Public house

A friend who rings at the local church in Cookham (UK) sent me this story from the Daily Mail, as she knows my penchant for the oddity.

Seems that the other afternoon the bartender at The Crown pub turfed out a couple of farm workers for being dressed in “work clothes”. What they were wearing was “casual trousers” and polo shirts with the logo of the farm where they work.

In other words—they were wearing what most tech company employees would consider high-end office wear.

They’d evidently just come from visiting a friend in hospital, so it’s not like they were covered with manure. From the DM’s photo, the one on the left could have tucked in his shirt, but otherwise I can’t see any indicator that there was any imminent danger of them breaking out in Liverpool football chants or demanding a darts tournament.

If you go to The Crown’s web site—which is poorly designed and gives a minimum of information, never a good sign when it comes to choosing an eating or lodging establishment, right on the home page it says they welcome all visitors, with no mention of a dress code:

But from the photos you can see behind the text block on every page, the pub looks more like an ad for Conran than a country pub. Check out that faux-distressed bar, for one.

Also, its menu puts the Ploughman’s Lunch (or “Ploughmans Lunch, as it’s printed)—which is bread, cheese and paté—in the Salads category (although they refer to the paté as “Chicken Liver Parfait). And tags it with a V for “contains no meat, suitable for vegetarians. Which also applies to the Caesar salad—which is at least a salad, but which has anchovies.

Actually, their menu is a hoot in and of itself for jumped-up-ness. Which probably describes the place accurately, ergo the landlord’s apparent belief that money from the pockets of parvenus is better than that from plebeians.

Keeping in mind that you don’t really go to the DM for the highest standards of reportage, there were still a couple of things about this story that are particularly amusing.

The paper mentions that the pub reopened recently after an alleged £600K refurbishment, and names a local low-level has-been celeb as a highlight of that reopening. I happen to know this person, and you need to trust me when I tell you that The Crown was not setting the fashion bar anywhere above a mud scraper when it had him in, so I don’t get them going all snooty on the sons of the soil.

 

The implication of the story was also that the patrons in business suits were acceptable, indeed desirable, and that if they started admitting blokes in “builders clothes” (whatever the hell they are), all the toffs would scram due to having to mix with the smelly and badly behaved plebs.

My personal experience from several years of riding London buses and the Tube is that an Englishman being in a business suit is not a guarantee of any standard of hygiene. Or, for that matter, of any better manners than your average lager lout.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.