Hallo there and Bonne Année to you all. I haven’t blogged for some time – because I’ve been busy on several writing projects, including a novel, a TV drama and a book on pub drinking. Here is a section from the latter, dsecribing my first experience of perhaps the best pub I ever drank in.
The Crown Inn, in Blackburn, universally known as ‘The Croon’, opened in the late 1860s. The village legend was that Burke and Hare, the notorious resurrectionists of old Edinburgh town, had drunk there during their travels out of the city to find corpses – or, more plausibly, to make corpses - for the anatomist Dr. Robert Knox. It was a wonderful idea, but hadn’t a grain of truth in it. For one thing, Burke and Hare were never recorded as plying their trade outside the capital. For another, and more importantly, the infamous murders took place in 1828 and Burke was hanged in January 1829 – more than thirty years before the Croon was built. Nice story but no true. (Mind you, I drank in the pub for thirty years, and I could name a bodysnatcher or two who hung about it in those times.)
According to Sybil Cavanagh’s history of the village, the Croon was always the haunt of the local ‘characters’. It was quintessentially a man’s pub - and a miners’ pub. And I loved it instantly. My first visit was little more than a fleeting appearance, though.
It came about because the senior pupils in my last year of teaching in the local high school asked me one day, as we were packing up at home time, what pub I went to. I told them Boyle’s in Bathgate. It was then one girl asked me, ‘Why don’t you go to my Dad’s pub, sir?” Her father part owned the Croon, with his brother-in-law.
So I did. One Sunday evening. Feeling just a touch vulnerable, I pushed open the doors and went into the bar. And back in time.
There were two doors immediately after the small vestibule, one to the right and one to the left of a jug bar. This was not used as such by then, but served as a kind of store-room. The door to the right opened on to a section of the bar that was stone-floored and old fashioned in furnishings, even to the extent of there being a bench seat from an old double-decker bus screwed to the floor behind a table. On the opposite side of the circular bar, through the left hand door, the seating and tables were sparser, and the floor was of varnished wooden boards. There was a back room, where the pool table was to be found, and this room also provided a throughway to the gents’. A more primitive convenience can not be imagined. The bar was circular, as stated, embracing in its loop the two stone pillars that supported the ceiling. The till was an old-fashioned cash register. It was an old man’s pub. Very few young people ever went into it. And therein lay its appeal to me.
The previous proprietor, a certain Tam Wilkinson, was a man who enjoyed the reputation of being a curmudgeon and wit – there are no shortage of them in Blackburn. As an example of Tam’s grumpy sense of humour, there was an occasion when a stranger emerged from the toilet. Passing trade was rare in Blackburn, so you might have thought Tam would have been keen to encourage it. Not necessarily so. This stranger spoke to Tam, as he took his place at the bar again.
“That’s a hell of a bright light you have in the toilet, there.”
“What’s your problem wi’ that?” snarled Tam. “What are ye doin’ anyway? Shitin’ or developin’ photies?”
Another time, a hot summer’sday, an Indian came in. I don’t mean Tonto or Cochise, I mean an Indian from India, with a turban on his head. (Well, he’d hardly have it anywhere else, I suppose.) And a case of brushes. Although that was not on his head.
“Aye?” said Tam.
“May I have a pint of water, please?”
“You think this is the Ganges? I’m runnin’ a business here, pal. I’ll give you a glass of water. But after that, buy somethin’.”
The man was so grateful for the glass of water that Tam must have felt a twinge of guilt at his rudeness. So he continued the conversation.
"You from India, pal?”
“Yes, my friend. From the Punjab.”
“Aye? They tell me somebody in India dies every eight minutes.”
“Sadly, true, my friend.”
“Aye? That’s impressive. No many folk can do that.”
I’m afraid that casual racism, like casual sectarianism, was not uncommon in those days. It still exists, of course, in further flung places than Blackburn, and in many places reputed to be more sophisticated too. But I am pleased to be able to say the incidence of unpleasantness has decreased markedly.
Most of the time Tam had the pub, they served light beer and whisky - nothing else. If your poison was lager, or heavy, or rum or, indeed, anything except light and whisky, then you’d had it. But not in The Croon, because they didn’t have it. Their light beer was reputedly excellent, the pub was noted for it, but that was your lot. That and whisky. And Capstan fags. Gradually, Tam added a heavy beer tap and a lager, then a Guinness. But light was the old bar’s stock-in-trade and most of the old boys who hung about it used to drink it. It was reasonably cheap and popular for use as a ‘chaser’ with whisky. It was comparatively low in alcohol content – abv (alcohol by volume) of 3% so that it was often said that you’d piss your trousers before you got pissed. The locals used to call it ‘leek-feed’, implying that its only value was as a source of minerals for plants. There are still guys drinking it in the village.
There was no Ladies’ toilet. Not many women frequented the Croon – and fewer ladies. In those days, women could acquire a reputation if they went into a public house. (Only a scarlet woman, the wisdom went in my Bathgate childhood, would enter one. Unless it was a man, of course.) On the very few occasions when a woman did go in, if she needed to spend a penny, the ritual was unvarying. She would inform Tam, who would shout into the Gents.
“Anybody in there? Eh?”
If he got no answer would say: “Right, hen, in you go.” And then he would roar to the bar at large: “Keep oot the noo, boys; lassie here’s havin’ a pish.” And he would stand sentinel until the operation was complete.
On my first night, there were maybe a dozen men in the place, in pairs and groups of three. My pupil’s father was tending bar and recognised me instantly. He, too, was a Bathgate man and knew my father very well – forbye the fact that he knew I taught his daughter. So my first pint in the Croon was free. I stood at the bar between a pair of older men on my left, and a group of three or four younger ones, about my age, to my right. As I sipped my drink, I listened to the conversations. The younger men were having a go at one of their company for not buying his round.
“It’s no my turn,” the accused protested.
“Would you listen to Shy-the Round here?” said one of his party. “Miserable bastart. Get the drink in.”
“It’s no a question a bein’ miserable,” said the first. “Davie’s afore me. I follow Davie.”
“No, Ah folly you,” said Davie emphatically.
“No, you’re afore me. Ye’re giein’me a red neck for nothin’,” said the first.
“Couldnae gie you a red neck wi’ a blaw-lamp,” said Davie. “No wi’ a can of paint and a brush. C’mon, get the drink up. Or do we have to turn ye upside doon and shake the money oot yer pockets?”
Now the older pair of men, drinking in silent companionship up to this point, took up the script. “Was that you?” asked the grey-haired one suddenly and sharply, turning to his mate and wrinkling his nose in disgust.
“Was what me?” said the bald one.
“Farted,” replied the grey-haired one.
“You cannae smell that.”
“Smell it? You could sew a button on it,” replied his pal. “You’re fuckin’ rotten. If you’re going to do that, we’re going to have to stick the whistle off a kettle up yer arse.”
“That won’t stop it.”
“Naw, but it’ll give us enough warnin’ to git out the vicinity.”
I shook with silent laughter. And that was it. That was enough. I didn’t stay longer than an hour that night. But I liked the pub. I determined to go back more often. It was a momentous night, in some ways.
I got to know John Pennycook, a retired miner who worked behind the bar several days a week, Jock the bucket-man, and a man called Rab Meek (‘worked wi’ the gas’, as Blackburn folk remember him now). All three were ages with my mother, who was born and raised in Redmill miners’ cottages, two miles from the Cross. They remembered her from the days of their youth.
“A great dancer, yer ma,” Penny said.
“She was, I believe, John, aye.”
“Aye, a great dancer.”
“I mind her at the Whitburn dancin’,” said Jock. “She had a complexion like peaches an’ cream. Peaches an’ fuckin’ cream!”
Rab now said, “I went oot wi’ yer mammy a couple a times durin’ the war. Mind ye, I think she only went oot wi’ me because I had the car. There wasnae many cars aboot in they days.”
“No, there wouldn’t be, Rab.”
“Used to pick her up at the hoose an’ take her to the jiggin’. Then run her hame again. Saved her waitin’ on the service bus. Oh, she was a bonny lassie, yer mammy. You know somethin’, son,” he said. “If yer mammy hadnae been so virtuous, I coulda been yer faither!”
“Well…”
“Ye might no a been as clever. But at least, ye’d a had a full heid a hair!”
