The blessings of a good pub

Terrible news. Adam Boulton doesn’t like pubs. Let me say, first of all, that this surprises me. Adam, one of the longest-serving luminaries of Sky News, looks like the sort of chap you would find in a bar arguing the toss about politics while signalling to the barman to bring him and his mate another two pints. But apparently I’m wrong.

Never mind. Each to his own. This weekend pubs in England are reopening following the long shutdown. Personally, I love pubs. I have always loved pubs. I started going as a teenager, and half a century on I’m still a fan.

The first pub I visited without my father was The Elk Inn, on the eastern outskirts of Belfast. I was there with my friend Alan. We were both 16. I ordered a pint of Guinness. The barman looked doubtful and turned to my friend.

“And what’ll you be after wantin’?”

“A Tia-Maria,” said Alan, uncertainly.

“Get the f*** out of here!” the barman said, which for some reason amused the other customers.

But we soon learned. By the time we were at university, the habit was deeply engrained.

In Durham, where I was supposed to be studying English, our local was the Britannia Inn, then run by the superbly-named Harry Defty. Harry was well used to student drinkers and allowed us to pull our own pints after closing time while his wife danced flamenco. In the North, he reminded us, it was important to make sure there was a decent head on your pint. He disapproved of pint mugs, with handles, which he thought of as a southern affectation.

But there was also the Duke of Wellington, the Shakespeare and the Three Tuns, all engraved indelibly in my brain. In fact, when I come to think of it, most of my memories of Durham are of spending evenings with friends in pubs. Did I drink too much? Of course. But I’m still here and still up for a pint.

Back in Belfast, to which I returned as a journalist, first with the Cork Examiner, then with the Irish Times, I used to drink in the Club Bar, owned by the Agnew Brothers. It was there that one night I was telling friends about my latest literary discovery, I Claud, the memoirs of Claud Cockburn. I had just read a section in which the author talked about his discovery that one of his children, the future Middle East specialist Patrick Cockburn, had been diagnosed with TB. It was beautifully written and I had been moved. Just then, I felt a tap on my elbow. “Hello,” said a young man speaking in a posh English accent. “My name is Patrick Cockburn.”

You get that kind of thing in pubs.

Sadly, the Club Bar was blown up by loyalists in 1976, killing two of the customers, though not the old lady on whom, it was said, Brian Moore had based his protagonist in The Lonely Passion of Miss Judith Hearne.

Dublin, famously, is good for pubs. The Irish Times local was Bowes, just across the road from the paper’s back door. At one end of the long bar, gathered in a little snug, the local gardai hung out. At the other, the hacks were to be found, led by the news editor Donal Foley. The two sides never met. We only nodded at each other in passing. Donal was a great man and a great drinker. I remember there was a phonecall from the new desk telling me to get back upstairs straight away. Donal wouldn’t let me go until I’d finished my pint.

But it was in England that I truly came of age as a pub man. Fleet Street was almost comically replete with good boozers. At the Daily Telegraph, in whose employment I now found myself, the King & Keys was the place to be of an evening. The blind columnist Peter Utley used to hold court in the snug, surrounded by his acolytes. On one occasion, an elderly lion on a lead joined them, but I wasn’t there for that; I was probably over the road in El Vino, which at the time was shared between us, the hacks, and the Rumpole crowd, joining us from the Inns of Court. Again, the convention was that we kept separate. It was as though we came from different universes.

Around the corner was the Olde Cheshire Cheese, with its memories (some genuine) of Dr Johnson, and there was also the Tipperary, the Old Bell, the Printer’s Devil and, if you were up for a walk, the Coal Hole. I remember them all. There was much drink “taken,” as my mother would say, at lunchtime as well as at night. But the papers never failed to come out and never lost their cutting edge. No one ever felt they were wasting their time. They were working, just not at their desks.

In my travels around England, pubs always featured. These days, if you’re going from London to, say, Birmingham or Leeds, you either drive or take the train. But in centuries past, pubs, or inns, were a necessary stop along the way, whether for ale and pie or for a night’s lodgings. Taverns were a feature of the landscape not only for those who lived within walking distance, but for weary travellers worn out after a hard day stuck on a fetid coach or saddle-sore after 50 miles on horseback.

Going further back, to Saxon times and beyond, I’m guessing that things were less organised. For a start, very few until the discovery of the steam engine travelled more than 20 miles from where they were born, meaning that the White Hart, the Red Lion and the King’s Arms had yet to be invented. But beer (and rough wine) were certainly available for purchase when the Romans ruled England, and I have no doubt that King Harold’s men had a few (perhaps too many) before taking on the Normans at the Battle of Hastings.

Those prints that used to feature on the walls of a lot of pubs, showing men in red coats and knee britches gathered round a fire while they smoked clay pipes and drank ale from peuter tankards, reflected a reality that existed from the Middle Ages almost through to our own time. Pubs were where we rested and recovered. They where were we learned the latest news and exchanged gossip, or caroused or did business. It was never all about the beer.

That doesn’t mean that a good beer after a day’s work wasn’t prized. My late father-in-law, Bernard McCabe, who grew up in Middlesbrough, used to tell of what happened near to where he and his family lived each evening at six. The local factory hooter would sound and a phalanx of men would make their way across the street to the pubs opposite where the bar staff would have the requisite number of pints ready to cope with the onslaught. The same was true in Ireland, where one pint of Guinness was handed over the counter while the next was started in anticipation of future demand.

Another story Bernard told was of how he and his good friend Seamus Heaney were in Rome once when they came across an Irish bar called… The Seamus Heaney. They went in. Bernard said to the barman, in Italian, “What would you do if the poet and his friend ever visited your establishment?”

“I suppose I’d have to buy him his drinks,” the barman replied laconically.

“Well, then, set them up,” said Bernard. “For here he is.”

There are all sorts of pubs, of course. In the cities, there are rough pubs and smooth pubs. You can get glassed in a rough pub if you’re not careful, but I have to say I never was. If you’re unlucky, you can hear terrible things said or be bored to tears. You might have pointed out to you the spot where one of the Kray twins dispatched instant justice to an unfortunate associate. You will almost certainly in the course of a drinking career do things that you’d rather not recall, sometimes awful things. But where else would you go? Life is what you make it.

A few years back, I found myself in South Kensington, where I’d agreed to meet my son. It was a freezing cold night and when we saw a pub sign throught the fog we didn’t hesitate. I can’t remember the name of the establishment, but it put both of us immediately at our ease. There were posh people there, dressed in tweed, drinking whiskies and gins and tonic, but also young men and women enjoying an evening out, and us, too, catching up on events of the last year. The bar staff, from Eastern Europe, were friendly and helpful and it was a shame when we had to leave to make our way home, my son to his flat, me to my hotel.

Two fixed images of the English pub are the Queen Vic, from Eastenders, and the Rovers Return, from Coronation Street. Both these take the idea of the pub as the centre of the community to something of an extreme. But they are not too wide of the mark. Things happen in pubs, not all of them good. But what’s the alternative if you’re fed up with watching television and just want a bit of craic with people you know, or nearly know, or who you might end up marrying or could offer you a job?

Rural pubs, especially village pubs, are the most intense expression of the one-pub-fits-all approach. I’m thinking of the Pear Tree in Hook Norton, in Oxfordshire, where in a succession of visits in the 1990s I met all kinds of folk, from farmers and car salesmen to dentists and college lecturers, all out for a laugh, ready to let off a bit of steam after a hard day at the coalface. The pub itself was cosy, the beer was good (delivered by dray horses from the nearby Hook Norton brewery) and the company was never less than entertaining. What’s not to like?

In Scotland, there is perhaps less conviviality and more serious consumption. But it could be that I’m not being fair. There are certainly good pubs in Edinburgh and Leith, and a place I used to visit from time to time was the Cross Keys in Denholm, where the clientele, in spite of living no more than ten minutes from the border with England, struck me as being every bit as Scottish as any kilt-wearing showoff from the Highlands.

There could be feuds, of course. A good friend of mine who drove home near to Jedburgh after having maybe three pints was warned by telephone just in time that a man who’d taken a dislike to him had informed the police that he was over the limit. My friend immediately took a swig of Scotch and greeted the officers bottle in hand. They hadn’t a leg to stand on, and half an hour later neither had he.

I know that times are changing and that among the young there is probably less affection for the local pub than was the case with my generation and a hundred generations that went before. But pubs have also adapted. The food is much better now – often superior to anything you’d find in a rural brasserie in France. (In my day, chicken in a basket was thought of as something you might indulge in if you were out with someone special.) And women have finally been accepted, which is the great leap forward. In Belfast in the 1970s, we – the lads, that is – would get “full” on a Saturday night before heading off to the dance hall. And the less said about that, the better. Today, though pubs can be hellishly noisy, with music turned up so that you can’t hear yourself drink, there is (generally) more civilised talk and less industrial consumption. I believe this is even true in Scotland.

But there will always be conflicting views on the values of pubs in society. On Reaction, Adam Boulton takes one side, echoing perhaps the Cadburys, the Rowntrees and the Frys. I take the other. Maybe one day, he and I can resolve our quarrel over a quiet pint.