Slaves to King Beer

Though the book dwells upon problems in mid-Victorian Middlesbrough it has - says author Norman Moorsom - a clear message for citizens of the 21st Century. Mind, they did like a drop in those days - the Boro, wrote the historian Asa Briggs, was a "turbulent urban frontier despite its Quaker origins."

In 1859 the still infant town had 74 drinking places, nine years later it was awash with 196. In 1859 there were four "brothels or houses of ill-fame" - for which they also blamed the booze - four years later there were 27.

1863 seemed to be a busy year for the oldest profession. In 1862 there'd been only 12 "prostitutes at large", 12 months later 73 were at it. Usually they'd be hauled before the police court, given a few weeks grinding the mill at Northallerton prison, reported assiduously in the Middlesbrough Weekly News and be back on the streets before the ink dried. The menfolk, meanwhile, were drunk and riotous, drunk and fighting, drunk and quarrelsome, drunk and refusing to leave the house, drunk and distinctly out of control.

"We are slaves to King Beer and passion drives us along behind his chariot through dust and dirt," wrote the editor after New Year scenes involving "as vile a crew of roughs as ever escaped the inside of Deptford hulks."

Saturday, pay day, was the worst, when 42.5 per cent of offences were committed. By Tuesday all passion, and most of the housekeeping, was spent. Just 3.6 per cent of offences happened on a Friday. Times change.

The Temperance Society held earnest meetings and lengthy lectures, staged grand picnics and alternative entertainments.

"The Demon Drink received its severest attack," notes Mr Moorsom, though still there are those in Middlesbrough who live to sell the ale.

THE Boro's first pub was the Ship, launched in 1831 and still afloat - the oldest building in the oldest part of town.

"They built a house so they had to have a pub," they say in the front bar, though the thirsting population had actually reached 154 by year's end.

Much changed but still nautically themed - there's a rather appropriate notice warning of roaming press gangs - it's between railway line and river, the Transporter Bridge a couple of hundred yards away. The council prefers to call it the Old Town, churchmen know it as St Hilda's. To everyone else, it's simply Over the Border.

These days it's mainly light industrial, the 74 pubs - all Middlesbrough was over the border in 1859 - down to four or five. "Thief's beware, steel gate's inside," says a warning on a nearby garage.

New homes are already boarded; an estate opposite the Ship lasted just eight years. "Bloody horrible people," explains Peter Rowe, the landlord.

There are three of us in, crowded only if two's company, a friendly place next to a former rag and bone yard.

"He found the Holy Grail once, then sold it again for £10," insists Peter. "When we played hell with him, he said he knew where he could find another one."

Then the stories start flowing like Worthington bitter, of bad times and good time girls and of the long gone night in the Captain Cook when two French matelots were rolling in mortal combat around the floor.

"I told the old dear on the piano to play the Marseillaise quick," recalls Henry Cox, an altogether accountant of almost 80. "When she started they leaped to attention, when she stopped they started killing each other again. It went on for hours like that."

After 170 years and much water under the bridge, however, the Ship's company still mostly talk of Canon Carson, the late and much loved Roman Catholic priest of whom it is said that if you offered him a pint he'd have a whisky chaser and a whisky and a pint chaser, but that he always went home at closing time on Saturdays. He had to be at work early next day.

Though it's not always been plain sailing over the border, Peter still reckons to make a living, not least on Sunday evenings. No drunkenness, of course ("well not much!") and definitely none of the other.

A couple of pints had seemed necessary to ease things along. As the gentleman said previously, cheers.

POSH folk don't get drunk. Rather they are sozzled, stewed or squiffed, tired, tipsy or as tired and emotional as George Brown was frequently said to be in the 1960s. Jeffrey Bernard was simply unwell.

The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Euphemisms, which fell in a heap from the Christmas stocking, offers eight pages of anodyne alternatives, the most appealing from Roy Jenkins, of all people.

Harold Wilson, said Jenkins, could be "distinctly ebullient" - as opposed to "bleakly sober." He means, of course, that Wilson was as ebullient as a newt.

ANOTHER readable present - Northumberland and Durham: the Sinister Side - has a chapter appropriately headed "Bevvied, boisterous and belligerent" and a reference to Durham miner George Tarry who on St Valentine's Day 1873 set out with his marrer to have a drink at every alehouse between Durham and Sunderland. It wasn't very romantic.

Locked up by PC 82, they appeared before magistrates next day - "fairly overcome by their many potations," said the Sunderland Echo (or ebullient, as the case may be.)

WHEN in Middlesbrough, there should have been time - and wasn't - to catch the matinee performance of the George Reynolds Show, that is to say Reynolds v Cleveland Constabulary in the High Court.

George, it may be recalled, claims direct descendancy from Barnacle Bill the Pirate (John North, November 30) - but is the Darlington FC chairman also related to Clare Short, Secretary of State for International Development and scourge of the page three girls?

Big Steve Molloy, George's long-time friend and colleague, is so certain of it - "first cousin, I know he is" - that he has offered to do a Bernie Slaven in Binns' window is proved mistaken.

Since the new Who Who's arrived on Tuesday, we checked Ms Short's entry - George Reynolds isn't in it, only Gillian.

Ms Short, curiously enough, reveals nothing of her early life, education or fetchings up. Whilst it doesn't say that she's George's first cousin, it doesn't say that she's not.

Evidence would greatly be welcomed. That really would be an international development.

TOMMY Taylor, superior human being but inferior dominoes player, hits 60 tomorrow. Last we heard, there was talk of a party (and karaoke classic) in Coundon club.

Tom, a former LibDem county and district councillor in Shildon, also tilted at Welsh windmills in one or other of the Newport parliamentary constituencies and became firm friends with Lord Cobbold (as now he is) when the squire of Knebworth twice contested Bishop Auckland, in 1974.

The most memorable story, however, happened on night shift at Shildon wagon works when Tom was cleaning out his ear with a matchstick - as, of course, you do.

A passer-by inadvertently jogged his elbow, the matchstick snapped, half remained in his hand and the other half had surgically to be removed at Bishop General.

He's heard all the jokes and still isn't struck. Happy birthday, old friend.

....and finally, pre-Christmas columns leant to some extent upon walking sticks made from Brussels sprouts stalks. But what, we'd wondered on December 21, about the other piece of the pizzle? Pizzle is a 16th Century term for what might most politely be called a bull's reproductive organ. There were pizzle walking sticks, too. "It dates from when every part of a slaughtered animal was put to good use," writes Janet McCrickard from Darlington, and kindly encloses a sketch, more corkscrew than thumbnail, of the item in question.

When she taught in Somerset, they also ate the bull's testicles - "butchers called them sweetbreads and the children assured me they were delicious. I took their word for it."

(In parts of Gateshead they still do eat testicles, of course, though the aftertaste - as Tuesday's front page demonstrated - can be quite bitter.)

Janet's note was prompted by a Sunday Times paragraph that a company in Utah is making both walking canes and golf putters from the self-same deep-pan pizzle.