What Is The Origin Of (265)?
Pub crawl
One of the (admittedly very few) joys of following a
football club around the country is that you get the opportunity to sample
different ales in different pubs. The old greybeards amongst my team’s
following often reckon that a game of football gets in the way of a good day’s
drinking and the more experienced will have planned an extensive tour of public
houses, timings set with military precision, to ensure sufficient alcohol is
consumed to anaesthetise the senses for what is to come. We call this a pub
crawl.
I had always assumed that the phrase came from the state of
the toper after (s)he had visited a few establishments over a few hours. All
they were capable of was crawling home. But I was wrong. It had a very specific
origin from the world of politics.
In the days before radio and television and way before the
dread days of social media, it was difficult for politicians to engage with
their growing electorate. Newspapers were, as they are today, partisan and not
everyone could be bothered to attend an election meeting. The Conservatives, at
least in Cambridge in 1909, sent individuals from pub to pub to drum up
support. Argus, the nom de plume of the correspondent who penned Our Local
Letter published in the Cambridge Independent Press on May 21, 1909, takes up
the story with some gusto and bluster.
Feigning surprise that the brains of the Conservative party
should come up with so uninspiring a phrase as pub crawling, he consoled
himself by noting, “assuming that they sally forth to advocate Imperialism,
true religion, national defence, and other great topics of that sort, to the
thirsty denizens of the Pig and Whistle, such a mission might surely be given a
better title than the one I have mentioned”.
Clearly on a roll – had he sniffed a cork or two? – Argus continued
to froth from his lofty perch. “I suppose they do crawl from “pub” to “pub”,
if I may use their own somewhat contemptuous abbreviation. Some men would find
such duties arduous and irksome, but tastes differ, and I doubt not that … some
who can make such a duty a delight. And in addition to satisfying an honest
thirst for information and for other things the pub crawler has the inspiring
consciousness that he is helping the cause. That knowledge, together with the
beer, must be peculiarly soothing. Pub-crawling is very popular in both West
and East Cambs”.
Opponents quickly picked up on these new tactics and thought
it advisable to warn their supporters of the dangers posed by these seemingly
affable chaps visiting drinking establishments. At the time, 1909, British
politics was polarised between advocates of free trade and protectionists, the
latter, known as The Tariff Reform League, deploying the pub-crawling tactics. The
Framlingham Weekly News in its edition of December 25, 1909 thought it
necessary to alert its readers to the dangers of pub crawlers.
“Hired men”, it reported, “are being sent out to
haunt the street corners and the public houses and catch you in your homes.
They pretend to be independent, non-political gentlemen, grieved by the sad
results of Free Trade. Sometimes they pretend that they are unfortunate victims
“out of work through Free Trade”. The Tariff Reform League seems proud to call
these men its “Missionaries”. Others, more truly, call them “Pub-Crawlers””.
These days the phrase has lost all its associations with
political campaigning and is now commandeered by stag and hen parties, and
other revellers.
