Monday 9 February 2015

Happy Birthday Charles Dickens! (Part the First)


The Hop Pole, Tewkesbury
 Charles Dickens would have been 202 yesterday if he'd made a more determined effort to cling to life, and Charlie and me have a lot in common. Not just the obvious bit about about him being just about the greatest novelist this country has ever produced, with me a red-hot cert to run him a close second when I get round to publishing Brockberrow, but also a very similar taste in Inns and public houses, specifically those visited by Samuel Pickwick in the Pickwick Papers.

There is an inn in Tewkesbury, called the Hop Pole where Mr Pickwick and his companions stopped to dine en route from Bristol to Birmingham, They had previously lunched at The Bell at Berkley Heath, becoming marginally legless, and had continued tanking up at the Hop Pole, with bottled beer, Madeira and port along with some 'take out' to see them through to the finish at the Old Royal in Brum.

My first visit to the Hop Pole was on a beautiful early summer day in 1953. I had cycled down from Birmingham with Diane, to operate a checkpoint in a cycling club event. Diane was the epitome of an 'out door' girl, dark hair, rosy cheeks, and gorgeously plump. I can still see the buttons straining on her tartan shirt as her shapely, tanned, legs turned the pedals, and I was totally besotted by the time we reached Tewkesbury

I was only 16 and still very wet behind the ears and Diane, I guess, would have been 18 or 19 and totally beyond the reasonable aspirations of an acne scarred adolescent like me. I remember that we sat outside the Hop Pole and shared a big bag of cherries while I desperately tried to come up with a foolproof chat up line, but of course, I couldn't come close, and that was the only cherry-sharing we ever indulged in.

Mr Pickwick , however, had no such feminine distractions and eventually arrived in at the Old Royal in Birmingham, a hostelry with which I became well acquainted.
The Old Royal, Birmingham.

I used to go there on Thursday nights, straight after work, along with Johnse, Stockton and a guy I can only remember as The Mole Man, so called because he was short, squat and without anything that remotely resembled a neck,. He also squeaked rather spoke, although I'm not sure if squeaking is a moleish characteristic.

 We would stop at The Old Royal until kicking out time, getting steadily rat-arsed, consuming meat pies and pickled eggs and playing seven card brag and a card game called Stop the Bus, the object of which, apart from it being a speedy way of loosing money, I disremember We actually knew the Old Royal as 'George's', after the accommodating landlord whom we had followed there when he moved from the St Pauls Tavern in St Paul's Square, although our original watering hole had been The White Horse Cellars, from which we had been barred following an acrimonious dispute over the quality of the meat pies. Meat pies loomed large in those bygone days.

Charles Dickens stayed at The Old Royal whenever he visited Birmingham, but there is no record that he ever played Stop the Bus.

(Part the Second will concern itself with The Bull at Rochester and The Great White Horse at Ipswich.)