Last Landlady

by Laura Thompson

  The club-like aspect of some coffee houses could doubtless be off-putting to the outsider. They were places where people gossiped, networked, showed off to each other. But they were also places in which people could talk to those who were not necessarily like themselves, where they could argue and do that famous thing of ‘exchanging ideas’, which is rarely as exalted as it sounds but which does, nonetheless, permit the very human desire to express oneself. This kind of congress transferred to pubs. ‘Every pub is a parliament’, as no less a beer drinker than Nigel Farage has put it; one can make of that what one wishes but the larger point, that a pub became a place where one could talk sense or nonsense with almost complete freedom, is true and important.

  More than this, however, coffee houses were places where one could simply be, in public. They were ‘public houses’. In that sense, they were probably the pub’s closest ancestor.

  And they were not about getting drunk, although they might be about drinking. So in that sense too they resembled an ideal pub, in which alcohol is central, but alcohol for its own sake is not.

  At the same time, however, something else was going on, something that came charging in from a wilder but not too distant frontier: the ‘Gin Craze’. This was the other side of the story, the untrammelled side, in which the concept of drink for drink’s sake was taken to an extreme that might even have defeated the hollering, staggering semi-catatonics of today. Gin! With its wretched allure, like a femme fatale dreamed by Baudelaire or the death wish in Billie Holiday’s voice … even when gin is tricked out, made cocktail-bar-smart with the jostle of ice, the clean chunk of lime, the plump speared olives; even when it is the tipple of twenty-first-century London youth, sold in faux-apothecary premises and crafted with achingly recherché flavourings; still the dip of melancholia lies within every sip. And there was no such paraphernalia in nineteenth-century England. Gin was itself, warm and unashamed and wickedly cheap. It was mothers’ ruin, fathers’ and children’s as well: girls in particular enjoyed the taste. Gin had come to England from the Netherlands, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had put a Dutch king on the throne. It was let loose upon the nation by a market that allowed unlicensed production, while other spirits were heavily taxed. Gin was in charge.

  By the time the government had understood the implications of this policy, it was too late. The 1736 Gin Act, which put the price up in line with other drinks, led to riots in the streets. People refused to do without their gin and, what a surprise, the black market supplied it. Six years later the new tax had been reduced back to nothing; the craze had to play itself out.

  It was, wrote Henry Fielding in 1751, a ‘new kind of drunkenness’. People had got drunk all the time before gin arrived, but gin made it so easy. It was as if crack cocaine could be bought at Poundland. It killed thousands of the desperate poor, many of whose bodies were later found to have rib fractures from falling or fighting. A woman strangled her two-year-old daughter in order to strip her of a set of clothes provided by the workhouse; the sale of the clothes fetched 1s 4d, which was spent on gin.

  This story is part-reflected in Hogarth’s engraving Gin Lane. A mother, smiling with a terrible merriment, is shown losing her grip upon a child that will apparently fall to its death. The quality of the woman’s drunkenness is indeed, as Fielding suggested, of a new order: nothing exists except the lucent trickle in her veins. One does see people drunk like that today, and they are not necessarily poor. Nevertheless, they seek that state. They seek it here, there and everywhere. Not just on nights out, but on trains, at airports, at football matches, on racecourses. It makes no odds where they are, because the desire is to be unaware, to lose the sense of self. The difference between now and then lies in the fact that this condition is sought, perversely, with self-awareness; this gallery is played to even as the gallery becomes a mirage, which the inhabitants of Gin Lane did not think to do. It is the difference, in other words, between having money and having almost none; having a choice and having almost none. Which in a way makes today’s drunks, and their urge to get wasted, out of it, done with whatever they are doing, even more wretched than their forebears, who at least had a reason to behave as they did.

  Today’s drunks operate in a post-pub world. They may do some of their drinking in a pub, but before an outing they can get preloaded on supermarket gear. They can buy cheap booze to be guzzled in whatever private way they choose, just as people did during the mid-eighteenth century, when there were some 17,000 gin shops – many of them former chemists’ premises. These proliferated wildly until the 1820s, at which point a measure of licensing control was imposed. The makeshift shops were replaced by an entity similar in its soul, but spectacularly different in its outward show: the gin palace.

  One sees gin palaces still, oversized in that grandiloquent nineteenth-century way, towering above the workaday street, dressed up and tough and oddly exciting to behold. Today they might house ordinary pubs. At the time of their creation, they were another step along the road to such pubs, bringing as they did that essential element of the theatrical: with their pediments and columns and gilding, they looked like music hall stately homes. Indeed, music hall itself evolved, in part, from the entertainments that were staged within saloons, which predated gin palaces by a couple of decades. Before they became superior bars – a twentieth-century develpoment – saloons were adjuncts to entrepreneurial drinking establishments, large rooms with an admission fee or higher prices, in which customers could gamble, play a sport such as billiards or see a show of some kind: dancing, singing, comedy, drama. These theatricals eventually became such a feature that they took on a life and identity of their own, but the music hall and the pub remained spiritually allied. They had the same throwaway vigour, the same supremely English mix of sentimentality and lack of sentimentality.

  Some forty years before Dickens conjured his proto-pub on the Thames, he wrote in Sketches by Boz about a visit to a gin palace. He described emerging from the dark slummy streets around Drury Lane and being transported, almost knocked out, by the sight of a building where ‘all is light and brilliancy’. Of course gin-palaces were rough houses, vulgar and decadent and the rest of it. But who could blame people for liking them? I would have liked them. They were literal beacons, places in which alcohol – although still a near-necessity – was associated with something more than just itself, set within a dreamscape powered by gaslight and vitality. They were nakedly commercial, full of advertisements for ‘the only real brandy in London’ or ‘the famous cordial, medicated gin’, but that too gave them a lurid beckoning zest. Their popularity was not unlike that of the dog track, which took possession of many cities a century later, and which similarly lifted the working man’s soul with its creamy floodlights and its implicit gift of hope.

  From the gin palace came that fundamental element to the pub: the counter. In Dickens’ sketch, ‘two showily dressed damsels’ stand framed behind it, barmaids in all but name, watched in awe by ‘two old washerwomen’ who sit on a bench drinking gin and peppermint (a ghastly concoction whose popularity recurred between the wars). The gin palace counter was made, customarily, of highly polished mahogany. Fittings in dark, swelling wood, interspersed with etched glass, were typical and again inherited by the pub. So too was the use of light: the gin palace created its allure with glass and mirrors, which it deployed like flashing weapons. In the pub this incandescence would be softened and modulated, given areas of shadow and occlusion. Its stage set was a subtle business, whereas the gin palace made no bones about the effects it sought to create.

  And what it lacked – not that it cared – was the sense of belonging, of ease. There are several ways of behaving when one is drunk, and to a considerable extent these are influenced by where one is at the time. Just as the true pub atmosphere induces mellowness, so this unnatural brilliant bombast seems to have sent people into a state of semi-hysteria. Fights were commonplace, as they are in today’s oversized, loveless pubs. Dickens’ sketch ends with th
e police being summoned to a mass brawl (if this was an exaggeration, it was credibly so). He also gives a faintly threatening edge to the relationship between male customers and female drink-servers. The respect paid is of the dangerously dashing, ‘devil take ye’ kind. Gallantry is flourished like a glinting sword; the girls’ coquetry is necessarily a shield.

  Most striking, however, is the reference to ‘the throng of men, women, and children’. At the age of twelve, Dickens himself ordered a ‘best ale’ – known as Genuine Stunning, a name to conjure with – in an establishment on Parliament Street, but the Drury Lane gin palace was truly no place for children. He also noted, at the end of the evening, the ‘two or three occasional stragglers’ still haunting the place, ‘cold, wretched-looking creatures, in the last stage of emaciation and disease.’ However palatial the mise-en-scène, the gin endgame remained the same. An air of regret often hovers over closing time, as the light flares into reality and the evening is dispelled into nothingness. But what Dickens described, because it was about drink as the only succour, was of a different order. Those who wrung their hands and decried alcohol as the root of all evil should, perhaps, have turned their argument on its head: the evil was there already, and the alcohol was merely the panacea.

  Yet there was, by this time, a rival to the gin palace, offering a better, simpler and kindlier place for it. A place for wholesome and merry boozing, not the insidious kind that wound its way through people’s innards, or so Hogarth suggested in Beer Street, his companion engraving to Gin Lane. The ‘beer house’ was licensed by the 1830 Beer Act: it was a rare piece of realistic legislation, designed to help people enjoy alcohol without killing themselves, or indeed each other.

  Notwithstanding the gin craze, beer or ale continued to be drunk regularly, and brewing had become a big industry: there were twelve major brewers in London, with splendid premises. Whitbread’s was said to have buildings ‘higher than a church’. The dray horses plodded nobly through the streets, delivering barrels as they would continue to do for more than another century: the sight of these animals, the patient stop-start of their hooves, the steam rising from their haunches into the London air, was one of my grandmother’s earliest memories.

  What is remarkable, and rather droll, about the beer house is that it bore such a strong resemblance to the Anglo-Saxon alehouse. It was a house, selling beer, quite possibly made on site by an ale-wife, or indeed husband. Spirits were not for sale. This was all about knocking spirits off their perch. Later they reappeared – although not in the first pub that my grandmother was offered, which had no spirits licence. As late as the 1950s, therefore, a version of the beer house was still around, although it had in the main evolved out of existence by the end of the nineteenth century. It had either died, or thrived and expanded to the point where it became a truly public house: a pub.

  Before that time, the beer house had proliferated to the point where there were around 50,000 in operation by the end of the 1830s, and even these relatively harmless establishments had to be brought into line. Ah, the English and their irrepressible boozing! The Sale of Beer Act in 1854 was a piece of silly legislation, an attempt to reduce Sunday drinking, which led to the usual mayhem and had to be repealed. The 1869 Wine and Beerhouse Act showed more sense. Although not everybody liked it, they accepted it. It prevented the creation of more beer houses, but it did not – as bad laws do – expect human nature to change, just because it said so. Instead it strengthened the licensing laws, thus supplying a sort of framework to drinking, which it turned out was what most people actually wanted: the quality of authorised pleasure that makes the pub what it is.

  Beer houses, gin houses, ale houses … they had all played their part in the creation of the pub, and now they were all pubs in the eyes of the law; that is to say, they were subject to the same jurisdiction, which, when it came to alcohol, was always liable to be flouted, but which was nonetheless necessary. Licences became a thing worth having, issued only to people deemed sufficiently respectable, often former members of the military. They were not to be risked by allowing gambling, or prostitution, or extreme drunkenness on the premises. Of course these things still went on. My great-grandfather’s pub had a bookie’s runner called Woodbine Minnie and a couple of semi-resident tarts called Queenie and Nell. They were facts of life, and the pub has always accepted those, but they were not to be waved like banners. Similarly: drunkenness would be forgiven, up to a point, but it would not be indulged. Standards were all, however much fun it was to chafe against them, and the power to maintain them was now invested, officially, in that high priest with the drink-damp stole over his shoulder, the publican.

  My great-grandfather was born into this land of pubs. It suited him. Very much like his daughter – lacking only the drama of her physical glamour – he was entirely fitted for this vocation, alight with elusive charm, disseminating his personality with apparent nonchalance, but in fact (like a chef with his seasoning) with an innate sense of how much to give. A tight ring of customers would congregate around him every evening, hoping for more.

  He was also a personage within his community. In his interwar heyday, when he had charge of the old pub, he would stroll the streets on his way to his daily cut-throat shave and his smiling importance would be acknowledged on all sides.

  The pub was accepted as intrinsic to society, therefore so was he … of course it was not quite that simple. There were still those who opposed pubs, who would have wished away not just the old dives with their watered-down gin and nightly punch-ups, but all pubs, on what they called principle.

  To those who view pubs as essentially good, which is not the same as moral, it is possible to see the pub and the church as twin locals. Not so the temperance societies, whose rise was contemporaneous with that of the pub (they originated in Britain in the late 1820s, flourished in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras and faded away, although not completely, in the 1930s). These varied in levels of stridency. Sometimes their warnings were concentrated upon spirits, rather than wine and beer, which given the effects of the Gin Craze was not unreasonable. However, the absurdly named ‘United Kingdom Alliance’ sought to ban the sale of all alcohol (a prohibition bill was actually put to the Commons in 1859, and defeated with the contempt that one might expect). But the general aim was to force the closure of pubs, if not all of them then as many as possible. In the early twentieth century it was believed that there were far more pubs than was necessary – which was probably true, although this was never really a question of necessity.

  The temperance movement was usually underpinned by religious conviction and espoused by Nonconformists such as the Methodists and Quakers. There was also a strong political dimension, as in ‘temperance Chartism’, which sought to free the working class of a potentially debilitating dependency. Again, this was a legitimate point of view. It was quite true that drink could be a wrecker of lives. Yet such was the quality of some of those lives, it could also be argued that drink was the only thing that made them bearable. Take it away, and what exactly was going to replace it? Against the fervent vision of fine clean living was something less ennobling but more generous: the wooden settle in the dim-lit bar, the glass full of amber consolation, the shuffle of the feet on sawdust tacky with spit, the communion as warm and lax as an illicit bed.

  G. K. Chesterton, whose socialism was of an anti-statist cast, saw the pub as just such a friend to the people and, furthermore, as an emblem of freedom. As with the old coffee houses, pubs were where anything might be said without inhibition or fear. An attack on the pub was an attack on liberty, goddammit. Nevertheless, the temperance set came close to a remarkable victory in 1908, when the Liberal government – paying a debt to its Nonconformist backers – set out a bill to close around a third of the ‘unnecessary’ pubs in England and Wales, and to ban Sunday opening in England (this had already happened in Wales, where the ban remained in place until 1961. It was not necessarily observed: a knock at the back door of a pub could open the
way to earthly paradise).

  This attempt by the Liberals to control drinking, which contained familiar elements mixed to unusual strength, was resisted with comparable ferocity. It was defeated by the Conservatives in the Lords, but before that a rally in Hyde Park had been attended by some 700,000 people, while the Licensed Victuallers’ Defence League – that is to say, the brewers – produced clever propaganda, suggesting that shutting pubs on Sundays was unfair to those who could not drink whenever they chose (and, in the case of the prime minister, Lord Asquith, most certainly did). As so often before, the nation’s drinkers were making their position extremely clear. Yet the urge to interfere in their habits itched away. George Bernard Shaw, a socialist of very different temper to Chesterton, remained convinced that the public could be purified of its terrible desire for the demon booze. High on teetotalism, backed by those of a similar righteous tendency, he established a community Refreshment Association, offering food and boring beverages. It also sold alcohol (profits to be returned to the association) but in the grudging, guilt-inducing, why-are-you-buying-this manner of supermarkets selling cigarettes: the drink was hidden behind curtains and absurdly expensive. The project failed. It did so in 1913, the year that Chesterton published The Flying Inn, a novel set in an England where pubs have been expunged by the ruling Fabians (Shaw and his kind), and a stalwart landlord traverses the country with a barrel of rum and a large cheese, carrying an inn sign bearing the words ‘The Old Ship’. A loophole in the law decrees that wherever this man erects his sign, people can come to drink. Thus the pub continues to exist, and to laugh gently at those who would destroy it.