Fragile Heritage

Within the last 24 hours, I came across two stories involving the potential destruction of irreplaceable heritage that have particular and immediate resonance for me. As I've spent the day working on the proofs of Blood of Kings, my new book about the 'Gowrie Conspiracy', it was strange to see the news story about a van demolishing the historic gateway at Scone Palace, which was originally built in c.1580 for William Ruthven, first Earl of Gowrie, and is mentioned several times within the pages I've been checking today. Given the speed at which the van must have been going to cause such damage - and to end up so far beyond the gate - it would probably have been quite entertaining to be a fly on the wall when the driver attempted to explain what had happened to his employer. I'm tempted to try and work some sort of reference to the crash into the proofs, but I doubt if my publisher would thank me... This photo of the gate in happier times was taken during my most recent visit to Scone, in November 2009.

Meanwhile, hundreds of miles to the south, the statue of Admiral Sir Robert Holmes in Yarmouth church on the Isle of Wight is in grave danger from that perennial curse of old buildings, the leaking roof. In some respects, Holmes is almost an 'old friend' - I wrote his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, a photo of the statue features on my website, and he appears as a central character in the second Quinton novel, The Mountain of Gold - so I've written to Yarmouth Town Council to offer my support for the cause. It's unfortunate that this potentially catastrophic situation won't receive as much publicity as the rather more obvious and 'media-friendly' disaster at Scone, and it's a racing certainty that the latter, unlike Yarmouth, will quickly obtain the funds for reconstruction. But I wonder which of the two pieces of our heritage is actually rarer, and intrinsically more worthy of long-term preservation?

Finally, today's post brought a copy of the audio book of Gentleman Captain. The workload means I haven't had time to listen to more than the beginning of Chapter One, but it's been distinctly eerie to hear one's own words being read aloud by someone else! A big thank you to Jonathan Keeble for doing such a wonderful job on bringing my characters and dialogue to life.

The Death of the Pub, Part 2

Apartheid is alive and well, and can be witnessed on the main street of any town in Britain on a Friday and Saturday night. It is not an apartheid founded on race; it is not even founded on gender. It is the insidious apartheid of age. Walk into any pub in those town centres and count the number of people over forty. Yes, there’ll be some – the ageing macho men trying desperately to relive their youth, hopefully pulling a giggling, paralytic young bimbo in the process, or the mutton-dressed-as-bedroom-fodder in unfeasibly short skirts. But relative to the proportions of the age groups in the population at large, this is Logan’s Run for licensed premises, with a comprehensive cull of those too old to fit in with the herds of inebriated yoof. So forget all the angst about happy hours, aggressive advertising and the other alleged causes of Britain’s binge drinking ‘problem’: the real root cause of dysfunctional drinking among the young is that they no longer drink with the old. Consider what used to happen in industrial towns throughout the country. In the evening, or after the completion of a shift, workers of all ages would spill out into the pubs together. The young learned the mores of drinking, subliminally or more overtly, from an older generation; not temperance by any means (the older men could invariably drink the young under the table), but rather the lost art of how to hold one’s drink. And if one of the younger men overdid it and misbehaved, an informal police force of workmates and/or relatives (often one and the same) was at hand to instil discipline or to get the miscreant home as quietly as possible. Pubs catered for all ages, and even if they were smoky, stinking bastions of misogynism, they also often had a ‘snug’ where older ladies could feel comfortable. Contrast that with the barn-like urban monstrosities favoured by the avaricious corporate pub chains, which usually have no quiet corners and are geared exclusively at herding as many young people as possible through the doors and ‘persuading’ them to consume far more cheap booze than is good for them. (Is anything this side of Parliament more hypocritical than the alcohol industry's 'Drinkaware' website, and their injunctions to 'enjoy Extra Strength Cirrhosis Juice responsibly'? I doubt it.) Conversely, of course, rural or more traditional pubs are often shunned by many young people simply on the grounds that older people go there, so they’re perceived as ‘uncool’, and/or they don’t have vast plasma screens pumping out endless MTV or Sky Sports.

My father used to tell a story of how he and his father would often go out for a drink together; this must have been in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when my dad was in his early twenties. My father would buy the first round- a pint for himself, a pint for his father. Then my grandfather would go up to buy the second round, and would return with a pint for himself, a half for my father. Nothing was ever said; it did not need to be. It was the unspoken understanding of the generations. But the wholesale destruction of British manufacturing industry in the 1980s broke that understanding, thus exacerbating the steadily increasing attitudinal divisions between generations that had been taking place from at least the 1950s onwards. The brewers finished the job by sweeping away the traditional concept of the pub, increasing the strength of alcohol and, in town and city centres at least, focusing almost exclusively on youth (with breathtaking shortsightedness, of course, for they did so at exactly the time that the number of young people relative to the population as a whole was in sharp decline, and the disposable income of the older sections of society was increasing). All of this, I suggest, long preceded the smoking ban and its undoubtedly detrimental effect on the survival prospects for many British pubs, albeit not for the actual customer experience within those that do survive.


Well, I think I've vented my spleen sufficiently on the decline of the pub (pro tem, at any rate!) so in the next post I'll return to more literary matters.

The Death of the Pub, Part 1

My village ‘local’ has closed. I know this isn’t unique – the frightening extent of pub closures in recent years has been well publicised – but it’s still quite a shock when it’s suddenly ‘your’ pub that’s gone, perhaps for good. There are apparently quite good prospects for it to re-open eventually, but similar reassurances have been given in many other cases where the pubs in question have ultimately remained ‘dark’. It’s also remarkable how many people emerge from the woodwork to bemoan the passing of ‘the heart of the community’ when they were hardly ever seen at the bar... 

Now, the causes of pub closures have been well documented – the smoking ban*, the impact of drink-driving laws and over-regulation on country pubs, the cost of drinking out as opposed to imbibing ludicrously cheap supermarket fare in one’s own home, incompetent landlords, the obsession with creating bland and transitory ‘gastropubs’ rather than trying to retain and develop the loyalty of one’s local catchment, avaricious breweries intent on getting a quick profit from selling off pubs for private housing; and so on ad infinitum.

Let’s be honest, though - many pubs were foul, and their passing is simply good riddance. Few can mourn the long-gone Walton Ale Stores in Oxford, where the furniture consisted solely of a few rickety kitchen stools strewn around a tacky floor, or the more recently departed Bricklayers Arms in Fenlake, Bedford, the only pub I’ve ever approached to be confronted by the classic Wild West scenario of a punched body flying out of the door. But for every irredeemably dreadful drinking den, we’ve lost half-a-dozen or more much-loved local boozers, and now my local might be joining them. It’s hardly reassuring in such circumstances to take the long view, and to realise that pubs have always closed down – many of London’s most historic inns were pulled down as the city was redeveloped in the 19^th century; many coaching inns closed when coaches gave way to the railways in the 1840s and 1850s (to be replaced in many instances, of course, by pubs adjacent to stations, which then often closed in their turn in the 1960s after Dr Beeching wielded his axe); and pubs in industrial towns closed in their thousands between the 1920s and 1980s as wave after wave of recession and contraction drove away or impoverished their former customer base.   

Arguably, though, there’s another and perhaps more important reason for the current malaise in the British pub, and for the undoubted problem of excessive drinking among the young in particular; and I’ll return to that in a few days’ time.     

(*  I must be one of the few people in Britain who was in pubs in Scotland, Wales and England on the first day of the smoking ban in each of those countries – and maybe the only person to achieve that unlikely ‘Triple Crown’ entirely by accident, not by design.)