One For The Road : The way we drank

We British have many idiosyncratic behaviours that have been commented upon with admiration, bemusement or contempt by other nations, and perhaps none more so than our drinking habits. I have often thought in earlier times that there was a peculiar joylessness to British drinking. The Parisians can sit on the boulevards outside their cafes in that effortlessly stylish way sipping red wine, smoking Gauloises and talking about ennui; their neighbours to the east can uproariously sink their brimming pints of pilsener beer, half foamy head, while no doubt singing and slapping their lederhosened thighs, while the Australians can swig the amber nectar on a sun-soaked beach while a cow sizzles on the barbecue (apologies for all the stereotypes, of which I promise there will be no more from this point). But to the Brits, it’s always been about just going down the dingy boozer, standing at the bar and necking pint after pint of tepid ale until it’s time to go home again.

Anyone for some pulled pork in a brioche roll?

I am prepared to admit that this may be more of a reflection of the urban boozer rather than the national institution. I am sure that even back in the bad old days of grey cities and grey lives there were gorgeous country hostelries, all oak and horse brass, where mine host might leisurely pull for you a generous draught of glowing October Ale while the sun poured in on the beer garden out back. This of course was something that, growing up in a grimy suburb to the north of Liverpool, I never experienced. But in these days where pubs serve food, play lively music and offer such diversions as quiz nights and karaoke the trip to the pub serves as another occasion to ponder upon the changes that time hath wrought.

Certainly the pubs my parents and their generation drank in were relatively austere places, largely free of superfluous ornamentation. They were basically just drinking places, and their appearance and atmosphere contributed to my perception of drinking at the time as being a fairly dour, workmanlike affair where you spent your whole evening single-mindedly working towards the single purpose of being able to go home drunk. There was for sure a hugely important social element to the activity; it seemed that the pub provided the only environment in which my parents and their friends would ever mix - without the pub they would almost have been hermits - and it must have been extremely comforting to be able to go in there night after night knowing the same faces would be there and you would rarely have to go through the awkwardness of meeting anybody new. And it was a nightly event; it seemed that you either went to the pub or you stayed at home, and as both my parents had a pronounced taste for their ale and home drinking was pretty much in its infancy, down the pub they went any night when my Dad was not on the night shift at work.

The drinks that they ordered seem mostly mysterious to me now. There was of course the ubiquitous bitter, though the only one normally available would be the brewery’s own – there was just one tap for the local Higsons bitter, which I remember with little fondness, and I’m not sure what anyone would have made of the notion of guest beers. Then there was mild, a darker and less alcoholic ale that could be mixed with others – my Dad used to often drink pints of mild and bitter, a concoction I have never tried and have little inclination to – and brown ale. All of these beers were very old standards, brewed since the eighteenth century or even earlier. Mild used to be the most popular drink in Britain right up until the 1960’s when it suffered a near-fatal decline in popularity. These days it is still to be found, mainly due to the existence of micro-breweries, and it probably mostly lives on in trendy pubs, labelled as craft beer and costing sums of money that would have made my Dad and his mates’ hair stand on end. All of this beer would have been served at room temperature – apart from the stouts with their bogus claims of medicinal benefits (‘Guinness is good for you!’), chilled beer was mostly not a thing until the arrival of lager, of which more later.

Apparently at one time they used to serve it in hospitals...and you can dip a poker in it for extra iron.

There were distinct gender differences in what you drank. The men would mostly drink pints of draught beer, whereas the women would be more likely to drink bottled – smaller amounts of brown or pale ale (now mostly marketed in England as IPA, a cool-sounding acronym standing for Indian Pale Ale, which was brewed for export to India from at least 1829 onwards). That, or the ‘shorts’, which themselves often combined startling combinations of flavour. ‘Rum and Pep’ was rum with peppermint cordial! In fact I continue to find the occasional bottle of peppermint cordial in the supermarket and wonder whether anyone drinks it without alcohol just because they like the flavour. It seems unlikely. Both bottled Pale and Rum and Pep were staples of my mum’s drinking diet, and my earliest alcoholic memories are of her pouring the Pale from takeout bottles into little china cups at home for me to have a bit.

Nobody expected to come into the pub and order food; and I suspect my Dad’s generations would have been mostly puzzled and displeased to be diverted from their determined drinking by frivolities like karaoke nights.

There were two pubs easily accessible to the folk of Arthur Street, Walton, where I lived – the eponymous Arthur, a Victorian-era pub at the bottom of the street and the slightly smaller and simpler Breeze up our end of the street. The Breeze was our pub. Once you chose a pub you stuck to it, and my parents would never have dreamed of going to the Arthur or anywhere else. The Breeze was a place of mystery; it was an island of light and sound – the uproarious conversation, the laughter and the loud clinking of glass – in a dark and quiet street. The windows were so high up that I couldn’t hope to jump up to look into the place, and they were frosted anyway. As kids we played around in the street outside the place and the only time we ever had occasion to go inside was when one of us had a message for a parent. On these occasions we would rather shyly push the door open wide enough to push our heads inside and wait until one of the grown-ups noticed we were there. It was definitely forbidden territory, and when we were eventually old enough to go inside and order a drink it felt very much like a rite of passage.

The Breeze is still there...and I can reach the windows now!

My parents would stay in the Breeze right up until closing time, 11pm in those days, and after the call for last orders at 10:50 the publican, Harold Dolby, would open all the doors to let in the draught and start asking, at the top of his leather-lunged voice, whether the patrons had a home to go to. Lying in bed some way down the street, we would hear his bellow from an impressive distance and know that our tipsy parents would soon be back with their Pales to continue drinking, and no doubt fighting, downstairs while we slept.

Though there were off licences it seemed rare to drink at home. Again this is very largely a British thing. The Europeans presumably, with no concept of a place where you went just to drink, were always happy to open a bottle or two of wine with dinner, but wine was always something that most Brits failed to appreciate. The notorious and much mocked wine adverts of the 1970’s were always for well-recognised and cheap brands – Blue Nun, Black Tower, Mateus – that most Europeans would have found appalling and were viewed even by most British drinkers with suspicion. Appreciation or even awareness of anything of a better quality would have firmly marked you out as distinctly middle class or above.

1970's sophistication

For the British drinking at home was mostly about canned beer, and this already had a long history by the 1960s/70s. Canned beer was being produced in the UK from the 1930’s but it had two distinct disadvantages – firstly it had a noticeable metallic taste because the inner liner of the tin had yet to be perfected, and secondly there was no easy way to get inside the can – the earliest cans had a crown cork like the bottles so without an opener you were stuffed; although that said the earliest openers were mostly just angled blades that could make a triangular hole on each side of the can to let the beer flow freely.

1959 saw the appearance of the notorious ring-pull which made it possible to open the beer cans without any utensils, although there were still issues. The ring-pull was a major contributor to the litter problem, it was prone to disappear into the can to potentially choke the drinker and, most frustratingly of all, sometimes the ring snapped and you still had to wrestle with the top of the can to get inside it. It was not until the 1970’s that the ‘stay-tab’ emerged, replacing the earlier ring with a stiffer lever that would push the tab down and underneath where it would be safely out of the drinker’s way. We have never looked back and the stay-tab is still with us today.

A whole separate post could be written about those canned beers that we used to drink back in the 1970’s. There was of course, what has become iconic of the time, the famous Watneys Party Seven, seven pints of fairly revolting ale in what was basically a massive beans can that could only be opened by forcing a couple of holes into the top, a fixture of every party from the period. As a teenager the only ones I remember with very much clarity were McEwans and Long Life, which sported the rather dubious boast that it was ‘brewed specially for the can’. Errrm…ok.

The infamous Party Seven

Brewed for the can...why was this a good thing, again?

If there was one revolution in drinking I remember very clearly from those days it was the coming of the mighty lager, and it is strange to reflect that such a major player, which became ubiquitous in the 1980’s, only made its appearance so recently. The way I have heard it explained is that by the 1970’s more and more of the British were starting to enjoy package holidays to the Spanish Costas where among other things they encountered and fell in love with the local beer, which of course was a lager much lighter than any British beers. Yet, although it was lighter, it was also for the most part more alcoholic, so to transplant the original product from a Mediterranean drinking context to a hard-drinking British one was a recipe for disaster. For this reason there arose, at the turn of the 1970s/1980s, a succession of more or less weak lagers designed to be more appropriate to British drinking habits while aspiring to exoticism by the use of Teuton- or Nordic-sounding names designed to evoke the fine beers appreciated by the Germans; sadly the invariably naff and wallyish marketing always undermined these aspirations. So we had: Hemeling (‘Wouldn’t you rather be Hemeling’), Harp (‘Stays sharp to the bottom of the glass’), Oranjeboom (‘It’s a lager not a tune’), Holsten Export (a triad of singing camels, among other things, singing ‘That calls for a Holsten’), Hofmeister (‘For great lager follow the bear’ – possibly the most wallyish advert of them all), Kestrel (‘It bites!’) and Tuborg (‘Pure Craftsmanship’). This sub-laddish marketing all but destroyed the image of the newcomer from the off; lager drinkers tended to be dismissed as badly behaved ‘lager lads’, lightweights who could not hold their beer without becoming disorderly Lager was seen by the more serious real ale drinkers as crude, vulgar and without depth or character, while its tendency to dominate the British pub scene in the 1980s raised concern that this generic fizz might end up completely replacing ‘proper’ beer.

Viz magazine, ever a keen observer of social trends, had the lager revolution sussed early on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkR0krOm9M4

One of 'those' Hofmeister adverts...oh dear.

In the end that didn’t happen, and these days it seems we live in a more nuanced drinking environment than we did in earlier decades. There is of course a much wider choice of what to drink, where to drink it and when we can drink – we are much more sophisticated about alcohol than we were in the days when a bottle of Blue Nun made you upwardly mobile. The dour drinking of the past often seems to have been replaced by a hedonism, town pubs overflowing with noisy drinkers after workplaces close, city centres full of revellers in varying states of intoxication at the weekend. It is a liberation of sorts, although as in many other areas of life it may be questioned whether the unshackling of alcoholic consumption in this way has contributed to a coarsening of our public life. I’ll have a think about that after I finish this glass.