BOOZERS: THEN AND NOW
By
GRUMPS
My first recollections of buying beer in a British boozer date back almost forty years to 1966 when I was but a lad living in the mill and mining town of Leigh, Lancashire. I remember the place being full of what looked to me like old men, puffing on Woodbines and sipping bitter from chunky glasses with handles. I ventured in, age 16, to try my first pint, underage drinking was daring in those days. I can still see the bar room, it was rather dark and a haze of grey tobacco smoke hung in the air drifting in swirls as people walked by. The tables were circular, heavy cast iron with wooden tops. Cheap stools and odd chairs with bent bow backs served as the furniture. The ceiling was nicotine yellow, matching the walls which were lined with a kind of varnished plaster that obviously had not seen soap and water in years. On the floor a rather threadbare carpet, that may have once been blue, had a huge sludge coloured satin in the centre, as if someone had walked their lunch into it, long, long ago. From a corner of the room came the tap, tap, rattle, rattle tap of a domino game and the occasional rasping cough. 'Pint of bitter' said I and paid one shilling and ten pence ( less than 10p today) for the frothy, warm brew. It tasted terrible, but I persevered and managed to drink the lot, it tasted better the more I drank giving me a warm glow. Pint number two went down a lot faster and it wasn't until I stepped outside into the cold Autumnal air of Lancashire that I began to understand about the effects alcohol could have on the legs.
At the start of the 1970s boozers began to change in character and the old time 'pint 'oles' were given interior makeovers. From the outside pubs, with names such as 'The Queen's Head' or 'The Black Bull', still looked much as they had done in the 50s and 60s, grimy, soot stained brick, obscure glass windows with the brewers name etched on them, stone steps and heavy dark oak door. But inside the stained old carpets, fag burnt tables and battered bar furniture had been replaced by something they laughingly called Mock Tudor. I recall one such boozer I went to in Wigan that had suffered the makeover craze, it had fake oak beams made of polystyrene, imitation panelled walls, brown leatherette seating and high bar stools with short carved wooden backs. The walls sported pictures of hunting scenes and children dressed in blue-velvet blowing bubbles, leather straps with horse-brasses hung down and amongst this nonsense stood, juxtaposed against the tat, a group of puzzled looking old men puffing on Woodbines. The decor wasn't all that had changed, behind the bar a new brand of drink was being promoted called 'Red Barrel'. When I went to order my pint of bitter I was persuaded by the landlord to try this brew that did indeed have the appearance of real beer, but that is where the similarity ended. This stuff was about as alcoholic as sarsaparilla and it tasted crap. I could see the Woodbine brigade staring at the murky slop and scratching their cloth caps. By the mid 1970s they had gone, like real beer on draft and the outside lavatory in the back yard of the pub with its open gutter urinal , the Woodbine men had vanished into memory and boozers would never again be the same.
I went to a pub in Lancashire the other month, I say pub, it certainly looked like one from the outside, it had a sign swinging in the breeze and the usual notification of the licence holder above the door, but inside it was more like a restaurant. Now I can understand that landlords have to make their public houses pay but to set all the tables out with knives and forks, salt and pepper sets and napkins is taking matters too far. All I wanted was a quiet pint of beer at the end of the day and to relax quietly contemplating the joys of life in the era of invisible Weapons of Mass Destruction, but that was not to be. I went to the bar, ordered a pint of the local brew, which was served from a pressurised keg into a tall glass without handle, cost £1.85p (my first pint cost the equivalent of say 10p so this beer cost eighteen times that). Then, with pint in hand, I sat down at the nearest table to the bar and was about to take a drink when a man I assumed to be the landlord came over and said 'can't sit there, that's for people ordering a meal'. At first I thought he was joking as every single table in the room had knives and forks etc. set out so I asked him where he thought I should sit. There was nowhere, the entire public bar had been laid out like a restaurant. 'Try the tap room next door' he replied, indicating a dingy room at the back of the pub. Resisting my natural inclination to point out to this 'landlord' that his licence to sell alcohol on these premises required him to provide seating in his bar and that he was supposed, under terms of said licence, to be running a pub not a restaurant, I ventured into his 'tap room'. It was like entering The Twilight Zone; rather dark with a haze of grey tobacco smoke hanging in the air drifting in swirls as people walked by. The tables were circular, heavy cast iron with wooden tops. Cheap stools and odd chairs with bent bow backs served as the furniture. The ceiling was nicotine yellow, matching the walls which were lined with a kind of varnished plaster that obviously had not seen soap and water in years. On the floor a rather threadbare carpet, that may have once been blue, had a huge sludge coloured satin in the centre, as if someone had walked their lunch into it, long, long ago. From a corner of the room came the tap, tap, rattle, rattle tap of a domino game and the occasional rasping cough. So this is where they went!
Today the pubs of Britain are totally unlike anything that existed when I started supping bitter almost forty years ago. The bars have undergone a strange metamorphosis from 'pint 'oles' into the laughable plastic Tudor, through amusement arcade with lager and bar snacks to the phoney restaurants that many now are. I mean come on, be realistic, these are boozers, pubs whose function should be to serve beer, real beer, not keg-lagers brewed in Newcastle with names like Grunthalle or Craplesburger. But good old British bitter beer is no longer the best selling drink in pubs, maybe these so called Alcho-Pops are. When I started boozing alcho-pops was the name of a bloke with a flat cap and big red nose, today they swig it from bottles. In The Dog and Duck on a Friday night, on the way home from what passes for work these days, one can no longer take a quiet brew, the pub is full of couples ordering Scampi and Chips or Chilli Con Carne etc. and still Scottish spring-water at £1.25p a glass. And who let the children in?