‘Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame’

‘Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human
frame’

Virginia Woolf ¹

Although there is a slight risk of colliding with a car, it is probably worth braving the mean streets to make your way to the pub. A recent study by economists at Stirling University found that workers who drink have higher salaries than their teetotal workmates. Moderate drinkers earn an average of 17 per cent more than abstainers, and even heavy drinkers, consuming more than fifty units a week, earn 5 per cent more. Your earnings start declining only if you drink very large quantities in single sittings; if you ‘steadily soak yourself in alcohol’ it seems to have the opposite effect.² How do we explain this statistical relationship? You could argue that drinkers are just naturally better at their jobs, or at getting on with their colleagues (although I wouldn’t advise you to do so in the company of a teetotaller). The most plausible explanation, however, is that the after-work drink is an important if unstated part of work itself. The emphasis on teamwork and networking in modern office jobs tends to blur the boundaries between work and non-work. Even if you are feeling tired and grumpy, it might be politic to pop along for that swift half before you catch the train, just to show your face.

When Mass-Observation conducted research in northwest pubs in the 1930s, it similarly discovered that drinking was not the main motivation for going to the pub. Pub-going was a social habit, a temporary liberation from the ‘time-clock factory-whistle dimension of living’.³ Tribal societies used music, dancing or some other ceremony to achieve this kind of transitional release from work-life rhythms. In Britain, it was the pub, a sort of halfway house between work and home, which served this function for the working-class man. (Women were not usually so welcome in the pub, although they were grudgingly allowed in the more expensive saloon bar.) When the main author of Mass-Observation’s The Pub and the People, John Sommer-field, returned to Bolton in 1960, he was struck by how little pub culture had changed: ‘Go into almost any pub and you would never deduce that this is the era of nuclear fission, computer thinking, sputniks, the cold war and all the rest of it. The winds of change have hardly ruffled the surface of a single gill of best mild.’⁴ But things were changing. Pub-going had been falling steadily since before the First World War in the face of new amusements like cinema, the radio and the football pools, and television seemed to be dealing it a death blow. By 1962, there were 30,000 fewer pubs than in 1939.⁵ Many of the surviving pubs were bought up by the big breweries, which wanted to appeal to newer customers like young people, white-collar workers and women. Their strategy was two-fold.

First, they tried to change what people drank. Even in the inter-war period, the pint of mild had acquired an unfashionable image as an old working-class man’s drink. After the war, brewers marketed more expensive drinks like bottled beer and bitter. One 1958 newspaper article concluded that ‘traditionally bitter is looked on as the bosses’ drink. Any man reckons he’s as good as his boss. So he chooses bitter.’⁶ The most successful new drink was Babycham, a perry served in a special glass, which on its introduction in 1952 did much to turn the pub into a respectable destination for women. But the most significant long term innovation was lager, which brewers loved because it was easy to keep. After being marketed first at women (Skol’s first ad campaign promoted it as ‘a blonde for a blonde’), it eventually found its niche among young male office workers, who wanted a less filling drink than bitter after their day’s sedentary labours.

By far the most controversial trend was the apparently inexorable rise of keg beer from the mid-1950s onwards. Unlike traditional cask beer, keg is no longer alive and fermenting: it is chilled, pasteurised and pumped with carbon dioxide to make it last longer. It was first drunk in 1936, after the East Sheen Tennis Club complained to Watneys that its beer was not keeping until the weekend, when most of its customers came in. Watneys, then working on a prototype beer called ‘Red Barrel’ meant for troops in India, swiftly redirected it to the less exotic surroundings of leafy Surrey.⁷ Until the 1960s, keg was mostly sold in a few clubs that only opened at weekends. But by the mid1970s, three-quarters of British pubs offered only keg beer and lager.⁸

Watneys Red Barrel, nicknamed ‘Grotneys’ by the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), was the most reviled example of keg. Apart from its allegedly awful taste, all evidence of which is now lost to history, many drinkers hated the coercive marketing that accompanied it, from irritating advertising jingles to entire pub refits. In 1971, in a misguided search for radical chic, Watneys urged beer drinkers to ‘Join the Red Revolution’. Pubs were painted corporate red, bar staff wore red socks, and posters featured lookalikes of Chairman Mao, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro supping Watneys.⁹ Trying to discover why its keg beer was not selling as well as expected, one brewery conducted what it described as ‘the most detailed product research ever undertaken into consumer beer drinking habits’. This research found that its keg beer lacked ‘drinkability’ (a fundamental failing, one would think).¹⁰ But drinkable or not, keg beer was often the only option for pub-goers in the face of a complex monopoly that made brewers producers, wholesalers and retailers rolled into one.

The brewers’ second strategy was to change the ambience of the pub. Of course, when it comes to complaints about the contrived atmosphere of modern pubs, nostalgia is never what it used to be. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), George Orwell laments the ‘dismal sham-Tudor places fitted out by the big brewery companies’ in the massive programme of inter-war rebuilding.¹¹ In a 1946 essay, he rhapsodises about his ideal pub, ‘The Moon Under Water’. This pub is ‘quiet enough to talk … the house possesses neither radio nor piano’. The furnishings have ‘the solid, comfortable ugliness of the 19th century’. There are ‘no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries, and, on the other hand, no sham roof-beams, ingle-nooks or plastic panels masquerading as oak’. Games are only played in the public bar, so ‘in the other bars you can walk without constantly ducking to avoid flying darts’.¹² Orwell finally admits what more perceptive readers have already guessed: this perfect pub does not actually exist.

After the war, the modern trends that Orwell hated were consolidated. Brewers refurbished their pubs, targeting younger, richer customers over older regulars. The class and gender divisions between public and saloon bars began to be abolished. ‘Special treatment’ or ‘theme’ pubs appeared as early as the late 1940s, although the theme at first was usually ‘local pub’, with prints, trophies and brasses designed to reflect the surrounding area.¹³ The campaign against theme pubs did not begin in earnest until the 1970s, when it became indelibly linked with CAMRA’s fight against the ‘mass-produced fizzy pap’ of keg beer.¹⁴ In 1978, the beer writer and CAMRA campaigner Roger Protz complained:

While the brewers’ real estate men go about their business of closure … trendy young architects are also ruthlessly engaged in the business of ‘modernisation’. The regular users of street-corner locals find to their horror that their pub has been re-designed as a large pineapple, a sputnik or a Wild West saloon to attract the gin-and-tonic and lager-and-lime trade. Public bars are ripped out and replaced by lounges with soft lights, soft carpets, wet-look mock leather – and several pennies on the price of a pint.¹⁵

It was the city-centre ‘circuit’ pubs (so-called because they were meant to attract a peripatetic crowd who would patronise several of them in an evening) that were refurbished most frequently, and these pubs particularly targeted after-work drinkers during ‘happy hours’. The term ‘happy hour’, originating in the US navy to describe a rest and refreshment period, began to be used in American bars in the 1950s. The concept owed something to the cocktail hour, that staging post between work and home when the man in the grey flannel suit downed a couple of dry martinis before catching the train. The British ‘happy hour’ – which really took off in the 1980s, as commemorated in a rather preachily disapproving song of that name by the Housemartins – was not quite so urbane. Starting about 5.30, it often lasted several hours, and was a way of plying after-work drinkers with cheap drinks until they were sufficiently relaxed to stay for more expensive drinks, and perhaps less happy hours.

If Orwell hated unruly games like darts, he would surely have loathed the electronic amusements of the theme pub – but they are really only a continuation of longer-term trends. In the 1930s, Mass-Observation noted that most London pubs prohibited any singing or live music, and that radio and slot machines had taken their place.¹⁶ In the late 1940s, the journalist Maurice Gorham complained that the jukebox had already ‘closed’ several pubs to him, and ‘there is another where the monster crouches ready to be called into hideous life; the regulars have the sense to leave it alone, but any day a Frankenstein may walk in.’¹⁷ By 1960, Mass-Observation reported that some London pubs had televisions, although they were rarely switched on.¹⁸ Eventually, the capital’s taste for artificial entertainment in its pubs extended to the whole country. Pubs directly managed by brewers, rather than run by landlords, were quicker to introduce such amusements to make money and attract younger customers. ‘What can one say of the miscellaneous, extraneous, intercuta-neous infestation of the juke boxes, one-armed bandits, pin tables and amusement machines which now buzz, click, bleep, chatter, and caterwaul in almost every bar of the land?’ lamented the architectural historian Ben Davis in 1981. ‘Like vermin they multiply, and like parasites they threaten the essential bodily functions on which the health of the pub must depend.’¹⁹

In the 1980s, as pubs faced fiercer competition from other attractions like wine bars and restaurants, they drew in customers with noisier activities like karaoke, quiz nights and televised sport. Pub theming became more organised, with contract furnishing companies springing up with the sole aim of refurbishing pubs in a particular style such as ‘Country Cottage’ or ‘Highlander’. Increased commercial pressures accelerated these changes. Up until the late 1980s, the pub trade was dominated by the tied estates of the big brewers, who owned the pubs and rented them out to landlords. Then, in 1989, after an investigation by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, the Thatcher government introduced the Beer Orders, which banned any brewer from owning more than 2,000 pubs. In a complicated compromise, aimed at breaking the monopoly while retaining the goodwill of the traditionally Tory-supporting ‘beerage’, the brewers were allowed to sell off their pubs while retaining sweetheart supply deals with the new owners.

If the aim was to give more choice to drinkers, it failed. Many pubs got taken over by massive pub companies or ‘pubcos’, which then simply bought the bestselling drinks from the big brewers. The themed pub turned into the branded pub. The Irish Pub Company was established in 1991, and soon became the largest supplier of Irish pubs in the world. Several British brewers had their own Irish brand, from O’Neill’s to Scruffy Murphy’s to Finnegan’s Wake (and James Joyce would have spluttered into his Guinness at the misplaced apostrophe). The McIrish pub cashed in on the early 1990s thirst for all things Hibernian, from Riverdance to the Irish success in the 1994 World Cup, which no one would have noticed if England hadn’t failed to qualify. This pub looked the same wherever it was in the world: lots of timber beams, stone floors and open turf fires, combined with assorted paraphernalia like porcelain Guinness toucans, old street lamps, bags of grain and road signs to Cork.

The confusing thing about the new pub chains and branded bars was that they were selling the idea of ‘authenticity’ itself. New pub names offered a quirky variant on the English tradition: Rat & Parrot, Tap & Spile, Hedgehog & Hogshead, Newt & Cucumber. Firkin pubs mimicked the spit-and-sawdust decor of ‘real ale’ boozers, with the added draw of hilarious puns like ‘I’m a Firkin Bar Steward’ printed on staff T-shirts. J D Wetherspoon, the largest of the chains, specifically targeted customers who did not like theme pubs. Its outlets had no jukeboxes, dartboards or pool tables, and the fruit machines were turned down low. Television was finally introduced in 2005, but only with the sound off. In conscious homage to Orwell, many of Wetherspoon’s early pubs were given names like ‘Moon Under Water’, ‘Moon and Sixpence’ and ‘Man in the Moon’. They particularly tried to appeal to a clientele that the industry had been after for years: women. Large, clear windows, instead of the traditional frosted glass of the pub, allowed women to check out the interior before entering. There were fresh flowers, plants, hanging baskets and clean toilets. Bar stools were banned, so the bar ceased to be a male preserve and the Darwinian struggle to catch the bartender’s eye was over. Each bartender had a set of beer pulls and a separate till behind the bar, so none of them ever turned their backs on a customer.²⁰

J D Wetherspoon pubs were the close relation of another concept, the ‘new bar’, which was essentially a corporate reinvention of the earlier wine bar. Before the early 1970s, wine was rarely drunk outside restaurants or a few traditional wine houses. Then new wine bars emerged in the capital, with a more sophisticated ambience and quirky names like ‘The Nose’ or ‘The Cork and Bottle’. During the Thatcher years, wine bars spread across the country. Their stereotypical patron was a flash yuppie stockbroker, conspicuously glugging Bollinger champagne (‘Bolly’) or Beaujolais Nouveau. But these bars were mainly successful because they appealed to professional women as calm, unthreatening places to meet after work. Opening a wine bar was a common fallback for what Richard Hoggart called ‘the redundancy-payment entrepreneurs’,²¹ the group of people who had been laid off from their city jobs in the periodic recessions of the 1980s and 1990s, and used their pay-offs to start their own businesses. As good wine became more common, though, there was less need for specialist wine bars. Chain-bar concepts emerged, like the ‘Pitcher and Piano’ and ‘All Bar One’, which offered other drinks and food as well. The mood to which they aspired was part-Continental and part-American, like the friendly bar in Cheers or Central Perk in Friends.

The new bar bore the stamp of one of the most influential works of sociology of recent years. In the late 1980s, the American academic Ray Oldenburg wrote a book called The Great Good Place which suggested that pubs, bars and coffee houses could offer a reassuring ‘third place’ between home and work. Work offered money and status but was competitive and unfair; home was nurturing but full of the demands and expectations of intimate relationships. The third place was a neutral ground where an ‘informal public life’ could flourish.²² Oldenburg’s ideas were mainly applied to upmarket chain cafés and bars. They inspired Howard Schultz, the Starbucks CEO, in his vision of the coffee bar as a ‘third home away from home, an oasis between home and the workplace where you meet friends’.²³ New bars similarly market themselves as comfortable refuges for middle-class professionals from the strains of modern life. There is a large range of good quality (but pricey) wine, which you can buy in a small or large glass or a bottle. The baristas might mix you a cocktail, but they are more likely to call themselves ‘molecular mixologists’ than go in for Tom Cruise-style flair bartending. Pine tables and couches are arranged in an artfully casual way, large mirrors create a feeling of space and transparency, and security-conscious women can use the handbag clips under the tables. These bars are found in central, high street sites, so they are a good meeting point for the after-work crowd, perhaps before they decide to go on somewhere else.²⁴

The antithesis of the new bar is the city-centre superpub, which is simply about getting people, particularly the young, to drink as much as possible. Young people’s favourite drinks are now bottled, premium lagers or RTD (ready-to-drink) spirits such as Bacardi Breezer or Smirnoff Ice. The problem with drinking from a bottle is that it cuts off the drink’s aroma, an essential part of the taste (although for certain modern drinks, this may be an advantage). But a bottle is a good way of identifying with a ‘cool’ brand, is easy to hold in crowded bars, and is a useful theatrical prop, providing ample opportunities for what Mass-Observation called ‘swiggling’, the kind of affected fidgeting that occurs in pubs, like moving your drink round in circles on the bar counter or the table top.²⁵

Writing in the Guardian in 1999, Matthew Engel could not contain his exasperation:

The present generation of young drinkers is the most credulous, malleable and undiscerning ever … they appear to be complete suckers for tasteless beer in tasteless bars. This lot would drink their granny’s widdle if some smart-arse copywriter came up with a line that persuaded them into thinking it was a fresh, exotic and sexy sort of lager.²⁶

In fact, Mass-Observation’s studies suggest that the majority of drinkers have always been undiscerning and apathetic, because the main purpose of going to the pub has seldom been to enjoy the taste of the beer. In the days before national branding, people rarely mentioned brewers’ names, but simply asked the barman for ‘the usual’. In 1947, one drinker in thirteen could give no information about the drink in front of him other than that it was ‘beer’.²⁷ The slogan ‘I’m only here for the beer’, used to sell the keg beer Double Diamond in the early 1970s, has rarely been true of any beer.

One of the more scientific experiments undertaken by Mass-Observation was to test drinking speeds by using a stopwatch to time over a thousand drinkers sipping half-pints. Its researchers discovered, unsurprisingly, that people who sat down and had other activities to preoccupy them drank less quickly. Very few Liverpool pubs, for example, provided games or other amusements, because the licensing authorities thought it would encourage people to go into pubs. Instead, this ‘drinking in the raw’ simply produced a much faster average drinking speed per half-pint in Liverpool (5 minutes, 34 seconds) than in Bolton (13 minutes).²⁸ Mass-Observation found that drinking speeds were a social phenomenon, group drinking being much quicker than solitary drinking. A group of men all drank roughly the same amount from their glasses at the same time, and emptied them simultaneously, a pattern observed even when blind and sighted men drank together.²⁹ The main reason for this level drinking was round-standing, an important act of social solidarity and compulsion, similar to gift-giving in tribal societies. In order to avoid the terrible stigma of being accused of not standing his round, the drinker whose turn it was to treat the others set the drinking pace, draining his glass slightly before everyone else so that they did not have to wait for him. Naturally, this high-speed drinking suited the brewers very nicely.³⁰

The rule of synchronised drinking seems to be less rigidly followed today. (I am inferring from general obser-vation: I am not quite brave enough to go round pubs with a stopwatch and clipboard, timing people drinking pints – a highly inadvisable activity in some of the pubs I frequent.) The round has lost some of its psychological coercion since people now consume such a wide variety of drinks, so-called ‘repertoire drinking’. But pubs have always had other ways of making people drink more quickly. In the 1930s, the techniques were fairly primitive, like offering salty snacks at the bar. Pubs have since become cannier. In the late 1990s there was a big growth in the number of pubs and bars in town centres, and in many towns there were simply not enough drinkers to fill the amount of licensed space. Managers of superpubs tried to draw in customers by selling larger measures, cutting prices and offering special promotions (‘women drink for nothing’ or ‘buy two glasses of wine and get the rest of the bottle free’). ‘Speed drinking’ bars offered unlimited alcohol for a set entry fee. Pubs also used the techniques of behavioural psychology to speed up drinking. Louder music made people hoarse from shouting and therefore thirsty, or simply made it easier to drink than talk. Removing tables and seating fitted more customers into the pub, and also made them drink standing up. Getting rid of flat ledges meant that drinkers could not even rest their arms by putting their drinks down. Superpubs also sold inexpensive cocktails like the Cheeky Vimto (double port and WKD Blue) or the Slippery Nipple (Baileys and sambuca), often served as ‘shooters’, designed to be downed like tequilas in a single, theatrical gulp to the cheers of onlookers.

The methods of the superpubs fed into a larger discussion in the British media about ‘binge drinking’ – after-work or weekend drinkers going out specifically to get drunk as quickly as possible. In 2003, the prime minister’s strategy unit put the blame on ‘vertical drinking’ dens that tried to cram in as many drinkers as possible; and it praised the more sedentary, Continental style of drinking found in quieter establishments like All Bar One.³¹ Fearful of impending regulation, pub chains began to scrap their happy hours, banning many special offers and marketing techniques. At the end of 2005, however, the government finally allowed pubs to apply for 24-hour licences, arguing (more by assertion than from evidence) that the end of closing time would produce more civilised, open-ended drinking. The newspapers predicted bacchanalian street orgies and drunken riots, which generally did not materialise (at least, no more than usual).

These are old anxieties in new bottles. The 1932 report of the Royal Commission on Licensing also attacked unsavoury national customs such as ‘“perpendicular” drinking’, or standing up to drink at bars. It criticised the large numbers of pubs that were ‘poor and cramped in structure, gloomy and often insufficiently ventilated’, and where ‘the predominating, and very often the exclusive, emphasis is on the sale of intoxicants’. It suggested that, while making allowances for our ingrained national customs and weather, the English pub could borrow the best features of the Continental café, such as ‘the open and airy surroundings, chairs and tables, and the service of all kinds of refreshments, alcoholic and non-alcoholic’.³²

The perennial dilemma that the brewers have faced since those years has been whether to cram in customers and ply them with cheap drinks, or foster this more sophisticated, Continental-style ambience and charge them more. In a sense, the dilemma has been solved as the pub-going market has fragmented. Pubs now practise the kind of retail anthropology pioneered by the supermarkets, using the look and feel of particular outlets to cater for carefully differentiated markets, not unlike the supermarket distinction between budget own-brands and gourmet ranges. As with the targeting of particular customers by the supermarkets, pub chains claim that they are simply appealing to different consumer ‘tribes’, defined solely by their lifestyles and attitudes. But in the chasm between the superpub and the new bar, divisions of age and class seem equally important.

In the understated middle-class ambience of the new bar, you can sit and wonder what all the CAMRA-inspired fuss about the decline of the great British pub is all about. It is not exactly Orwell’s paradisiacal vision of ‘The Moon Under Water’, but it is nice enough. There are whitewashed walls, wooden floors, big squishy sofas and glass tables; the gentle sound of clinking glasses, unraised voices and perhaps a man playing old standards on a Steinway; no vulgar drink promotions and certainly no ‘theme’, just a soft, subliminal branding which, no doubt with the approval of the prime minister, has turned you into a civilised Continental. ‘Drinking in the raw’ it isn’t. Here you virtuously sip your glass of dry white wine, have intelligent conversation about work and other matters, and gently unwind after the day’s labours. Then, before you can line your empty stomach with too much drink, you make your excuses and go home to eat.