The 1986 Good Beer Guide

Overwhelmed with a request to follow the triumph of the 1985 post with a sequel, I offer you the 1986 Good Beer Guide, complete with details on how pubs were selected.

No change there?

There were some familiar themes: ‘the past twelve months were probably the blackest period in British brewing since CAMRA was set up’ as the takeover and closure of breweries such as Border, Simpkiss and Yates and Jackson were lamented. It also foretold the current crisis.

I always enjoyed the satirical explanatory key that was a feature of editions until 2018, since when it has been played straight.

Looking back the 1980s were a bit of a wasteland really. Britain’s industrial base was being wiped out, ripping the hearts out of so many of our towns and cities, and the music was pretty rubbish. Apart from The Chicken Song obviously.

Reviewing my own performance for 1986 some classic pubs visited for the first time. The Square and Compass at Worth Matravers provided ample opportunity to bang your head on the low beams. Built in 1776 and originally two cottages, it is one of only nine pubs to appear in every edition of the Guide.

Pic: Dorset Echo

As if it didn’t already have enough to commend it, the landlord in 2015 built Woodhenge in a neighbouring field. He didn’t apply for planning permission and after a complaint was told it could only stay for two years. A very English solution.

I went to the Borve Brewhouse on Isle of Lewis, remote even by Hebridean standards.

The Western Isles were still firmly in the grip of the somewhat ironically named Free Church of Scotland. No pubs were allowed to be open on Sundays and even the swings in the playpark were chained up. Church services forbade the use of musical instruments – narrowly overturned in 2010 – and some congregations still only sing psalms. The result is hauntingly beautiful https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6S3XDunMj2Y

I kept a bottle.

The brewery later moved to Aberdeenshire where you had to go to the brewer’s house to gain entry. My recording remained uncharacteristically neat.

The Tan Hill Inn is Britain’s highest at 1732 feet (528 metres). It pips the Cat and Fiddle to the title by a mere 42 feet in what was a bitterly fought contest. It was originally called the King’s Pit as it was built to lubricate coal miners. The last mine in the area closed on 1929 but the pub survived, later flourishing as a film scene for such 1980s classics as Ted Moult advertising Everest double glazing. I guarantee most people over a certain age can remember the slogan that went with it.

Pic: Northern Echo

Let’s hope it reopens in time to see Ferocious Dog close the Highest Festival in July.

I regret not making it to Sheffield’s Golden Perch, ‘Spartan quiet street corner pub. Bar Billiards. London “Fives” dartboard in no smoking room’. It was previously The Albion, run by an Irish-Jamaican couple and popular with domino-playing Jamaicans who worked at the steelworks. Also known as an East End board, it had no number one so instead of 501, games started at 505. It pre-dates the familiar Clock Board – invented in 1890 by a fairground showman from Bury – by many years. The article on the website below lists pubs where these boards could still be found.

Pic: Patrickchaplin.com

Inevitably many of the pubs listed are long gone among them The Falchion in Darlington named, according to the Guide, after a ‘worm-killing sword’. The Toxteth (Collins’s) in Park Street, Liverpool had a description you won’t see in the Good Beer Guide, or any other Guide, again: ‘boxing memorabilia in bar; stripper in lounge Sunday lunchtimes’.

One magnificent Edwardian gin palace I recall clearly is the still standing, but neglected and closed since 2008, Red Lion on Soho Road, Handsworth. It’s a listed building with a cupola and a terracotta facade.

From 1949 business-live.co.uk

The interior is gorgeous. I am so glad I went there but how good would it be to see it restored and open again?

Pics from
1995 by Martin Mullaney

From unaccompanied Gaelic psalms to dubious Liverpudlian lunchtimes, old Good Beer Guides are a wonderful journey through social history. And that’s why I love them.