The landlady – by which I mean the figure as delineated in popular culture – exhibits a knowing, winking exaggeration of ‘female’ traits. She wears the equivalent of a uniform, designed to signal either good-natured availability (tight, tinselly) or matronly competence (brisk, bosomy). She listens to men with wry sympathy – the elbow on the counter signifying intimacy with boundaries – and responds with seen-it-all wisdom. She serves, obliges and dispenses. She prides herself on her desirable ‘house’. Like the lesser type of landlord, she may exert her power by cheaper means, acting the shrew or the dominatrix, but she remains within the familiar spectrum of feminine roles.
Nor is her power diminished by all this emphatic womanliness. It is underlined. The landlady is following the rules of an old game, and everybody knows it; but it is a game that she herself controls.
So strong is her image that it makes little difference whether or not the real woman resembles it. My grandmother would have dismissed the landlady of popular culture as vaguely insulting (Bet Lynch? Please) and, like all concepts, completely irrelevant. She was herself, always and only. But images do not develop in a vacuum. They are informed by observation, however skewed this may become along the way. Because my grandmother was the supreme landlady, she displayed traits that, to the casual eye, would have confirmed the stereotype; and confirmed in turn why the stereotype is based upon truth. She was as colourful as a macaw, and – Bet Lynch again – she favoured leopard print (although it all came from Knightsbridge). She had a hostess’s charm, simultaneously meaningful and meaningless (‘lovely to know you’ was her greeting to one and all, pressing the flesh as her eyes deadened with the strain of remembering who the hell they were). She believed unquestioningly in the importance of what she was doing. She commanded adoration and absolute respect, apparently without trying.
And the customers at her new pub – cattle-dealers, butchers, ramblers and the rest – recognised her instinctively for what she was. They were happy, one might even say honoured, to help fulfil her destiny.
It was of course unusual for a woman to wield power and be received without resentment. This is still true, however much we might protest and wish it otherwise.
Yet men, especially English men, especially when they have had a drink, have for many years loved and revered the landlady. She is part mother, part nanny, part sorceress, part goddess. So yes, a fantasy figure – nothing unusual about that – which doesn’t mean that the real woman was not equally loved. The insult to my grandmother, chucked out of her father’s bar because she was a woman, was committed by the world outside the pub: the customers had not wanted her to go.
In some form or other, the landlady has been with us for a very long time. Her earliest manifestation was as the Anglo Saxon ‘ale-wife’ – often unmarried, despite the name – who brewed in her home and made a small income from her skill. In the days before clean water, tea and so on, people might drink as much as a gallon of ale per day (even children drank ‘small beer’). Brewing – ‘tippling’, ‘tapping’ – was a handy trade for a woman, one of the few available to her and imparting a peck of dignity and independence.
The ale was sold either from the woman’s home, where she would raise a bush on a pole to advertise its readiness, or in alehouses, which were therefore the first ‘pubs’ (Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans is officially the oldest extant pub in England, being an eleventh-century structure on an eighth-century site, but obviously many alehouses predated it). In effect the ale-wife was not so different from my grandmother’s female predecessor at the pub, who ran a little home business dispensing alcohol: their tradition lasted a thousand years.
And it survives, in different form, in the ‘craft’ brew industry. There were women making these in the late fifteenth century, although by then more as a hobby than a living. Throughout the Middle Ages, brewing developed into an industry, which in the nature of things was run by men, and with the arrival of hopped beer in the late fifteenth century the female brewer was almost completely sidelined. The ale-wives at the sharp end were more likely to be working for male brewers or as medieval barmaids (‘tapsters’), possibly with a bit of prostitution thrown in. Those who were married or widowed might have charge of a drinking establishment: thus, landladies.
But their status was low, on the whole, because alongside the history of drinking in this country runs a parallel history: that of opposition to drinking. A succession of licensing laws, mostly resisted with roaring rage, were prefigured more than a thousand years ago, by a royal decree issued in 965, which attempted to limit the number of alehouses to one per village, and inevitably failed to do so.
Then came religion, powerfully railing against alcohol as a facilitator of sin. Some truth in that, of course. The proper pub is a counterpart to the church, a place of sanctuary and forgiveness, but drink can be the very devil. I once had a boyfriend to whom a pub was no more or less than a place to assuage a craving, the prettied-up equivalent of a needle full of smack; his forehead bore a constant cold sweat of wine; his urges made me feel, physically, what previously I had merely accepted, the absolute difference between the true pub and alcohol. However, William Langland, in his late-fourteenth-century Piers Plowman, conflated the two, just as the Temperance Society hardliners would do some 600 years later. When Langland sends his character Glutton to an alehouse, his fellow customers include tarts, thieves and a hangman, and he drinks so much that he sleeps all through Sunday. Chaucer, in his roughly contemporaneous Canterbury Tales, is more urbane, as for instance when one of his pilgrims suggests an alehouse as a venue in which to tell his tale, and the others refuse, on the grounds that only a very off-colour story could possibly be told in such a place. The pilgrim who makes the suggestion is the Pardoner, a man of the cloth. Chaucer was a man of the world, but the Langland view was a force that resounded.
Given that organised religion is rarely a friend to women, it is unsurprising that the ale-wife became a target of this godly wrath, dangerously implicated in the criminal allure of alcohol. She was Eve, the timeless temptress, albeit with a jug of cider rather than an apple in her hand. Some of the medieval ravings against her prefigured the lunacy of the witch-finder. In 1540 the city of Chester banned the sale of ale by any female between fourteen and forty – that is to say, the quasi-official ages of desirability. The conflation of drink and sex; the bullying and terrorised attitudes towards women; the perversely English sense of guilt and concomitant excitable delight in misbehaviour … they are all there.
And yet. The landlady, in the presiding form that we would recognise today – although she no longer really exists – would become a figure who commanded ungrudging respect. What saved and hallowed her was the pub. The easy acceptance of her authority came about when pubs were accepted, with ease, at the heart of our society.
At its best the pub could always cleanse the English of our complexities. Whether to do with sex, guilt, class, lack of confidence, self-consciousness, what you will, they were all let calmly loose and dispersed in the smoky air. The pub allowed us to be ourselves. Therefore we were at home there, quite possibly more so than anywhere else. And for a time – a precious time – our common culture understood the value of this. Of course there were always those who opposed pubs. Yet society, as a whole, implicitly acknowledged the pub’s place within it: not exactly necessary, but needed.
When did the pub occupy this position? At a rough estimate, between the ages of Charles Dickens and Tony Blair, peaking between late Queen Victoria and Harold Macmillan.
This is hardly a historian’s analysis. Such a thing would be impossible. One can cite facts, yes: about the development of pub counters in the mid-nineteenth century, and the deregulation of licensing hours that so confused pub rhythms in the early twenty-first; about the excitable rush to build pubs at the end of the nineteenth century, and the ‘never had it so good’ prosperity that began to sideline the pub from the mid-twentieth century.
But my estimate is also about some
thing numinous – an instinct, a hunch. I say Dickens partly in the way that Larkin said that sex began in 1963. It is an imagistic thing. Our image of Dickens is always somehow wrapped in a warm-lit haze, as if seen through a murky, kindly, close-paned pub window. He embodies the pub’s earthy, compassionate Englishness, and his characters are repeatedly placed in real-life establishments: the Red Lion at Barnet, where the Artful Dodger took Oliver Twist to breakfast; the George at Southwark, where Sam Weller met Mr Pickwick; the Maypole at Chiswick cited in Barnaby Rudge – names and places to evoke a picaresque and freewheeling London, which ran alive with places that were pub-like but not yet quite pubs. In 1812, the year of Dickens’ birth, the pub was still evolving from its ancestral strands. By the end of his life, in 1870, it was an entity: officially so. The Wine and Beerhouse Act of the previous year had set out the licensing laws that form the basis of today’s system, and that gave the pub its essential aspect of benign authority.
The act was passed a decade or so before my great-grandfather was born, by which time the term ‘public house’ was widespread. But the foundations for this cultural centrality had been laid beforehand, throughout the mid-nineteenth century, which meant that by 1864 Dickens could conjure in Our Mutual Friend the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters on the Thames, a drinking place for the London watermen and a pub in spirit, if not in name, with its ‘bar to soften the human breast. The available space in it was not much larger than a hackney-coach; but no one could have wished the bar bigger…’ Furthermore it is presided over by a figure of rich, radiant familiarity:
Miss Potterson, sole proprietor and manager of the Fellowship Porters, reigned supreme on her throne, the Bar, and a man must have drunk himself mad drunk indeed if he thought he could contest a point with her.
A landlady, indeed. Not one to arouse the customers’ swooning love, but one whose ability to command veneration is beyond any doubt.
Throughout the Dickensian era, drinking establishments were acquiring other recognisable traits: the counter; the separate bars with their different prices and atmospheres; the windows with their soft dimples and fruit-gum colours, their white lettering framed and fretted like ice sculpture; the glow that envelops and hallows. The pub was emerging – it was becoming, as it seemed, what it had always been meant to be. It had evolved from alehouses, taverns and inns, from coffee houses and gin palaces; all of these had aspects of the pub. The alehouse, the oldest of the lot, was about drinking, impure and simple. The inn, fully established by around the late twelfth century, provided food, drink and accommodation. The tavern was for food and drink, possibly including wine, very popular in London from the thirteenth century. These strands were not always distinct from each other – for instance an alehouse might offer some basic food, rather in the manner of my grandmother’s giant chunk of Cheddar; a tavern might have a few bedchambers – but the three types of establishment were given separate status in legislation.
They were too as clearly distinguished in people’s minds as a gastropub from a Harvester. Alehouses were the bottom of the pile and as unavoidable as rats: at the start of the fourteenth century there were more than 1,300 in the City of London alone, as compared with around 350 taverns, and a 1577 survey of England and Wales recorded more than 14,000 alehouses. Two hundred had been suppressed in London just before this survey was taken: another attempt to do something about drunkenness, and completely hopeless as they continued to proliferate. People wanted them. They were generally small and basic, sometimes barely businesses at all, sometimes brothels on the side. More often than not they were like the worst kind of pubs, in which the desire for alcohol was unclothed by joy and subtlety, and the solace on offer was that of mere oblivion.
Inns, by contrast, stood proud and respectable. They were pub-like in their centrality, not just to their own community but to the life of the nation. Although their first function was as stopping places for travellers, they were often much more besides. Rather like the giant shopping malls of today, which one really need never leave since everything is in them, inns might be post offices, auction houses, holders of goods (some had warehouses in their yards), business centres, employment agencies and places where wages were allocated at ‘pay tables’. They might be debating chambers, meeting places for elections or trade associations. They might hold dances, banquets, inquests, cockfights. They might be entertainment venues. By the late sixteenth century it was commonplace to have a ‘minstrell’ strumming nearby, Wilko Johnson in doublet and hose, while actors flooded into London inn-yards with no doubt the same sweetly annoying zest as today they set up productions of Huis Clos in a room above a saloon bar. The more sophisticated rural inns also staged plays, particularly in the seventeenth century, although I doubt that this was the case for my grandmother’s pub.
It was only with the advent of the railways, and the death of coach travel – a great national shift that took effect from the 1830s – that the all-purpose primacy of the inn began to fade. Its various functions were dispersed. The first ‘station’ hotels were built. Some of the major London inns were demolished or – like the Tabard at Southwark, from which Chaucer’s pilgrims began their journey to Canterbury – rebuilt in entirely different form but with the same name outrageously attached. Some town inns, reasserting their original purpose, became small hotels. One sees them now on almost every high street, with their wide arches through which coaches entered cobbled courtyards, their solid and self-respecting façades shielding interiors that all too often fail those implied civic standards (bars crowded with ersatz wood, white wine like sugar water, QPR–Wrexham making lacklustre flickers on the big screen).
Meanwhile, country inns retreated, perforce, into the world of their village. Their former occupation was gone. More than a century elapsed between the last stagecoaches and the first steady stream of cars (it was not until the 1960s that customers drove as a matter of course to my grandmother’s pub, creating that constant pulsing sweep across the windows). In between times, the country inn was a ‘local’. Almost a pub, but not quite; lacking as it did the quality of rogue vitality that gives full value to the words ‘public house’.
There is indeed always something urban about the true pub, even when it is situated in the country. That is why its closest spiritual ancestors were those bustling streetwise creations, the tavern and the coffee house. Taverns had the warm ruby glow at their hearts; they conjured that state of alert relaxation, of excitation rooted in the everyday. ‘What things have we seen done at the Mermaid,’ wrote the playwright Francis Beaumont to Ben Jonson, ‘heard words that have been so nimble and so full of subtle flame …’
Of course the Mermaid Tavern had a highly particular clientele, which according to legend included Shakespeare (who, in Henry IV, reimagined the real-life Boar’s Head at Eastcheap as a literal inn with the fiery benevolence of the tavern and the savage sluttish allure of the alehouse: one would expect no less). Of course there would have been bad taverns, as well as those that were great and good. Nevertheless, when Dr Johnson wrote that ‘there is no private house, in which people can enjoy themselves so well, as at a capital tavern’, he was precisely elucidating the reason why its descendant, the pub, needed to exist.
Also familiar – as revealed by a seventeenth-century inventory of the Mouthe at Bishopsgate – were the tavern’s separate bars: the Percullis, the Pomgrannatt, the Three Tuns, the Vyne and the King’s Head, all of them furnished with tables, benches and stools. The Percullis contained an ‘oyster table’ and a couple of ‘playinge tables’ for cards, while in the King’s Head – more controversially – stood a ‘child’s stoole’. These places, goes the implication, were for anybody: mostly men but not exclusively so. In that sense they had something in common with the pub of today. So too in the fact that food was there to mitigate the alcohol – in so far as that was possible or desired. Alcohol had a power of its own that no establishment could quite contain, but the vivid natural life of the tavern did its best.
Its hard-e
dged conviviality was echoed in that creature of the late seventeenth century, the London coffee house. There too one found the mist of mixed breath and smoke and steam, enclosing the clientele in an embrace; there too the sense of liberated belonging, of controlled transgression. In fact, in their earliest days, coffee houses were seen as likely breeding grounds for sedition. Then they became part of society in a way that, again, prefigures the pub. Their interiors – also pub-like – were often shabby, nicotine-shadowed, with sanded wooden floors and tired furniture, but there was a purposeful logic to the décor: everything that was requisite was there, and nothing that was not, and that was how people liked it.
In the same spirit, the coffee house did not demand anything of its customers that they did not want to give. In an atmosphere both energised and unpressurised they could read, smoke, eat sandwiches or muffins, drink not just coffee but tea, chocolate or ‘spirituous liquours’. This all-day, all-is-available aspect is again reminiscent of a good contemporary pub; it also sounds like a club, which is what some coffee houses became when they evolved out of existence in the nineteenth century. Before that they were club-like, as are so many pubs. Some of them were meeting places for groups of people: Whigs, Tories, lawyers, journalists, politicians, ‘stock-jobbers’, actors, each set gathering together in its specific coffee house, such as the famous Chapter in Paternoster Row, used by booksellers and writers, in which Charlotte and Emily Brontë stayed on their first visit to London. Charlotte, who beneath her bonneted correctness would have loved pubs, instantly grasped the mysterious joy of being one among her ‘pen-driver’ kind, and more obscurely her humankind.
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