It has been a bad day for the pub trade and workers in it. Boris Johnson while,it would seem, at last starting to listen to good advice on COVID-19 at the same managed to dump pubs and workers in it. Solidarity. Below is classic excerpt from Richard Boston’s 1970s Guardian column on pubs and beer
Richard Boston on a traditional pub
The late Richard Boston wrote a column mainly about beer for The Guardian in the mid-1970s. Boston was a kind of green anarchist having been involved in the first wave of CND in the early 1960s and very much involved with environmental concerns.
He lived in Aldworth, Berkshire, near to the Bell pub which continues to be a CAMRA award winner to this day.
I was looking back through some of his Guardian columns in the British Library this week. They were important in promoting the early move away from old style keg beer and the promotion of cask beer.
They also however reflect to a degree a world we have lost (for better or worse).
Here for example is an extract of a visit he paid to a Greenall Whitley pub in Chester. Greenalls were then the UK’s largest independent brewer (Guardian 5th June 1976)
The customers.. were all men, all smoking, all silent and all extremely serious.
There is a particular variety of gloom that is only to be found in the pubs of northern towns and the plays of Samuel Beckett.
The old man got up and carried his empty glass to the bar. The guvnor filled it up, the old man put some coins down and the drink was bought and sold without a single word being exchanged.
Not quite your local craft beer bar..
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