Remembrance

When the pub and the hand of history collide

‘I’m afraid I have some bad news.’

The woman who had served me a pint came from behind the bar and stood in front of a couple on the next table to me.

‘You know Paul, used to come in here Tuesday evenings, used to be a naval policeman in Plymouth.’

She paused.

‘He had a stroke on Wednesday and died three days later. He was in the night before, I served him. He was only 70.’

Both the man and the woman she was talking to expressed their shock and at the news and the man took a deep swig from his pint of dark beer.

‘When’s the funeral and is there a card to sign?’

The woman who had told them the bad news said she didn’t know about the funeral but that there was a card that locals who knew Paul had been signing and she would bring it out after serving an elderly man who hobbled into the bar using a stick to steady himself.

I sat in the corner, and thought about the death of a man I didn’t know but who was known to many that visited this pub a lot more than I did. One evening you were in the company of others, taking your time with a pint or two and the next day your system was in shock and the end was near. That experience of talking one evening in the pub with someone and then hearing about his death the next day had happened to me once.

It was Friday night and I was in my local in the Exmoor town where I then lived. As I invariably did I would exchange a few words with whoever was there, usually about the weekend’s football. On this occasion, it was with a local farmer, who I had got to know over several years. We discussed the football and then I finished my beer and went home. I never saw him again for he died from a heart attack the next day trying to get his truck out of a snow drift in a road above the town.

When you become a regular in a pub, you become part of its history, its fabric and its communality. You are greeted by both staff and several others with whom you have exchanged words and jokes and stories over the time you became a regular and you will become history when you die and the subject of occasional conversations that frequently mention the word ‘remember’. Many of pubs will have imbued the voices and laughter of past generations in their very fabric, ‘hush is that old Harry telling his tale about coming back from the Boer War’ or just the wind whistling through the cracks in the windows?

Many pubs are part of our common history. For instance, in deepest Kent there are probably still pubs where Battle of Britain pilots, victorious during the day, would come in once evening had fallen to quench their thirsts, or there might be pubs where aid and succour would have been given, as is the case with the Britons Protection in Manchester which acted as a casualty collecting point for those poor souls injured at nearby Peterloo in 1819.

There are pubs located in landscapes that once thundered with the hoofs of charging cavalry while shot split the air and there are pubs which bear witness to events that happened long before they were built, but are still touched by the history of the surrounding landscape. There are pubs whose architecture and design hark back to a growing change in British society, the coming of the motorcar and the disappearance of the coach, the mobilisation of mass tourism and then there are pubs which have become homes for communities that found themselves unwelcome in other pubs.

The pub and the history of the British Isles is deeply intertwined, whether it’s the personal history of people like Paul or the events that have whirled about within its walls or in its vicinity. I used to visit the Sedgemoor Inn in the village of Westonzoyland, close to which the battle of Sedgemoor took place in 1685. Sitting there with my pint of Exmoor Gold, I could not help but think of the death and destruction of that uneven battle and the vicious aftermath of Jeffries’ retribution, of how the village over 300 years before would have been a site of great carnage and misery. Sometimes a pub is more than a place to have a beer and a chat, it is a place to remember.