by Albert Jack
Storm of battle and thunder of war,
Well, if it do not roll our way.
Form! form! Riflemen form!
Ready, be ready to meet the storm!
Riflemen, riflemen, riflemen form!
Form, be ready to do or to die!
Form in freedom’s name and the Queen’s!
True, that we have a faithful ally,
But only the devil knows what he means!
Form! form! Riflemen form!
Ready, be ready to meet the storm!
Riflemen, Riflemen, Riflemen form!
By 1862 the Volunteer Force numbered almost 170,000 men, fully trained and ready to defend their country in the face of the threat of French invasion. This significant military presence would certainly have helped deter Napoleon III, who took the decision not to attack, or even threaten Great Britain again.
In 1907 the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act merged the Volunteer Force and the Yeomanry into the Territorial Force. They were famously used as a recruiting vehicle at the start of the First World War to drum up recruits for Kitchener’s Army (see THE LORD KITCHENER). Deeming conscription to be a bad idea for the morale of the country, Kitchener geared his recruitment campaign to the notion that a young man was more likely to volunteer his services if he knew he would be training, marching and fighting with his friends and family. And so the Pals Battalions were formed all over Britain, entire villages and towns posted together in one single battalion and sent to the front lines.
In retrospect, this was a disastrous policy, as tragically proven on 1 July 1916 at the River Somme in northern France, in what became known as the Somme Offensives or the Battle of the Somme. It was here the Allied forces attempted to break through the German lines along a twelve-mile stretch of the river and in just one day suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, nearly 20,000 of which were fatal. The Pals Battalions suffered horrendously as just one shell, or machine-gun attack, could deprive an entire village of its able-bodied young men. The Leeds Pals lost 750 men in just a few hours, while Grimsby and Sheffield both lost nearly 500 men over a similar period of time. Inhabitants of the small town of Accrington were to mourn nearly 600 deaths that took place on that day alone. As Percy Holmes, the brother of one victim, stated to the Accrington Observer many years later: ‘I recall when the news came through to Accrington that the Pals had been wiped out. I don’t think there was a street in Accrington and district that didn’t have their blinds drawn, and the bell at Christ Church tolled all day long.’
Prior to the fighting, people had been caught up in the patriotism and enthusiasm of volunteering for a just cause, but poor military strategy during the war resulted in the devastation of entire communities. Unsurprisingly, the Pals’ experiment was never repeated.
After 1920 the Territorial Force became known as the Territorial Army, which engages in military activities to this day. The TA continues to be a volunteer force, its history traceable to the days when young men would go to the local tavern with the ‘volunteer’ sign displayed outside and offer to serve and protect their country. They and those that came after them are one of the reasons we can sleep soundly in our beds at night, and why French or German is not our national tongue.
J. D. Wetherspoon
HOW GEORGE ORWELL’S IDEAL PUB INSPIRED A CHAIN REACTION
This renowned chain of pubs, stretching country-wide, was founded back in 1979 when twenty-four-year-old law graduate Tim Martin opened his first pub in Colney Hatch Lane, London. From modest beginnings Martin’s company has grown into one of the largest independent pub and hotel chains in Britain. Although not old – certainly not in comparison with most of the other pubs in this book – J. D. Wetherspoon, with its distinctive name and revenue of over £900 million a year, seems well worth investigating.
Interestingly, literary inspiration has played a large part in the formation of the pub chain. In an essay written by George Orwell for the London Evening Standard and published on 9 February 1946, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four describes his ideal pub, the Moon Under Water. Inspired by Orwell’s description of the pub’s agreeable atmosphere and his comment that the place was ‘always quiet enough to talk’, the Wetherspoon group took the decision not to play the loud music once expected in all English pubs of an evening. Despite this, Wetherspoon’s Orwellian principle of providing cheap food and drink for the masses has inevitably led to the pubs becoming a magnet for hard-up students, and it is in the university towns that they have chiefly flourished. Orwell’s perfect pub has also lent its name to a number of pubs in the chain, all called the Moon Under Water. By contrast, other Wetherspoon pubs have been carefully named after local heroes or historic events. Hence in Rotherham, for instance, the Wetherspoon pub on the High Street is called the Corn Law Rhymer after Ebenzer Elliott, a local iron merchant who expressed his indignation at the unfair Corn Laws (see THE IRON DUKE) by writing a volume of verse called, naturally enough, Corn Law Rhymes, and published in 1831.
And so to the question of where the distinctive name – J. D. Wetherspoon – comes from. The idea for the name appears to have occurred to Tim Martin during his first ever night as a pub manager. On that evening, the customers started fighting with each other and Martin found he was unable to control the crowd. When a chair went flying through a window, the young manager was immediately reminded of a former lecturer of his, who, like him, had been unable to control an unruly crowd, in his case a classroom of bored students. He was the same tutor who had written on Martin’s report card: ‘Tim will probably amount to nothing.’ His name was Wetherspoon, to which Tim added the initials ‘J. D.’ in honour of his favourite television character of the 1970s, J. D. Hogg, from The Dukes of Hazzard. And that, believe it or not, is a true story.
The Wheatsheaf
HOW MAN EVOLVED FROM THE BEASTS… THROUGH DRINKING BEER
Except at harvest festivals, a wheatsheaf is a rare sight today, when the fields after harvest are dotted with vast straw bales rather than stooks of hand-gathered sheaves or bundles of wheat. There are many traditions associated with the harvest of former times. In some regions the farmers believed that bad spirits resided in the corn and so the last sheaf to be harvested would be trampled on the ground to chase the sprits away. By contrast, the Devon ceremony of ‘Crying the Neck’ involved the last sheaf or ‘neck’ being raised into the air by way of ritual celebration. Elsewhere strands of wheat would be woven into a ‘corn dolly’ that was kept safe for luck until seed-sowing the following year, when the ears of grain would be ploughed back into the soil in order to bless the new crop. Wheat and other cereals have always been a vital crop, providing bread to fill the stomach and, much more importantly, beer to lift the spirits.
Beer, mostly brewed from malted barley (see THE MALTINGS) but also made from wheat, maize or rice, is one of the oldest manufactured drinks in the world. It was first recorded in the written history of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia around 5000 BC, and archaeological evidence goes back a couple of millennia before that. So, at around nine thousand years old, beer and its history should clearly be included in any book touching on the history of mankind, especially one concerned with the history of the places in which beer was drunk.
The chronicle of beer can be traced back to the earliest civilizations, of the Chinese, Egyptians and Mesopotamians, who were the first people to actually organize their societies and communicate with each other without pointing and shouting. It is thought that the Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia were the first to brew beer after, it is assumed, some grain became moist and began to ferment. Very soon they realized they could repeat the process as often as they wanted, and before long, no doubt, they were all under the influence of their new discovery and pointing and shouting at each other again. This took place around nine thousand years ago, and mankind has been adapting and refining the process ever since. Odd, then, that even after all these years of research and learning from the practice of others, the Australians are still unable to produce a drink
able beer.
In Mesopotamia, during the second millennium before the birth of Christ, a narrative poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, was written to explain how man evolved. Enkidu, a hairy primitive who ate only grass and drank only the milk of wild animals, wanted to test his power against the demigod Gilgamesh. Seeking to learn about his enemy, Gilgamesh sent a prostitute to spend a week with the wild man to teach him about civilization. Among other things, she taught him how to eat bread and drink beer as it was the ‘custom of the kingdom’, so Enkidu drank seven cups of beer, after which his heart soared, he cleaned himself up and became a civilized human being. Although these days, after seven cups of beer, that process seems to happen in reverse. Indeed, perhaps after seven cups of the ancient ale, Enkidu wisely had an afternoon nap before going out for a mountain-goat madras in the evening.
There is evidence that all the ancient civilizations drank some form of beer; the Babylonians even had laws establishing beer rations. For the record, it was the priests who received the most, around a gallon a day, probably accounting for all those visions they kept having. Beer was popular among the Romans before wine-making took over, when it was considered a barbarian drink. The Romans occupying Britannia noted how the Celtic Druids drank ale made from barley, fermented yeast and water. They tried to introduce their wine to the Druids, but without success. And that state of affairs seems to have continued as, by the end of the Middle Ages, beer remained Britain’s most popular drink, drunk from breakfast through until night-time, just like it is around most football stadiums today.
During the fifteenth century, merchants began importing European hops as a new type of bittering agent to temper the sweetness of the malted grain (previously flavoured with chequer berries – see THE BUSH), and what was referred to as ‘ale’ was now called ‘beer’. This was when a distinction grew between lager and the traditional bitter, which it seems, even now, only the British can stomach. It was during this period that innkeepers would display a picture of a wheatsheaf outside their alehouses to advertise traditional English ‘real ales’ were available, and not that European ‘rubbish’.
At nearly nine thousand years old, beer drinking is as old as civilization itself. Indeed, as Enkidu found out, beer quite possibly did much of the civilizing. Although you wouldn’t always think that when walking through most English towns of an evening, stepping over half-eaten kebabs and sleeping teenagers, when the traditional pastime of drinking beer is taking place.
The White Hart
SYMBOL OF A KING WITH LITTLE HEART
Something that used to trouble me as a child was why the White Hart at Pirbright, close to where I grew up, was spelled without an ‘e’. And what would a white heart be in any case?
If the pub had been called the White Stag instead, all would have been clear. For a hart is in fact an adult male deer, especially a red deer. A white one would be rare indeed, sufficiently rare to go questing after it, as Sir Gawain does in one of the legends of King Arthur (see also THE GREEN MAN), when a white hart runs through the hall at Camelot. Interestingly, the word ‘deer’ – related to the modern German word Tier, meaning ‘animal’ – originally meant a wild animal of any kind, as opposed to a farmed one. Over time, it came to mean one specific creature. (Likewise the word ‘venison’ applied to all wild game, not just the meat from a deer.) The town of Hertford (pronounced ‘Hartford’) grew up around a river crossing point for animals; its name clearly means ‘the place deer cross the river’. And all this, in turn, means when we talk about the White Hart a deer is what is referred to, and the name has nothing to do with the blood-pumping organ in the middle of our chests.
Of course, that now raises the other question, why so many pubs and hotels are named after the rare and elusive animal. The reason for this is that the white deer or hart was used by English king Richard II (1367–1400) as his heraldic symbol, and members of his household and court would all display the white hart in one form or another. Innkeepers and tavern owners would also display the image on their signs to show allegiance to the king. This would have been a wise move in such turbulent times. Richard II, who came to the throne as a child (see THE RED LION), was the monarch famous for crushing the first poll tax riots in 1381, better known as the Peasants’ Revolt (see JACK STRAW’S CASTLE). After the revolt was quashed, the heartless (with an ‘e’) king broke all the promises he had made and sent a militia through the countryside to seek out any remaining rebels. Having a sign outside your pub with the king’s symbol painted prominently upon it was a good way of ensuring that you and your clientele of revolting peasants avoided royal retribution.
The White Lion
EMBLEM OF THE FIRST YORKIST KING OF ENGLAND
Regarded as the king of the beasts and a creature of dauntless courage, the lion has long been used as a symbol of royalty. In heraldic terms, lions tend to be golden and sometimes red, but rarely white. The royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom consists of a shield displaying various lions, two sets of three golden and one red (see THE STANDARD and THE RED LION), the shield supported on one side by another golden lion, for England, and on the other by a silver unicorn, for Scotland (see also THE LION AND THE UNICORN). The three formerly golden lions from the royal coat of arms also appear on the badge worn by our national football team. These lions aren’t white, either, but dark blue.
Edward IV (1442–83), son of Richard, 3rd Duke of York (see THE ROSE AND CROWN), was a hugely popular king of the York dynasty. He was a brilliant general and talented politician; indeed, had he not died when his son and heir was only twelve, the house of Lancaster might not have won the War of the Roses. Edward used a white lion as his personal emblem, which is almost certainly why so many English pubs, hotels, lanes and even shopping centres bear the name the White Lion today. Edward IV in turn inherited the symbol from his grandmother Anne de Mortimer, which accounts for why some pubs are called the White Lion of Mortimer. The lion, depicted carrying a shield bearing the white rose of York encircled by a golden sun, appeared on the Great Seal of Edward IV, more recently used by George VI (1895–1952) when he was Duke of York.
The remains of lions were found buried in the moat at the Tower of London in 1936. The bones – of the Barbary lion from north-west Africa where lions are now extinct – were recently carbon-dated to Edward IV’s reign. They would have been part of a royal menagerie at the Tower, consisting of exotic animals and housed in the Bulwark Tower, specially built for the purpose. It was later renamed the Lion Tower but was largely demolished, with the exception of the Lion Gate, after the animals were removed in 1835 on the orders of the Duke of Wellington (see THE IRON DUKE).
The Widow’s Son
(Bow, London)
WHERE ‘VINTAGE’ APPLIES TO THE FOOD NOT THE DRINK
In the early nineteenth century, a widow lived in a small cottage on the Devon Road in Bow, east London. As Easter approached one year, she was looking forward to seeing her only son, a sailor in the Royal Navy, who was due home from his first voyage at sea. As it was Good Friday, his mother baked him a hot-cross bun to celebrate his homecoming. It was then widely believed that buns baked on Good Friday had miraculous powers (helped by the cross) and would never go mouldy. Hence their presence in the house was considered lucky and protective. The following day she waited impatiently at the front gate, looking up and down the road in the hope of catching sight of him, but as dusk fell she realized he was unlikely to come that day. Easter Day came and went and there was still no sign of him. The days turned into weeks, the weeks into months, and still he did not come.
The widow kept the bun she had baked for her son, threading it on to a cord and hanging it from a beam, for the day he finally did return. Each new day came and went, much as the last, and each day the old woman stood at the gate, looking up and down Devon Road, hoping to see her son, but he never arrived. Eventually news came that he had been lost at sea, presumed dead, although no body had been recovered that could be returned to his grieving mother. So the widow clun
g to the thin belief that her son was still alive and would eventually find his way home. To mark the passing of each year she baked him a hot-cross bun, threaded it on to the cord with the other buns and hung it back on the beam. She was never to see her son again and when she died her cottage was knocked down and a fine new tavern built in its place.
The story goes that the workmen, discovering the string of buns, wanted to show respect to the old widow by hanging them in the new bar, and the new landlord, upon hearing the tragic tale, decided to keep the buns on show and named his pub the Widow’s Son in honour of the lost boy and his devoted mother. Each year since 1848, when a pub was first built on the site, successive landlords have continued his tradition of inviting a member of the Royal Navy to add a hot-cross bun to the pile, now stored in a net hanging from the ceiling, still on display in the main bar and now numbering over two hundred buns. But if you’re hungry, I’d definitely advise you to stick to the sandwiches.
The Woolpack
THE TRADE THAT HELPED MAKE BRITAIN GREAT
For centuries the wool trade was an important part of the English economy. The Domesday Book, the great survey of England commissioned by William the Conqueror and completed in 1086, records how the industry was already thriving at that time, with flocks of up to 2,000 sheep. Many English towns grew as a result of the wool trade, becoming flourishing centres of production. By 1260 records show that hundreds of flocks had over 8,000 sheep, each managed by as many as a dozen full-time shepherds. By the reign of Edward I (1239–1307), wool had become the country’s major export to Europe. It was also a significant source of income for the king, who in 1275 sought to regulate the industry by introducing a form of export tax called the ‘Great Custom’.