Gordon Thorburn - Pocket Guide to Pubs and Their Histories

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

Remember When

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright Gordon Thorburn 2010

ISBN 978 1 84468 093 1

eISBN 978 1 84468 933 0

PRC ISBN 978 1 84468 934 7

The right of Gordon Thorburn to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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M any, many thanks for photographs to Peter Bensimon, Margaret Brace, Eric Fleming, Maggie Grey, Mike Greenwood, James Hannen, Marion Nicholson, Frances Thorburn, Andrew Todd, Peter Walkley, Mike Wilde, David Woolley. Special thanks also for wise words from the three Johns Bjornson, Mann and Murphy.

A pub may be calm or boisterous, smart or scruffy, genteel or rough, quiet or noisy, urban or rural, big or small, crowded or empty. No two of the nearly 70,000 in England and Wales are the same. The worst are detestable, the best are unique contributions to human happiness, and among the greatest of British inventions.

Richard Boston, Beer and Skittles

T he first time I went in a pub, I was with my dad and two other blokes. It was sometime in the 1957 58 football season, which would make me 11 or 12 years old, and we were driving back to Scarborough from watching Middlesbrough beat Doncaster Rovers five nil, with a certain B Clough scoring four of them. We stopped off at The Little Angel in Whitby. It's in Flowergate, at the top of Brunswick Street, and I was allowed in because my father until very recently had been a police sergeant in Whitby.

I wasn't allowed beer of course; my first taste of that was a year or two away, and the appropriate drink was deemed to be Kia Ora orange squash. These were Spartan days, when J20 hadn't been invented and nobody in Yorkshire had heard of Coca-Cola. The soft drinks I knew were dandelion and burdock, cream soda, lemonade and Tizer the Appetiser. Fruit juice was something adults had as a first course in a restaurant. I would have preferred any of those to orange squash, but I was not consulted.

Plus a change

... plus c'est la mme chose. As the late Richard Boston noted in his estimable work, Beer and Skittles: Graffiti discovered by archaeologists in Ur of the Chaldees show that the inhabitants thought that the quality of the drink (beer) had deteriorated, and the first legal code ever devised, that of King Hammurabi of Babylon in about 1,750 BC, condemned weak and over-priced ale.

The men had two or three pints of what I don't know while I sat with my orange which, as a favour to my father, had been mixed very strong. By the time it had been topped up and topped up, it was almost entirely Kia Ora with hardly any water.

We were about five miles out of Whitby on the North Yorks Moors when I told my dad I thought I was going to be sick. I was immediately proved right so my words had been, in more than one sense, a Scarborough warning. Doubtless there are many folk who can recall being sick after a visit to the pub early in their drinking careers, but how many can claim to have thrown up on Kia Ora?

My first beer was a taste of a bottle my father was drinking, at about age fourteen. By the time I was seventeen I was, like most of my friends at Scarborough High School for Boys, regularly passing myself off as eighteen and drinking pints of bitter in pubs. I had 1 a week pocket money, which would have bought twelve pints although it never did, two or three on a Friday being considered quite daring enough. After all, I had to drive home on my Vespa 150 and appear sober to my mother.

This latter was quite important to bear in mind, as I'd already alerted her warning systems. I'd been playing cricket for Seamer, an evening game, possibly a cup game, away at Bempton on Flamborough Head. I was sixteen and not very good at cricket, but I was available and my girlfriend was the scorer. Returning from what may have been a victory, the team stopped at a brilliant old roadhouse called The Boak End (pronounced Bork).

This pub, famous and much admired by all in those days, is now an island in a sea of caravan sites and renamed The Dotterel Inn by one of the chains. It was advertised recently for sale: The outlet is situated on a major crossroads on the main road between Scarborugh (sic) and Bridlington and the operators need to be able to combine marketing flair to initially attract people into the outlet backed up by quality service and food to encourage repeat business. They should also be able to interact with the local community to provide a solid community base for the outlet.

As Alan Freeman used to say, not' arf.

Believing The Boak End to be a pub rather than an outlet, and knowing nothing of marketing flair but hoping to interact later with my girlfriend, I was inundated. The team had decided it was time for an ancient cricketing ritual to be performed, a rite of passage, viz, the getting of a junior player into an advanced emotional state and leaving him on his doorstep for his parents to find. Between them, they bought me six pint bottles of Cameron's Strongarm, which would be enough for most experienced drinkers and more than enough for a callow sixteen-year-old. Deposited on the doorstep as aforesaid, I found myself unable to explain my condition to my mother. I dont think I made it to the great white telephone. Cups of tea and towels cloud my memory.

Of course, getting drunk to vomiting point was never the reason for going into pubs, although nowadays it seems to be like that in cities at weekends. We went under age in pubs because it was a grown-up thing to do and because we liked beer. The beer we had in Scarborough was Cameron's of West Hartlepool, Rose's of Malton and Moors and Robson's of Hull, known as Muck and Rubbish.

The Scarborough and Whitby Brewery, maker of the famous Target Ales, itself the result of amalgamations and deals among several older firms, including the Esk in Whitby, St Thomas's, the Old Brewery and the Scarborough Brewery Co, had been taken over by Cameron's. The other main Scarborough pub estate, belonging to the Castle and Phoenix Brewery also called Nesfield's, had been swallowed up by Moors and Robson's in 1932.

There was one Tetley pub which we didnt use much because Tetley's beer didnt travel well, and one Bass house I remember, The Aberdeen, closed the last time I looked. All the pubs sold the product now called real ale but nobody called it that because all ale was real. There was no keg beer in the ordinary pubs in Scarborough in 1963 and no draught lager. Lager came in bottles and some girls drank it with lime as a change from Babycham or Cherry B. Very few girls drank beer. My girlfriend's cousin drank pints of Guinness, which caused more amazement than if she had had four legs and a tail.