Tuesday 31 May 2011

We're all bastards

Bitchy, divisive, argumentative, petty, partisan, bigoted, puerile, shallow, fickle, inconsiderate, incorrigible,  retrogressive, inflexible, intolerant, uncritical, passive, manipulated, corrupt, corrupted, corrupting, corruptible, unreadable, intemperate, gauche, unbelievable, impenetrable, obtuse, oblique, bloody-minded, uncontrollable, inebriate, insolvent, incoherent, unstable, unhinged, unanswerable, unable, enabled, entitled, embittered, iridescent, incandescent, unaccountable, contemptible, contemporary, incontinent, irrelevant, incomprehensible, pretentious, precocious, pernicious, irredescent, incandescent, impenetrable, imprecise, unaccountable, unstable, indefensible, egotistical, eccentric, introspective, inflexible, grumpy, self-absorbed, left-handed, historical, hysterical, hoptatstic, hyperactive, hyper-critical, fanatic, fantastic, fantastical, flamboyant, self-publicising, publicity-seeking, unnerving, unnatural, lazy, obsessed, illegitimate, ignorant, indigenous, inaccessible, insoluble, nasty, negative, onctuous,  pointless, questionable, ridiculous, stupid, trash, uninteresting, venal, wimpy, brash, brassy, brass-necked, bland.


We're a bastard of bloggers.

Beamish Porter in India

I'm not convinced as to the accuracy of the quote that follows. Some of it is clearly bollocks. Which raises the question, can we believe any of it?

It's a bit weird, because the bit that interests me is merely a footnote. A footnote about Porter in a Dublin jail:

"Before proceeding to the biographical account of this extraordinary person, which it is my intention to give, I think it proper previously to state the very singular manner in which our friendship had its commencement. One evening, in the month of October, 1812, I had the misfortune, from some circumstances here unnecessary to mention, to be conveyed for a night's lodging to the watch-house in Dublin. I had there the good fortune to meet Mr. Odoherty, who was likewise a prisoner. He was seated on a wooden stool, before a table garnished with a great number of empty pots of porter.*

* We beg leave to hint to our Irish correspondent, that if the pots were empty, they could scarcely be termed pots of porter.— Blackwood. [And I beg leave to hint that, in the watch-house in Dublin, in 1812, such a liquid as porter was not at all likely to be in request. The drink of that region would inevitably be — whiskey punch. In 1812, very little malt liquor was used in Ireland. Most of what was made was exported to the British army then under Wellington in the peninsula, to the British West India islands, and to the East Indies. The soldiers drank it, of course, as if it were so much "mother's milk"—only a great deal stronger. In the West Indies, where the drought was great, the draughts were copious. In the East Indies, whenever what was called Cork porter and Fermoy ale happened to arrive, in anything like good condition, it brought a great price, and was imbibed freely. But, in those days, brewers had not arrived at the present certainty of making ale as drinkable on the banks of the Ganges as in London, Dublin, Cork, and Edinburgh, In 1812, London porter was scarcely exported to the East or West Indies: Edinburgh ale was not known much beyond the city of its birth; and the supplies were sent from the porter brewery of Beamish and Crawford, of Cork, and the ale brewery of Thomas Walker & Co., of Fermoy. The last-named concern has wholly ceased, but Cork city rejoices in Beamish and Crawford's porter brewery, whence it also taken one of its parliamentary representatives (1855), in the person of Frank Beamish. At present, the pale ale of Bass and Alsop — rival houses in the small English town of Burton-upon-Trent — is the favorite tipple in British India, where one man asks another to "take a glass of Bass" with him, just as, elsewhere, he would invite him to take a glass of champagne. It is surprising that in Calcutta, Madras, or Bombay, some capitalist does not commence an ale and porter brewery, and go in to make a fortune thereby. Long after Odoherty's time, Guinness's Dublin porter came into note in rivalry with "London Stout." The story goes that Guinness had no great note until the full body of one particular brewing attracted the attention of those who malt. On cleaning out the vat, there were found the bones and part of the dress of one of the workmen, who had been missing for some weeks. Guinness, it is said, sang small about the matter, but to give his porter the required body, instead of boiling down a man, as before, substituted a side of beef, and has continued the ingredient from that time to this. So, after all, even a tee-totoller must admit that Guinness's porter is but a malted description of — beef-tea! — M."
"Miscellaneous writings of the late Dr. Maginn, Volume 1" by William Maginn, 1855, pages 3 - 4.
There's a clear claim there that Porter from Cork - in particular Beamish and Crawford's Porter - was exported to the East Indies at a very early date: 1812. I know that Guinness exported their Stout to India a couple of decades later. But this is the earliest mention of Irish Porter in India. Just a shame it's from someone who can't spell Allsopp properly.

Then there's the stuff about the workman dissolving into Guinness. Obviously totally untrue, as all stories like this inevitably are. If for no other reason than that at the period in question putting anything other than malt, hops, sugar, yeast and water was illegal. And the authorities took the rules pretty damn seriously.

Monday 30 May 2011

Bolton

I've never been there. Never drunk a beer brewed there.

One colleague. My first programming job, at Legal and General. She was from Bolton. Notlob. I can remember that joke being made.

What a place to work, Legal and General. For the canteen. Hot food - great choice - and a fully licensed bar. Shepherd Neame on cask. For 20% less than the pub price. Nice. Especially having cask, drink of the gods.*

"Dad, do you want to hear some really weird Japanese music?"

"No, I'm trying to make a very subtle point about cask beer"

"Listen to this, dad"

"It sounds like a a really, really, really, really annoying ringtone (nyan cat)"

"It's a pop-tart cat, going through space with a rainbow flowing out of its bottom. Can you imagine how annoying it gets after a while?"

"No imagination necessary, Andrew."

This is the quote I wanted to share::

"The leisure of the young is largely concerned with courtship—and dance halls provide no alcohol. Once mated, the leisure of a considerable section of the male population (the pub-goers) is concerned with "I pass a couple of hours in 'ere ow't road o't' wife."

Bolton. It's assuming mythic proportions for me.











* And plebs like me.

Pub numbers decline in Bolton

Pub numbers. Pub closures. A very topical topic. But one that's been kicking around for longer than my lifetime.

This is a very specific look at pubs in a particular Lancashire town. In particular, how many of them there were. I'm bringing this quite specific account because it's typical of the developments in pub numbers across the UK in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. The same pieces of legislation had much the same effect everywhere. Principally, a sharp reduction in the number of pubs and virtually now new licences ever issued.

At the time this piece was written in the late 1930's, there were 304 pubs in Bolton.


"In this book historical material is only being used to illustrate facts about the contemporary pub, and not for the sake of trying to include a "history of the pub" as such. Now, in order to understand more fully the factors of pub distribution, and to deal with the basis of the different types of pub that are examined later, we require some relevant history.

Some Worktown pubs can be traced back from before the Industrial Revolution. There is a list of 61 names and addresses of pubs existing in 1824. Nineteen of these are still in existence, same names and addresses.

Mackies Worktown Directory and Almanack for 1849 gives the following list:

Inns    117
Beerhouses    188
Beerhouses supposed to exist without a licence    15
Inns and Beerhouses where thieves and prostitutes resort    20
Inns and Beerhouses where gambling is practised    13
Inns and Beerhouses having musical entertainments    14

That is, ignoring the pubs without licences, Worktown had one more licence in 1848 than in 1937. Only, then there were 170 inhabitants per pub, now 559.

Said Mr. Taylor, Coroner for the Borough, 1848, in a speech to the licensing magistrates:

These ale and beerhouses would hold every man, woman, and child in the Borough . . . there is a drinking place for every 25 houses . . . such are the present resources for selling drink — or poison — some called it by one name, some by the other.

By 1854 there were another 25 beerhouses in existence, though the number of full licences had remained the same; and the absolute number of pubs continued to rise, until in 1869 there were 452 of them.

By then there was also a powerful and militant temperance movement in existence. At a packed meeting of 2,000 people in the new Temperance Hall the Rev. C. Garrett declaimed "No working man in Lancashire need be without clothes, but if he will insist in clothing the landlord and landlady in purple and fine linen, he must be content to remain in poverty and rags". Since 1830 there had been no restrictions whatever on the issue of beer licences; this policy remained the same for 39 years, when the Act of 1869 empowered the magistrates to refuse to grant the renewal or issue of beer licences; and another Act of 1872 still further restricted the conditions of issue and renewal of licences. The general basis of the present day licensing system had been established. From that time it is possible to trace statistically the ratio between pub and population variation.

Though in 1869 there were nearly half as many pubs again as there had been in existence twenty years earlier, the amount of full licences had only increased by 6, from 117 to 123. Next year, when the Act came into force, 69 beerhouses were abolished right away. The diagram opposite shows that the population: pub ratio has never subsequently decreased, steadily rising from 210 people per pub in 1870 to its 1935 figure of 559.

For nearly thirty years after the new act came into force, the absolute number of pubs continued to fall, while the population was still rising. In 1898 the borough boundaries were enlarged, which besides adding to the population increased the number of pubs by 61. (The break in the curves on the diagram, that are joined by dotted lines, indicate this.) For a few years the absolute number of pubs increased again slightly, but after 1903 began a long, steady fall, decreasing on an average by about three pubs every year. And in 1928, after a period of stagnation, the population too began to fall."
"The Pub and the People" by Mass Observation, 1943 (reprinted 1987), page 73.


The Beer Act of 1830 ushered in an, historically considered, untypically liberal licensing regime. Basically anyone could open a beer house, that is a pub that only sold beer and no spirits. Unsurprisingly, the number of pubs rocketed. From the 1869 Act mentioned onwards, increasingly strict legislation was introduced, mostly designed to close beer houses. It was a task that continued into the 1980's. Sometime around then beer houses finally disappear from the licensing statistics, having fallen to just a couple of hundred in the 1970's. As you can see from the table below.

You'll notice that Bolton was very close to the national average for the number of pubs per head of population in the 1930's: 1 per 559 people, when in 1938 the average was 519.

Pubs in England and Wales
Date
fully-licensed pub
beer house
Total Pubs
clubs
Total on Licences
Off Licences
On and Off licences
population
pop. per pub
1900


102,189


..
..
30,515,000
299
1905


99,478
6,589
106,067
25,405
124,883


1910


92,484
7,536
100,020
24,438
116,922
33,651,600
364
1915


86,626
8,902
95,528
23,202
109,828


1920


83,432
8,994
92,426
22,198
105,630
35,230,200
422
1931
57,072
19,814
76,886
14,377
91,263
22,105
113,368
39,988,000
520
1938
56,173
17,747
73,920
16,951
90,871
22,052
112,923
38,348,400
519
1941
56,961
17,249
74,210
15,864
90,074
21,756
111,830
41,748,000
563
1951
59,757
13,664
73,421
19,511
92,932
23,669
116,601
43,815,000
597
1961
64,570
4,366
68,936
24,418
93,354
23,934
117,288
46,196,000
670
1965
65,353
1,217
66,570
23,598
96,157
26,352
122,509
45,870,100
689
1971
63,640
447
64,087
26,548
101,863
28,166
130,029
49,152,000
767
1976
64,666
361
65,027
28,203
108,905
32,595
141,500
49,184,500
756
1982


68,373
30,269
121,232
39,362
160,594
49,634,000
726
1985


70,331
30,277
125,871
42,646
168,517
49,763,600
708
1991


74,299
28,999
134,404
47,944
182,348
51,099,000
688
1994


75,522
28,520
135,451
47,735
183,186
41,620,500
551
1995


75,392
28,277
133,711
45,986
179,697
51,820,600
687
1998


77,934
26,461
134,174
45,425
179,599
52,421,400
673
2000


77,876
25,032
131,682
45,450
177,132
52,942,800
680
2001


78,540
25,785
132,293
44,696
176,989
52,211,000
665
2003


81,933
23,912
135,307
47,478
182,785


2004


81,455
23,664
133,283
46,582
179,865


Sources:
Statistical Handbook of the British Beer and Pub Association 2005, page 62
Statistical Handbook 1974, page 48