Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  Even so, there was still a significant amount of drinking being done in post-war Britain – not only in pubs, but also in a dense urban network of workplace clubs (typified by the Finch Lane social centre for Liverpool Corporation conductors and drivers, with George Harrison’s bus-driver father, Harold, as Saturday night MC), a rich, diverse array of sports and social clubs, and the 3,000 or so working-men’s clubs attached to the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union. These clubs had, for their predominantly male members, several distinct advantages over pubs: more liberal opening hours; greater selectivity, ie keeping out women (except at weekend concerts) and rowdies; often better games facilities, for instance snooker, as well as less constrained gambling; and what M-O identified as ‘an atmosphere of trust that does not often appear in pubs’, exemplified by the men on entering the Grafton Club in York leaving their hats and coats on pegs by the door. In Coseley, Doris Rich asked some members (of working-men’s clubs and other social or sports clubs) what they liked about them and why they attended:

  Sooner come to this club than others . . . all your own folks from round about home.

  No women.

  Satisfaction of knowing profits.

  Much the same as a public house but more free and easy.

  Handy.

  Somewhere to go.

  Nothing else to do in Coseley.

  Pass an hour away watching people play.

  It’s a break after being at work all day.

  I pass an hour . . . play dominos and talk different things . . . as regards politics I’m not interested.

  There’s never no falling out.

  Never no bad language.

  Force of habit.

  Ultimately, though, as Dennis et al made clear in their study of Featherstone, a smallish mining town with six working-men’s clubs, it all came down to the liquid amber: cheaper than in the pubs, and free to each member – up to eight pints anyway – during each of the Christmas, Easter, Whitsun and August bank holidays. ‘In essence,’ they concluded, ‘the Working Men’s Club is a co-operative society for the purchase and sale of beer.’11

  Pubs by contrast were already on a long, slow retreat. In 1904 there had been 99,500 in England and Wales; in 1919, 83,400; by 1950 it was 73,500 (compared with 19,200 licensed clubs, almost triple the 1904 total). ‘There is a general awareness that there is less drinking going on,’ an M-O investigator reported from Cardiff in 1951. ‘People talk about the pubs being empty and some publicans complain about a drop in trade.’ In particular, pubs during the early post-war era seem to have had a problem attracting young people. The sociologist John Mogey in his composite portrait of the Jolly Waterman at St Ebbe’s, a traditional working-class district in Oxford, emphasised that virtually all the regular clientele were over 55; while Donald James Wheal, growing up in White City, recalled ‘most London pubs’ as ‘unappealing places for the young’, with ‘spilt beer, ancient Scotch eggs and a bar dominated by the middle-aged’.

  One should not exaggerate the retreat. After all, M-O’s 1947–8 survey of drinking habits found that 79 per cent of men and 49 per cent of women said that they went to the pub. Within these overall figures there was little in the way of occupational differences, but some regional variations, with overall (ie men and women) pub-going percentages of 69 in London, 67 in Middlesbrough (men 81, women 53), 64 in Bolton, 63 in Birmingham and 49 in Blaina (reflecting the Welsh temperance tradition, with men 73 and women 24). As for frequency of pub-going, ‘the most regular drinkers are working-class people earning £4–6 a week, nearly all are over 25, and most of them married with children’. One of those regulars was a Dagenham milkman. ‘I get home fairly early on my job,’ he told M-O, ‘but soon after six my wife turns to me and she says, “It’s time for me to get the kids to bed, come on, get out of my way,” so out I come, round here to the pub.’12

  Pubs varied hugely in character, facilities and opening hours as well as size, but almost certainly the majority, certainly in those many working-class districts where pubs were still thick on the ground, were physically not all that different from the Cannon in Cannon Street, Middlesbrough, where at nine on a typical Monday evening in September 1947 there were 27 people in the public bar, all of them male, all of them working-class:

  The Cannon is situated in a lower working-class area and surrounded by rows of small brick cottages rapidly assuming the condition of a slum district. Both inside and out this pub is an enlarged version of any of the dilapidated dwellings which it serves. Crumbling exterior brickwork, grimy windows, and blistered paint introduce one to the conglomeration of small dirty rooms inside with bare rough floorboards, stained tables and walls, and a general atmosphere of poverty and depression.

  It was only a little smarter in the Jolly Waterman, where there was a serving hatch, not a bar counter, and the only room for general use had ‘plain wooden benches around the wall, a chair or two, one dark much-painted table screwed to the floor, a dart-board, a notice-board, and an open cast-iron Victorian fireplace’. Even so, there had been since the 1930s a clear trend under way towards a mixture of modernisation and what one might call cosification, with George Orwell in 1946 praising his mythical pub, The Moon Under Water, not least because it had neither ‘glass-topped tables or other modern miseries’ nor ‘sham roof-beams, ingle-nooks or plastic panels masquerading as oak’. Five years later a letter in the Daily Mirror saw it all as a sinister plot:

  Publicans whining because their takings are down deserve all the desertions they’re getting. They’ve paid so much attention to making their places fit for women – pretty lampshades, rows of bottles with lights behind ’em – that they’re not fit for men.

  There are too many women in pubs anyway. There was a time when the pub was Everyman’s Club. That was in those happy days when no decent woman dared be seen in licensed premises.

  The writer was ‘Nobby’ from Birmingham, and he signed off with a single, expressive word: ‘Heigho!’

  In practice, it was only a part-time threat to male well-being. ‘Though women are not prohibited from entering the public houses during the week,’ Dennis et al noted in their Featherstone study, ‘in fact it is only at week-ends in most cases that they are to be found there.’ And they added pointedly that ‘only old women go to the public house during the week unaccompanied’. Moreover, even if a woman did go to a pub, it was likely to be on certain strict territorial conditions. ‘I walked across to the Royal Oak, plucked up courage and walked into the public bar,’ related a female M-O investigator in Middlesbrough. ‘All the men looked up and there was a dead silence. I tried to head for the bar but a man of 40 stopped me and said, “You’re in the wrong place, you want the other door.” He walked to the door and pointed to where I should have gone. I went without a murmur.’ She did not tell exactly where she had been directed to, but evidence from other pubs is suggestive. In the Red Lion at Blaina, women were usually relegated to the back kitchen; in the Marquis of Granby in Derby, there was a tiny ‘snug’, invariably occupied by three old ladies nursing bottles of milk stout; in the Ring of Bells in Coventry, there was a long passage, again the preserve of old women; and in Coseley, as in Blaina, it was the back kitchen again or, if they were lucky, ‘with the young couples in the smoke room’. At the Jolly Waterman in St Ebbe’s there was only one room – but there, the women sat ‘around the walls’ acted ‘as a fringe to the men’, still sitting separately even on ‘convivial Saturday nights’. Nevertheless, some sort of progress had been made. ‘You never saw women in pubs here before the war, at least, very few indeed,’ asserted Mr Evans in Blaina in 1947. ‘The war has brought it on, believe me. A woman who came into a pub before the war was looked upon as a “bad un”. Sometimes they used to go into the smoke room but never outside. The changes that do come!’13

  Women also came in from the cold through the newly booming pub sport of darts, with ladies’ darts teams being among the several thousand teams across the country playing in leagues sponsored by th
e major breweries. M-O reckoned darts to be ‘the commonest and by far the most organised’ of games played in pubs, with ‘the straight 301’ as the most popular type of darts. There were plenty of other pub games, including ‘dominos and shove ha’penny’ as ‘fairly universally popular’, as well as ‘crib and whist’, but M-O’s belief was that music and singing were no longer all that frequent in pubs and that ‘on the whole those who want concerts now go to the club instead’. Most pub games could generate significant betting. ‘The amount of gambling that went on, especially on dominos, was shocking,’ one customer at the Lion & Lamb in Newgate Street, Newcastle in the 1950s recalled. ‘There were the regular, expert domino sharps who sat with their backs to the windows and invited mugs to join in the game. Disinterested men at the bar would appear to be discussing the fate of friends in court or in prison. What they were doing, of course, was using jailbird slang – like two half stretches – to tell their mates in the game exactly what the mugs had in their hands . . .’ M-O in its report pointed out that gambling in pubs was illegal and ‘frowned upon by the police’, but added that ‘few regular pubgoers see anything reprehensible in it at all’.

  Pubs were also often the centre for a range of other activities. ‘One in each district of Coseley houses a lodge of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes [a friendly society], two house Pigeon Clubs and one a Fishing Club,’ itemised Rich in the Black Country. ‘“Death and Dividend” and “Sick and Draw” “clubs” are based on some and members gather together weekly or fortnightly to pay their subscriptions and have a drink and a chat. Such “clubs” are still very popular in Coseley . . .’ But of course, in any one pub a huge amount depended on the individual landlord in terms of both activities and atmosphere. The West Midlands brewers Mitchell & Butlers may in 1950 have been providing bowling greens to more than 150 pubs in the Birmingham area alone, but for a few more years yet it was the publicans who, relatively speaking, called at least some of the shots; and for whatever motives, many of them did so in such a way as undeniably to enhance working-class associational life.14

  The beer-drinking itself, though, was not a peripheral matter. Reputation counted, certainly in early 1950s Byker (Newcastle), where the Grace Inn was reckoned to have the best ESP on Shields Road and the Addison’s popular landlord, Tommy Shaw, was highly rated for his Bass, McEwan’s Special and the Guinness which he bottled himself. As to type of beer generally drunk, M-O’s 1947–8 survey found that the most frequent mentions were given to bitter, mild, stout, mild and bitter, Guinness, brown ale and light ale; that overall ‘nearly half of all beer drinkers drink mild and/or bitter’; and that within that there were big regional differences, with for instance 34 per cent of Middlesbrough beer drinkers favouring bitter, only 5 per cent mild, and those proportions being more or less reversed in Bolton. An investigator got talking to a couple of drinkers one August evening in the Wilton Arms, Fulham:

  Working man, aged 55–60. Drinking pints of mild. Accepted one. Said mild was most popular drink, ‘What we call “wallop”.’ Said most working men drink mild – cannot afford bitter, and anyhow prefer mild. Said ‘ladies’ like stout or pale ale (no spirits in this pub). Two to three pints usual evening consumption for him – quite enough – home to bed etc.

  Woman, aged 50 – cook – drinking mild. Agreed with above remarks regarding popularity of mild, stout etc. – comes in about three times weekly. Two to three pints mild or else sometimes stout for a change.

  Almost certainly most beer drinkers were deeply conservative in their habits – a conservatism epitomised by the failed introduction, as a result of a beer shortage, at Blaina’s Red Lion of a dark Mitchell & Butlers beer, with most left unsold and going sour. ‘The Welshman likes a light beer so that he can see through it and tell whether it is clear or not,’ explained M-O’s man on the spot. ‘They are very sceptical about anything new and the fact that they could not tell whether the beer was cloudy etc. was enough to put them off it.’15

  What did the working class talk about in pubs? ‘Conversation in public-houses is confined almost entirely to the men,’ reckoned Mogey on the basis of his St Ebbe’s research. ‘Topics which are preferred are largely escapist, about horse racing and football bets, about seaside holidays and coach trips.’ Tellingly, he added that ‘the world of personal references is harsh and full of jokes’ – a way, he thought, of preventing ‘close inquiry into individual lives’. Certainly the escapism comes through in M-O’s survey. ‘There is solid evidence in pubs that football is the main topic when in season,’ was the Birmingham finding, while in nearby Aston a drinker bluntly asserted: ‘Football and beer, that’s the only two things you’ll find up here.’ Or take the Golden Lion in Fulham High Street during the August 1947 convertibility crisis, when ‘although Parliament was in the public eye when Inv. was visiting the pub, he did not hear any particular discussion about the crisis’. During a December evening at the Red Lion, Blaina, there were three main topics: the cold weather (‘If it freezes then Griffins [the local bus company?] will go off the road’); the discovery of a baby’s body in a nearby lake (‘It might not have been anybody local, see’); and the imminent outing from the pub to Newport Pavilion to see a show (‘Is Bill going, Mrs Jones?’ someone asked the landlord’s wife).

  The fullest rendition we have comes from Room Three of the Cannon in Middlesbrough, where one Monday evening the patient investigator listened to Gerry, Bob and Mrs Richards, all three of them regulars. The topics discussed were, in toto:

  The Boys’ chances against Derby County at football

  The landlord of the Cannon’s ban on singing

  A forthcoming ‘do’ in the select room of the Cannon

  The service at the pub called the Turf

  The beer being weak – ‘the rain’s got in’ says Bob

  The weather (train of thought from the last topic)

  Deadness of the pub at the moment

  The Boys’ chances against Derby

  The forthcoming ‘do’ at the Cannon

  The quality of the beer

  A street outing to Borsbeck

  The local looney bin

  Gerry’s woman friend

  Deadness of the pub

  The cost of the pub chairs

  Gerry’s pipe

  The Boys’ chances against Derby

  People’s ages

  The current pantomime and the week’s films

  The quality of the beer

  The forthcoming ‘do’ at the Cannon

  The outing to Borsbeck

  Pubs and landlords in general

  Leeds as the best town in the county

  Beer pumps with glass tubes

  Lack of ‘everything’ in Middlesbrough

  Repetitive, reassuring and deeply familiar, this was a conversational world that, as Dennis et al reflected about comparable conversations in Featherstone’s working-men’s clubs, privileged ‘concrete details’ and not only mistrusted but rarely ventured upon ‘the level of general principles’.16

  Why did people go to pubs? M-O’s survey found the favourite reasons were ‘for the company’ (42 per cent), ‘to get a drink’ (23 per cent), ‘for a change’ (13 per cent) and ‘to pass the time’ (10 per cent). This predominantly social motivation was confirmed by John Barron Mays in his study of inner-city Liverpool in the early 1950s – describing pubs as ‘popular rallying points in the neighbourhood where one can be sure of finding warmth and fellowship’ – and almost movingly evoked by the M-O investigator’s description of a cold December night at Blaina’s Red Lion: ‘The mere fact that people congregate closely together around the fires seems to make them open their hearts as it were and talk personally. Groups seem to be closer together and everybody one large family.’ Yet in practice, the pub as a social centre operated in a very specific, carefully defined way, with a huge premium on familiarity. ‘People generally have one or two favourite “publics” to which they are faithful,’ Rich discovered in Coseley. ‘At weekends they
arrive at their public house early, take up their usual seats and stay until closing time . . . Everyone knows everyone in the public houses, for few strangers come to them unless they are situated on a main road.’ The M-O survey concurred, finding that the ‘average’ pub-goer was a working-class person going ‘steadily’ to his ‘favourite pub’, often a ‘little back-street pub’ like the Cannon in Middlesbrough. Moreover, not only did 46 per cent of pubgoers have a favourite pub, but the survey also produced a remarkable study of 529 groups (ie two or more people) drinking together. Of these, 397 were of the same sex, 426 were of the same class, 363 were of the same age group – and only three ‘contained a mixture of different sexes, age and classes’.17 Put another way, pubs acted as central reinforcements of working-class certainties in an era when those certainties – above all of place (in both senses) and gender – still unquestioningly applied. But, for all their psychological importance in underpinning a strong, cohesive sense of identity, they were certainties of exclusion as well as inclusion.