Martyn Cornell’s Porter & Stout a Complete History –The Session #150

Where to start?

When Boak & Bailey, along with Alan McLeod, suggested that we focus on a part of Martyn Cornell’s magnificent tome Porter & Stout–A Complete History for The Session #150 one would have thought it would be an easy ask for me. After all, I’d written on the subject of porter previously and I was a relatively good researcher of facts, if not a great retainer of them. What could be easier? Pick a topic related to the book and write about it …

Simple, huh?

If only.

-o-

Let’s back track a little to when I first started writing about beer history. In the beginning I would consult Martyn’s website or books, as well as those of others, to see if a certain broad topic had been covered, and I quickly came to the realisation that Martyn had covered almost all of what I was hoping to write about on any given subject. I kept thinking back to that old South Park episode where everything that the denizens of that world thought up had already been done by The Simpsons.

‘The Simpsons did it!’ rang through my head but with Martyn’s name instead.

But eventually I stopped checking, as it became a little deflationary, and I began writing just from my own research and by taking a path generally less travelled by other writers. There would be the inevitable crossovers but I just hoped that I wasn’t making any huge mistakes that would engage his, or others, wrath. Anyhow, I've come to realise that coming at a subject from a different angle, or even the same one by a different writer throws up new content and opinions.

I certainly did made mistakes but I found that I was indeed covering some new ground, especially on the Irish side of things and on topics beyond the ubiquitousness of Irish porter history, and carved a little tiny niche in beer history where I still happily sit, albeit beside the giant hall that Martyn excavated out for himself. (Admittedly my efforts to create a bigger more comfortable space for myself have slackened of late, mostly due to blunt, rusty tools—although what is it they say about bad workmen?)

Anyhow, my much better half ordered and purchased Martyn’s book for me, after quite a bit of cancellations and reordering, and when it eventually arrived, I sat down and read the Irish section over a few evenings. And that’s when the issues and self-doubt began again, as he had covered almost every aspect of Irish porter history! As a fan of beer history, I was ecstatic, but as a writer of it I felt, selfishly, dejected and deflated.

Isn’t that odd?

I put the book under a pile of others and left it there, crushed under the beer histories of Cork breweries, pub lore and other vaguely beer-related publications. I wasn’t annoyed with the book by the way, or at Martyn for writing it, I was more annoyed at myself for feeling how I did and spiralling onto a ridiculous ever decreasing circle of self-doubt and self-pity, which is not a good look for a late middle-aged beer writer! Although it is perhaps more common than I think?

Anyhow, there the book remained until Boak & Bailey first mentioned it as a topic for The Session.

-o-

I never met Martyn and didn’t know him really in any way beyond Twitter and then Bluesky, or apart from the odd amicable email exchange. We certainly had some heated 'discussions' over the years but not too many, the worst being on the subject of one of my bugbears, which is the use of the dreaded and incendiary phrase ‘The British Isles’, which is like a red rag to bull to me. I had heard all the geography-based arguments before and I explained my case but we couldn’t see eye-to-eye on the subject, and that was fine in truth.

Generally, I liked the version of Martyn I knew from social media. He could be quite prickly of course but he was supportive of lots of my writing and commented on my posts, often gently admonishing me regarding things he didn’t agree with. He was passionate, prolific, and persistent, and I must say I really miss his input into beer history topics.

But back to his book and Boak & Bailey’s call to arms.

I dug out the book again, rescuing it from beneath an ever-growing stack, and I flipped through the pages with a new found need to give myself a much-needed kick in the backside and find a topic to write about. But even with some new-found energy and enthusiasm it wasn’t quite so simple, as firstly the subject of Irish porter—my general topic of interest in the book—is a vast one and multiple ideas sprang to mind only to flitter away and dissolve as I came to the realisation that he’d already covered it all, or had covered enough of to make me require a deeper dive which I wasn’t quite up too right now.

Then I reread a little nugget that reminded me of an interaction with Martyn, one where he admitted to 'borrowing' my research for his book. An interesting tiny snippet of information that had fascinated me enough to tweet about a while back, and for Martyn to comment on.

Now I had my piece; my connection.

The content of the referenced piece is on pages 81 & 82 of his book and is regarding signage advertising Irish Porter (versus English) for sale in public houses. It was an advertisement I found in a newspaper from 1779 where a sign maker was touting for business. It reads thus:

Transparent Labels for Shops, &c.

ISAAC COLLES, at his PRINT-SHOP

No. 13, Capel-street

CONTINUES to execute the elegant and much admired TRANSPARENT LABELS for SHOPS. The Utility of the above Transparencies are obvious, shewing[sic] the Name and Profession conspicuously at Night, when Shew-Boards cannot be seen. He likewise paints Lables on TIN or Copper for the Day, in plain or gilt Letters.

Said COLLES particularly recommends it to the Publicans, who have resolved to sell Irish Porter, to have these useful Transparencies fixed to the windows, as they can be seen at Night, the Time usually allotted for Porter-drinking.

I put this up on my feed at that time and I got a reply from Martyn.

‘Thank you; stolen!’

So you see I definitely contributed to this book! Admittedly, in a very minor way. (Although I have a sneaking suspicion that he also gathered other snippets and dates from my posts and pieces!?)

The advertisement, which Martyn, rightly, didn’t focus too much on, but might be the first ‘lit’ beer advertising sign in Ireland.

The idea of transparent, backlit signs could be assumed to be a relatively modern invention, but here we have a signmaker purporting to be making some in the 18th century. I decide to do some more digging and seemingly the most common way to create a transparent material in order to write lettering on was to coat thin paper or fabric with a varnish-like substance. You can see how this would indeed create an opaque surface, and certainly ‘transparent’ enough for it to be seen from outside a window in a well-lit public house. Oil could also be used, but that might make the painting of the material more difficult. Or perhaps oil could be mixed with pigment to do the lettering and the words themselves would then be highlighted? (Glass was another option but given the wording used I don’t believe that was used in this case.)

Transparent paper could be purchased readily in England at this time too, and tellingly from a varnish maker, so it was a known practice as advertised in The Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette in April 1788

Sadly, I can find no surviving examples of this type of signage but there are a few images of paintings done in such a way on the internet, seemingly there was a small craze for them around the time of that advertisement.

-o-

So that’s my own personal connection to the book. Martyn didn’t credit me, but in fairness he did thank me and admitted he was stealing it!

I also think he may have been baiting me by his use of that term ‘The British Isles’ in the book.

Trust him to have the last word.

Liam K

Pub Fiction: Something Special in McDaids - The Session #149

 

Seamie sat at the back of the small lounge bar, his elbows resting on the table as he nursed his bottle of stout, his third of the afternoon. They had draught porter here of course, and it was kept in good order in fairness, but he preferred the ritual pour - and the strength and tart dryness - of the stout instead. He’d take a couple of half-pint bottles over a pint of plain any day. And as for the shiny new taps? Well, he had no idea how they worked and didn’t much care. The so-called swingin’ sixties how are ya, everything was changing, and not for the better. And Watney’s? Those little red barrels of English piss were propped up on almost all the bars he frequented now. He didn’t care much for ale anyway, apart from the odd barley-wine of a cold night.

His stomach rumbled, but it was drowned out by the chattering of the men propping up the counter and the clatter of barmen behind it. At this time of the day the place was full of journalists and businessmen grabbing a quick pint before heading to their cosy homes. They were talking their usual shite of course, of politics and sport, both subjects Seamie had no interest in. Anyway, he was as likely to sway public opinion by getting involved in such talk about which TD should do what as he was to appear on the pitch in Croke Park.

He hadn’t eaten today. Not that that was an unusual occurrence, as most days he’d do without breakfast or lunch, partly because of disinterest but also because he needed to mind the few bob he earned from the council for sweeping the streets. Anyway, there was rarely any food in the little bedsit he shared with his brother Iggy near the canal. Iggy didn’t work, or couldn’t work, ever since he was let go from the biscuit factory for being too slow. Not physically slow but mentally slow, or maybe both. Since then all he did was sit in the big chair by the window, looking out at the rare barges that passed by and crying. Iggy cried a lot.

Seamie heard a commotion as two men walked in and were greeted by those gathered at the bar as if they were old friends. He recognised one of them, a spectacled so-called poet that seemed to often be in bother. Seamie had read some of his stuff but didn’t care for it. He preferred classics like those in a little treasured book of 19th century poets he kept in the breast pocket of his overcoat. James Clarence Mangan, now he was a real poet with a proper poet’s name to boot. He never wrote about stony grey shite …

His stomach rumbled again, louder this time and he coughed to cover the sound, not that anyone was paying him a blind bit of attention as the writer held court.

He counted the few coins he had in his pocket, he had enough for his favourite meal with a few pence left over. He raised himself from the bench he was sat on and hobbled to the side of the bar.

‘Peter?’

One of the barmen broke off from conversation with a customer and went to him.

‘Alright Seamie? Another bottle?’ he said as he reached for the shelf.

‘No, no. Can I get a Bovril and a toasted sandwich?’

‘God you can Seamie, sure. The toasted special?’

‘Aye, perfect. Lovely’ He counted out his coins and handed them to the barman. 

He paused. He had just enough left.

‘I will take that stout Peter, just don’t open it.’

He handed over the rest of his coins.

‘I’ll drop them down to you.’

Seamie returned to his seat and finished the last of his stout while he waited for his sandwich, trying not to listen to the insufferable bar talk that had reached a new level of pompous stupidity. Why were men so loud and obnoxious at times?

The barman arrived with the mug of Bovril and a toasted sandwich on a plate with a knife. He placed the bottle of unopened stout on table and went back to chatting with the now large throng that crowded the counter. Seamie carefully cut the sandwich in half and watched the cheese ooze out from the edge. There were lads that would eulogise about a pint of stout but surely a decent sandwich deserved some special words too? If Seamie could only write then he’d have penned an ode to the toasted special. There was something about the combination of cheese, ham, onion and tomato shielded between two slices of overdone toast that suited a public house, especially with a mug of Bovril. That, in fact, was your only man.

Seamie slurped his hot drink and nibbled at his half sandwich, savouring it, relishing it and appreciating how something so simple could change your mood. He finished his Bovril and sat back, staring out past the rounded windows into the darkening sky. He wanted to stay a bit longer, but knew he couldn’t.

Taking a hanky from his back pocket he wrapped the rest of the sandwich carefully and stored it in the deep pockets of his well-worn overcoat before slipping the unopened bottle of stout into the other. 

He headed for the door.

‘See you Seamie,’ said Peter.

‘See you lad,’ he replied.

He stopped and adjusted his overcoat before opening the door, his elbow just jutting out enough to spill some of the whiskey that the poet was raising to his lips as he leaned against the door jam.

The door swung shut on shouts and insults as he heading back towards the canal, with both hands in his overcoat, minding Iggy’s supper.

(The above images of McDaid's public house from 1965 were on the Dublin City Digital Library website archive, and I previously posted it on Twitter with a link. That link appears broken and the archive has moved but is from their collection and used here for non-commercial purposes. It was wrongly reversed in the archive so I fixed and enhanced it at the time.)

This was for a call to action on pub food for this month's The Session by David Jesudason here.

Please note, all written content and the research involved in publishing it here is my own unless otherwise stated and cannot be reproduced elsewhere without permission, full credit to its sources, and a link back to this post. DO NOT STEAL THIS CONTENT!

Beckett on Bars: The Session #147

There’s no shortage of mentions and images of Irish pubs and beers in the literature and artworks of this country, so when Phil Cook suggested the theme for this month’s The Session - basically to discuss something beer-related in art or fiction - selecting something to write about wasn’t difficult. The issue was more so to find something that hadn’t been written about before, or at least not to the point of readers skimming past it by it being just another misplaced or misinformed ode-to-the-ode ‘The Pint of Plain’ or another look at the Mr. Spock-like character in Harry Kernoff’s ‘A Bird Never Flew on One Wing.’ Not that these are not important and much-loved works, but they hardly warrant another revisit by me.

And where’s ‘here’? Well, The Session was originally conceived in 2007 by Stan Hieronymus and Jay Brooks as a way of pulling together a collection of blogposts from different beer writers on a single topic once a month, and hosted by a different writer each time who chooses a topic. It finished in 2018 but has since made a revenantial appearance thanks to Alan McLeod - this being #147, or #2.6 depending on whether you see it as a continuation of the old or the start of a new series.

This is my first proper contribution to the collection of writings.

-o-

Around the time when this month’s theme was announced I had acquired a copy of Samuel Beckett’s first novel called ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’ as once more I tried to delve into the works of The Big Irish Writers of the early 20th century. So far, I had failed with Joyce (apart from Dubliners), couldn’t find any huge love for Behan’s fictional work, O’ Casey was too theatrical for my taste, and O’Brien/O’Nolan/Na gCopaleen/etc. had been quite hit and miss. Beckett’s works didn’t seem to hold out any more hope for grabbing and holding on to my clearly substandard intellect but seeing as ‘More Pricks’ was a series of short stories like Dubliners I decided to give it a try.

It is a collection of related tales woven around a character called Belacqua Shuah and is set in and around Dublin, presumably in the early parts of the 20th century. The main protagonist is a somewhat unlovable character - for the reader at least -  who has some unfortunate relationships and a penchant for gorgonzola, mustard and cayenne sandwiches on blackened toast - possibly his most likeable attribute. The book itself would have been classed quite risqué in places at the time it was first published in 1934. Indeed it was seemingly banned in Ireland at that time, which is hardly a shocker given how the country was firmly in the grip of the clergy then as many tried desperately to find an upper level hierarchical body to replace the lost overlords in our relatively new country - quasi-militant Catholicism filled that void quite nicely for some. Even today it might certainly be cancelled for the latent misogyny that appears on occasion in its pages, although that’s not a reason for any rational person to ban, cancel or indeed, burn it.

Anyhow, most of the book is certainly quite readable and entertaining, although in parts it suffers from the same problem I have with the syntax, grammar and wording used by certain Irish writers, where some passages appear to have been translated into a vocally similar sounding but unfamiliar language by one person just using just a dictionary, before being translated back to English by another separate hand who similarly has no knowledge of the language into which they are translating, and who lazily decides to leave a few non-English words in the text to boot. (I am fully convinced that you could read out loud passages of Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, to a non-English speaker in Antwerp and they would nod along enthusiastically to whatever they were apparently hearing in their own dialect, regardless of what it meant in English.) The result is something that you can, at a push, make sense of and understand but it requires a lot of hard work on the reader’s part and can ruin the flow and entertainment that should be derived from reading. (And yes, dear reader, I’m hardly one to talk about jittery, over-punctuated, writing styles and invented words I know …)

But even allowing for my shoddy intellectual capability to understand parts of this book there are flashes of pure brilliance that even I can recognise, and one such passage is the piece of writing I want to highlight for this month’s The Session.

-o-

In the third chapter of the book, titled ‘Ding-Dong,’ our sub-hero is out on the town one evening and having walked up Pearse Street has ‘turned left into Lombard Street’ and ‘entered a public house.’ This may have been the public house now known as The Lombard, whose bar entrance appears to have been just across the road after the turn, but quite possibly was the pub that sat on the site where The Windjammer now is, further down the road at the corner of Townsend Street but with an entrance on Lombard Street. Certainly given Beckett’s description of ‘the rough but kindly habitués of the house, recruited for the most part from among dockers, railwaymen and vague joxers on the dole’ it might perhaps sound like the latter at the time but clues are scarce.

Regardless, it was the account of his experience within the establishment that grabbed my attention the most, just before anxiety and despondency hit him as he contemplated the day’s events and his general future:

Sitting in this crapulent den, drinking his drink, he gradually ceased to see its furnishings with pleasure, the bottles, representing centuries of loving research, the stools, the counter, the powerful screws, the shining phalanx of the pulls of the beer-engines, all cunningly devised and elaborated to further the relations between purveyor and consumer in this domain. The bottles drawn and emptied in a twinkling, the casks responding to the slightest pressure on their joysticks, the weary proletarians at rest on arse and elbow, the cash-register that never complains, the graceful curates flying from customer to customer, all this made up a spectacle which Belacqua was used to take delight and chose to see a pleasant instance of machinery decently subservient to appetite. A great major symphony of supply and demand, effect and cause, fulcrate on the middle C of the counter and waxing, as it proceeded, in the charming harmonies of blasphemy and broken glass and all the aliquots of fatigue and ebriety. So that he would say that the place where he could come to anchor and be happy was a low public house and that all the wearisome tactics of gress and dud Beethoven would be done away with if only he could spend his life in such a place. But as they closed at ten, and as residence and good faith were viewed as incompatible, and as in any case he had not means to consecrate his life to stasis, even in the meanest bar, he supposed he must be content to indulge this whim from time to time, and return thanks for such sporadic mercy.*

Although even the latter parts of this passage suffer from the 'Flemishisation' that I mentioned earlier, it is pure prose and poetry combined. Something perhaps that should be studied and discussed by students in schools throughout this and other lands. We have poetic parts such as the ‘charming harmonies of blasphemy and broken glass’ and an almost religious aspect to his thoughts and feelings as he sat drinking his porter. It is descriptive to an extreme in how it portrays an early 20th century urban public house, with mentions of beer engines, cork-pullers, bar staff known as ‘graceful curates’ and customers ‘at rest on arse and elbow.’ The wording keenly reflects how this pub was seen to be a refuge and place of escape, albeit with some reservations, at that time. Superb stuff. 

I am not sure it requires much more discussion, perhaps just a second reading and maybe a third For me it is probably the best written piece on drinking and public houses that I have so far encountered, and it is worth nothing that I first read the passage in a public house on a quiet Saturday afternoon, at rest on arse and elbow.

So, I shall say no more, just go back and read it again, and again ...

Liam

*I quote this piece from the book purely for educational and non-commercial reasons, some hopefully I will not get in trouble with the executors of Beckett’s estate!?

Please note, all written content and the research involved in publishing it here is my own unless otherwise stated and cannot be reproduced elsewhere without permission, full credit to its sources, and a link back to this post. The quoted piece from Beckett's More Pricks than Kicks appears on pages 39 & 40 of the Picador 1974 edition. DO NOT STEAL THIS CONTENT!