Turn left at the Red Lion

How pubs personify our histories

People make pubs and that has been the case for a long time, which works hand in glove alongside the pub’s indelible link with the history of England, its ability to act as a weather vane for the centuries that have passed. Our pubs, inns, taverns, stretch back two millennia to when the Romans turned up, with certain ones acting as guides and signposts on a journey that provides a reminder of events that shook the world of England.

The pub is part of the English historical and psychological landscape and it is not for nothing that we direct ourselves around towns and cities and in the countryside by using pubs as signposts, telling travellers to go past The Bell, cross the road at the Who’d Have Thought It and turn left at the Red Lion and you will have arrived. It is almost as if this direction finding by pub is part of our own personal map of England.

Some of these pubs have been open for centuries and seen countless generations come through the door and many will have imbibed voices and laughter in their fabric and become repositories of public memory and taken in the atmosphere of historical events that have either happened within their walls or nearby. They are also echo chambers for the myths and legends that act as a hidden history of England: the giant worms the courtly knights fought; the hound of hell whose eyes glowed in the night and caused mayhem in a Suffolk church leaving the locals to gather in the local hostelry and tells tales of their miraculous escape; the drummer’s boy who went underground and was never seen again; the ghosts that haunt the English landscape and sometimes the very pubs. We might go to the pub for company and a glass of something worthy and wet (and often something to eat, but personally I believe food gets in the way of the beer), but there is another element to think about when you push open the door of a chosen pub.

Visits to certain pubs can casually and without much fuss reveal moments of national history, as when popping down the Red Lion or the Bull and Bush or even the Beer Engine becomes an informal history lesson, a revelatory spell of time to go with your pint or glass of wine. Furthermore, this sense of history has a duality to it as the pub can also reveal personal histories of those who came before. As an example I think of a framed group of six black-and-white photos displayed in a pub near Dartmoor. The visions are of Brylcreemed hair, flat caps and trilbys, shirts and ties, one man in a cravat, NHS spectacles, farmers, labourers, shopkeepers and the retired, all smiling and laughing as darts trophies were handed out and the landlord, pipe in hand, shook hands with another man next to the dart board, presumably an act of congratulation. It was not all men either, in one of the photos a group of women laughed and joked at a table crowded with beer glasses, many of them empty. A time of celebration and sociability and throwing away for a brief time the cares and concerns of rural life in a time when the memories of a world at war were raw. I don’t know if the photos were taken over the course of one night, but I would say that they came from the late 1950s/early 1960s and that most, if not all, of the people in them were now dead. Yet, they were remembered with these photos on the wall and there would be regulars in the pub now who would be able to point out these people and give them names and let them rest and enjoy their place in history.

Then sometimes there are moments and conversations in pubs that link up to the larger tides and currents of history. I have in mind an elderly woman who was a regular at another one of my locals when I lived in a moorland town on Exmoor. She was as firm a crusty member of the upper class as you can get and a fanatical supporter of the hunting scene, which was a requisite to get on in local society. I recall once when paying for her meal at the bar she handed a bank card over and the barman, Logan (a loquacious and friendly character, who sadly ended up being sacked for too much imbibing during his shifts), looked at it and asked, ‘oh you’re a lady, how did you become one’. I was sitting on a stool at the bar and I heard her reply in that drawl of insouciance English aristocrats are prone to, ‘well my father (and this is when I nearly said, “was one”) was the Earl of Halifax’. At the time I wrote in my diary, ‘That pub is like an episode of sodding Eastenders, all the characters. I found out tonight that there is a Lady Caroline there who is the daughter of Lord Halifax, not sure if he was the one who was pipped to the post as PM by Churchill, suspect it is his granddaughter. It’s history.’ I was right, her grandfather was the Earl of Halifax who was all for accommodating Hitler after the Little Ships helped to bring back the British Army from Dunkirk in 1940.

So next time you turn left at the Red Lion and head for the White Horse before you get to The Gate Hangs High try and remember those for whom the pub was a home and a harbour into which they could repair after the stormy seas of the day.

My latest book A Pub For All Seasons (Headline) is now out in paperback.