Following the signs

Published on Monday 31 August 2009 21:35

IN AN uncertain world, there is much to be said for the elbow-polished counter and reflective twilight of an unpretentious, old-fashioned pub. We're not thinking in terms of a crammed-to-the-gunnels delirious cup-final mêlée here; more the kind of establishment evoked in the Glasgow writer George Friel's novel The Boy Who Wanted Peace – "as quiet as a church. A man could be at peace there, with a drink in front of him and the gantry a kind of altar."

But what happens when someone in a corporate boardroom somewhere far away hires a style consultant whose idea of hostelry heaven resembles a collision between an airport transit lounge and a genetic research institute, with unsettlingly wan lighting and strangely hued beverages, dispelling the mellow ambience of generations? And, of course, with the make-over – or maybe even without it – they'll change the pub name for good measure, so that hamely howff formerly known as The Clachan, or the Green Tree, or maybe just Jimmy's, finds itself landed with a name that sounds as if it was chosen by a focus group. By way of example, I've seen no less than three Green Trees wither from the Edinburgh pubscape over the past couple of decades, one of them at least renamed Champagne Charlie's, and subsequently a lot of other things, another being quietly demolished.

So, our alcoholic psychogeography sustains yet another dunt, as any sense of attachment to location, history or community vanishes … or are we just being crusty old barstool reactionaries? "Why do people do that," asks Albert Jack, peevishly. "Like a lot of other people, I just don't like it, and it's not because I'm getting old and just want things to stay the same. I'm only 44."

With a book out this month called The Old Dog and Duck: The Secret Meaning of Pub Names, Albert Jack – whose own name has a certain inn sign ring to it – is well enough placed to comment, having consumed a considerable number of pints across Britain in the interests of research. And pub revisionists – those who lightly set aside what may be centuries of tradition for the sake of a makeover – are clearly not his favourite people.

Jack divides his time between Cape Town, where he spends most of his year, and Guildford, Surrey – where, he complains, "there's a pub that was called the Britannia, everybody knew it, and they changed it to Scruffy Murphy's. It died overnight, so they ended up renaming it the Brit. Bizarre, isn't it?"

The affliction of pub revisionism was one reason for Jack embarking on his book. He'd already experienced bestseller success with books including Red Herrings and White Elephants, exploring well-known phrases and expressions, and Pop Goes the Weasel, about the secret meanings of nursery rhymes. "I have a natural curiosity about these things," he says. "There was another pub in Guildford called the Mary Rose, but they've changed it to the Five and Lime. I don't know what that means, and don't want to know, I'd be much more interested in knowing why there was a pub called the Mary Rose in Guildford, which is not really a sailing community, in the first place."

As Jack writes in the book's introduction, he is an enthusiastic admirer of the British pub: "There's something about a good old honest-to-God boozer that can't be beaten, so I decided to find out more about where they've come from and what their names mean." One of the first to intrigue him was the common pub name of the White Hart which, he says, stems from the 14th century, when the English monarch Richard II adopted a white hart, or stag, as his symbol, which was widely adopted by the humbler classes wishing to show their allegiance and avoid any untoward visits from the royal minions.

At least one exception to this, it has to be said, is the venerable White Hart Inn in Edinburgh's Grassmarket, whose name is linked with a different king, David I of Scotland, and his legendary encounter with a white hart while hunting in what is now Holyrood Park. He was thrown from his horse and a cross, the "holy rood", appeared between the threatening stag's antlers and it vanished. David survived to found the abbey of Holyrood in grateful thanks. While many of the pub names in Jack's book are common to both north and south of the Border – the Cross Keys, the Wheatsheaf, the Saracen's Head, the Forrester's Arms – it is perhaps inevitably weighted with better or lesser known English pub names, from the famous Trip to Jerusalem at Nottingham with its Crusades resonances, to such characterful names such as the Clog and Billycock (near Blackburn) and a handful of intriguing-sounding establishments called The Case Is Altered which, among numerous theories, may refer to England's state renunciation of Catholicism in the mid-16th century.

It turns out, however, that the Red Lion – which vies with the Crown for the honour of most common pub name in Britain, with an estimated 700 examples of each – is credited by some as having Scots connections. When "Jamie the Saxt" – James VI of Scotland and I of England – moved his court south on the Union of Crowns in 1603, the story goes, he encouraged the Scottish royal crest of a red lion to be displayed widely and, rather as with the earlier White Hart, innkeepers decided it would be in their interests to comply. Jack, however, tends towards the alternative thesis: that the lion in question came from the coat of arms of John of Gaunt, in the 14th century the most powerful man in England.

Another well-worn pub moniker is that of the Admiral Duncan, named after Viscount Duncan of Camperdown, the renowned, Angus-born mariner who defeated the Dutch fleet at Camperdown in 1797 in a historic naval action. Then there are an ominous number of World's Ends, such as the one in Edinburgh's High Street, often suggestive of former old town limits, and where the city walls once ran, as in the case of the Edinburgh one rather than anything apocalyptic – although the end of the world was indeed predicted by someone whose name adorns some other English pubs, Mother Shipton, aka Ursula Southeil, the early 16th century alleged witch and seer.

And for good old traditions of brewing, death and resurrection, what better than the John Barleycorn, named after the hero of a folk song common to Scotland and England, and an early version of which is found in the Scots Bannatyne Manuscript of 1586, in which the eponymous John – personification of barley or Christ figure? – is threshed to death then ploughed into the ground, to rise again. Robert Burns, ever a man for the reamin' swats, published his own take on the song.

Often during his researches, Jack found that the customers and even the landlords of some of the pubs he visited were blithely ignorant of the history behind their establishments' names, "although there was a notable exception down in Cornwall, where there was a great pub called the Bucket of Blood. It turned out to have only been named that in the 1970s or 90s, but the story went back some 300 years, to when, according to local legend, a customs officer's head came up with a bucket of water from the well. So they were reviving an old tale, and I love stories like that. Whereas the Five and Lime…"

I'm moved to inform him that, within ten minute's walk of this newspaper office, in Edinburgh's Drummond Street, the past decade has seen the convivial howff of Stewarts made over unrecognisably as the Brass Monkey, while just last year, across the street, Robert Louis Stevenson's old student haunt of Rutherford's, another no-nonsense drinking shop, was summarily converted into an extension to the Italian restaurant next door.

Pasta-bound patrons may read a plaque on the corner quoting Stevenson recalling nostalgically how he "pickled about Rutherford's in the rain and the east wind … and passionately hoped (if I did not take to drink) I should possibly write one little book".

Perhaps, suggests Jack, having done his own fair share of pub philosophising: "Hopefully, with books like this, we can try and keep some of these places – and their names – alive."

The Old Dog and Duck is published by Particular Books on 10 September.