ABSTRACT
Because traditional brewers prized beer sales as paramount, catering was not simply unimportant but wholly irrelevant. This perspective in turn elevated licensees’ ability to control unruly, drunken, sometimes violent men as foremost in their recruitment. Orthodox brewers also saw drunkenness as integral to the industry’s prosperity. They steadfastly accepted heavy, excessive drinking as unavoidable to sustaining the brewing industry’s prosperity, thwarting efforts of critics, both inside and outside the industry, to discourage drunkenness. Upholders of the status quo who distrusted technical training and science in general, favoured instead practical experience acquired through an informal, lengthy “apprenticeship.” A new pub clientele whose femineity confronted the pervasive influence of the masculine republic, women proved central to transforming the pub from a working-class boozer into a respectable family venue. According to Progressive brewers’ diagnosis, women’s absence in the “masculine republic” contributed to the pub’s immorality, tolerance of drunkenness, penchant for violence and overall disreputable reputation. Improved public houses enthroned food as centrepiece of the interwar pub reform ethos. The traditional pub was reconfigured, enlarging its physical layout, shortening its drinking bars and widening its functions with the genteel lounge. Other trappings found nowhere else on licensed premises reinforced the atmosphere of refined culture: carpeting, cloakrooms, upholstered chairs, stylish prints, green plants, flowers, attractive décor and non-alcoholic beverages. By the end of interwar England, a new clientele of upper-working and middle-class women drank in the lounge, a new gender-neutral room where only here could they socialise with men and other women seated at tables following drinking norms generally associated with more refined individuals who patronised smoking-rooms of gentlemen’s clubs. Integral to achieving this goal was elevating licensed victualling into a respectable career with reliable, resourceful and reputable men recruited as tenants.
