HOOD). Foresters were employed by the king to manage the royal land. They held a position in society similar to that of a local sheriff or law enforcer such as a magistrate. Responsible for patrolling the land and capturing poachers, their duties also included negotiating the sale of timber, one of the most widely used building materials of the time, and replanting stock. Criminals and bands of outlaws would hide in the forests and the forester’s responsibilities extended to organizing gangs of armed men to hunt down such lawbreakers. This was dangerous as many confrontations ended in a fight to the death, but foresters could make a decent living out of their job, and they were usually well respected among the law-abiding.
While the medieval foresters probably did form their own friendly societies at the time of the guilds in the thirteenth century, it is not clear that these had any meaningful influence on the Ancient Order of Foresters when it formed in 1834. At their first meeting in Leeds, the members of the society declared support for their fellow men who fell into need ‘as they walked through the forest of life’, and insisted their duty was to support any family who became distressed when the major wage earner fell ill or was unable to work for any other reason. This charity became the major function of the Foresters, whose members initially paid a few pennies a week into a common fund from which sick pay, funeral costs and poverty grants could be drawn.
In 1813 its predecessor, the Royal Order of Foresters, expanded and had begun to establish subsidiary branches around the country. The venues of these meetings would soon become the pubs and hotels we now know as the Foresters or the Foresters’ Arms. As with the Oddfellows, the principles of the Foresters would be incorporated into the trade unions representing workers later in the century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British government started applying the ideology of the friendly societies to the law of the land and a classless society began to draw nearer. (Well, here’s hoping.)
These days the Foresters Friendly Society is a financial institution with no shareholders or any obvious influence from the City. Acting independently for the sole benefit of their members, who share in all profits earned, the organization has remained true to its original principles and has continued to provide charity for its members instead of dividends to greedy investors.
The French House
(Soho, London)
THE HEART OF THE FRENCH RESISTANCE IN THE HEART OF LONDON
The French House in Dean Street is one of the smallest pubs in London. Although not one of the oldest, it has one of the most vibrant histories of them all. During the 1950s the French House became the drinking den of choice for most of London’s artistic community. Every day writers, artists, actors, musicians, singers and songwriters could be found holding court in the small downstairs bar, or hunched over a humble lunch in the cramped upstairs dining room, sharing stories and ideas and hatching artistic plans. Dylan Thomas (1914–53) was a regular and established his hard-drinking reputation at this pub. It was Thomas who once said: ‘An alcoholic is somebody you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.’ He often drank at the French House with the flamboyant painter Francis Bacon (1909–92) and Jeffrey Bernard (see THE COACH AND HORSES) was also a regular. To this day, the French House remains a favourite haunt of London bohemians.
Originally called the York Minster, the bar became the unofficial London headquarters of the Free French Forces after the first Frenchman to be granted a landlord’s licence in London took over the Dean Street bar. It was this, of course, that led to the pub changing its name. During the Second World War, General Charles de Gaulle, along with other senior officers, was exiled in London after the German invasion of France. Their official headquarters was established at 4 Carlton Gardens, but de Gaulle and his generals would often use the York Minster in Dean Street as a place to eat and drink and from which to direct the troops of the French Resistance battling the Germans in Europe.
The Garibaldi
THE ITALIAN HERO WHO BECAME THE TOAST (AND BISCUIT) OF VICTORIAN ENGLAND
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Italy was a collection of warring states. The person responsible for drawing them into one country was Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82), a soldier and politician who is credited with being the first international revolutionary, a nineteenth-century Che Guevara.
Born on 4 July 1807, Garibaldi joined the Carbonari (the ‘Charcoal Burners’), a secret revolutionary organization dedicated to Italian nationalism, but in 1834 fled to Brazil when his part in a failed revolution led to his being condemned to death in his absence by a Genoese court. In 1841 Garibaldi travelled to Montevideo, Uruguay, where the Uruguayan Civil War had been raging for two years. There he raised an Italian legion and then spent the next six years defending the city against the forces of Uruguayan president Manuel Oribe. He also earned himself a reputation as a brave, if not reckless, soldier by leading uphill bayonet charges against forces that far outnumbered his.
Garibaldi’s heart never strayed from his home country, however, and the revolutions of 1848 finally tempted him home to Italy and to Milan in particular, where the inhabitants were fighting against Austrian occupation. When the French, under the command of the future Napoleon III, sent forces to Rome, Garibaldi’s republican army found itself fighting the imperialists on far too many fronts. He was forced to withdraw his 4,000 men and head north to Venice, which was being besieged by the Austrians.
During this time his romantic profile as a freedom fighter was increasing daily, especially in Britain where Italian exiles frequently wrote about his exploits. Garibaldi himself was aware of the importance of public support and at one point had a press corps of nearly one hundred reporters travelling with his army. But with the Austrians, French and Spanish in hot pursuit, the people who wanted to write about him began to outnumber the people who wanted to fight alongside him and he was again forced into exile, this time to New York, on 30 July 1850.
Refusing a parade, the famous Italian managed to slip quietly into the city, where he retained a low profile, avoiding publicity for nearly three years before leaving Baltimore and sailing into Tyneside on 24 March 1854. Garibaldi cut quite a dash with his red silk shirt, poncho and sombrero hat. By mixing with the working classes rather than hobnobbing with local dignitaries, he further enhanced his reputation in the eyes of the public.
Garibaldi toured the country for a month, and thousands of Londoners
were at Nine Elms station to greet his train when he arrived in the capital. He was hailed in the newspapers as the ‘Italian lion’ and ‘the noblest Roman of them all’. Cake makers Peek Frean later developed a biscuit in his honour, said to be based on the raisin bread he provided for his marching troops and still produce the famous Garibaldi, or ‘squashed fly’, biscuits today. Thousands lined the streets, chanting ‘We’ll get a rope and hang the Pope, so up with Garibaldi’ as the Italian hero passed by. Hotels made a profit from selling his bathwater and hundreds of Italian café and tavern owners renamed their establishments in his honour, such was his reputation during the 1850s. However, the great and the good of British establishment were relieved when the man they considered to be nothing more than a rabble-rousing terrorist returned, once again, to his homeland, with Queen Victoria declaring, ‘Garibaldi, thank God, has gone.’
Back in the Mediterranean, Garibaldi bought the small island of Caprera, northern Sardinia, and in 1859, as the Second War of Independence broke out, he formed his own volunteer unit, the Hunters of the Alps. The Garibaldini, as the men were nicknamed, soon became a formidable force.
With his army growing on a daily basis both in number and support, he began moving north until, on 30 September 1860, the Garibaldini fought the French at Volturno and won a decisive victory. Garibaldi then handed over his southern territorial gains to Vittorio Emanuele, whom he famously addressed on 26 October as the ‘King of Italy’.
With Garibaldi’s dream of a free and united Italy finally a reality, the famous guerrilla leader rode triumphantly alongside the king into Naples on 7 November before retiring to Caprera in search of a more peaceful existence. But the political turmoil in Europe during the mid nineteenth century never really settled down and Garibaldi was called into action many more times. Despite this, he died peacefully in bed on 2 June 1882, aged seventy-four. Giuseppe Garibaldi is now regarded as the father of Italy, while to Victorian Britain he seemed like a latter-day Robin Hood. The enthusiasim for him and for Victoria’s other bête noire LORD PALMERSTON show a much less respectable side to nineteenth-century hero worship. Perhaps that’s why there remain so many pubs called after him today.
The George
SLOW AND STEADY WINS THE ENGLISH THRONE
Britain is full of pubs called the George, the person on each sign differing from pub to pub. I’ve seen every well-known George on them, from George Best to Boy George. But who was the original George who inspired all these imitations?
The answer is quite simple: he was in fact King George I, and the sheer quantity of pubs named after him reflects the enormous public relief at the ending of a particularly turbulent period of English history. The turbulence was caused largely by the various foibles of the ruling Stuart dynasty. When Charles II died, in 1685, he left several illegitimate children behind him but no legal heir and so his brother James became king. He was not a popular choice. Charles’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism and James’s barely concealed adherence to the faith panicked a Protestant people who had been brought up on the highly coloured stories of inquisition and torture of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Like his brother, James also had no male heir, or not at first, but by the time his wife had given birth to the long-awaited son, it was too late and rumours abounded that the baby was not his but part of a Catholic strategy to take over England.
In 1688 a group of nobles invited the Protestant William of Orange, who was married to James’s daughter Mary, to come to England with an army. When William arrived in November, many of James’s key advisers and his other daughter, Anne, promptly defected to his side. James went into exile and William and Mary took over the throne. They didn’t have any children and when they died, Anne succeeded them. Anne was pregnant a staggering eighteen times but tragically none of her babies lived longer than six months and when she died the crown passed to her obscure German cousin, George, the Elector of Hanover. Although fifty-seven Catholics bore a closer blood relationship to Anne, the Act of Settlement passed by an anxious Parliament in 1701 prohibited Catholics from inheriting the throne, and George was Anne’s closest living Protestant relative.
Despite sharing a name with England’s patron saint, George was a rather desperate choice for a xenophobic country racked by dissension and rebellion – and the Jacobites promptly tried to depose him for James’s son (see THE THREE LORDS) – but he actually turned out to be a reasonable king. Although he didn’t speak English, he had a lot of experience in governing. Parliament had chosen him and so, unlike his predecessors, he interfered relatively little with it. His citizens were ambivalent about their stolid king but knew that he was the best choice. As the author William Makepeace Thackeray put it a century later:
His heart was in Hanover. He was more than fifty-four years of age when he came amongst us: we took him because we wanted him, because he served our turn; we laughed at his uncouth German ways, and sneered at him… I, for one, would have been on his side in those days. Cynical, and selfish, as he was, he was better than [James’s son the Old Pretender] with a French King’s orders in his pocket, and a swarm of Jesuits in his train.
George’s reign marked the end of absolute monarchy, and the combination of king and Parliament for the most part working together meant that England became more stable and more successful than ever before. It’s ironic that it took a German king to stress the importance of British nationalism (see also THE BRITANNIA), but George’s broader outlook led him to realize the potential that existed in a truly united kingdom. He was succeeded by Georges II, III and IV, and the stability never wavered. The name George thus became synonymous with the British crown at its steadiest; calling your inn the George was therefore an explicit expression of support for the status quo.
The George and Dragon
GOD FOR HARRY, ENGLAND AND SAINT GEORGE!
St George was not England’s first patron saint (see THE CROWN AND ARROWS); he was adopted by Edward III around 1340 when the king dedicated the chapel he was building at Windsor to the soldier saint who represented the knightly virtues of chivalry he so admired.
Much of the rise in popularity of the legend of St George arose during the Crusades, the medieval religious wars waged by the Christians against their Muslim enemy in the East, from which the legend is believed to originate. The new taste was for much less passive saints and a more bloodthirsty Christianity, promoted by the clerics who accompanied the soldiers on the Crusades and who recruited huge numbers to the cause. So it must have been some comfort to know, before setting off into the unknown, that there were mighty Christian warriors, one called George, already there, and fighting for your own god.
The George and Dragon legend continued to grow in popularity in the Middle Ages thanks to a twelfth-century collection of saints’ lives called The Golden Legend, written by Jacobus de Voragine in around 1260. The tale it recounts is set near a godless, pagan city called Silene, thought to be in what is now Libya. In a lake close to this city lived a fearsome dragon which threatened to kill the villagers if they did not provide it with a live animal to eat each day. And so, to appease the monster, they threw it a sheep every evening. When they had run out of sheep they drew lots as to which children to sacrifice instead. Eventually the king’s own daughter was chosen: he pleaded with his people and promised them all of his gold and half of his land if they would spare her from the dragon, but they refused.
Standing at the edge of the lake, the trembling princess saw a magnificent young Christian warrior from a nearby town riding towards her, having heard of the king’s plight. ‘I will defend you in the name of Jesus Christ,’ he called as he galloped towards the dragon, which was, by then, approaching his supper. The dragon turned on George instead but, making the sign of the cross to protect himself, the warrior drove his lance into the neck of the beast with such force the creature was pinned to the ground.
George and the girl then walked the defeated dragon through the town to show the shamed creature to the people. He told them the Lord had
sent him to deliver them all from evil and promised to slay the beast if they would become Christians like himself. The people agreed and the dragon was killed with one mighty blow from the warrior’s sword. On that very spot, 15,000 people were then baptized and the king later built a church to the Blessed Virgin Mary on the same site.
Looking at the story more closely, you can see how Christianity had simply appropriated the ancient Greek tale of Perseus and Andromeda. The legend of St George held firm in England, but likewise, thanks to medieval myth and fable, the story developed and altered over the ages to suit changing tastes and needs. St George could be co-opted for all sorts of purposes, including folk remedies – as exemplified by a fifteenth-century manuscript advising people how to protect their horses from witches. At the time it was commonly believed that if a horse was found to be sweating, or tired, in the morning, then a witch or hag had stolen it during the night and ridden the animal hard. To prevent this, according to the manuscript, you should hang a flint with a small hole in the middle above the stable door to remind the witch, if she appeared in the night, that St George had banished her for all time. And apparently that worked.
The story of St George remained extremely popular, leading to later embellishment by Richard Johnson in his Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendom (1596). Johnson removed most of the Christian religious references and replaced them with chivalrous and noble ideals, reflecting the romantic era of the knights and the Crusades. According to this version, George is a lad born in Coventry to aristocratic parents but is stolen soon after birth and taken east. As he grows up he bravely saves the King of Egypt’s daughter, Princess Sabra, from a fearsome dragon and as a reward is told of his true ancestry. With that he returns to Coventry (rather than being sent there) where, before long, he is unlucky enough to encounter another dragon on Dunsmore Heath in Warwickshire. Although George manages to save the people by slaying this second dragon, he is himself poisoned by the beast’s evil breath during the battle and dies soon afterwards, in the process securing a place in English folklore for ever more. His body, Johnson writes, is buried in the Chapel at Windsor that Edward III had dedicated to him.
