Pubs come in all shapes and sizes. Recently many of the old London pubs have been modernized. Plastics and neon lights have taken the place of huge glass walls engraved with advertisements for gin and beer and old-fashioned glass-shaded electric lights. In their efforts to meet the competition of television at home and milk bars or soda fountains down the street, many pubs have adopted new and, to a purist, disgusting attractions. The news that a pub in Cambridge intended to sell ice cream convinced many serious thinkers that this was the end of the Empire. Similarly, a friend told me in shocked tones that when he was served a pint of beer in a suburban pub the barmaid handed him "a damned doily" to put under the glass. He informed her, he reported, that he had given up spilling his drinks at the age of three and a half.
Despite the inroads of the milk bars and the trend toward bottled beer bought in the pub and drunk before the television set, draught beer is still the mainstay of British drinking. "Beer and beef have made us what we are," said the Prince Regent. (His friend, the Duke of Wellington, somewhat surprisingly, thought the Church of England was responsible.)
English beer has a bad name in the United States. The GI invading the country in 1942-5 found it weak, warm, and watery. During the war years it was indeed both weak and watery. Today, however, it has regained its old-time potency.
In addition to the standard beers and ales, the British brew small quantities of special ales that, as the old saying goes, would blow a soft hat through a cement ceiling. The Antelope, in Chelsea, had managed to hoard some bottles of this liquid as late as the autumn of 1940. After two bottles apiece, three Americans walked home through one of the worst nights of bombing exclaiming happily over the pretty lights in the sky.
The merits of the brews in their respective countries are a favorite topic for conversation between Britons and Americans. The tourist will find that his host holds no high opinion of American beer, considering it gassy, flavorless, and, as one drinker inelegantly described it, "as weak as gnat's wee." The British are continually surprised by American drinking habits. They consider that the GI who hastily swallows three or four double whiskies is asking for trouble, and that the object of a night's foray in the pub is not to get drunk but to drink enough to encourage conversation and forget your troubles. Prohibition, gone these many years, is still a black mark against Americans in the minds of the pundits in the pubs. They regard it as a horrible aberration by an otherwise intelligent people.
It should not be assumed that the British drink only beer. When they are in funds or when the occasion calls for something stronger, they will drink almost anything from what my charwoman once described as "a nourishing drop of gin" to champagne. During the war they drank some strange and weird mixtures and distillations that, if they did not kill the drinker as did some Prohibition drams, at least made him wish he were dead the next morning.
But the pub's importance, let me repeat, is due to its place as a public forum as much as to its position as a public fountain. There questions can be asked and answers given which the average Briton would regard as impertinent if the conversation took place in his home or his office. There interminable public arguments will probe the wisdom of the government's policy on installment buying or Cyprus or, with due gravity, will seek to establish the name of the winner of the Cambridgeshire Handicap in 1931.
The atmosphere of discussion and reflection of the English pub thus far has been proof against the juke box, the pinball machine, and the television set. But the fight is a hard one. These counterattractions to the bar are making their appearance in an increasing number of pubs each year. At the same time, publicans are giving more thought to the catering side of their business. The bar, which was the heart of the pub, has become merely an adjunct to the "attractions" and the restaurant.
The spread of restaurant eating is itself a novel change in British habits. Until the Second World War the great majority of the working class and the middle class ate their meals at home. Even today, in the New Towns, the industrial worker prefers to return home for lunch. But the shortage of servants, the difficulties of feeding a family on the weekly rations, the need to get away from the drabness of chilly, darkened homes during the war and immediate post-war years combined to send millions of Britons out to eat.
This has changed the character of a large number of pubs. It has also improved restaurant cooking, especially in the provinces. British cooking is a standard music-hall joke, but the comedians are somewhat behind the times. It has improved steadily since the war, largely because the British had to learn how to cook in order to make their meager rations palatable. The squeeze on the established middle class forced the housewives of that group to study cookery. Dinners in that circle are shorter and less formal than before the war, but the cooking is vastly improved.