PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
" At the ends of many streets stand groups of ruffians who feel no interest but in ill-treating peaceable and unoffending inhabitants. This is particularly the case near the Crown &. Kettle. I know many who are obliged to sneak home along back streets or in the cart road. Violence is common." Newspaper report. on Ancoats, Manchester, 1923.
Pubs and Pubbery
There are all sorts of problems in life - marriage, divorce, murders, arson, small print, plastic wrapping and dog-fouling- but none so urgent as that involving pub landlords. They are, or should be, the bedrock of our society. But the
big breweries have them by their optics and those honest creatures of toil are caught with their kegs down. I have said it before and I will say it again if I can remember what it was. Ah yes. All publicans should be given the chance to buy their premises and run them independently of big brewers. That is the only way we will get decent choice at the point of thirst. Big brewers are there, in my book, to produce the beer and no more. Landlords are there to sell it. I and one or two friends are there to drink it.
In these circumstances I would like to put on record a few things about landlords.
First, political correctness. They are not very good at it. A landlord near me was inclined to shout, "Anyone order a taxi?" when someone not of his own ethnicity entered the premises. It was not conducive to good relations. On the whole, ethnicity is not for pub landlords to judge. A particularly good drinking companion of mine was a rotund person named Sarkis. His second name was never mastered, at least by me. It was Gubulchik, or some such thing. At any rate, he was Armenian and sweated a lot and we had many uproarious and happy times together. I also had a particular respect for a very dark-skinned person who frequented Yates's Wine Lodge in Ancoats, Manchester, and who was inclined to shout, when bar staff were too busy to serve him, "This country was all right before you whites came."
An Ancoats landlord named Charlie was a great favourite. He had a mournful face. He was talking to a customer in a near-deserted bar one day and his face became even more mournful. Because someone walked in, crossed the room to the toilets, spent time there, then crossed the room again and walked out. On the carpet, he had left solidevidence of why his visit was necessary. It was gently steaming. Charlie observed, "You wouldn't credit it, would you?"
Charlie's wife was cheerful and buxom. When she leaned over the bar one day, the Daily Express drama critic of the time said, "If those ever have pups, I'd like one."
That journalist had a liking for gin and tonic, so he asked Charlie for ice. Charlie said he did not have ice. Why not? asked the journalist. "No call for it," said Charlie.
Their pub had three entrances at the corner of a road. A fellow walked in one day and, since he was already drunk, he was ejected. He staggered round the corner and came in at the other door and was ejected again by Charlie. Then he was ejected for a third time. He said, "Do you own all the bloody pubs round here?" I heard that used as a joke, later, on TV.
There was an editor named Dick Lewis, very rumbustious, ex-major Commando, and he was drinking there one day when fire broke out upstairs. When the brigade arrived, he sent drinks up for the brave lads in helmets. Then more. Then he joined them to hack about a bit. And by the time the firemen left they were in such a happy glow that one of them observed, "Best bloody fire since Belle Vue."
The landlord at a pub nearby was small and wiry and tough. He was of the city centre gentry in that he advocated ties with elastic so that if a customer tried to strangle you, he had some difficulty in achieving his purpose. He got into a struggle with a customer one day and the sleeve of his jacket was pulled off. Then the other sleeve. And the jacket finally collapsed to the floor. He took it back to his tailor, flung it to his bench, and said, "What kind of workmanship do you call that?"
He told many interesting stories of clashes in pubs and he emerged unscathed because he was quick with the mind. When cornered in a toilet he said, "OK, but Danny won't like it." Danny was a publican who put the fear of God into thugs like them. "You know Danny?" said one. "Close friend," said the landlord. They vanished without further words.
I was posted by a drinking friend at the entrance bar to the pub when he took over. He threw somebody out before his furniture had gone upstairs. Among the furniture, I reported in wonderment, was a small crocodile, stuffed, in a case. He put a painting of his wife in the main bar. It made her look like a horse. I often wondered whether he put it there out of admiration for the artist or to remind his wife to keep her place.
A tall barman used to appear with a plate of food and shout, "Steak pie and chips" or whatever in a most belligerent fashion. I had a standing joke, very boring, I imagine. I would say, "You'll never get served if you shout like that." He managed to ignore me on every single occasion.
A large publican in Manchester city centre was talking to a friend whom he respected for his humour and his wisdom. At some stage, he said, "Excuse me, Mr Thomas." He thereupon threw out two people talking nearby. They were ejected at speed through a revolving door and there was a loud squeal of brakes from a double-decker bus. He returned to the bar and said, "Sorry about that, Mr Thomas. I couldn't hear what you were saying." Mr Thomas drew his attention to the fact that he had thrown out two customers but it wasn't his pub.
May of Top Yates's was a forbidding creature and I shall not describe her at length, because that would be to usurp the greater experience of others. Enough to say that she was a disciiplinarian,. When Pat Phoenix, of Coronation Street, said, "I hear you are retiring, May. I will give you a signed photograph," May said, "Who of?" I never did trace a pub I heard of where the landlord's dog was said to welcome customers but refuse to let them out.
In Blackburn stands the Adelphi Hotel, next to the Evening Telegraph's former building. It was run, at one time, by a red-haired little man who was a great friend and a great chef. He had been trained at somewhere like the Dorchester. His expertiese meant that when I did my rounds of the Blackburn pubs, beginning in his at 7pm, I could return at 10.20, go upstairs, and drink his soup.
It was good practice to buy drinks for employees of the nearby Thwaites brewery in that pub. They didn't buy drinks in return, but if you were lucky they invited you into the sampling room at the brewery.
In nearby Darwen lived a journalist friend named Norman Bentley. He was known to every publican in the town. Fellow once had a bet that you could not go to any premises and find that he was not known. The bet was taken. The taker went into a new, posh club and said, "Has Norman Bentley been in?" and the barman said, "Norman? Haven't seen him in ages."
I was drinking with him and another friend in a Darwen pub and there were just the three of us, with three behind the bar. At some stage, the landlord said, "Hey, hang on a minute. There are three of you and three of us and we can't keep up."
One evening, he got involved in an absorbing game of darts in a Darwen pub and was surprised when he opened pub door to go home to discover that a shaft of sunlight hit him.
Being a journalist, he was invited to receptions, particularly as he was racing correspondent. He turned up at one of these and noted that the barmen were ranged six feet apart at a long, free bar. By the door were tables laden with snacks. Being the first arrival, he did not actually run to the bar, but sauntered, idly, as if not interested. And then he got into the serious business of diminishing it. Finally, as he left, he picked up a snack. When he arrived home, his wife, a woman not to be scorned, said in an accusing tone, "Bentley!" "Yes, love," he said. "What is it?" She replied: "You've been eating onions." Crisis over.
He once got for her a pot of geraniums. Then - since he had been to the pub in advance of getting the present - he wondered where he had got them. Perhaps, he thought, he bought them from someone at the bar. At any rate, he was troubled by his purchase and retraced his footsteps. And he came across a long drive to a big house and near the house there were pots of geraniums all in a row. One was missing.
A fireman one day described a fierce blaze of the night before. "That's amazing," said Norman. "It's broken my dream." "I don't see how," said the fireman. "You were standing next to me at the fire."
He was a very good journalist and recruited people for the national newspapers, but he never had the slightest wish to advance himself.
When I moved house I first tried the nearest likely-looking pub. It passed muster, so I bought the house. The landlord of the Hoghton Arms was named Bill Swift. He looked like Mr Micawber and was quite wonderful. If you took guests he thought you wished to impress, he was bowing all over the place and saying comforting words, such as, "For you I have..." followed by hints that we were the most hallowed customers in the world. He was originally a butcher, properly trained in a hard establishment and all that, and it occasionally showed. Particularly when he was eating a bull's testicles with the farmer who owned it and the creature was nursing its wounds back at the farm.
The cellars of the pub tended to flood and all hell was let loose. Soggy carpets hauled out. Weeping and wailing. One of the customers, a man of few words, and those pretty incomprensible to anyone outside the area, said, when the cause was discovered, "I could have told him that (meaning a stream or fractured culvert or whatever) was there."
To this day I can not imagine why he kept that a secret for years.
A policeman was in the habit of arriving at the pub, ostensibly to see that it was clear of drinkers after closing time. And this habit was noted by the customers. So several of them went through a hatch into the cellar. When the policeman arrived, he got his pint, and then the hatch was off and the customers were back on parade, saying, "If he's having one we're having one."
Another of the hello-hello service was posted temporarily to an outlying township and he duly turned up at the pub after closing time. It was very busy, several deep at the bar. So he told the customers to drink up and go. And one said, "No. You are not our bobby."
I could go on. But then, those who enjoy a pint usually do.
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
3 March, 2007