You know where you are with the pub sign, and no pub tourist should pass by without tipping their hat to one of this country’s great glories. Here is the novelist Sebastian Faulks rightly waxing lyrical about the pub sign’s contribution to the landscape in The Telegraph: “People who think of England as a practical country with little flair for the visual would never have imagined that its lanes and roads would be regularly punctuated by what look like cards from a wooden tarot pack.”
The names are often a treat, too. The cosy detective novelist Martha Grimes (recommended to me a long time ago by Anglophile friends at Harvard) has made a living from repurposing some of the odder British pub names for her Richard Jury series, real public houses such as The Old Silent, The Grave Maurice, The Blue Last, The Lamorna Wink, The Case Has Altered, The Horse You Came In On, The Old Contemptibles, The Old Fox Deceiv’d, I Am the Only Running Footman, Help the Poor Struggler, and The Man With a Load of Mischief. You wouldn’t read these books for realism, and much of the pleasure for a native reader is trying to connect Grimes’s Britain with something remotely approximating the country we live in. For instance: Grimes’s very first murder is that of a man strangled and then deposited in what both the author and the locals refer to as a “keg” of beer. Since a keg typically holds 18 gallons of pressurized beer in a sealed aluminium or steel shell, the American Grimes means a cask or a barrel. I’m also faux outraged at local characters asking for “whiskey,” putting “catsup” on their mashed potatoes, reaching for a packet of Hershey’s when they want a cup of hot chocolate, or, in the case of an especially fantastical rustic, busily employed skinning skunks “to keep off the ghouls.” Skunks in England! But at least the pub names are real.
In the Middle Ages, alehouses existed in every town and village, offering travellers sustenance along many of the main routes. Generic signs existed then, probably adapted from Roman customs, in the form of bushes or evergreen branches, poles decorated with greenery, or just brooms (brewing was predominantly a woman’s trade, and the broom was a handy emblem of domestic labor). The broomstick helped the “alewife” complete her later transformation into the witch, and the persecutions of the early modern period, by which time – not coincidentally – the brewing trade had passed into the control of men. The English authorities were also keen to tame the business of drinking and to take their cut too, so a sign was a useful identifier for the state as well as the passing trade. In 1393, in the reign of Richard II, pubs were required to identify themselves with proper signage. This put in train the process by which pub owners devised the visual and verbal language that we are familiar with today.
The pub sign advertises the business of drinking, food, accommodation, and entertainment, but it does much more. The scores of religious signs reflect Christian heritage and symbolism, as with Ye Old Salutation Inn in Nottingham – the salutation being the Archangel Gabriel’s Hail Mary – though my friends and I didn’t know it at the time, and we cheerfully shortened the pub’s name to the overfamiliar “Sal.” Sometimes, the association with the church takes on more militant forms. Ye Old Trip to Jerusalem, down the road from the Sal, was for me only a rather occasional haunt, mainly for the novelty of drinking in the sandstone snugs carved out of the cliff the pub is built into. It claims to be the oldest pub in Britain, which isn’t nearly true, but the name references the Crusades and makes much of the idea that soldiers of Christ would set out from or stop off here before making their way to meet up with Richard the Lionheart. The same thing with the innumerable Turk’s Heads or Saracen’s Heads or Lamb and Flags.
Royal motifs are ten a penny too, and Royal Oak signs refer to the hiding place of the future Charles II. The association with the merry monarch was largely fitting, but his successor was another thing. Around the corner from the Salutation stands The Royal Children, commemorating the children of Princess Anne, daughter of the soon to be deposed, inconveniently Roman Catholic James II. James’s grandchildren were supposedly given refuge here in 1688 as the last Catholic king’s days were numbered. Association with royalty can be a handy thing, but when the game of thrones is inseparable from sectarian strife, it is probably more sensible to hedge your bets. The risk of popular pub names like The White Hart, associated with Richard II, is that the violent overthrow and murder of the king was incompatible with the business model. In some cases, as with the White Boar, emblem of Richard III, the king’s newly evil reputation and the advent of the Tudor dynasty is said to have led to a rash of hasty repainting, and the proliferation of unnatural but unaligned Blue Boars.
Subsequently, it was simpler to celebrate national heroes and victories, so long as the defeated were foreigners rather than fellow citizens, and the victories unequivocal. Nelsons and Wellingtons, Trafalgars and Waterloos, are all easy to explain, but though the Battle of Alma during the Crimean War lent itself to more pub names than any other victory, few Brits now could identify even the combatants. Likewise, the Marquis of Granby (John Manners, son of the 3rd Duke of Rutland, commander-in-chief of the British Army during the Seven Years War), is remembered now for the many pub signs up and down the country rather than for his military exploits.
Other pubs have signs that are rapidly falling out of favour. Britain still has around 70 pubs called the Black Boy. Campaigners for the various pubs with that name object that it derives from an affectionate maternal nickname for Charles II (owing to his swarthy complexion as a child). But the Guyanese-born British artist and photographer Ingrid Pollard has argued that these names reveal a racism “hidden in plain sight.” A curator in the catalogue text for Pollard’s recent exhibition has written that “the spectre of the black boy, it seems, haunts every English town and village, and has taken material form in the mundane furniture and fittings of ordinary life. The legacy of slavery and the presence of Black people have been relegated to the margins, to incidental signs on drab buildings whose exact location remains obscure.” In The Art Newspaper, Ingrid Pollard herself says that “I’m just a pubgoer trying to have a conversation.”
Philip Howell is Professor of Historical Geography, University of Cambridge. This is an edited extract from Philip Howell’s Pub, published in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons, a series about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
