A couple of beers from yesteryear

I picked up a couple of beers from the supermarket the other day which were a common sight in pubs when I was younger, Newcastle Brown Ale and Mackeson's Stout, both of which have now become something of a "ghost brand": still produced, albeit in much lower volumes than before, but never advertised or promoted.

I occasionally drank Newcastle Brown Ale as a student in the early nineties, when it became something of a cult beer and was regularly stocked by student union bars (it also pops up in most episodes of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, rereuns of which I've been watching on That's TV). Since then, Heineken has bought Scottish & Newcastle, demolished the former Federation Brewery in Gateshead where the beer had ended up, and moved production to John Smith's in North Yorkshire. I'm not sure if it's the move from Tyneside to Tadcaster, but it seems much smoother and blander now, although still with a decent head and a slightly sulphurous aftertaste that is quite appealing and reminded me of the famous "Burton snatch" you get in the pale ales brewed there, Draught Bass and Marston's Pedigree.

The first pub in drank in as a teenager, a Whitbread house that finally closed its doors this summer, stocked bottles of Mackeson's Stout., a beer they had acquired from a brewery in Kent which they bought, and eventually shut down, turning it into a national brand (the dairy churn on the label of the bottle indicated that it contained lactose, a sugar derived from milk). Milk stout is traditionally associated with either pregnant women and nursing mothers, due to its supposed health properties, or older ladies, no doubt because of its low strength and sweetness. The gossipy trio who supped it in the snug of the Rovers Return in early episodes of Coronation Street fit the latter archetype, although it was also the favourite drink of one of my fellow teenage pubgoers, rather the bitter, lager, Guinness and cider everyone else ordered, and who regularly took bottles of it home with her. I quite enjoyed my first taste of it, which comes now out of a can rather than a bottle: a dark brown, rubyish colour similar to Guinness, a thick, off white head, an aroma of brown sugar, bit of a thin mouthfeel, and slightly roasty, not at all sweet really (I'm still on the look out for some Whitbread Gold Label barley wine so, like Ron Pattinson at Shut Up About Barclay Perkins, I can make a Mackeson's and Gold Label black and tan).

Castle Kings of the Mild Frontier

I went to the Castle in Macclesfield yesterday afternoon, which had been voted best pub of Mild Magic, the annual sticker trail organised by my local CAMRA branch, Stockport and South Manchester, and extended to the former Cheshire silk town for the first time this year. The owner of the Black Country brewery Sarah Hughes was also there to pick up the best mild award for their 6% beer Dark Ruby.

I haven't been to the Castle for a decade, since when it's shut, changed hands and been refurbished. Having the same name, it always brings to my mind the final, unfinished, novel by Franz Kafka, especially as its historic multi room interior mirrors that of the village inn where the young surveyor arrives late on a winter night at the beginning of the book. The dark strong beer we were drinking wouldn't look out of place in Kafka's native Czech land of Bohemia either.

I've only been to the Beacon, the pub in Sedgley where it's brewed, once, back in 2012, but that too is something of a time capsule, especially the front room on the right where I sat, which is essentially unchanged since the twenties.

To Look for America

There seem to have been quite a few films about US politics on TV in the last month or so, mostly on specialist channels Film Four and Talking Pictures TV, but also on BBC Four (as part of an evening marking the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation as President). November's upcoming presidential election has no doubt influenced the programme schedulers in selecting some of these films too. It prompted me to make a list of my own top ten films about mainstream US politics, the left and labour movement.

Advise and Consent 

A congressional hearing to confirm a liberal President's nominee for high office is enlivened by Charles Laughton, in his final screen appearance, as a conservative Southern Democrat digging into his past.

All the King's Men

The main character, Willie Stark, is a loosely disguised portrait of Louisiana Democratic governor Huey Long, a populist demagogue whose authoritarian rule leads to his assassination (for US sports fans, there are also some college football scenes involving his son).

All the President's Men

Probably my favourite of all, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford play Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward investigating the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building and its cover-up by the White House. Jason Robards steals every scene he's in as Post editor Ben Bradlee.

The Best Man

With a screenplay by Gore Vidal, this also concerns skeletons in the past of political candidates, at the open convention of an unnamed party selecting a nominee after the incumbent President decides not to seek re-election on health grounds.

Blue Collar 

A gritty tale about racism and union corruption in a Detroit car plant which stars Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto and Richard Pryor, and also has a superb blues soundtrack.

Hoffa

Jack Nicholson as the charismatic Mafia-connected boss of the Teamsters truck drivers' union Jimmy Hoffa and Danny DeVito as his loyal lieutenant (I once drove past the American football stadium in New Jersey beneath which Hoffa's body was allegedly buried after he fell out with the Mob and was whacked by hitman, and probably my distant relation, Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran).

The Last Hurrah 

A comedy in which Spencer Tracy plays the Irish-American boss of a Democratic political machine in a Northern city whose power is based on dispensing patronage through an army of ward heelers.

Matewan

John Sayles' masterful account of a miners' strike in West Virginia, with Chris Cooper as the union organiser who overcomes ethnic divisions between the workers and those brought in by the coal company to break their strike.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 

A slightly saccharine, but still entertaining, film by director Frank Capra, with James Stewart playing a naive youth leader unexpectedly chosen to replace one of his state's senators, and ending with the famous filibuster scene in which his faith in American democracy is restored.

Reds

A personal project by Warren Beatty based on John Reed's book Ten Days That Shook the World about the Russian Revolution, and featuring interviews with pre-World War I US radicals (also the film whose late night showing on BBC Two in 1997 was interrupted by a news flash saying that Princess Diana had been injured in a car crash in Paris).

No smoke without ire

Opinion polls seem to show a narrow majority in favour of the government's proposed ban on smoking outside pubs. The correlation seems to be that if something is potentially unhealthy and costs the NHS money (irrespective of the revenue raised from it) the consumption of it should be restricted, or ideally banned, a dangerously authoritarian idea which could easily be applied to many other things, especially those already deemed harmful by public health professionals, notably alcohol and fast food.

The original ban on smoking in indoor spaces could be justified by the protection of others from the effects of passive smoking, in particular pub staff, but that doesn't apply here. It's hard to see any other motivation for it apart from middle class distaste for and disapproval of unhealthy working class habits.

If this ban goes ahead, one of three things will happen: smokers will stop going to pubs, the time and money spent on constructing outdoor areas for them there will have been wasted, and inevitably more will shut, especially wet led ones; smokers will stand just beyond the boundary of the pub premises, potentially causing a nuisance to pedestrians and other businesses; or they will find the darkest corner of the beer garden in which to flout the ban, leading to awkward confrontations between pub staff and their customers who will rightly wonder what harm they are doing by smoking a cigarette outdoors and why that act is now illegal.

Radicals in the Park

I've spent the last couple of evenings listening to local bands Blossoms and New Order playing a few miles away at Wythenshawe Park, the sound carrying clearly across south Manchester.

Wythenshawe Park is the last remnant of the country estate of the staunchly Royalist Tatton family and surrounds their former home Wythenshawe Hall, besieged by Parliamentary forces in the Civil War, which makes it a bit ironic that since the late sixties a statue of their republican nemesis Oliver Cromwell, first erected outside Exchange Station in Manchester city centre in 1875, has stood there, after the road layout around the original location was altered. Queen Victoria once expressed her distaste for the statue of a man who had killed her ancestor King Charles I before a visit to Manchester, and since its move to Wythenshawe Park it has been attacked numerous times because of Cromwell's genocidal policies in Ireland (when he was a bus conductor in the early sixties, my dad witnessed Irish drivers opening their cab windows to spit at it as they went past).

Near the north east corner of the park is a street of modern housing called Hallas Grove. I'm guessing that it's named after the revolutionary socialist activist Duncan Hallas who grew up just round the corner on Sale Road in Northern Moor, served an engineering apprenticeship at the massive MetroVicks factory in Trafford Park where my grandad worked as a toolmaker, and then became a leader of the International Socialists/Socialist Workers' Party, although I'm a bit puzzled as to why the middle of the road Labour types on Manchester City Council would bestow his name on it.

Magic Weekend still magic?

Magic Weekend, where all the teams in rugby league's Super League play a full round of fixtures in the same stadium, took place at Elland Road football ground in Leeds over the last two days, and recorded one of the lowest total attendances for the event since it began in 2007.

I went to the three Magic Weekends played at the City of Manchester Stadium between 2012 and 2014 and enjoyed them all, but questions are understandably still being asked about what the event is actually for (the outside agency IMG, which conducted a review of the sport's structure and promotion, had been widely expected to tell the Rugby Football League to axe it, but in the end advised that it should continue in some form, no doubt because of the revenues it still brings in for clubs and the governing body).

The two stated aims of Magic Weekend are for existing rugby league fans to spend a weekend away in a city outside the M62 corridor, which constitutes the game's heartlands, and to attract new fans there to the sport. The problems with the first part include the cost of travel and hotels for what is still an overwhelming working class fan base and the unsuitability of some of the venues chosen in terms of seating and sightlines inside the ground and things to do between and after matches near it (Newcastle, which has hosted the event numerous times, was highly rated by fans for both, but Liverpool, which staged it just once, attracted criticism on each count), and unless there's a local club for new fans to support, or for youngsters potentially play for in the future, the second part falls down too, attracting casual spectators rather than long term supporters (Leeds was a particularly strange choice this year, being a city away fans are already familiar with and with a well supported and successful home side playing at Headingley). 

Future venues being mooted for the event - Cardiff, Dublin, Nottingham - suggest that the RFL is happy to keep cashing an increasingly modest cheque each summer rather than thinking seriously about where it and the sport should be going.

Last Orders at my First Local

The first pub I drank in regularly in the late eighties was a large Whitbread house, built in mock Tudor style by Chester's Brewery of Ardwick in the mid thirties, where between the age of eighteen and twenty I supped gallons of their keg bitter, Trophy (I also occasionally drank Holt's cask bitter at what we then regarded as the old man's pub down the road, which later became my local for another decade or so).

Our visits to the first pub came to an abrupt end when it reopened after a refurbishment, the lounge having become a restaurant and the small carvery at the side of it a bar, with higher drinks prices and a strict dress code which effectively excluded the younger drinkers who had frequented it in large numbers before its transformation into a more upmarket dining place.

A few years later, Whitbread built a Premier Inn hotel next to the pub/restaurant - an obvious move given the proximity of Manchester Airport, the end of whose main runway lies just a few hundred yards beyond its car park - and it soon came to depend on trade from that rather than locals.

Now, as part of a national programme of such conversions, it's closing, with the space being turned into extra hotel rooms, so on its final night of opening I popped in for a last drink there.

I was worried that it might be dead, but it was actually rammed, mostly by people my age, with a few fellow nostalgics no doubt amongst the crush at the bar. It often had cask beer on after I stopped going in regularly, lately a single handpump for Doom Bar, although I never saw anyone order it and always swerved it myself, so it was the usual default choice of Draught Guinness, which was a decent enough pint. At half past eight, the landlord rang the bell for last orders for the final time and a few champagne corks flew through the air, at nine the doors shut, and that was that. 

It was nothing like the pub or the atmosphere I drank in as a teenager thirty-five years ago, but I'm glad I was there to see it go under the waves.

There is a history of the pub here