Pubs like the
White Horse take all the prestige and fame brought
on by awards like 'Pub of the Year' and stand it on
its head.
Not all the components
that contribute to a great pub are present on this
site in the small village of Welton, but the fact
remains that we have had more good nights in the White
Horse than in any other pub in Britain. More importantly,
we have had more drinks with more good friends than
anywhere else on the planet and been warmly welcomed
more times than we can count.
With the White Horse, we
take our thesis on pubs to another level. We can travel
the length and breadth of the country, investigate
dozens of pubs, recommend visits to this place or
that, describe history and tradition and myths associated
with these fine old buildings, but to a large extent
all that misses the point.
Architecturally and historically,
this is not a significant building. But to us, this
may be the finest drinking establishment in the world.
And we just keep coming
back. We repeatedly extol the virtues of the company
here, how the conversation flows back and forth all
evening around and across the table, how Bill, Ted
and Bill argue and agree in the same breath, and how
the evenings fly by, but the White Horse is more than
that yet.
It is actually quite a
nice little pub.
This night they were offering
Speckled Hen, another night it may be Spitfire, another
night something different, all the while offering
good, consistent standard fare in the Black Bull or
Scrumpy Jack cider. The music is unobtrusive, and
while the eating area is quite noticeable, it is successful
enough to bail out slow beer nights without ever dominating
it.
The White Horse has been
through some interesting changes of late, mostly involving
the landlord. The person running the pub can have
a dramatic effect upon the establishment, which is
why it may be worth going back to a moderate pub at
a later date, just in case it has changes hands and
therefore fortune.
Subtle changes
can increase or decrease traffic substantially. For
example, many pubs have a clearly demarked eating
area, separate from a predominantly drinking area.
While there are no rules or laws that prohibit eating
in the drinking area, customers are free to sit where
they please. However many 'drinkers' disapprove of
'diners' eating their meals by the bar. By encouraging
diners to eat by the bar, the landlord risks annoying
his regular drinkers, while at the same time providing
diners with less-than-satisfactory dining accommodation.
Nobody is happy.
So the landlord encourages
a little separation. He puts flowers on the dining
tables, provides slightly better wine, gets a good
cook from the village, and uses linens. The result?
Happier diners who increase income, and happy drinkers
who do not have to sit and watch someone eat.
There were times when my
father would turn up at eight in the evening, and
the landlord would turn on the lights to greet him.
Today, the situation is much, much improved, to the
point where it is very difficult to get a seat some
evenings, in the lounge side or the bar side.
In the bar side is a traditional
Hood Skittles game. Hood Skittles is a miniaturized
version of Old English Skittles in which hard fist-sized
lumps of plastic (bearing a curious similarity to
a piece of cheese) are thrown underarm at pins on
a table about eight feet away. It is extremely popular
Northamptonshire but not much place else, and therefore
fortunately fails to lend itself to the Firkins and
Hogsheads of this world. The surrounding leather bound
and cushioned sides of the table offer the option
to bounce the cheese off them before hitting the pins
thus obtaining angles not possible in other less animated
games, while the hood prevents wayward cheeses and
pins flying off into other parts of the pub. A friend
of mine is very proud of the fact that he was once
thrown out of a pub for playing Hood Skittles over-arm.
Many experts consider Hood Skittles to be one of the
most enjoyable English pub games around so it would
be well worth popping into a pub featuring the game
if you ever have the chance.....
Also seen occasionally
is the Bar Skittles game, sometimes known as 'Devil
Amongst the Tailors', where the ball is on a string
suspended from an upright stick. This game first appeared
in the 1700's and was later miniaturized so that no
throwing area was required as the nine pins involved
stood on a small square table and were knocked down
by the aforementioned ball which swung around the
stick. The throwing area of Hood Skittles takes up
valuable room where customers may otherwise stand
or sit, while Bar Skittles is much more compact.
But how did the
odd name come about? Apparently, back in the 1780's,
some London theater-goers and tailors got a little
carried away and started a little fisticuffs outside
the Theatre Royal in Haymarket over a play that the
tailors judged to be insulting. Just how do you insult
a tailor? Anyway, the local crack Dragoons were called
in to quell the riot, which they did in such an overly
enthusiastic way that their tactics were likened by
the local press to the wooden ball plowing through
table skittles. Hence, 'Devil Amongst the Tailors'.
The little village
of Welton has been around for quite some time, since
there is evidence that the six wells in the area prompted
a Roman encampment. The name Welton is derived from
those six wells, though not very imaginatively: 'Wel'
meaning a spring or stream; and 'tun' being the Saxon
word for a village. Naturally, it went through the
various spellings down the years, variously as Waletune,
Weletone, and Welintone. Today there are five Weltons
in England, each of which I have visited as part of
a single trip. This may seem odd, but in fact it gave
the touring party a fine excuse to see areas of the
country that would otherwise go unvisited. The Northamptonshire
Welton was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1089,
about when the three Saxons who owned the land were
unceremoniously kicked out by three invading Normans,
one of whom was Robert, Count of Mortain.
Now, here's the
interesting part: Robert was brother to William, as
in William The Conqueror, who was responsible for
killing King Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066,
thereby changing the course of British history (it
was also the last time a foreign soldier set foot
on British soil in anger, I am proud to say). Harold's
last name was actually Goodwinson, or Son of Goodwin.
Where did I get all this
information? From current village resident, Phillip
Goodwin, a direct descendant of Harold.
There it is again,
that recurring continuity of time, where a battle
over nine hundred years ago is not a detached piece
of encyclopedia history, but instead is part of a
continuous unbroken temporal chain, where someone
who walks into the pub on a Friday night is just one
of the many links. Yes, history is cathedrals and
castles, but it may also be sitting across the table
from you in the pub.
Just on the short
walk up to the pub, there is so much history. Coming
out of my father's house into Emery Close, you are
reminded that the pastures that once were here were
owned by the Emery family, and were called Kiln Fields,
which leads us to Kiln Lane, and the climb up into
the village. On the right, the new developments where
once we saw the burned out remains of Welton House.
On the left across the small green is the Old House,
which is mostly from the 1700's but may have a medieval
core, and was once the bake-house for the village.
Now on the right, the well-known gravestone to six-year
old John Hewitt, who was 'lost by neglect January
16th 1806'. And watching over the poor boy's grave,
the Fifteenth Century St.Martin's Church.
All this history in just
a few hundred yards in an ordinary Northamptonshire
village. Can you imagine how much history there is
to be discovered in this country?
Today, Welton village is
relatively quiet, and has been guaranteed a green
buffer between the village boundary and the encroachment
by Daventry to the south. At least into the foreseeable
future!
The White Horse will forever
be a destination, even when they have to wheel me
there. This pub may be thousands of miles away, but
it is my local. We know the barman, we know the cook,
we know people who wander in; we catch up on news
from our friends who gather around the table; we go
up the road some nights, stay home others (but not
many!); we treat this pub as our gathering point.
It is our pub.
