What's in a Name

Andrew Varley on the philistine brewers

The brewers, especially the large chains, have never shown themselves great preservers of the national heritage. They own a huge number of historic buildings and are the custodians of a significant portion of living social history but, as ever, are not letting such trivialities as these stand in the way of making a quick buck.

Attention at the moment is focused on the way breweries are playing fast and loose with pub names. You do not have to be a regular at your local, or even a member of CAMRA with a taste for atonal folk music, to be angry about this. Everyone with an attachment to the preservation of our heritage and with a concern for tradition should support the private members bill being introduced by Anne Winterton, the spirited Tory member for Congleton. Her aim is to prevent pubs which have been known for generations as The Royal Oak or The Red Lion transforming into The Wig and Pistle, The Brahms and Liszt, or whatever tiresome piece of jocularity appeals to the appropriate department of the brewery concerned.

The brewers want to fill their pubs and believe that one way to appeal to the part of the market under 25-years of age - the men among whom are the heaviest drinking section of the population is to abandon tradition or rely on "theming". It is perfectly understandable to want to develop redundant pubs in areas where the customers have moved on or the clientele has changed such as outside closed shipyards or in city centres with no resident population to speak of. It is quite another to make gratuitous changes to well-known locals or ancient inns. It is to change their essential nature for a short term gain.

With the same purblind arrogance which in the sixties led them to foist bland keg-bitter on the public in the belief that beer needed to taste uniformly nasty everywhere in the country, the brewers now regard their customers as so stupid that they cannot cope with a pub unless it has the same name as its exact replica in Bolton or was christened by some buffoon of an executive with the delusion that he has the same talent for whimsy as the Monty Python script writers. No doubt somewhere drinkers are propping up the bar in The Dead Parrot.

I live in an ancient town in rural Suffolk. For some reason, Scottish and Newcastle bought a pub there which since the mid-sixteenth century has been called The One Bull, a reference to the papal document rather than the animal. It was a run-down, unappealing establishment and its new owners wanted to brighten its image and fill it with young drinkers. They decided to rename it Ye Olde Cloisters. I know, I know. It beggars belief. The town had a mighty abbey in happier days and its ruins are still a major feature but its cloisters were nowhere near this particular pub. Nor is it easy to understand how monastic reference is believed by Scottish and Newcastle marketing people to be especially attractive to lager-swilling youth. The intended name change was so offensive to everyone in the town that it was abandoned after vociferous protest. People rightly saw a brewery which had no connection with the area unilaterally obliterating a small section of its heritage. (The poor things at Scottish and Newcastle are a bit vague about names: one of their pubs in Sunderland has been called The Wolseley since the time of the eponymous Victorian hero, Sir Garnet "I am the very model of a modern Major-General" Wolseley. A few years ago, the brewery decided that a new sign would be effective and so there appeared a passable copy of Holbein's portrait of Cardinal Wolsey.)

A similar hazy view of history was shown in Nottingham in 1996 when The Turf, succinct and to the point, became The Samuel Morley Victorian Ale House, prolix and anachronistic. The pub had originally been named in honour of Lord George Bentinck, political ally of Disraeli, high-living grandee, and author of the laws of racing. Samuel Morley, on the other hand, whilst undoubtedly a local worthy, was a proselytising abstainer and so possibly less suitable for commemoration in a licensed premises than the sporting Lord George.

Mike Ripley, a spokesman for the The Brewers' and Licensed Retailers' Association, clearly out of his depth, attempts some ill-informed historical justification for changes of name:  "Pub names do change - if they didn't they'd all still be called the St Peter or the Virgin Mary, because before the Reformation, they were owned by the Catholic Church. The beer was brewed in local monasteries. Henry VIII came along and did away with the Catholic Church so landlords were faced with a choice - change the name or lose your head. That's why so many pubs are called the Red Lion - his coat of arms - or the King's Head." Of course, Mr Ripley is not paid to know about history or heraldry, which is just as well.

It is very easy to mock the industry's stupidity and ignorance, but there is an important point here. The overriding concern is to sell as much drink as possible. The most profitable market is perceived to be young people. Therefore, pubs are themed and renamed to appeal to them. Two undesirable things are happening: local sensibilities and traditions are being outraged and young people are being encouraged to drink even more than they are at the moment outside the constraints of the community pub.

None of us, even if we only use our local pub for an occasional coffee, want The Bull or The Rover's Return to emerge from "restoration" as The Happy Hooker or The Gorilla and Air Hostess.

Whatever did happen to Watney's Red Barrel?