Bob Bell's UK Memoirs Circa 1966 - Pubs and More Pubs
My friend Tom and I returned to Winchester in 1963 with a taste for cider, an appreciation of pubs and a hankering to visit more. Due to being underage, we chose our destinations with care, entering hostelries that we hoped our parents and their friends never frequented.
A particular favourite was the Westgate Hotel, just beyond the city’s old West Gate. It lacked the rough and ready charm of Minehead’s Queen’s Head. In fact, it was rather boring. We never made friends with any of the few locals we met there. The decor was gloomily middle class, and the building had no immediately visible charms, at least not to our teenage sensibilities. It did sell cider, however, and it was quite far from where our fathers worked, and thus, we imagined, was a safe refuge.
The cider they sold was not as strong as the Somerset scrumpy, and certainly not as cloudy, but it had a bit of a kick, and most importantly was cheap. We had a little routine that we thought was funny, but in hindsight was fairly stupid. We would order a pint each, give the barmaid the money, and while she went to the till we would drain our pints in one long swift gulp and put the empty glasses back on the bar before she returned with our change. Then we’d say as we took it, ‘Well, thanks, but what about our cider? We’ve paid for it, but where is it?’ And she’d give us a puzzled glance, look at the empties in front of her, and start to doubt her sanity. Oh, the unending wisdom and unbridled wit of teenagers.
My pub-going days in Winchester ended after I left home to work in London later in 1965, but some of my favourites included The Royal Oak which was situated down a little alley off the High Street. Makes one wonder just how many Royal Oaks there are in the British Isles - I bet there is one in every decent-sized town. This one was most definitely an ancient place - legend had it that it was the oldest pub in England. I do know that a part of it dated to around 1,000 AD, but I have no idea if it was actually a pub or inn at that time. Certainly by the mid-1600’s it was selling ales. Anyway, it was a splendid old place, (and I am sure still is), with blackened oak beams, sunken floor and all the amazing little nooks and crannies that define the buildings of long-ago times. In the early to mid-sixties, spanning the time of CND, beatniks and the arts crowd, and merging into the dawn of the beat groups and Carnaby Street, we used to meet at a popular coffee bar, The Two Bare Feet, and as we and the coffee bar crowd grew older, the Royal Oak became our preferred centre of the universe. Like the Queen’s Head, there was a variety of humanity, but this being Winchester, there were no, or very very few, folks off the farm or seasonal workers, but more the children of the middle classes, art students from the local art college, aspiring folk singers and a whole heap of youngsters who probably had no idea of what they were going to do, and even more, just didn’t care. Plus the usual mix of antique dealers, a smattering of businessmen, and the inevitable dedicated alcoholics.
The folk boom was underway, and sometimes we’d find ourselves at a folk club held in the bar of the Eagle. Never really dug folk music, per se, as it was all too serious and self-conscious. Young bank clerks singing songs about coal mining, sea shanties and the like, with one finger stuck in an ear in a desperate attempt to find the pitch, and the audience all quiet and reverent. We could only take it for two beers at the most and then had to split for sanity’s sake.
The next couple of summers were spent in Somerset, and as I got older I discovered some of the other pubs that Minehead had to boast about. Architecturally, the most interesting was the Plume of Feathers at the top of The Parade, which was torn down in 1965 in the name of modernisation. A sad day for Minehead.
Minehead where the pub scene has changed a great deal since Bob’s days in town
The name Plume of Feathers was appropriated by a pub come hotel called the Carlton, which was, by our standards, a bit of a ritzier joint. It too is gone now, torn down and replaced by a block of flats, I think. There was a rather nice little pub on the harbour, The Old Ship Aground. In my early days of married life in Minehead, around 1967 after I first left London, a friend and I took up fishing and would go down to the harbour one evening a week to chance our luck. We soon found it was easier to catch a beer rather than a fish, and so spent much of those evenings aground in The Old Ship with beers in out our fists rather than quayside with rods in our hands.
Venturing out of town, The Luttrell Arms in Dunster was always a good call. They sold cider, had a posh lounge and a rough and ready public bar, and of course you can guess which one we frequented. The regulars were a charming cast of rural locals, old tweeds, worn shoes and thick accents. One of my favourites was Pip, a man of indeterminate age - probably in his seventies - who was forever accompanied by his dog, a scruffy little terrier. Pip wore a tam-o-shanter, a barely seen sight then, had a pipe stuck in his mouth, and had only one leg, well, only one real living one that is. The other was a wooden peg, and Pip’s party trick was, after a certain amount of cider, to put his wooden leg on the bar. Whether he did it in the manner of Little Richard putting his leg on the piano, or whether he actually took it off and laid it on the bar, I am afraid I can’t remember, Possibly the latter, as the top of a bar is considerably higher than the keyboard of a piano. Anyway, however he did it, he did it, and the action was always accompanied by roars of appreciation from all those present. In those days tobacco was an ever-present factor of pub life. The walls and ceiling of the Luttrell Arms were a dull ochre, which I thought was just the colour of the paint. Not so, tobacco smoke stains all it touches, and that was the source of the colour. In a valiant attempt to soak up the smoke, the pub hung a sheaf or two of hay from the ceiling. It wasn’t just a quaint country custom to keep the cider fresh, as some wags would earnestly tell the tourists, it was to trap and absorb the smoke. How efficient it was, I have no idea. Nice try, anyway. The other unforgettable thing about the Luttrell's was the men's toilet. Across the alley from the public bar, it was a stinking hole with a long rusting trough for a urinal. It was quite possibly the foulest toilet I had encountered back then, which was long before I had the opportunity while traveling in America to savour the appalling and beyond disgusting toilets at some of the more out of the way truck stops. In the States, by the way, the lav’ is known as a 'restroom'. A risible euphemism in many cases - most certainly not a place one would wish to tarry in.
Dunster Church near the Luttrell Arms - not that Bob did much praying in here back in the 60s
I returned to Luttrell Arms last year, in 2019, on a visit to the old country. The place is now posh beyond words and has been extensively remodelled. What was the men's room now forms part of the restaurant. If only the diners, savouring their steaks and relishing their desserts, knew ...
Another place we might hit on a Saturday night, as an example of a desperate attempt to entertain ourselves, was a rather large hotel on the seafront. I can’t recall its name, but it had a very large room that served as a sometime dancehall, and a barroom too. Saturdays would feature a very nice lady who ran a music and dance school named Red Shoes. She played piano and organ, and her husband accompanied her on whatever it was she wasn’t playing - piano or organ. They had a drum machine for rhythm, the first time I had ever encountered one. This was 1966 and 1967 after all. It worked like a metronome with a loudspeaker. The result was a strangely turgid and rigid performance, droning waltzes and perky polkas, and dancers drunkenly glided about the floor trying to emulate being on ice skates. The whole experience was hard to take for more than an hour or so - it was a little like Dr Johnson’s remark about a dog walking on its hind legs which goes something like ‘It’s not that he does it well, but that he does it at all’. We were uncouth rubberneckers at a grotesque ball.
