Two of the oldest signs in Europe, on one pub – and both of them were telling you something urgent
Bell Bush Lane holds a 4.4 from four hundred and one people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and its name contains two of the oldest signs in European drinking.
The bush
We wrote about this at the Bush Tavern in Notting Hill and it is the oldest advertisement there is.
Roman taverns hung vine leaves outside to show that wine was sold – the vine being sacred to Bacchus, and the signal being understood by a population that could not read.
England has no vines, so we used ivy – evergreen, also Bacchic, and it survives a winter.
An ivy bush on a pole above the door meant: wine is sold here. That is the whole message.
And it gives us the proverb – good wine needs no bush – which means that a genuinely good thing does not need advertising, and which Shakespeare uses in the epilogue of As You Like It as a joke about the fact that he is, at that moment, doing an epilogue.
The bell
Which is doing something completely different.
A bell is not an advertisement. A bell is an announcement, and in a medieval or early modern town it was the primary means of telling everybody something at once.
The church bells rang the hours, because almost nobody had a clock. They rang for services, for deaths, for fires, for curfews, for danger.
The curfew bell – couvre-feu, cover the fire – was rung at nightfall and it was an instruction: bank your hearth, put out the flame, because in a city of timber and thatch a fire left burning overnight could take the town.
Which, in 1666, in a bakery on Pudding Lane, is exactly what happened.
The last orders bell
And it is still here. It is the only bell most people in this country ever obey.
The bell rung behind a bar at closing is a direct descendant of the curfew bell – a signal, from an authority, that the drinking is over and the room must empty – and it was formalised by licensing law, which was tightened enormously in the First World War specifically to stop munitions workers drinking at lunchtime.
That legislation lasted, in essence, until 2005.
An entire nation’s drinking hours were shaped for ninety years by a wartime concern about factory productivity, and the bell that enforced it is a medieval fire precaution.
The pub
Cheap for the City, honest, and a 4.4 across a real sample.
Verdict
Good pub, and a name carrying two signals: one that says wine is sold here, and one that says put your fire out and go home.
Time gentlemen please
The phrase deserves a note, because it is dying and nobody has mourned it.
It is an announcement of the law. It is not a request and it is not a courtesy – the landlord was legally obliged to clear the premises, and the phrase is the formal notice that the permitted hours have expired.
The gentlemen part is the joke, and everybody in the room knew it was a joke, and it was said anyway, every night, in every pub in the country, for the better part of a century.
Since 2005 it has meant nothing at all. Some landlords still say it. It is now purely theatre – a ritual whose legal force evaporated twenty years ago and which nobody can quite bring themselves to stop performing.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Mein Therapeut wird sich wiedererkennen.