The treasures you can find in a used bookstore can sometimes boggle the mind. The other day (quite a few days ago, to be honest) I stumbled on an odd book called The English Pub: A unique social phenomenon by Michael Jackson. (No, not the singer!) In it Jackson takes us on a kind of historical pub crawl from first century AD (the first record of a pub—passed down to us by Dioscoredes, the Greek) till 1976 (which is when this book was published in San Francisco).
In this book we see the many faces a pub can wear: the neutral ground, a place where anyone can have guests and not worry about the mess at home; where courts have been held, where the pilgrims Chaucer described so well could eat, drink and sleep, where Marx and Lenin devised their philosophies, and where cricket was invented. And we watch the pub evolve as an institution through the ages—and learn some fascinating facts about individual pubs and individual Englishmen and women along the way. I was fascinated to learn, for instance, that Queen Elizabeth I was the only monarch ever to object to being depicted on an inn sign. That’s the sort of behavior I would expect from Queen Victoria; not the Virgin Queen. But then, Queen Elizabeth objected not to the idea of having her visage displayed but to the manner in which she was shown.
I was equally interested to discover that the rules for playing cricket were formalized in a pub (The Bat & Ball). Or, perhaps, it would be more correct to say by the pub owner’s son, John Nyren, in a book titled The Young Cricketer’s Tutor. And then I laughed to learn that Stilton (the cheese) gets its name directly from a pub. According to Jackson, Stilton cheese goes well with a pint of beer.
And Jackson does not neglect the pub legends. Be careful where you sit at the Busby Stoop (a pub named after a man who was hanged there) for, the locals will assure you, if you sit in a certain chair you will die a violent death. The ghost that haunts the White Swan in Birmingham, by contrast, is far more amiable. He simply comes in (for a bit of ghostly beer perhaps?) with his dog.
No, this review is not meant to encourage people to go out and get drunk and yes, I am aware of the dark side of the British pub culture (link). Nonetheless, when Britain presents its face to the world, the image usually includes a pub. This book then is a great introduction to Britain.
