45 Fun Facts About Pubs

Tim Martin named his pub chain Wetherspoon, founded in 1979, after one of his what in New Zealand?

Schoolteachers: Wetherspoon was the surname of a teacher from Martin's New Zealand school days, in one telling a man who could not control his class, while the 'JD' comes from JD Hogg of The Dukes of Hazzard.

Once a pub's doors are locked for a lock-in, what are the drinkers still inside said to have become?

A private party is the legal fiction behind the lock-in: regulars put money behind the bar before closing time, so that no drink is technically sold once the doors are locked.

From 1916 to 1919, Britain's state-run pubs forbade customers from doing what?

Buying rounds of drinks was banned from 1916 to 1919 under the State Management Scheme, which nationalised the pubs and breweries around the Gretna munitions factories.

What did Francis Crick announce to lunchtime drinkers at the Eagle in Cambridge on 28 February 1953?

The structure of DNA: Crick told the pub he and James Watson had 'discovered the secret of life', an anecdote Watson retold in The Double Helix and now marked by a blue plaque beside the door.

William Booth's 1865 sermon outside Whitechapel's Blind Beggar pub led to the founding of what?

The Salvation Army grew out of the East London Christian Mission that Booth set up after that sermon; a century later, in 1966, Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell dead at the bar of the same pub.

What did the crown stamp on a British pint glass certify before the EU's CE mark replaced it?

That it held a full measure: the crown showed that an agency of the Crown had certified the glass, and in September 2021, after Brexit, the stamp's return to UK pint glasses was announced.

Pub quizzes took off in Britain when Burns and Porter sold them to breweries to do what?

Fill pubs on quiet nights was the pitch: Sharon Burns and Tom Porter were soon supplying quizzes to thousands of teams every week, and went on to work for the BBC as well.

The Rovers Return, in the fictional town of Weatherfield, is the pub of which ITV soap?

Coronation Street's Rovers Return was built by the brewery Newton and Ridley, opened in 1902 and was named for the safe return of Lieutenant Philip Ridley from the Boer War.

Which BBC soap's pub, the Queen Victoria, stands on Albert Square in the borough of Walford?

EastEnders' Albert Square is named after Prince Albert, husband of the pub's namesake Queen Victoria, and the Queen Vic set was once burnt down in a storyline, and in reality, so it could be rebuilt.

Richard II's 1393 law making landlords hang out a sign helped which officials find alehouses?

Ale tasters, the borough inspectors who judged the quality of each brew, could then spot alehouses easily, and with much of the medieval population illiterate, pictures beat words on the boards.

Which common pub name may come from John of Gaunt's personal badge or from the royal arms of Scotland?

The Red Lion is often called Britain's commonest pub name; one story has James VI of Scotland, on taking the English throne in 1603, ordering his red lion shown on important buildings, pubs included.

Which animal, Richard II's livery badge, became a popular name for inns and taverns during his reign?

A white hart was Richard II's own badge, and when his 1393 law made alehouses hang out a sign, many landlords are said to have picked the king's emblem; it is still one of England's commonest pub names.

Which Athlone pub was certified in 2004 by Guinness World Records as the oldest in Ireland?

Sean's Bar is reputed to have been established in AD 900, and renovations in the 1970s found a back wall partly built of wattle and wicker.

The Bingley Arms in Yorkshire, self-styled oldest pub in Britain, says it once served as a safe house for whom?

Catholic priests are said to have sheltered at the Bardsey pub, once called The Priests Inn; it dates its history to between 905 and 953, yet the building standing today is 18th century.

What lies behind Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem in Nottingham, believed to be the castle's old brewhouse?

Sandstone caves carved into Castle Rock may be as old as the Norman castle above them, while the pub's own claimed founding date of 1189 has no documentary evidence behind it.

Which Wapping pub claims the site of London's oldest riverside tavern, dating from around 1520?

The Prospect of Whitby, once so rough it was known as the Devil's Tavern, took its present name from a collier that moored alongside it, bringing sea coal from Newcastle to London.

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street was home for some 40 years to which foul-mouthed celebrity?

An African grey parrot, Polly swore at the customers and mimicked popping champagne corks; when she died in 1926, around 200 newspapers across the world ran obituaries.

Which writer described his ideal pub, the imaginary Moon Under Water, in a 1946 newspaper essay?

Orwell's ten requirements began with uncompromisingly Victorian fittings, and the essay became so well loved that the Wetherspoon chain has named a string of its pubs The Moon Under Water.

Tolkien and C. S. Lewis belonged to which Oxford writers' group that met at the Eagle and Child pub?

The Inklings met at the pub for beer and talk in a back room called the Rabbit Room, but the readings of work in progress took place on Thursday evenings in Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College.

Which Southwark pub, named in Dickens's Little Dorrit, is London's last galleried survivor of the coaching age?

The George Inn is only part of what it was: the Great Northern Railway pulled down other ranges round its yard, and only the galleried south side still stands.

From which Southwark inn, established in 1307, do Chaucer's pilgrims set out in The Canterbury Tales?

The Tabard catered for pilgrims heading to Thomas Becket's shrine at Canterbury Cathedral, and Chaucer made it the meeting point for his own pilgrims in the 1380s.

Which highwayman is said to have been a regular at the Spaniards Inn on Hampstead Heath?

Dick Turpin's supposed haunt later drew the poets Byron and Keats, and the pub claims that Keats wrote Ode to a Nightingale in its garden; it also turns up in The Pickwick Papers and Dracula.

What earned the Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden its old nickname, the Bucket of Blood?

Bare-knuckle prize fights in the upstairs room gave the pub its nickname in a then-violent corner of Covent Garden, and a plaque recalls the 1679 attack on the poet John Dryden in a nearby alley.

Which body bought Belfast's gas-lit Crown Liquor Saloon in 1978, urged on by Sir John Betjeman?

The National Trust restored the Victorian interior three years later for £400,000, keeping its ten booths with their gun-metal match-strikers and a bell system for summoning staff.

Which 1914 wartime law had beer watered down and pub hours cut to a lunchtime and an evening session?

Defence of the Realm Act rules also banned flying kites, lighting bonfires and buying binoculars, and the afternoon gap they put into pub opening hours outlived the war by seventy years.

Which nation's pubs were shut on Sundays by an 1881 Act, a rule its last dry district kept until 1996?

Wales got the Sunday Closing Act in 1881, the first law since annexation that applied only to Wales, and local referendums from 1961 gradually let districts go 'wet' on Sundays.

Which prime minister's government ended the afternoon closing imposed on English pubs in the First World War?

Margaret Thatcher's government passed the 1988 Licensing Act, which let pubs serve straight through from 11am to 11pm six days a week; Sunday kept its afternoon break until 1995.

The 1989 Beer Orders forced big brewers to let their own pubs sell at least one what?

Guest ale: each landlord could choose one traditional draught beer from any other supplier, and the same orders pushed the biggest brewers to shed thousands of pubs, which new pub companies sprang up to buy.

What is a pub called when a brewery owns it and obliges the landlord to stock that brewery's beer?

A tied house gave a brewery a guaranteed outlet, which is why brewers raced to buy up pubs in the late 19th century; a pub that can choose its own beers is called a free house.

Which room of a traditional pub had frosted glass above head height so nobody could see who was drinking?

The snug let people drink unseen, women above all, at a time when many frowned on them visiting a pub; very few classic snugs survive in British pubs today.

Which pub dish did dairy marketers popularise under its present name in the 1960s?

Ploughman's lunch is an old meal with a modern push: bread, cheese and beer had been served together in inns for centuries before the Milk Marketing Board promoted the name nationally through the 1960s.

Why does the 'nonic' pint glass bulge outwards a couple of inches below the rim?

So stacked glasses don't stick is only part of it: the bulge also improves grip and protects the rim from chipping, which is where the name comes from, 'no nick'.

Most traditional ale reaches the pub in which nine-gallon container?

Firkin probably comes from a Middle Dutch word for a fourth, as it holds a quarter of a 36-gallon barrel; its nine gallons work out at 72 pints.

A pub's beer engine, worked by the tall handpump on the bar, draws ale up from where?

A cask in the cellar feeds the handpump, which lifts the ale by hand with no gas pressure; the device was devised in 1690s London by John Lofting, a Dutch inventor who also patented a fire engine.

Which organisation publishes the Good Beer Guide, an annual directory of about 4,500 pubs?

The Campaign for Real Ale, champion of British beer, was founded in Ireland: four men opposed to mass-produced beer set it up in 1971 in Kruger's Bar in Dunquin, County Kerry.

Which Faversham brewer, with an official founding date of 1698, claims to be Britain's oldest?

Shepherd Neame shares the claim with Shropshire's Three Tuns Brewery, and town records show commercial brewing on its Court Street site since the 1570s.

The Butchers Arms in Herne, opened by Martyn Hillier in 2005, is cited as the original modern what?

Micropub was a term Hillier revived for his one-room conversion of an off-licence, and the 2003 Licensing Act, effective from 2005, made such tiny independent pubs easier to open.

Bat and trap, a pub game where a ball is flicked up from a see-saw lever, survives in which county?

Kent has kept the game going in pub-garden leagues, Canterbury's since 1922; the batter knocks the ball up off the trap and must drive it between two posts 21 yards away or be out.

Which pub card game did the antiquary John Aubrey credit to the 17th-century poet Sir John Suckling?

Cribbage grew out of an older game called noddy, and Suckling was said to be so fond of cards that he would spend a whole morning in bed with a pack, studying his favourite games.

Which pub is the village local in the Yorkshire Dales soap Emmerdale?

The Woolpack stood in a village called Beckindale until the show renamed it Emmerdale in 1994, months after a plane-crash episode drew its record audience of 18 million.

What is the name of the only pub in Ambridge, the village at the heart of BBC radio's The Archers?

The Bull is modelled on the Old Bull in Inkberrow, and Chris Moyles once appeared in it in 2004 as a customer suspected of being a Pub of the Year judge.

In Shaun of the Dead, what hanging over the bar of Shaun's local turns out to really work?

A rifle, the Winchester above the bar of the pub called the Winchester, proves functional while Shaun battles the zombified landlord, and Ed stays behind with it to buy the others time.

In An American Werewolf in London, which moorland pub's locals warn the two hikers to beware the moon?

The Slaughtered Lamb's exterior was really a cottage in Crickadarn, with interiors shot at the Black Swan in Surrey, nowhere near the North York Moors where the story is set.

In Treasure Island, old seaman Billy Bones lodges at which lonely coastal inn, where the story begins?

The Admiral Benbow is where Billy Bones guards a mysterious chart and drives off Black Dog in a cutlass fight before collapsing, setting Jim Hawkins on the road to the treasure.

Which Sussex pub game involves tossing brass coins at a lead-topped table?

Toad in the hole players throw four heavy brass 'toads' at the table: one that stays on the lead top scores a point, one down the hole scores two, and anyone who overshoots 31 goes bust.