INTRODUCTION

THE TWO WORLD WARS and the interwar years comprised a period of major discontinuity in British and Scottish history. The two world wars were marked by heavy loss of life in combat and, in the case of World War II, by civilian casualties, such as the German bombing of Clydebank in March 1941. Civilian casualties per head of population in World War II, however, were lower in Scotland than in England and Wales. On the other side of the coin, both wars saw a boost for the Scottish economy, as demand for ships and armaments provided work for the Clydeside shipyards and the heavy industries of central Scotland. Around 250,000 Scots worked in war-related industries in the Clyde basin during World War I, and the west of Scotland was transformed into ‘a vast arsenal for the mass production of ships, shells, guns and other munitions’. Both wars were ‘total wars’, and women were drafted into previously all-male occupations as the men left to join the armed forces. This led to a gradual improvement in the status of women, marked most obviously at the end of World War I by the Representation of the People Act of 1918 which extended the vote to all adult males over twenty-one and all women over the age of thirty.

The two world wars saw an extension of state control into many aspects of life, from the building of large national munitions factories, nationalisation of parts of the drink trade and requisitioning of buildings, including hotels, for the armed forces, hospitals and other government use in World War I, to blackout regulations, food rationing, evacuation, billeting of troops and children, and further requisitioning in World War II. Both world wars were extremely expensive, and government debt to pay for them rose to record levels, particularly by the end of World War II when the country was practically bankrupt. During World War I, patriotic Scots bought larger numbers of war bonds proportionately than the rest of the United Kingdom.

INTRODUCTION

THE ELECTION OF a majority Labour government at Westminster in 1945 ushered in an era of rapid social and political change, as returning servicemen and servicewomen voted for a change of government from the wartime coalition to a Labour Party that had campaigned on a platform of radical change. The heavy defeat of the Conservatives under Winston Churchill, the wartime leader of the country, had been unexpected, and the new Labour government set in train an ambitious programme which involved the nationalisation of key parts of the economy, such as railways, coal mining, electricity supply and so on, and reforms in health, education and social security, based on the Beveridge Report of 1942. From 1945 to 1951, the Labour government continued to intervene in many areas of British life that were previously unregulated, including the licensed trade, partly as a result of ideological conviction, partly as a continuation of wartime regulation.

Rationing, which had been introduced in wartime, continued through the 1940s and was ended only by the new Conservative government at Westminster in the early 1950s. The 1950s saw high employment and a modest increase in levels of affluence. The Scottish economy began a long drawn-out change from one dominated by employment in manufacturing industry to a service-based economy. The share of the service sector in employment in Scotland rose from 24 per cent in 1951 to 33 per cent in 1971, 66 per cent in 1991 and 70 per cent in 2000. This was linked to a rise in female, often part-time, employment and, by the mid 1990s, there were more women than men in the Scottish workforce, though many of them worked part-time. The proportion of married women in the female workforce rose dramatically from only 23.4 per cent in 1951 to 60.45 per cent by 1991. These changes in society, together with legislative changes, such as drink-driving laws and the smoking ban, had a profound effect on Scottish drinking places, and the stand-up, men-only pub faced a real challenge to its survival by the early years of the twenty-first century.

Key to locations:

1. The Bluebell Inn, 10 High Street, Annan, Dumfriesshire DG12 6AG

2. The Globe Inn, 56 High Street, Dumfries DG1 2JA

3. Poosie Nansie's Inn, 21 Loudoun Street, Mauchline, Ayrshire KA5 5BA

4. The Crook Inn, Tweedsmuir, Scottish Borders ML12 6QN

5. Glasgow – Horseshoe Bar, G2 5AE; Lauriston Bar, G5 9HU; Lismore Bar, G11 6UN

6. The Four Marys, 65–67 High Street, Linlithgow, West Lothian EH 49 7ED

7. The Hawes Inn, 7 Newhalls Road, South Queensferry, West Lothian EH30 9TA

8. Edinburgh – Bennet's Bar, EH3 9LG; The Blue Blazer, EH3 9DX; Guildford Arms, EH2 2AA; (Grosvenor) Maybury Casino, EH12 8NE; Oxford Bar, EH2 4JB; Sheep Heid Inn, Duddingston EH15 3QA

9. Prestoungrange Gothenburg Tavern, 227 High Street, Prestonpans, East Lothian EH32 9BE

10. The Golden Lion Hotel, 8–10 King Street, Stirling FK8 1DQ

11. The Salutation Hotel, 30–34 South Street, Perth PH2 8PH

12. Dundee – Phoenix Bar, DD1 4DH; Speedwell Bar, DD2 1AS; The Shand Bar (formerly the Jimmy Shand), Dickson Avenue, Menzieshill DD2 4HJ

13. Moulin Hotel, Moulin, Pitlochry, Perthshire PH16 5EH

14. Prince of Wales, 7–11 St Nicholas Lane, Aberdeen AB10 1HF

15. Stein Inn, Waternish, Skye IV55 8GA

16. Plough Inn, Rosemarkie, Inverness-shire IV10 8UF

17. The Old Inn, Gairloch, Wester Ross IV21 2BD

18. The Old Ship Inn, 1 North Ness, Hoy, Orkney KW16 (no longer an inn)

THE SCOTS HAVE LONG had a problematic relationship with alcohol. The quotation above from the Reverend John Bruce, minister of Forfar, shows that, even before the rise of the temperance movement in the 1820s, ministers of the Church of Scotland were critical of the role played by ale houses, dram shops and tippling huts in the lives of their parishioners. The (Old) Statistical Accounts, published in the 1790s on a parish-by-parish basis, are full of criticisms by Presbyterian ministers of rising levels of crime, drunkenness, alcoholism and consequent impoverishment of families, as a result of the replacement of beer by whisky as the drink of choice for the masses. Their anxieties were strengthened because this was a period of rapid social and economic change, with large-scale population growth and population movement, growing urbanisation and industrialisation, accompanied by widening social divisions. It was also a period in which existing social and political orthodoxies were being challenged, as the examples of American independence and revolutionary France lent encouragement to republicans, secularists and others who questioned the existing social, religious and political order. Pubs and ale houses were closely involved in these changes, as public spaces, often below the radar of the authorities, where artisans, labourers, craftsmen, farmers, shopkeepers and others could meet to discuss matters including economics, work, religion and politics, as well as local gossip. For example, the Reverend John Scott of Perth, a substantial burgh with a population of 19,800 in 1792, condemned ‘the lamentable effects which happen to some persons, from their being too ready to leave their loom, or their workshop, to meet in companies, or in clubs, or in the ale house.’

INTRODUCTION

FOR MOST OF THE period between 1790 and 1815 Britain was at war with France. This led to the recruitment of large numbers of men for the army and navy and the disruption of supplies of food and drink, including wine, brandy and rum, as well as other goods from mainland Europe, the Caribbean and North America. With the deposition of Louis XVI in September 1792, his execution the following year, and the formation of a French Republic along revolutionary principles, the authorities in Britain came down hard on any attempts by the lower orders or the middle classes to campaign for social and political change. The end of the French wars brought economic depression and hardship, as large numbers of demobilised soldiers and sailors returned home. This was the background to events, such as Peterloo (1819) and the Cato Street Conspiracy (1820) in England, and the Radical War (1820) in Scotland.

The fear of foreign invasion during the Napoleonic period led, in 1805, to an outburst of patriotism among the licensed trade in Perth. An association of Perth landlords was formed called ‘The Loyal Perth Landlords’ Defence against Invasion or No Accommodation for Napoleon’. Most of the pubs in the centre of Perth were members of this patriotic organisation, including the Ship Inn, the Salutation, the Black Cow, the Bluebell, the Ewe and Lamb, the King's Arms and no less than four Lions, Black, White, Red and Golden.

RISING LIVING STANDARDS AND CHANGING TASTES

As living standards rose in the late eighteenth century, significant changes were taking place in the consumption of alcohol in Scotland. The consumption of whisky and strong ale increased at the expense of weak two-penny ale, and more wine and rum were drunk in middle-class households and taverns. By the 1790s, there was an increasing number of commercial breweries in Glasgow, and Glasgow-brewed porter was ‘now much more drunk in public houses by tradesmen, than formerly’ which had ‘diminished the consumption of whisky’. Porter was popular in Perth but mainly ‘among the higher classes for their forenoon refreshment’. A similar situation was found in Stirling where the poor drank small beer, ‘a thin vapid, sour stuff’, or whisky and ‘the more opulent’ drank English porter.

DAVID WALKER, FORMER Chief Inspector for Historic Scotland, who spent a lifetime studying and recording historic buildings, came to the conclusion that ‘no surviving building in Scotland, proven to have been built as an inn, is older than the seventeenth century’, though earlier origins are claimed for a number of sites, including Tarbert, Loch Lomond, Dunbartonshire, which has a recorded history dating back to the sixteenth century. The problem is that, though some Scottish pubs claim to have been founded from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, they have usually been rebuilt on the site of an earlier building or housed in an older building that was not built as an inn or a pub. In Edinburgh, the White Hart Inn at 34 Grassmarket is one of the oldest surviving inns in the capital, dating back to 1516, though only the cellars survive from this time, the present building dating from 1740.

Some of the oldest inn and pub buildings in Scotland are situated in historic burghs, away from the pressures of redevelopment to be found in cities and larger urban centres. In Haddington, East Lothian, the former Bluebell Inn is a three-storeyed building, with a corbelled stair tower at the front, which dates from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries. In the royal burgh of Falkland in Fife, the Stag Inn is dated 1630, while the Falkland Arms, another old inn, has an inscription dated 1607, from when it was a house. Falkland is the likely home of Kind Kittock, the Fife alewife or ‘Guddame’, the central character of William Dunbar's poem The Ballad of Kind Kittock, so it seems an appropriate place to find early inns. In another royal burgh, Linlithgow in West Lothian, the Four Marys pub on the High Street opposite Linlithgow Palace is housed in a building dating back to about 1500, though it began life as a house and was a chemist's shop in the nineteenth century.

At Laurencekirk in Kincardineshire, the Boar's Head, now the Gardenstone Arms, has a date stone of 1638 but was rebuilt by Lord Gardenstone between 1770 and 1778 as part of a planned village. In Moffat, Dumfriesshire, the oldest inn is the Black Bull, opposite the parish church.