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Toby's web on pub culture in London will start here. More later.

Toby Sullivan
Pub Culture Historical Fiction
Senor Cerveza is a Spanish Merchant Seaman on 48 hour leave from his ship, “El Vino de Dios”, while it unloads its cargo of Dutch Gin in Victorian London. “Aye dios mio”, thought Senor Cerveza as he disembarked his Spanish cargo ship. The Spanish Armada could not have had a worse voyage than the one he’d just been on. First it was olives from Valencia, then rugs from Rabat, then cider from Normandy, then gin from Rotterdam. Now he had only a 24 hour leave in London before he would have to go on to Kiel, Copenhagen, Bergen, Narvik, Newfoundland, New York, Bermuda, Panama, Santiago, Montevideo, Ascension, and his home Island of Tenerife. It was not the many ports of call that had Cerveza down, it was the
prospect of weeks at sea under the rules of Capitan Purritino. Purritino held the belief that a dry ship would never sink. This meant no alcohol on board. Purritino even died the medicinal alcohol black to keep track of its use and consumption. When Cerveza found out that in London they would be docked in Canary Wharf, he was overjoyed. Surely he would be able to find the familiar tapas bars of his Canary Islands in this Canary Wharf. Spying an arched sign that read, “The Widow’s Son”, Cerveza headed toward what he thought would provide him with the refreshments he craved.

It was only as he stepped in the “Widow’s Son”, that Cerveza realized how truly
hungry he was. Then he noticed what he took for a quaint English custom, strung over the bar were many buns. It reminded him of the hanging jamon and garlic of his home country and he eagerly helped himself to the nearest bun. As he bit into the bun, Cerveza came to two disturbing realizations. Firstly the bun was
not frosted, rather it was mold encrusted. Secondly, the customers, who were
exclusively in Royal Naval uniform, were approaching him menacingly. After being
punched by a Petty Officer, raked by a Rating, and bit by a Boy Sailor, a
startled Cerveza was ejected from the “Widow’s Son”. Back in the pub, the
sailors ordered another round of Pusher’s Rum. They discussed among themselves
the audacity of the man they had just turned out. “Imagine, a sailor about to
set off to war, tells his lone mother that he would return and she should have a
bun ready for him when he does. And the mother, every year adds a bun of hope.
Only to have some swarthy civilian come in and deface the shrine by stealing a
bun and almost vomiting before even one drink. Some people have no scruples.”
Meanwhile, Senor Cerveza, oblivious to his crime, staggers down the street
along the Thames, now needing a drink more than ever. He dives into “The King’s
Head and Eight Bells”, and orders a pint with shaking hands. In order to steady
his rattled and battered nerves, Cerveza sets his beer down on a rather large
and pretty coaster. Cerveza turns to the customer next to him and comments of
the poor quality of the coaster. For as the beer slides down his glass on to the
coaster, the intricate image washes away. The fellow customer is none other than
the Bohemian artist, Augustus John. The coaster is nothing else than one of his
masterpieces. Augustus slaps Cerveza, his friend and fellow artist, Whistler,
scratches Cerveza. All of a sudden a horde of Bohemian groupies descend of
Cerveza, kicking his shins and pulling his hair. Cerveza leaves without so much
a sip of beer, but with a much greater understanding of London’s alternative art
scene that he ever wanted.
Senor Cerveza by passes many rough looking pubs, until he comes across one that
he knows cannot possible cause him harm. “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese”. Cerveza sets
himself down on a stool next to a man working on a book that looked like three
bibles together. Cerveza gives the man a friendly, “Hola”. The man suddenly
becomes excited and says quickly, Hello dear chap I’m Dr.Johnson. I’m a
lexicographer and if you have any other new words do please tell me now. I will
buy you a pint for every page we get done together.” Cerveza does not understand
any of this, but the man seems friendly so in Spanish he tells him all about his
travels and home in Spain. Dr. Johnson feverishly writes down every word and
appears fascinated by each word Cerveza says. This makes Cerveza open up more to
the stranger, his enthusiasm for talking is furthered by the periodic appearance
of a pint paid for by Dr. Johnson. After three hours of meticulous recording and
many crowns worth of bought drinks, Dr. Johnson realizes that Cerveza is
constantly repeating words and is most likely a troublesome foreigner. Cerveza
talks throughout Johnson’s realization until the Dr. stops buying drinks and
stabs Cerveza with what is left of his quill.
Lonely, beaten, and dejected, Cerveza needs some tender loving care that only a
senora (or a ship’s boatswain on long voyages) can provide. His quest brings him
to the “Shepherd’s Tavern”. Senor Cerveza overcomes his fear of the sailors
going in and out, because they are all accompanied by senoras. It is times like
these that Cerveza is glad to visit Protestant countries. The women wore quite a
lot of make up and were showing skin from ankle all the way up to lower calve.
Cerveza found that he must have a sexy foreign allure, because he was surrounded
by lovely ladies as he tried to order a beer. But as soon as Cerveza brought out
his money to pay for his drink he was accosted by blue soldiers. These were the
new Bobbies or Peelers. The policemen made it clear to Cerveza that soliciting
prostitutes would land him in prison for a long time. Cerveza, noticing that the
police were not entirely sober, told them that if they wanted to continue
receiving Dutch gin they had to get him back to his ship quickly. The constables
then decided in the interests of serving the peace, to expedite the legal
process.
Cerveza is escorted to “Ye Olde Cock Tavern”, next to the Law Courts. In the
best traditions of British drunken justice, Cerveza is permitted to meet with a
solicitor. Cerveza’s legal council has a huge amount of confidence in the
prospect of securing a victory or at least more beer in the Viaduct Tavern.
Cerveza and his lawyer pass the Old Bailey to the nearby Viaduct tavern where
judicial wig powder and alcoholism fill the air. Victorian London is punishment
happy and it is a altruistic relationship. The very poor are often better off in
prison that on the street or in military service. Thus there is a queue for
“hiccup” justice. A feeble elderly man in front of Cerveza, drops his ha’ penny
as he attempts to pay for a pint. A nearby Judge sentences the old man to forty
years in debtor’s prison. Cerveza has a bit more luck and it sentenced to 10
pints at the “Morpeth Arms”.
It was ten long hard pints at the Morpeth Arms next to the Millbank
Penitentiary. Cerveza had to listen to Jeremy Bethem, the great prison reformer,
talk on and on about silence being a virtue and comparing prisons to church. It
was as Bethem was explaining how the prison windows were high so prisoners would
look toward god, that Cerveza looked up toward the bottom of his tenth pint
glass and left.
Cerveza, now very impaired from his rehabilitation, rejoins polite society. He
is robbed pesoless outside “The Angle” a riverside pub. The attack is witnessed
by a writer by the name of Charles Dickens, who is finally able to figure out
how to dispose of the Bill Sykes character in his Oliver Twist project.
Cerveza stumbles into Whitechaple where he hopes his luck will improve. As he
enters the pub, “Sir Rodney’s Head” a well dressed man on the way out barrels
into him. It is none other than Sir Frederick Treves a man who pioneered
philanthropy in England. After declaring Cerveza the poor soul most desperately
in need that he had ever come across, Sir Frederick showers Cerveza with money
and finery.
Armed with the confidence of the newly rich, Cerveza travels far west to the
former leafy town of Richmond upon Thames, now a London suburb. Cerveza decides
to celebrate his good fortune with others of his “esteemed” status in the “White
Cross”. He enters the pub cum dancing hall and is quite literally swept off his
feet. All of a sudden the door are shuttered and there are gleeful cries of,
“The old girl is flooding again” and “jolly good show”. Sure enough the Thames
water seeps in, but the dancing and later, energetic sloshing continues well
into the night. When Cerveza is released he is soaking wet from the filthy river
water and sweat.
Cerveza shivers along the Thames, when he is spirited by young men in straw
hats into a nearby pub, the “Duke’s Head”. Cerveza is chided by one well spoken
youth, “hear hear ole boy its not race day yet what. Fell in the water while
crewing for the blues did you eh what? You better be careful ole boy, the crew
from Cambridge is just a staines throw away what.” The old boy network came
through for Cerveza and he was sent off with a Oxford scarf to keep him warm.
XII.Duke’s Head
Cerveza, who after such an active night just wants to relax enters the pub,
“Jerusalem”. After all what place says peace better than Jerusalem? Cerveza
enters the pub in the middle of a fiery oratory. “Wots keepin ush dowan, is tha
bloody uppa class, OxBridge oppressors. This workin man’s benevolent society was
founded on tha principals of Marx. We need to wedestribute tha wealf righ ear,
righ now ”. Right then and there, Cerveza was noticed for the first time. What
followed was a redistribution of not only Cerveza’s wealth, but also a good deal
of his face.
Cerveza, looking as worse for where as he has all night, seeks a place of
guaranteed quiet, the “Museum Tavern” next to the British Museum Library.
Cerveza sits down as a man with a full beard eyes him. The man comes over and
with an almost intelligible German accent, introduces himself as Karl Marx.
After finding out that Cerveza is also a foreigner, Marx dubs him a true
representative of the downtrodden international proletariat. Cerveza is agitated
on hearing the same name he heard the last time he got beaten up. Marx mistakes
his agitation for a burning revolutionary passion. After an excited conversation
in broken English on both sides, Marx has aroused himself to be ready to lead
the revolution. Grabbing Cerveza by the arm, Marx whisks him off to “overthrow
the bourgeois imperialist government.”
Marx, pulling Senor Cerveza in tow, storms into the “Trafalger tavern”. Pitt
and Gladstone are seated behind snob screens in the back snug. Marx quickly
passes out from overstimulation and intoxication. Cerveza does not so much
succeed in overthrowing the government as he is at throwing up on the
government’s trousers. Cerveza finds himself out on the street again and begins
to head over to Canary Wharf.
Cerveza trudged through the streets of Victorian London and reflected. Here was
a city where everyone lived on top of each other, but led rigidly separate
lives. He could not understand why people would choose to live in the same place
as people they would refuse to have a drink with. Tapas bars in Spain were
welcoming social centers. Pubs in London appeared only to cement social
divisions in building form. He had heard that there was a place for everyone in
London. Now Cerveza wondered if he would ever find his place in the great dark
city. Then out of the fog that blanketed the city, a white building gleamed. It
was a pub, it was the Spaniard's Inn.

Toby Sullivan
Pub Culture
Modernization is often accused of being a culture killer. Marx claimed it
impersonalizes human interaction to cold business transactions. At the other end
of the spectrum the aristocracy bemoan the indifference to tradition and the old
hierarchy. In fact, culture was merely changed not killed, by industrial
modernization. Even in the most built up areas of London there thrived cultural
centers where strong personal relationships were formed and maintained, and
tradition was preserved and created. These cultural centers were the pubs of
London. Pub culture in the modern era demonstrates the ties that bind people
together and the divisions that keep others apart. Pubs serviced the classes
that drove modernization and made the aristocracy more irrelevant that ever
before. Be it in the high end pubs where businessmen lunched and networked or in
the crime ridden working class lumbers where plots were formed, pubs provided a
physical place for the modern citizen to hold court.
The development of modern pub culture got off the a rocky start. The Great Fire
of 1666 had decimated nearly all the pubs in London. After the fire the
government took greater control over licensing pubs. At first the quality of
drinking houses went up in both decor and sanitary standards. The downward turn
began when in an effort to undermine the French wine trade, William of Orange
slashed tariffs on gin and lifted restrictions on distilling. The inevitable
result of these measures was that the market was flooded with extremely cheap
gin. The poor masses drank the gin in gaudy gin palaces. These institutions
revolved around the what one may argue, modern principal of profit at the
expense of culture. In fact the gin palaces were run specifically to discourage
chatting and lingering. Most of the time there were no chairs to sit in or food
to eat. It was the antithesis of European cafe culture. Gin was heavily drunk by
the poor a cheap way to escape daily trials. In actuality it took on a form
close to suicide. So many were drinking themselves to death, that while quality
of life and sanitation steadily rose so did the death rate. There were those
among the middle class especially who quickly identified the devastating effects
of gin on the populace. There was a kind of anti-gin culture movement that was
separate from the female driven protestant morality of the American temperance
movement. In Britain the alcohol was not lambasted as much as the manner in
which it came. In the paintings “Beer Lane” and “Gin Street”, Hogarth depicted
the residents on the former to be in great robust health while the opposite was
shown on the latter. In 1830 the Government stepped to drive out the Gin Palaces
by passing the Beer Act.
The Beer Act’s intent was to encourage more responsible beer drinking by
deregulating restrictions on setting up beer houses. Anyone who paid a nominal
amount to the government was given license to sell beer. The effects were
immediate and diametric to the principal behind the Beer Act. Yes gin palaces
fell into decline, but thousands of beer houses took there place in the slums as
the scourge and refuge of the poor. Neither gin palaces nor beer houses
cultivated a pub culture, but both became essential to the overall culture of
the Victorian poor. Urban poverty in Britain manifested itself in the worst
possible ways. Massive over crowding and disease made life unbearable for many
unless they turned to alcohol. It was common for people to be malnourished from
lack of food, but still spending what little money they had in beer houses.
Finally in 1869 the badly thought out Beer Act was repealed and the real pubs
started coming into there own.
The name “pub” comes from “public house”, this terminology began in the 1800s.
The name says a lot about the type of culture that exists in pubs. They are open
to the public and thus are not exclusive like the many gentlemen's clubs; they
are accessible to a diverse range of people. “House” seems to acknowledge that
the customers are almost guests in the publican’s house. This was often close to
the truth as it was not uncommon for publican's to live above there business.
Like a residential house pubs contain different rooms. There were often
partitioned nooks for small group drinking and separate dinning areas, both
supplementing the always present communal bar. The provision of food service was
as important as the Beer to many customers.
A pub became a place where a worker could sit down and eat cheaply. Pubs in
middle class and business districts served food to professionals on lunch
breaks. Soon pubs became a place to conduct business in its own right.
Negotiations and planning could take place while the alcohol flowed and there
was no need to break to eat. More informally the people one encountered in the
pub could be valuable business contacts. Not all business conducted in pubs was
entirely legitimate.
Bare knuckle boxing though made illegal by the 1860s, still took place in pubs
such as the Black Bull and the Queen’s Head. Criminals made use of pubs as
planning headquarters. Pubs were often used to pass counterfeit cash and some
publican's would also fence stolen property.
These activities served to polarize pubs. There were the respectable pubs for
middle class professionals and honest working men and there were the sinful pubs
of disrepute. With the development of suburbs in the 1800s, as London’s
dramatically rapid growth extending the into the countryside and villages, there
were oasis of middle class respectability. Here the upper middle class would
drink in the same pub as the working class servants and gardeners. Drinking in
the same pub was not the same as drinking together. Victorian London was far
from egalitarian and segregated “snugs” differentiated the between the middle
and working class drinker. In middle class pubs there were even so called
snob-screens between drinker and publican. This served the dual purpose of
keeping ones anonymity in the chattering classes and sending a message to one’s
“servant” behind the bar. Urban pubs utilized snob screens in response to the
desire of the upper classes to remain separate from the lower classes, while
taking into account the practicalities of the two communities living side by
side in a city environment.
Another entirely different breed of pub were the music halls. These could
contain examples of the finest entertainment or be the haunts of prostitutes.
Musicians were expensive to keep up so the Halls with out much talent soon
closed.
Some pubs provided social services to there clientele, the modern welfare state
was still a ways off in Victorian Britain. Loans were given as was equipment for
jobs. Many laborers both skilled and unskilled did not have a place to find
work. Pubs became job centers where workers and employers were matched up. The
name of the pub often designated what skills or support could be found there. A
contractor might visit the Builder’s Arms for laborers and the out of luck and
pocket mason, the Bricklayer’s Arms.
The modern era was often shaped by the political empowerment on the working
classes. The vote was opened up, giving more working men a direct say in their
affairs. Unions were tolerated by the government. Pubs provided spaces for
Working Man’s Friendly and Benevolent Associations. These were in between social
clubs, unions and guilds. The Lamb was headquarters of the Street Mechanics’,
Labourers’ and Hawkers’ Association. At a time when Parliament was more
concerned with the middle class electorate than the workers and radical
socialist groups espoused more philosophy than results, the Benevolent
Associations were one of the few examples of organizations that really were in
the worker’s best interests. Besides leading to ever greater politicalization of
workers, the associations fostered a family culture of mutual support. Common
laborers were often Irish immigrants who came without family and left their old
support system behind. Victorian London was the source of modern social
progress, but it often happened at a slower pace than was needed. Pubs became
the worker’s parliament.
All pubs in the modern age were not romantic cultural fountains. Very often
pubs were an escape not a solution to one’s problems. Pubs encouraged a culture
of alcoholism and neglect that ruined families and even threatened industry. The
good of pubs was that they were for the people. The precious little leisure time
that workers had could be spent at the “local” with friends and co-workers.
Vacations were unknown to the lower classes and public parks did as little to
encourage their patronage given British weather weather. It was the ability the
relax or vent in the pub that kept many workers able to continue fueling the
economy’s growth. Ideas sprung from the inebriated, but uninhibited, culture of
the pub. One worker was usually insufficient to make changes in the lives of
others. A full pub, on the other hand, got people well on the way to making a
difference. Despite the built in physical barriers, pubs were one of the few
institutions where the middle class was partaking in the same activities in the
same room as the working class. The social barriers were starting to crack.

All information from Ted Bruning's Historic Pubs of London guide book

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