“Ah’ll sithee”

The seventies. Party Sevens, power cuts, Wombles. Mateus Rosé. Sitting in a hearing-aid beige Austin with a square steering wheel, waiting for the AA man.

It’s thursday, 5.15pm on Yorkshire Televison. Here’s the legendary Frederick Sewards Trueman as a sort of cardigan-bound public bar Ted Hughes, presenting Indoor League, an unashamed celebration of working class pub ‘sports’.

‘The biggest bonanza of sporting skill i’ve ever clapped eyes on’ says the veteran of nearly 70 test matches, candidate for greatest-ever English fast bowler and cult figure of Yorkshire cricket’s golden years.

Is that an unsparkled pint? In Leeds?

The Darkness

Prior to WW2, the family business (on my dad’s side) was haulage. And until my granddad rode off to Skipton and acquired their first lorry (teaching himself to drive it on the way home) it was all horse-drawn. My granddad was a real horseman. In fact, the first time my grandma saw my granddad he was sat on a horse, trotting past the mill gates where she was chatting with her friends. Every summer he’d take his covered wagon (‘It looked like a cowboy’s chuck wagon’) off to Appleby and return with a few gypsy-bred horses. Along with the haulage, they had a contract for snow ploughing, a particularly dangerous job. There is a tale of Granddad’s collie digging him out of a deep snowdrift he’d fallen into on the moorland road between Oakworth and Colne. Another sideline was demolition.

The bit of Keighley where West Lane and Oakworth Road meet was once called The Pinfold. Most local histories use the prefix ‘notorious’ when mentioning the place. It was an overcrowded, squalid slum – the gutters running with entrails and blood from nearby abattoirs. In the 30s my granddad, his brothers and their horses were given the contract to pull the area down. ‘They weren’t bad people in the Pinfold’ my grandma says, ‘but the Pinfold was a bad place’.

All that remains of this once-troubled locale is a pub, the Brown Cow. Three or four of the Pinfold’s cottages knocked together, it probably started out as a domestic beerhouse. It’s been in the Taylor brewery estate since 1901, and to be fair, for most of that time it’s been considered one of Keighley’s rougher pubs. In a town with a lot of tough men doing tough jobs, Taylor’s pubs weren’t always as thoroughly wholesome as they are now, and a reputation is hard to shake. As recently as the early years of this century, the Brown Cow was considered out-of-bounds by many. It was that pub on the edge of town that you never saw anyone enter or leave. But given good management, a pub can be rehabilitated. And that’s just what happened when Barry and Carol Taylor (no relation to the brewers) took over in 2003.

An ex-drayman for Taylor’s and a former soldier, the first thing Barry did was clear the ‘idiots’ out, as he put it. And as he’s the size of an American fridge freezer, it would have been a very daft idiot who argued. Then came one of the country’s first smoking bans – and then a ban on swearing. Word got around that the Brown Cow had changed. Now a trip home for me isn’t complete without a visit.  There’s the full Taylor cask range and  two guest pumps, typically with something from Moorhouse, Bateman, Acorn, Ilkley, or Salamander. Barry and Carol have picked up an impressive number of awards since taking over – several of the local CAMRA Pub Of The Season awards and runners-up CAMRA Yorkshire Pub Of The Year in 2008, losing out (by one point, it is alleged) to the mighty Kelham Island Tavern. It’s the textbook, traditional West Yorkshire town pub (albeit run by a Lancastrian).  No fancypants nu-keg stuff. No gimmicks. No arguments about sparklers or definitions of craft. Just reliable ales in first-class condition. The Carling tap was binned through lack of interest in lager – though a Kozel fount has appeared in recent months.

The Boltmakers – a ten minute walk away - gets most of Keighley’s pubby glory (see here for an article I guest blogged for Fuggled) especially for their incomparable pint of Landlord. But it’s time the Brown Cow took its share of that fame, especially for their pint of Landlord’s sibling, Ram Tam. This was once a seasonal winter warmer, though in recent years this sultry, sweetish, mellow, nutty and fruity beaut has become so popular it’s now brewed year-round, though it’s one I keep for cold winter nights.

I was in the Brown Cow a fortnight back. Putting the world to rights with friends i’ve known almost my whole life, with my back to the fire and savouring that dark ale in that excellent pub. Beer seldom tasted so good.

A Mark Twain Moment

I am that rare thing – a Yorkshireman who is delighted to be wrong. Reports of the Bell’s death were exaggerated, despite all the eyore-ish scuttlebutt from some locals. After my gloomy recent post the Twitter faction of East London and City CAMRA made a call to the Bell’s pubco, getting the reassuring news that they were in negotiations with a new tenant. The place was worryingly silent and forlorn for a couple of weeks, but a recent walk past the Bell revealed that the men in hi-viz are back supping their Carling and their Guinness. I’m not sure what they’ll make of the new tenant’s touches – the most visual being romantically lighted candles in all the windows.

One pub that really is very dead indeed is Lincolns (TIW passim), still sat halfway up the High Road like a beached galleon. When the Police kicked the dodgepots out a few years ago, it was mooted that Lincolns might revert to its traditional name of The Elms and become a decent, real-ale boozer – a role since fulfilled by the just-keeps-on-getting-better Red Lion. However, Lincoln’s is getting demolished next month to make way for housing association flats. The old place did have one last hurrah – it was made over as ‘The Taj’ – an exterior set for the filming of The Magnificent Eleven. A rumour that Robert Vaughan was later seen buying a large doner from Leytonstone Kebabish has been difficult to prove.

Heavy Haulage

Classic scooterists – banish forever those critics who call your mighty steed an underpowered moped. Here is empirical evidence that a Series 2 Lambretta is perfectly at ease lugging you and your spouse. And a sidecar with a child in it. And your luggage. And a folding caravan with a stock of pink Witney blankets. And a rowing boat.

Check out that commentary. Why does nobody sound like that any more?

The Midnight Bell

Some years ago, I was in the Aprilia Centre on Commercial Road when I heard a loud bang. I glanced through the window just in time to see a motorcycle, a motorcylist and the 1980 Vespa P200 I’d left parked outside all in the air together, like a film still of a ballet. The biker had overtaken a lorry at speed, lost control and smacked into my scooter, writing it, his bike and his kneecap off in the process. A day later I was showing my documents at Leytonstone police station. The desk sergeant clocked my CAMRA membership card.

“Like a pint, do you son?”

“Er, yeah.”

“Take my advice. Stay away from every pub on the High Road. All of ‘em. Except the Bell. The Bell’s alright.”.

That was nearly ten years ago, and the rough pubs that kept the local coppers busy are almost all gone. They’ve been converted to flats or mini-supermarkets or demolished altogether. Some have even been gentrified. You wouldn’t think twice about visiting the remaining pubs. And the sergeant was correct about the Bell – It was alright. A big, friendly 30s roadhouse bookended by the red brick former Police station and the Cuthbert-Dibble-and-Grub Fire Station. There’s been an Inn on the site since at least 1718.

Packed on a friday when the Karaoke was on, likewise on sundays with Billy Stevens’ Famous Quiz with its prizes for losers, the Bell wouldn’t be on many beer nerd’s tick list. Unless you liked Greene King, that is – two meagre pumps of decently kept Abbot and IPA – but as a beer nerd, sometimes you need a night off the Mikkeller and the Magic Rock just to swig Carling prem to the click of pool balls and the fruit machine. Punters were an affable mash of firemen, regulars from neighbouring streets and a smattering of contractors from the Olympic park. Lots of different accents, ages, modes of dress and skin tones. East London in microcosm. It had a large, L-shaped bar and smaller back room. Decor cues were from an episode of Changing Rooms, circa 1995 – but none the worse for that. Nosh was famously cheap and popular with blokes in hi-viz with betting shop pencils tucked behind an ear.

You can see the demise of some pubs coming a mile off, but often it comes as a shock. When the guv’nor of another local told me of the Bell’s demise, I thought he was joking. It seemed so unlikely for a pub reputedly making a decent profit to close so suddenly, but the Bell sold its last pint in the wee hours of New Years Day.

Exactly why it closed is a bit of mystery. Some say the landlady has retired, others say the pubco has flogged the building for housing. Whatever the reason, it’s proof positive that if you don’t keep an eye on your pubs, they can vanish.

Kernel Bogey

It’s become a bit of a tradition at work that on the day we finish for Christmas, I bring in some ‘interesting’ beers for my lager-favouring colleagues to try. I nipped over to the London Bridge Oddbins and picked up some bottles from Kernel, lovingly made one bridge further East along the Thames at Bermondsey. That afternoon we got stuck into some of their Stella IPA and M.A NZC Pale, with measures getting ever-smaller as more colleagues came and joined in. “I never knew proper beer could taste this good” said one, who normally drinks Magners. Every now and then a brewery pops up that deserves the hype. Kernel is one of them. I kept back an Export India Porter for Christmas dinner.

A few days later. The turkey’s carved. The pigs are in blankets. The bottle of Porter has been settling on a cool shelf. I gently ease the the Kernel’s cap off, and a spout of sticky black liquid blasts from the bottle, coating the microwave, the kitchen worktop, the floor and the window sill – and me – in the best part of five quid’s worth of beer. The two fingers I manage to rescue into my La Chouffe glass is swimming with sediment. Down the sink, and I reach for an Old Peculier instead. A Theakston bottle may not be as modish as Kernel, but you can be sure you won’t need a mop on standby.

One A Day

A picture a day from my first week back at work. Happy new year!

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