PLAYING HOOKY

August 2023. Brailes, Hook Norton-land.

A reminder of the best ever film about playing hooky*.

Actually I wasn’t exactly AWOL; I had told Mrs RM I was off in the campervan for a couple of days. I think.

Let’s finish Warwickshire. Carefully now, lest we stumble into the land of Donnington beers.

Admit it, you haven’t a clue where Brailes (Upper or Lower) is, have you. On the slow road betwixt Stow-on-the-Wold and Banbury, so sort of edge-of-Cotswolds. Shipston-on-Stour your nearest town, the one with posh crisps.

Brailes is attractive without being twee,

and the George, with that irritating cartoon Hook Norton sign, has the bonus of definitely being open midweek since it’s a hotel for folk called Hugh and Margaret on a short break from the Surrey hills.

Spotless but lacking any edge, just as Margaret and Hugh like it.

Sadly, it’s very quiet, and a quiet Cotswolds pubs is never a joy.

Fittingly for the pub, the Hooky is fine, tasty if not crisp (NBSS 3), and at £4.60 a pint unexpectedly cheaper than Ely.

The lone Old Boy leaves his beer unattended by the fire, safe in the knowledge I’m not putting a drop of rohypnol in his lager while he’s away. Or nicking his tobacco. In the Gents later, he initiates the legally obligated conversation whenever two blokes are at adjoining urinals;

“Weather picking up a bit, isn’t it ?”.

On his return the landlady instructs him to “Make something exciting happen“, possibly a first in a pub, and he tells us he used to do tap dancing. I used to play drums in the Salvation Army; we have the basis of a variety act already.

He then starts to whistle along to this classic,

and if he could combine the whistling with the tap dancing I think we’d be on to a winner.

*Actually, best film full stop.

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Published by retiredmartin

Retired NHS, doing long walks around UK and the world to record the great bits. Focused on Good Beer Guide pubs and live music.

11 thoughts on “PLAYING HOOKY”

  1. Think this is factual: that Hook Norton installed a Coolship at the top of its brewing tower in AD 806 (this date could be approximate 😉) , but has never dared use it out of fear of wild yeasts (which, ironically is exactly why one installs a Coolship, so what were they thinking?) to exploit them. Therefore, like many a Family Brewer Co., it has produced boring beers (despite having, and read, Roger Protz’s The Family Brewers of Britain trying to convince we haven’t been dealing with the bad, sad & mad). First came across Hook Norton beers at Uni in 1976, and they were boring then but no alternatives (immediately to hand) that weren’t in those days.

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      1. Hook Norton, a bit like Harvey’s, is rarely at its best in the hotels and dining pubs of the home counties, but in the Peyton Arms in Stoke Lyne it was magical.

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      2. Why beer was boring – a view.

        Growing up along the Somerset-Dorset boarder I entered the beer scene in the 1970s. On the plus side there were probably over twice as many pubs across the area as there are now.
        Probably something over 50% of the pubs in the area were owned by The Big Six. In fact it was narrower than that as they had their own regions of dominance so it was (there may have been the odd outliers) more a Big Three: Bass Charrington; Courage; Grand Metropolitan (Watney Mann etc.)

        The smaller immediately local breweries had already gone. Yeovil’s Brutton taken over by Charrington in 1960 and closed 1965. Brutton’s itself had taken over the brewery in Sherborne (which traded as Dorsetshire Brewery) in 1951. Brutton’s, only having a small estate itself, wanted its pubs (78) and immediately shut the brewery down.

        Thus by the 70’s the rest of the pubs were divided up between the remaining local ‘Family’ breweries. In my area (say around a twenty mile radius of pubs) these were, in rough order of frequency: Eldridge Pope (brewing in Dorchester); Hall & Woodhouse (brewing in Blandford); Palmers (brewing in Bridport); Wadworth (brewing in Devises); Devenish (brewing in Weymouth).
        Ushers were still brewing in Trowbridge but had been taken over by Watney Mann in the 60’s and thus part of Grand Met empire by 70’s. Thereafter the pubs did keep the Ushers brand name for quite a while and served ‘Ushers’ beers but each refurbishment saw another one reduce the name to merely a mirror or two hanging up. Gibbs Mew (brewing in Salisbury) just about stretched into my area – recall a single one of their pubs being in Yeovil.

        As for genuine Free Houses – there were very VERY few at that time in the area. Struggling to recall more than the fingers on one hand that knew of by what was on the bar. There may have been others that were independently owned but as far as the customer was concerned they might as well not have been as they’d tied themselves to one supplier at some point.

        And here we come to the crux. The tie.

        When walking into almost any pub at that time knew exactly what I’d see. There would likely be two cask beer pumps (very occasionally three). One would have that brewery’s Bitter and one would have that brewery’s Best Bitter. If Mild had ever been a big thing in the West Country it was long before my time. It had almost completely disappeared from the cask pumps and those limited number of pubs where it still cropped up at all it was on Keg with its longer shelf life as they weren’t shifting enough.

        There were the odd seasonals, but not many. Most would produce something darker and stronger for Christmas, and there might occasionally be something at other times of the year. But mostly any variety in beer was consigned to their remaining bottled ranges. It was an era of customers self-mixing. Not all the time, but jeez, can’t face the 10th pint of the same Bitter in a row this week, so people would mix Bitter with a bottle of Brown, or a bottle of Light, a half-and-half with Guinness, a Gold Label or whatever, just for some variety. Wasn’t only me that was bored with what was on offer out of the taps.

        The above Family brewers had basically given up brewing draught Stouts/Porters, with Guinness ubiquitous. A pub that didn’t have a Guinness tap was unusual, one noticed the absence. There would be keg Bitter and likely a keg Best Bitter, sometimes with a different name to the cask version sometimes not, but very much the same beer in a different format. Elsewhere on the Keg section of the bar they either didn’t see the need to, or couldn’t with its mass volume production and huge advertising budgets, compete with the national Lager brands. The only one definitely recall producing its own draught lager was Devenish. The reason can still recall it was because one of the worst beers have ever tried.

        So national Lager brands were pushing at a door held open for them. The beer scene was that boring.

        For my part, that’s why – until moved away to areas of the country that didn’t generally have it back in those days – drank more cask cider than beer. Although many small producers had already disappeared, with orchards grubbed up even in a stronghold like the West Country, and it had become harder to find. Perhaps 25% of the Family Brewer pubs and maybe 10% of the Big Brewery pubs still would have a barrel or two, often on gravity though sometimes pulled through hand pump, tucked away in a corner. Sourced from whatever cider press was nearby, each using its own combinations and percentages of different cider apples, and producing varying dry/medium/sweet blends, decades before the dreaded term “Craft” appeared it was the nearest thing to ‘craft’ (as in varying, different and interesting) one could buy in a pub.

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  2. “the George, with that irritating cartoon Hook Norton sign”. It’d be worse than irritating with a “Gotcha” speech bubble.

    The landlady instructs “the old boy” to “Make something exciting happen“ and he doesn’t think it’s his lucky day ?

    ,

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    1. I think it’s quite hard enough on the poor old dragon, who was just minding his own business before being blamed for adding rohypnol to some princess’s lager, but in this case he doesn’t even get second billing on the front of the pub.

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  4. “Admit it, you haven’t a clue where Brailes (Upper or Lower) is, have you.”

    My grandparents bought a weekend place in 1963 in the village of Mickleton, between Stratford and Broadway on the A46. For two or three years we drove from Hemel Hempstead to the Cotswolds, either with my grandparents or in my father’s car, so often that I knew the route(s) like the back of my hand.

    My dad went via Bicester, Aynho, Brailes and Shipston whereas my grandad preferred Buckingham, Banbury and Edgehill, since you ask.

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