Monday 4 March 2013

English public house

Currently skimming through The English Public House As It Is, by one Ernest Selley, and I came across this passage:

‘This was the worst public house company I met during the whole of my travels. Nothing I saw reminded me so strongly of Hogarth’s pictures. The women were the most degraded I have ever met. They were noisily obscene. One woman illustrated a filthy tale about herself by bodily motions. The tales provoked uproarious laughter. The potman joined in and laughed as heartily as the rest. This conversation could be heart at the bar. I remained for half-an-hour yet no one interfered or called for anyone to desist. One young girl, red-eyed  with drink, repeatedly called upon one of the tale-tellers to “tell the one about the parson”. When at last the request was granted she became hysterical. It was the vilest story I have ever heard. This conversation was shouted rather than spoken. Anyone passing this house could have heard quite distinctly. There were children playing outside the doors. From the brazen way the women behaved, the attitude of the potman, and the way calls were made for this and that filthy story, one could guess that these sort of  ‘carry on’s ’ were not exceptional for this house.’

Sounds rather modern doesn’t it? Actually it was published in 1927 and is an attempt by the author to profile the pub as it was then; it’s rather a negative approach and tut-tuts a lot about the amount of drink people are consuming (nothing has changed there then), but it’s also a fascinating piece of social history about an essential part of our lives, something I don’t think the author gets. And he’s a bit of a spoilsport in not telling the reader the tale about the parson…  

7 comments:

  1. Fascinating stuff and all the more interesting because it shows the disapproval of drink to be essentially a form of class based snobbery. The author is showing his disapproval of the behaviour of the lower orders. Things haven’t much changed. Modern articles in the Daily Mail focus on working class people in town centers with a focus that somehow the drunken behaviour of women is far more shocking than that of men. Make drink more expensive, that’s the solution! How about a minimum price?

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  2. Elsewhere in the book he disapproves of more women going to the pub since the end of the war (WW1) but also wags a finger at a pub whose clientele is essentially lawyers, council members etc — and he does suggest that putting the price of drink up will help…

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  3. As I read that description of story telling in pubs, it reminded me of the scene Chaucer paints in the Canterbury Tales of communal story telling and a love of a good story about the local clergy!

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  4. When I’m telling stories about people, clergy or otherwise, in the pub I’m always looking nervously over my shoulder just in case said person comes in…

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  5. that's why you should always sit in the corner, with a view of the whole pub!

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  6. You don't often see crowd-pulling tell-the-one-about story-telling these days. Or maybe it's just the pubs I frequent. (You don't often see a sing-song breaking out, either, but I've seen that happen in the local Spoons'.)

    It has been known in parts of Wales for the storyteller to switch into Welsh for the punchline. Sorts the men from the boys that does.

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  7. Worrying about the working class, especially women, having fun is a recurring theme of just about all writing about pubs and drinking all through the 19th century and up to today. See how they love to show a pissed up woman sprawled on some city-centre pavement. That and distorted statictics from temperance campaigners are perennial favourites in the UK media.

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