by Albert Jack
A belvedere is a structure at the top of a building or in an elevated location – such as on a hill in a formal garden – affording a wide panoramic view. Prior to the fifteenth century, however, surveying the countryside from an elevated location wasn’t something you did for leisure, especially during times of conflict. Lookouts keeping watch from a high vantage point by the sea or near a town would be relied upon to alert their fellows to any unusual activity, whether an army returning in triumph or an enemy approaching with menace. But then from the late fifteenth century, looking at the view simply for its own sake suddenly became fashionable.
‘Belvedere’, meaning ‘beautiful view’, from the Italian bel (‘beautiful’) and vedere (‘to see’), is a term that crops up from that time. The original belvedere, a summer-house by the same name, was built on the hillside above the Vatican for Pope Innocent VIII in the late 1400s. Subsequently, the architect Donato Bramante (1444–1514) was commissioned to design a huge courtyard, the Cortile del Belvedere, to link the Villa Belvedere with the Vatican. Taking pride of place in the courtyard is an ancient statue of Apollo, rediscovered in 1489 and depicting an image of the god as a youth with his cloak thrown back to display his naked perfection. Known as the Apollo Belvedere, the statue was much admired and became widely copied, while the villa itself inspired a fashion for similar structures built in panoramic places.
There are now hundreds of inns, hotels and restaurants called the Belvedere, stretching from Calcutta in the east and California to the west, so if you find yourself in one, as you go about your travels, then presumably you’d be best advised to ask for a table by the window.
The Ben Jonson
DRINK TO ME ONLY WITH THINE EYES…?
Those whose historical knowledge dates back only to the 1980s will be relieved to know that pubs all over Britain are not named after Ben Johnson, the American Olympic sprinter who won a gold medal at the 1988 Olympics but was later stripped of his title when he was exposed as a drugs cheat.
The real Benjamin Jonson (1572–1637) was a poet, playwright and actor. He knew all the important writers of the period, including Shakespeare, and in later life was a big influence on younger poets, who formed an early version of a fan club, called the ‘Tribe of Ben’ or ‘Sons of Ben’. In his younger years, however, Jonson attracted quite a bit of controversy, even ending up in prison on a couple of occasions. The first spell in gaol came about following his arrest on a charge of ‘leude and mutynous behaviour’, due to the supposedly offensive content of a play, The Isle of Dogs, co-written with Thomas Nashe (1567–c.1601) and quickly suppressed. A year later, in 1598, Jonson was imprisoned again for a brief period after killing a fellow actor in a duel. Such was his fame, or notoriety, many an anecdote about him still circulates today.
One such tale relates how the writer had been avoiding his favourite tavern after falling into debt with the inn-keeper. Then one day they bumped into each other on the street and the landlord told Jonson that if he could answer four simple questions he would wipe the slate clean. Jonson agreed and the landlord posed his questions, confident the writer would struggle to answer them:
1. What pleases God?
2. What pleases the Devil?
3. What pleases everybody?
4. What pleases me?
But he had underestimated Jonson, who, after the briefest pause, wrote down his replies:
1. God is best pleased when man forsakes his sin.
2. The Devil is best pleased when man persists with them.
3. The world is best pleased when you draw them good wine.
4. And you are best pleased when I pay you for mine.
The slate was wiped clean and Jonson invited back and presented with a fine case of wine for his ready wit. This story probably isn’t the reason there are pubs and hotels still named after the writer nearly four hundred years after his death, but it is a good tale nonetheless.
Jonson was appointed the king’s poet in 1619, three years after Shakespeare’s death, a position he retained until his own demise in 1637. His body is buried in Westminster Abbey, London.
The Bishop‘s Finger
SIGNPOST TO A SAINT OR A PINT OF REAL ALE?
Pubs called the Bishop’s Finger were originally found only in Kent, their name commemorating the fingerposts along the Pilgrim’s Way that pointed travellers in the direction of the shrine of the murdered Archbishop Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral before Henry VIII destroyed it (the shrine, that is) in 1539, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Bishop’s Finger is now best known as the Kentish ale made by Shepherd Neame (one of Britain’s oldest brewers, established in 1698) and exported throughout the world.
The Blind Beggar
THIRTEENTH-CENTURY EARL WHO WENT FROM RICHES TO RAGS
There are very few Blind Beggar pubs in Great Britain, which is not too surprising as it’s hardly the most appealing of names. Except to goths and bikers, that is: the Blind Beggar pub in Edinburgh is devoted just to them.
The original Blind Beggar, in Whitechapel Road, east London, is by far the best known, and with the most colourful history. There has been a drinking house on the same site since at least 1664, and it was there, in 1865, that the British Methodist preacher William Booth gave the sermon that led to the formation of the Salvation Army. There was to be no salvation for the decaying building, however, as it was pulled down a few years later and rebuilt in 1894.
But the name did not change, and it was still the Blind Beggar when, on 9 March 1966, gangster Ronnie Kray calmly walked into the bar and shot rival mobster George Cornell between the eyes. No salvation for Cornell then, either, nor for Kray, who spent the rest of his life in prison for the murder, not to mention a string of unsavoury crimes committed with twin brother Reggie.
The pub’s name is thought to have been inspired by a popular Elizabethan poem, ‘The Ballad of Bethnal Green’ (adjoining Whitechapel). It tells the tale of a poor blind beggar who sat at the crossroads with his begging box and became a well-known figure locally. Over the years the tramp’s daughter, Bessie, a beautiful girl with fine manners, attracted the attention of many brave knights, all of whom rejected her when they learned of her humble origins. All of them, that is, apart from one young gentleman, who loved Bessie enough to marry her despite her lowly background. It was only after he had asked the old beggar for his daughter’s hand in marriage that the tramp then admitted that his true identity was the rightful Earl of Leicester. Much to the surprise of both his daughter and her suitor, he then endowed the couple with a great fortune.
This song about a beggar who long lost his sight
And had a fair daughter most pleasant and bright,
And many a gallant brave suitor had she
Because none was so comely as pretty Bessie.
So begins the ballad and, sixty-three verses later, it concludes:
Thus was the feast ended with joy and delight;
A happy bridegroom was made the young knight,
Who lived with great joy and felicity
With his fair lady, dear pretty Bessie.
The old blind beggar turned out to be none other than Henry de Montfort, son of the Earl of Leicester, whose army had been crushed at the Battle of Evesham on 4 August 1265 by the forces of Edward I, better known as Longshanks or the Hammer of the Scots. The Earl of Leicester had been killed on the battlefield that day and his son and heir, blinded by the blade of one of the king’s knights, was left for dead.
It was there that a young baroness discovered Henry, helped him from the battlefield and secretly nursed him back to health. They later travelled to London, married and produced a daughter, Bessie, a girl of fine noble stock, although the secret was kept until her marriage. And that is the message of the Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green: don’t be blinded by your desire for money and position, but follow your heart and be kind. A pity that Ronnie Kray didn’t follow his advice.
The Bombay Grab
(Bow, London)
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY SEADOG MILLIONAIRES?
In 1661 the seven islands of Bombay were ceded to Charles II in the dowry of his new, Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza. Eight years later the islands were rented to the East India Company for £10 a year (see THE JOHN COMPANY). Based on a deep natural harbour on the west coast of India, Bombay proved the perfect trading spot and rapidly became the largest city in India, growing by 600 per cent in just fifteen years. In 1687 the East India Company transferred its headquarters there.
The trade worked in both directions. Opium, silk, cotton and spices were imported to England, but all kinds of British products were exported outwards on the trading ships’ return journeys. Prime among these was beer (see THE WHEATSHEAF). This must have gone east with the first ships from England to sail to the Indies in the sixteenth century. Because fresh water inevitably became brackish over a long voyage, beer was the regular drink on sailing ships. But now it wasn’t just the ships that demanded English beer; it was the growing colonies. By 1750 almost 1,500 barrels were being exported from England to the areas governed by the East India Company, a figure that had risen to 9,000 barrels by 1800.
The shipyard of the East India Company was at Blackwall, along the Thames, downriver from the City of London and just to the west of the mouth of the River Lea. When the commanders and captains of the East India-men – the ships chartered by the East India Company – went to buy goods to export, they turned for the beer to a brewer close by, George Hodgson, at Bow. Hodgson was an unusual choice as his was a small company, but the beer from his brewery could be transported easily to Blackwall for loading on to the East Indiamen, and, crucially, he offered a lengthy period of credit of up to eighteen months.
What really made Hodgson’s name was an unexpected side effect of his beer’s six-month journey out to India. By the time the beer arrived in Bombay, Madras or Calcutta, having gone via Madeira, Rio de Janeiro, St Helena, Cape Town and the stormy Mozambique Channel, his October Ale had become paler and more bitter, perfect for the unremitting heat of the Indian subcontinent, and the ancestor of today’s India Pale Ale. The expatriate British running the East India Company’s ‘factories’ and commanding its three private armies loved it, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century Hodgson’s was the beer pronounced ‘in almost universal use’ in India. The Bow brewery’s reputation was established in that country, its name now a guarantee of quality: in 1809 it was being advertised in the Calcutta Gazette as ‘Hodgson’s select Pale Ale, warranted of superior excellence’.
By 1815 over 4,000 barrels were being exported to drinkers across the British Empire, an increase in trade of over 400 per cent in just a decade. George Hodgson’s son Mark moved the brewery to a new premises a few hundred yards along the river at Bow Bridge and set up a pub there. His choice of name has puzzled many. The official reason is the pub was called after the East India Company’s Bombay headquarters, and a two-masted Eastern coasting-vessel known in Arabic as a gurab. But I prefer the more cynical suggestion that the name really celebrates the fortune they had managed to grab from Bombay.
The Britannia
WHAT DID THE ROMANS EVER DO FOR US?
Slightly over two thousand years ago, our group of islands off the north-east coast of mainland Europe was invaded twice by a well-armed and murderous group of Romans led by Julius Caesar. At the time the mainland was called ALBION, Ireland Hibernia and Scotland Caledonia, but the Romans combined them all under the umbrella name Britanniae (i.e. ‘Britains’, referring to all the islands). The name itself derives from the word used by the ancient Greek Pytheas in his famous account of a voyage around the islands between 330 and 320 BC.
Caesar’s first invasion was short-lived but his second was more successful, despite his initial disappointment at Britain’s lack of pearls, gold or silver and the discovery that tin was the most valuable metal commonly available (after all, this was two millennia before the invention of the beer can). After nearly two hundred rebellion-suppressing years with the natives, the Roman emperor Hadrian ordered a wall to be built from coast to coast to protect his army from the Picts (northern dwellers of Albion). This was when the Romans officially called the southern part of the island and their province Britannia and the area north of the wall Caledonia. Ireland, which was never occupied by the Romans, was given the name Hibernia, from which the present name, Eire, derives.
The Romans were adept at absorbing other nations into their empire and one very successful way of doing this was by integrating the gods and beliefs of their conquered peoples into their own. In the rebellious province of Britannia this was a vital policy. The local Celtic goddess Brigantia, the equivalent of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, warriors, trade and poetry, was picked to represent Britannia and Hadrian introduced coins bearing her image. In early portraits she appears as a beautiful woman in a flowing gown or toga with one breast exposed and wearing a centurion’s helmet. The symbolic message to the conquered people was unmistakable: the British goddess was dressed as a Roman and all the more powerful for it. (Interestingly, the early Christian Church used a similar tactic when trying to convert the Irish, appropriating many of Brigantia’s stories and symbols under the persona of the Irish saint Brigid.)
After the Roman Empire fell into decline, its former province shifted back into a series of small kingdoms and the name Britannia became less relevant. The Anglo-Saxons fighting against the encroaching Vikings (see THE DUKE OF YORK) concentrated on their own territory and identity and renamed it England, Land of the Angles, after themselves. England continued as a separate nation for the next few centuries, annexing Wales in 1284 and finally achieving union (of a sort) with Scotland, when James I (James VI of Scotland) took over the English throne in 1603. It was time for a new name for the territories and one that would unite them, but while James I often called himself the King of Great Britain, the English and the Scottish remained thoroughly separate (and hostile).
The Acts of Union of 1707 created an official United Kingdom, but it wasn’t until an entirely new and entirely un-English royal family (see THE GEORGE) took over the throne in 1714 that hearts and minds began to change. England had been shaken by civil war and the Glorious Revolution, Scotland by a series of rebellions supporting various dysfunctional members of the Stuart family; a united kingdom was a necessity. As pragmatic as Hadrian before him, George I may not have been able to speak English but he clearly understood the dangers of disunity, as did his son, George II. Then help came the monarchy’s way in the form of a poem drawing on the old symbolism of the proudly defiant warrior goddess uniting Britons with their Roman conquerors.
‘Rule, Britannia’ was written by James Thomson in 1740 and set to music by Thomas Arne to entertain Frederick, Prince of Wales at the royal court. The song was an instant success, helping to instil some much needed patriotism into the British public. Here is in slightly abridged form:
When Britain first, at Heaven’s command,
Arose from out the azure main;
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain:
‘Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
Britons never will be slaves.’
The nations, not so blest as thee,
Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;
While thou shall flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all.
‘Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
Britons never will be slaves.’
The Muses, still with freedom found,
Shall to thy happy coast repair;
Blest Isle! with matchless beauty crowned,
And manly hearts to guard the fair.
‘Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
Britons never will be slaves.’
Thanks to the song, the figure of Britannia grew in popularity. Still sporting the centurion’s helmet, she was also frequently depicted holding a trident to symbolize Britain’s domination of the oceans of the world. Britann
ia was thus adopted by the Royal Navy as a figurehead, and due to the supremacy of the British fleet her image was seen to represent Britain to the world at large. Any hint of raciness was now gone, however, as, unlike her French counterpart, Marianne, she was no longer topless.
Over the years Britannia has grown into an important and popular image that British people can easily identify with, especially at times of war. Adorning many a pub sign throughout the land, she is seen to represent freedom and democracy in the same way that ‘Lady Liberty’ does for the Americans. This is despite an apparent attempt by Gordon Brown to lower Britannia’s profile by removing her image from coins minted from 2008. Although that should have come as no surprise, because he is, after all, Scottish.
The Bucket of Blood
(Phillack, Cornwall)
WHEN DRAWING A PINT COULD MEAN SOMETHING MORE SINISTER…
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the number of smugglers in Britain was thought to be around 150,000. As many as 300 ships were fully employed bringing contraband goods into the coves and on to the beaches of southern England. Cornwall was the most popular choice due to its vast number of small inlets and hidden coves. It was also estimated that as much as 25 per cent of the entire import and export trade of the England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries consisted of smuggled goods, and duties to the king were rarely being collected. At one point the authorities in London believed the entire adult population of Cornwall was involved in smuggling, either as a consumer or an illegal importer.