The beer writer Will Hawkes has posted on twitter some too rare good news about brewing and beer.
The small pubs group Graceland have acquired London Fields Brewery in Hackney from Carlsberg and plan to run it as a brewery and taproom known as Saint Monday.
Given the excellent beer pedigree of the group’s pubs as such as the Kings Arms E2 and the Axe N16 this is good news
But what is the name about?
Until the 1871 Bank Holidays Act there was what was known as Saint Monday
The daily routines of working life are well-known and they date back to the imposition of industrial disciplines on what had been previously an agricultural workforce during the nineteenth century.
Labour was required to work machines and if it wasn’t available money was being lost.
There was a battle over hours and time (there still is of course) and artisanal and craft working practices were only slowly given up.
EP Thompson in the Making of the English Working Class records employers complaints about the working practices of weavers. They did not work on Sundays, or Mondays (Saint Monday) or often on Tuesdays either. Towards the end of the week and on to Saturday they worked ferociously hard.
Saint Monday was a day of leisure to rest and to drink.
Thompson speculates in his essay Time Work Discipline that bursts of hard work followed by periods of idleness and drinking, while not what employers want, may well conform to a much more natural working pattern than the daily grind of economic reality most now experience.
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