Visit the Shut up about Barclay Perkins site

Been on another scanning binge. The Brewing Trade Review, this time. So much fun stuff.
Like this on licence applications. As background, new licences were almost impossible to get, redundancy was de-licensing pubs deemed surplus to requirements, and applications to extend opening hours almost always refused.

"In pre-war days the adjourned sessions wore often more exciting than the principal meetings, as consideration of the normal controversial subjects of new licences, redundancy, and extensions of permitted hours, was mostly deferred until the second meetings. However, under the present conditions, the adjourned meetings have passed off, in the majority of cases, almost unnoticed. Even in those areas where controversial points have been raised there has been little of the fire and heat which is ordinarily evident.The “usual opposition .... on temperance grounds” was, of course, made to the few applications for new licences, but these were principally confined to applications for full or less restricted licences for hotels and restaurants. At one of the London sessions, the reasons given for applications for licences for restaurants were that, “Whereas in times of peace it was always possible for a non-licensed restaurateur to send out to a local public-house for alcoholic liquor desired by a customer, in these war-time days of short supply, it was not always found practicable for licence-holders to satisfy off sales demands. Not only had messengers moving from restaurant to public-house and back again with orders fulfilled met with accidents in the black-out, but there had been occasions on which women messengers, having secured the drinks required by customers of a restaurant, being accosted by men on their way back to the restaurant who took advantage of black-out conditions to consume the contents of glasses on the tray and then made off.”The continued shortage of beer, wines and spirits again resulted in several applications by off-licensees for permission to sell in smaller quantities than their existing restricted licences permitted, one such application being granted "for the duration of the war.”"
The Brewing Trade Review, April 1943, page 115.
This is the first time I can recall hearing of BYO in the UK. Slightly different, as you didn't have to do the bringing yourself. I'd have expected it to be in bottled form. Not in a glass on a tray. Which is a pretty obvious temptation. How far would you walk through the streets with a tray of drinks? It's a weird image.



More...