The Fifth Hants and further haunts
I rarely visit pubs now. Since Cyfnod Clo ("lockdown") they have largely lost their appeal except for special occasions. They say two pubs close every day, but I don't suppose I ever went to any as a "regular" sufficiently often that the loss of my custom would make much difference.
Many urban pubs, brass mirrored Victorian gin palaces, offered working class people more genial surroundings than their homes often were: an uncanny parallel to the "stately homes" the early mental health asylums were intended to resemble, lifting the spirit though architecture. I'm lucky today to have a nicer, cosier home environment than most licensed premises, and certainly no need to "escape" to the pub. The food and music are better here. And I have no complaints about the company I keep.
Thanks to the profound impact on my thought processes of learning a new language, beyond just replacing one vocabulary with another, immersed in a different grammar and mindset, I have from Cymraeg appreciated the nature of the Continuous Present. I realise that I only need to have been somewhere once, to be there again any time I imagine, as if a deeper connectedness is ever present, which is of no help at all to the hospitality trade. Here is a selection of some memorable establishments in roughly chronological order, if you believe in Time as a 'thing'.
Although coming from Portsmouth, my first drop of ale happened to have been in Cymru at about 16 years old, in the now long replaced 'brutalist' café designed by Clough Williams Ellis at the summit of Yr Wyddfa (also known as Snowdon). I don't suppose I said at the time that a pint at the end of a good walk is always welcome. But I did think Younger's Tartan Ale the best in the world, in the absence of any comparison.
In Portsmouth, Albert Road in Southsea actually, as if to distinguish the posh bit from the Dockyard, the Fifth Hants Volunteer Arms was anything but posh. It had been run since time immemorial by Gladys, who it's said had been born there, and was reputed to throw people out bodily if they caused trouble. The lounge bar at the back was "shabby chic" before the expression had been invented, and "spit and sawdust" in the public bar at the front. A favourite of old school chums, but always had to be the front bar.
At Puckpool, Ryde, Isle of Wight, the former Battery pub was a regular haunt for my parents after they had moved across the Solent in the 1970s. On a Friday evening, the weekend yachting people would arrive on The Island. When they became too exuberant or ‘Entitled’ (as one might say today), my father would, in his customary stage whisper, say "I hear the Rodneys have arrived!" (a Naval expression for one’s 'superiors' I believe). Silence prevailed. I don't believe anyone ever punched him.
In London, I was intrigued by a large framed print in the upstairs room at the Dog and Duck in Soho. A small historic pub with celebrated green wall tiles, and allegedly a former favourite of Madonna, the painting showed the interior of some sort of vehicle, with a view of a horse-cab through the rear window. Seated on the left, a stern looking gent in a top hat, staring ahead, adjacent to a bearded suited man clutching a briefcase of some sort. The stern one seems desperate to avoid engaging eye contact with the young family also present. Before AI or Google Lens, it took a few months of searching to identify the work as An Omnibus Ride to Piccadilly Circus: Mr Gladstone Travelling with Ordinary Passengers (AKA “Man of the people”), a satirical painting from 1884/5 by Alfred Morgan. The bag was of course a Gladstone Bag carried by his Secretary.
I have only visited (and stayed in) Pen y Gwryd Hotel twice but enjoy exploring its labyrinthine interior again in my mind whenever I can't sleep. Between Capel Curig and Llanberis, the former farmhouse was a climber’s inn by 1898, later a training base for the 1953 Everest expedition. From the front door, a plain room on the right is almost a museum of memorabilia from that expedition. A room on the left recreates an alpine hut. Ahead the main bar and reception, a snug further along to the right before a cosy lounge shelved with mountain books. Then a traditional dining room with gong to strictly summon guests at precise meal times. Behind the bar is another residents’ bar long known as the Smoke Room, a large function room behind that. The decor has not changed for many decades, the better for it. Likewise the upstairs where crooked creaky floors and Victorian plumbing are as if in a living museum. Visiting Pen y Gwryd is a veritable ‘pub crawl’ in one building. I hope it never changes.
A plush cosy dining area in The White Hart in Hawes rubs shoulders with local farmers in the bar, as Yorkshire Dales pubs seem to do so well. It used to be like that in the George Hotel in Keswick (Cumbria) before the town became a victim of its own success, now overrun with fancy coffee shops (dare I mention Rodneys again?).
I have never visited the Vulcan. It closed in 2012. From 1853 it served a richly diverse area of Caerdydd docks known variously as Adamstown, Newtown and Little Ireland. I hope to go next year when its rebuilding is complete (as it was in 1915), at the St Fagans National Museum of History.
Like some beverages, this post may have been watered down, but that last bastion of social stratification, that of Class, rings out more clearly than the closing time bell.
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I look forward to your comments. Also it would be nice to know where you are in the world. Thanks for reading.