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18-11-2016, 11:56
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The English Public House As It Is, a book by social observer Ernest Selley, was published in 1927. Re-reading it in search of a reference, we spotted a passage that hadn’t previously grabbed our attention.In it, Selley reports on his visit to The Fellowship Inn, Bellingham, South London (pictured above when we visited in August), where he met*someone who was unimpressed with the new style of*‘improved public house’:
Evidently this man is a member of what I once heard described as*‘The Flea and Sawdust School’; one of the type which prefers the stuffy*‘coziness’ of the dirty, ill-ventilated taproom to any of the*‘new fangled’ ideas.
Some ancestor of The Pub Curmudgeon, perhaps? (That’s not us having a go: we suspect he’ll quite like the comparison.)
It’s interesting to us that this lobby, which we associate with a certain wing within CAMRA today (http://boakandbailey.com/2014/03/the-snug-bar-preservation-society/), was sufficiently well-developed by the mid-1920s for Selley to say he had*‘met several of these critics’, and for it to deserve a nickname. It was clearly, as they say, ‘a thing’.
http://i0.wp.com/boakandbailey.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/fellowship_historic.jpg?resize=643%2C508The Fellowship Inn in c.1920s. SOURCE: Inside Housing (http://www.insidehousing.co.uk//happy-hours/7014503.article).Also of note, in the section that immediately follows, is an account of early beer snobbery: Selley records a meeting with a bloke who won’t drink at*the local improved pub because*‘the beer is rotten’. Selley says he tried it and found it anything but ‘rotten’. In his view the man was prejudiced because he resented the posher, more expensive pub, even though Selley was sure he would have enjoyed the very same beer served at the more down-to-earth*‘Pig and Whistle’. We can’t say for sure what was really going on*— Selley was prejudiced too in his own way, in favour of improved pubs — but this kind of debate about value, quality, and the qualities of a ‘proper pub’ is certainly still going on 90 years later.
QUICK ONE: The Flea and Sawdust School, 1927 (http://boakandbailey.com/2016/11/quick-one-the-flea-and-sawdust-school-1927/) originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog (http://boakandbailey.com)


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