EAGER to slake his thirst, an American traveller stumbled across one of Glasgow’s less salubrious watering-holes. “It was a dark place,” Bill Bryson recalled, “and battered.” There were only two other imbibers, “a pair of larcenous-looking men sitting side by side at the bar drinking in silence.”

For a while no one offered to attend to his needs. When eventually a barman did appear Bryson requested a pint of Tennent’s. “Hae ya nae hook ma dooky?” responded the barman. Not being fluent in the local dialect, Bryson simply repeated his request which was duly satisfied.

It was only then that he sensed his presence was unwelcome and that the liquid in front of him ought to have been preceded by the word “Fairy’. He took a couple of diplomatic sips and at the first opportunity made a swift exit via the Gents, doubtless relieved he was still alive and had not been poisoned.

The date of that encounter was the early 1990s but it could have been any time in the previous century and beyond. In his newly-published book A History of Drinking: The Scottish Pub Since 1700 – astonishingly, the first to deal with the subject – Anthony Cooke charts our often complicated, colourful and destructive relationship with alcohol and the environs in which it is served.

The idea, he says, evolved from research he was doing into self-improvement groups for working men in the nineteenth century who used to meet in pubs to conduct their business. Cooke wanted to find out what went on in these drinking dens, what their role was economically and socially and how it has changed down the decades.

What he discovered is that such establishments in Scotland have always differed greatly from those elsewhere, especially England.

For example, says Cooke, there was no Scottish pub “remotely” comparable to an English inn of the type portrayed by Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers, where eating was as important as drinking.

Much more characteristic of Scotland was the boozer described by Robert Burns in poems such as The Jolly Beggars, which is set in Poosie Nansie’s Inn in Mauchline and which is still going strong.

The poem is a hymn to Ayrshire lowlife and rejoices in mocking Presbyterian virtues, such as sobriety, self-denial, moderation and hard work.

But the reality, as Cooke relates, was far less appealing. In March 1786, the fifteen-year-old brother of Jean Armour, Burns’ wife, was involved in the pub in a violent assault on a prostitute. But it was her not him who was pilloried by the mob and paraded through the village streets and condemned by the local kirk session for “lewd and immoral practices”.

It is one of countless stories which confirm pubs as male-dominated bailiwicks. As recently as the 1950s, women customers were regarded as at best a distraction and at worst a nuisance.

In a celebrated mischievous essay, The Dour Drinkers of Glasgow, Hugh MacDiarmid (pictured) protested that he was not a misogynist. Indeed, some of his best friends may have been members of the fairer sex. Nevertheless he was vehemently opposed to the presence of women into pubs, some of whom were even brought by their menfolk – “if you can call them that”.

MacDiarmid’s preference was for a complete absence the female kind “on occasions of libation”. He was also against music. “I am therefore,” he added, “ a strong supporter of the lower – or lowest – type of ‘dive’ where drinking is the principle purpose and no one wants to be distracted from that absorbing business by music, women, glaring lights, chromium fittings, too many mirrors unless sufficiently fly-spotted and mildewed, or least of all, any fiddling trivialities of l’art nouveau.”


IN bygone times, places such as those described by MacDiarmid were plentiful in Scotland’s towns and cities. Indeed, the sheer number of them makes the mind boggle. In Tranent in East Lothian, for instance, which in 1792 had a population of fewer than 3,000, there were thirty alehouses.

Nearby was a distillery which produced 3,000 to 4,000 gallons of whisky which were “annually retailed in the parish”. A few miles to the east, in Dunbar, there were no fewer than 46 licensed premises, which worked out at one per 80 of population.

Needless to say, such ease of access to alcohol made the clergy thump their Old Testaments in disgust. Having said which, it was not unknown for ministers and elders to take a dram and then some on occasion. Scottish literature is saturated with sozzled members of the dog-collared fraternity. 


But Cooke’s history of pubs embraces their more positive contribution to society. At their best, when well-run and policed, they were trouble-free and a focal point for communities and the gamut of human rituals, from christenings to funerals.

Hotels are also an essential part of the mix. As Cooke relates, it was tourism which drove their development, allowed as they were to serve drink on Sundays to “bona fide” travellers when pubs were legally obliged to close.

But even as recently as the 1960s, many of the facilities on offer in hotels were inadequate and were having a deleterious effect on visitor numbers.

In Edinburgh, for example, it was revealed that the number of tourists had dropped from 822,000 in 1961 to 743,000 in 1965. “Even the Edinburgh Festival,” notes Cooke, “was not immune to this trend, as numbers attending the festival had declined from 99,000 in 1961 to 89,000 in 1965.”

Today, you cannot move for visitors to the capital and the current hot topic of debate is the walnut whipped-shaped hotel that is scheduled to replace the excrescence that is the St James Centre.

For the purpose of research, Cooke visited many pubs and spoke to landlords, landladies and licensees and asked them about the changes they had witnessed in their trade.

When he was talking to Alistair Don at The Doublet in Glasgow, members of a female pole-dancing club, average age 60 plus, descended on the pub for a lunchtime drink.

The Doublet has no Sky television and attracts custom from across the social spectrum, as the best pubs invariably do. It is “a pub for conversation and a social centre”.

Other pubs now sell as many cups of tea and coffee as they do beer and spirits.

WHAT is apparent is that change has been glacial-paced but gradually the ratio between male and female customers has moved significantly in the latter’s favour. The kind of pubs Cooke personally favours are those such as the Prince of Wales in Aberdeen, the Horseshoe in Glasgow, the Oxford in Edinburgh and the Plough in Rosemarkie where the beer is good and the banter freely flows.

Such pubs, however, survive against considerable odds. Since the introduction of strict new drink-drive limits last December, Scotland’s licensed trade has estimated that alcohol sales in bars have dropped by up to 60 per cent.

Across the UK, some 6000 pubs are believed to have closed following the introduction of the smoking ban in 2006. In Scotland, meanwhile, more than a thousand pubs are said to be swigging “in the last chance saloon”, as supermarkets woo cash-strapped customers with cut price offers on their favourite tipples and so-called “superpubs”, such as those managed by the JD Wetherspoon’s chain, undercut those that are under independent ownership.

In my own home town of Musselburgh a handful of pubs closed earlier this year because of a combination of the aforementioned factors.

All, moreover, were what might be termed “rough”. Their clientele, male and female, had a habit of appearing before a sheriff accused of an exchange of views which had gone beyond the verbal. The courage to cross their thresholds always failed me.

Should they reopen, it will not be as traditional, spit-and-sawdust howffs but with clear glass frontages, well-mannered Polish baristas instead of sour-faced Scottish bar staff, coffee and cake on the menu, and an assurance that women who need to use the facilities may do so without having a nasty experience.

It is far cry from the pubs of yore and whose passing many of us will mourn, if only momentarily.

A History of Drinking: The Scottish Pub Since 1700 by Anthony Cooke is published by Edinburgh University Press at £19.99