TAKE COURAGE - or a better beer!

TAKE COURAGE

or a better beer!

As my crime stories are set in the 1950s, much of the action takes place in pubs. In those day, drink-driving was hardly frowned upon and even policemen were known to imbibe on or off-duty.

Some beers were just about acceptable - Courage bitter for instance, but others, despite being widely drunk, were frowned upon by beer connoisseurs. Watney's Red Barrel, introduced in 1931, was an export keg beer that could travel long distances as it was filtered and pasteurised, probably represented the nadir of bitter drinking. 

Style and Winch was one of the older breweries. It was registered in March 1899 as merger between A F Style & Co with Edward Winch & Sons Ltd and had a total of 356 public houses. Another thing which helps to establish the period is to describe the vessels that were used for drinking the beer and these were often pewter tankards.

Here is an extract from BLOOD ON THE TIDE, describing the Shipwrights Arms the pub at Compass Point (Rye Harbour).

The Shipwrights Arms was a modest building, with stone walls, tiny recessed windows and a pantiled roof. It sat right at the end of the quay, next to the station, hunkered down against the weather. It had withstood any number of gales and powerful storms and had survived, battered but unbowed. Inside was a small, low-ceilinged room, the once white paintwork now the colour of nicotine, stained dark from years of coal fires and the smoke of a lifetime of tobacco pipes. The woodwork was an even deeper colour, with a tar-like quality. Indeed, tar may well have been used as a ready substitute for paint. The room served as the solitary bar and a door marked PRIVATE led to Alf’s compact accommodation. The landlord was far from being the archetypal mine host. Rangy and thin, he barely spoke more than a sentence at a time, always wore a suit and tie and had bookshelves crammed with classics in his living room. He stood, impassive, in front of a brace of barrels of ale sitting on a rack behind the wooden counter. There was a foxed mirror on the wall above a shelf, reflecting a line of brown bottles. Below the barrels, shelves held clean, upturned glasses; pints and halves. The floor was bare floorboards, with a dusting of sawdust and sand and apart from a couple of stools, the only other seating was comprised of three chairs that had seen better days, arranged around a battered tin-topped table, next to the unlit fire.

The morning sun slanted through the small windows, dust motes dancing in the rays. An old clock ticked on the wall, and apart from the occasional squeak as Alf polished glasses, all was tranquil.