ABSTRACT
Interpreters of brewer/retail relations divided into two distinct groups: optimists who pointed to lengthy queues of applicants for tenancies, longevity of tenants and their families at some licensed premises, some retailers’ social mobility and low turnover of pubs and beerhouses as proof that brewers treated tenants fairly and so substantiated the mystique of El Dorado; and pessimists who portrayed brewers as heartlessly exploiting tenants through what became an oppressive, all-encompassing tied-house system to maximise profits, and cited high turnover of tenants, bankruptcies, premature deaths, suicides, alcoholism, wives undertaking outside employment and low social mobility as compelling evidence of El Dorado’s fraudulent reputation. Whether English publicans achieved social mobility depended not merely on their status as inheritors, but on how carefully they shunned tenancies of uneconomic pubs. Ability to unmask a deceptively advertised pub as El Dorado required inside knowledge of licensed victualling. Probated wills show that the average retailer who thought that running a pub would make him rich—and rich without too much effort—was sadly mistaken. For the archetypal publican, running the local was exceedingly precarious, with the fortunate few attaining real affluence, while most subsidised unprofitable pubs, too often bankrupting them. World War I redefined what constituted a licensed victualler, though primarily in the thriving south and larger midland cities, such as suburban Birmingham. Critical to the interwar improved pub was a clientele with a certain degree of prosperity to spend money in establishments with socially refined lounges. It might have been possible to reach a position where most pubs had been improved, but that bourgeois version of El Dorado had certainly not been attained in the depressed north by 1939. In sustaining a steady flow of new tenants, the beguiling El Dorado mystique helped obscure a stark reality—extraordinary turnovers of tenants in uneconomic pubs. Pivotal to its longevity and out of self-interest, brewers trumpeted the riches beckoning the ambitious. Meanwhile, successful inheritors, together with athletes and those with trade connections, upheld the glorious image that ultimately proved so elusive to the gullible.
