A Game of Pubs
Reflecting on the big news this week that pubs are allowed to stay open longer for the football, I found myself thinking about how much has changed in terms of exactly what pubs meant to so many people during my childhood and exactly what they mean now.
First off, it’s worth pointing out that, beyond the semi-regular trip to Spoons in Ramsgate for breakfast and the occasional weekend dash out to country pubs with my wife for the odd glass of red, I am not a pub drinker. This is probably because I spent so much of my childhood in pubs and around pub culture.
The majority of my family populated the pubs when I was growing up…and I viewed them very much as the sort of little kingdoms you’d see on shows like Game of Thrones. The Iron Duke sat at the intersection of Bellevue Road and The Plains of Waterloo and was presided over by Johnny Giles, my favourite landlord of the bunch (simply because he was a thoroughly decent bloke who taught me how to throw darts and play dominoes). At the Horse and Groom, you had Bill and Babs, whom I remember particularly, as they were an extremely well-dressed couple, and this meant that for a lot of us kids, The Horse and Groom was actually the ‘posh’ pub in Ramsgate. It had an actual ‘garden’ where you could hang out and play cards: when I look at that garden nowadays - a tiny square no bigger than a postage stamp, really - I’m always fascinated by how big it seemed to me back then.
The Camden Arms was home to John and June. John was particularly memorable as he often wore an oversized sailor’s cap, and there are plenty of photographs of me wearing it in the saloon bar as a kid. Oddly, most of the pictures I have of myself were taken in the Red Lion, though I don’t remember any of the owners that I’m pictured with there. A lot of the gang seemed to meet at The Working Man’s Club by the science labs at Chatham House: again, it seemed enormous to me as a kid. The idea that these days it’s just a private house or a few flats is practically unthinkable.
Pubs were places you went after school, Boys’ Brigade or Scouts, sometimes to eat or play games, occasionally to hang around while the adults sang songs and told stories about their own childhood… in pubs. I came from a working-class family, I might add…so if the picture painted is of a bunch of work-shy grifters, then I guess it couldn’t be further from the truth. My family included postmen, estate agents, electricians, accountants, writers, professional boxers, solicitors, you name it.
My nan was the exception to the rule, in that sense. She’d married young, become widowed and had relocated to Ramsgate with her second partner and his son. A bit lost away from Penge (where she’d been born and raised), she quickly became a regular singer in a lot of the Ramsgate pubs and managed to get an awful lot of adoration and free drinks because as a younger woman she wasn’t hard on the eye and she managed to arrive in the town at the same time as her nephew (Alan Minter) become IBF Middleweight Champion of the World. These days, my nan is best depicted as ‘Queen of Margate’ in the justly celebrated painting by my cousin, local artist Lisa McGuinness. My nan was the lynchpin of our family - but the pubs were the places we all called home.
I remember fights: lots of them…but most of these involved people pushing and shoving and the occasional black eye or swollen lip, and that seems preferable to the mass fights you now see on the beach at Broadstairs and Margate that seem more like drug-fuelled riots than actual disagreements.
Alcohol has become demonised in modern society…and quite rightly, too. I’m a drinker - I don’t go crazy, but there’s definitely a price that comes with drinking. I don’t sleep exceptionally well, and every glass of anything these days seems to offer a lot more drawbacks than benefits. It’s a shame, though - pubs now are either giant chain establishments where most people remain strangers unless you’re propping up the bar every day or are invariably empty and largely abandoned unless there’s a live music event or a big football tournament. I remember joining a darts team not long before the pandemic and being surprised at how empty the bars were even then. If you’d told me during my teens that in just a few decades people would swap singing, laughing and playing games in pubs for sipping cappuccinos in coffee shops, I’d have called you a liar.
Don’t get me wrong, I know pubs can be viewed in a bad light and can certainly be a source of trouble…but couldn’t it be argued that they’re a strong source of community, too?
