Mike Pentelow, erstwhile editor of the agricultural workers’ journal Landworker, has teamed up with photographer PJ Arkell to produce an iconoclastic guide to more than 150 pubs . It is, as they say, the ultimate boozers’ Who’s Who and a valuable service to the pub industry and indeed our national heritage.
I should declare an interest, having alerted the dynamic duo to several pubs and I am naturally pleased to see the Jean Harlow featured. Harlow – Jean not the new town in Essex – is an example of Pentelow and Arkell’s quest to find pubs named after commoners. That’s the key to this excellent illustrated guide as they eschew royalty and aristocrats and the more surreal modern pub names.
And what a quest! Combining their lifelong interests in radical politics, travel, photography, writing and passionate support for brewers (measured by their consumption of beer), they take us on an historical journey. The early days of rural revolts, as evinced by Jack Straw and Wat Tyler, popular heroes and legends like Robin Hood, Dick Turpin and Rob Roy, artists, poets and musicians such as Alexander Pope, Handel, Wilfred Owen and Robert Burns and sporting heroes like Larwood and Voce and WG Grace are here along with noted wits Oscar Wilde and Dean Swift. Trade unionists will be heartened to see flying pickets Ricky Tomlinson and Des Warren featured along with dockers’ leader and Pentonville Five hero Vic Turner (but saddened to note them in the pubs closed section).
This is a richly rewarding book for the reader to dip in and out of. The pubs are all variously illustrated by way of their signage, frontage or interiors and their beers are listed for the drinking connoisseur to plan an expedition of culture and enjoyment. The potted biographies are amusing collections of anecdotes as well as Pentelow’s often incisive insights. Do not be put off, dear reader, by some of the more detailed descriptions of the fate of some of the eponymous heroes. After all, we have a brutal heritage and used to have ingenious ways of executing our felons which our author describes with macabre interest.
Tribune readers will be delighted that George Orwell, one time literary editor of our favourite weekly, gets a mention for the pubs named after him in Wigan, how apt, and Islington. Pentelow and Arkell have filled a gap in pub guides many of us did not realise existed; and have produced a witty, informative and thoroughly indispensable volume. Cheers!
