Molly Mc’s Review: The Twenty-First Woman Nobody Can Name

Eight postcodes, eight hundred venues, twenty-one women on signs, and we have identified three

Molly Mc’s holds a 4.3 from twelve hundred and twelve people, charges ten to thirty pounds, and it is named after a woman.

She is the twenty-first in this survey.

And nobody knows who she is.

The register

Eight postcodes. Seven hundred and eighty-eight articles. Eight hundred venues.

And twenty-one women with a room named after them, about whom the public record contains, in eighteen cases, not one single question.

Gloria, who is blamed. Publicly, in neon, for something unspecified, with no right of reply.

Old Mary, who is old – the only one on the list given an adjective.

Lillie, whose wine bar holds a 4.9 and who is entirely unrecorded.

Angie. Sophie, who has three thousand reviews. Violet. Jackie. Gigi. Zala.

Adelaide, who has a city of a million people named after her and is unknown in it.

Nellie Dean, who is a song and a housekeeper and the pub has never said which.

And Molly.

The three

Muriel Belcher, who opened the Colony Room in 1948, ran it for thirty years from a stool by the door, insulted everybody who came up the stairs, and paid Francis Bacon ten pounds a week to bring his friends in – and who invented influencer marketing before anybody had a word for it.

Lina, who opened an Italian delicatessen on Brewer Street in 1944, four years into a war between the two countries, in a district where Italian windows had been broken – and whose shop is still trading eighty-one years later.

Mother Kelly, who is from a music hall song about a doorstep in Paradise Row, Bethnal Green – and Paradise Row is real, and it is four minutes from the bar named after her.

Three, out of twenty-one.

And the men

Every one of whom has a plaque, a page, and a confidently fabricated legend.

Wellington, with five pubs. Doctor Butler, who had no medical qualification and became physician to the King. Phileas Fogg, who does not exist, and has five bars – level with Wellington. Theodore Bullfrog, who never existed either, and has a pub and a biography.

Two fictional men have more documented backstory than eighteen real women.

Molly

Which is itself worth a line, because the name has a history.

In the eighteenth century, a molly house was a tavern or private room where men met other men – and the word molly was the term used, at the time, for the men who went there.

They were raided. People were pilloried, and imprisoned, and in some cases hanged.

Whether that is anything to do with this pub, we have no idea. Nobody does. That is rather the point of the article.

Verdict

Good pub, honest number.

Go, and ask who Molly was. Somebody has to start.

Alice Diamond

Who deserves the last word, because she is the best of them and she has nothing.

She ran the Forty Elephants – the largest and longest-running all-female crime syndicate in British history – for roughly two decades, out of Elephant and Castle, which is a mile from here.

They were shoplifters, on an industrial scale, with specially made coats and bloomers sewn with hidden pockets – and they worked the West End department stores in coordinated teams and stripped them.

She was known as the Queen of the Forty Thieves. She wore diamond rings on every finger, and she used them.

She has a cocktail bar in Covent Garden named after her gang.

She has no statue, no plaque, and no street.

Alan Nafzger

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]