“There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced, as by a good tavern.”
One of the Midlands’ most famous sons, Dr Samuel Johnson of Lichfield fame, wrote those words more than 300 years ago, and they still ring true today.
Or they would if there were any good taverns left. But a letter in last week’s Post from Keith Watkins of the Walsall Campaign for Real Ale summed up the state of much of what is left of our pub industry.
Keith’s epistle was a bleak lament over the decision by Marston’s to sell 202 pubs to a company called NewRiver Retail, who had announced its intention to ‘convert the majority of the assets to meet the high demand for new convenience store premises from the Ƶ’s major food store operators.’
Keith complains that tenants had not been offered the opportunity to buy the freehold of their businesses and bemoans the sale of the 202 pubs to a company ‘whose sole aim is to destroy them.’
He surely has a point or two here, although you can’t necessarily blame Marston’s for deciding to offload the pubs and cash in on their market value while they can.
In over 40 years of frequenting pubs, I have never known times so bad. And that’s desperately sad, because a way of life unique to the Ƶ is slowly disappearing in front of our very glasses.
Recent statistics from the British Beer and Pub Association show the intrinsic value of retaining that way of life while we still can.
A report by economic experts Oxford Economics for the association shows that 900,000 jobs in the Ƶ depend on beer and pubs – and almost half (44 per cent) are younger workers aged 16-24. The report says the industry pays out £11 billion in wages, and adds £22 billion to the economy. Brewing itself sustains 80,000 Ƶ jobs, but it is in pubs where the jobs impact is most felt, with 820,000 jobs.
The industry also spends over £1 billion in capital investment, and pays an astonishing £12 billion in total taxes. But that investment would appear to be in danger of drying up, with figures from CAMRA showing an average of 28 pubs closing every week in the Ƶ.
Those figures are alarming, given the industry’s financial contribution to the economy. But this story cannot be measured in dry statistics alone.
Pubs, for millions of (increasingly ageing) people are more than a statistic.
They are a way of life, a (hopefully) safe haven from the cares of the world, an oasis of relaxation away from some of the madness of modern society.
Our pubs, or at least the best ones, have no equivalent anywhere in the world. You only have to consider the state of some of those ghastly Irish theme bars or the soulless identikit ‘sports bars’ so common in continental Europe to realise that nobody does pubs better than Britain.
And there’s a timeless cultural aspect to this debate. Great artistic figures, from Shakespeare to Dickens, Orwell to Chaucer, have extolled the virtues of alcohol.
Shakespeare, who peppered his play with references to wine, said: “A man cannot make him laugh – but that’s no marvel, he drinks no wine.” Orwell wrote The Moon Under Water, a paean to the ideal British pub.
In his classic tale the History of Mr Polly, HG Wells wrote of his eponymous hero’s recovery from a dreadful existence running a failing shop to the joy of landing a job working in a countryside pub, the Potwell Inn.
One of the greatest English novelists, Evelyn Waugh, was a dedicated imbiber, while his son, Auberon, the funniest journalist of his generation and probably any other, memorably defined happiness as ‘good food, good wine, laughter and friends.’ It’s not a bad definition.
But it’s not just literary types who have enjoyed the pleasures of alcohol. In a splendid article in the Daily Telegraph last year on his giving up booze for Dry January, political commentator Peter Oborne argued that the best politicians were the ones who enjoyed a drop or two.
“Those who do not drink are very often mad. Let’s consider the Second World War. Hitler, who did not drink, was probably the most evil man who walked this earth.
“His main opponent, Churchill, led the British people through the war on a diet of whisky, brandy, vintage champagne and claret.
“George W Bush is another case in point. Would we have had the horror of the Iraq invasion if George Bush had enjoyed the odd drink? One wonders.
“In my experience, all the wisest politicians drink a fair bit, and the ones who don’t are the ones to watch out for. Margaret Thatcher famously enjoyed a whisky or two before going to bed.
“By contrast, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair didn’t drink nearly enough....Blair would have been a better prime minister if he had drunk more.”
There are downsides to booze, and in the worst cases the demon drink can lead to household abuse, bankruptcy, alcoholism and sometimes death. My best friend in newspapers, a wonderfully talented individual, drank himself into an early grave by the age of 52, his mind and body wrecked beyond repair by years of over-indulgence.
But alcohol can also provide an intoxicating pleasure quite unlike any other, often oiling the wheels of the dullest social gathering.
All the best people I know drink, sometimes more than they should. But life is there to be enjoyed, and a teetotal existence is not necessarily a recipe for happiness either.
We would all be immeasurably poorer, as a society and a country, if we were to lose the great British pub.
