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REBELS OF THE BLACK SWAN
OF THE EDINBURGH BRANCH OF THE CAMPAIGN FOR REAL ALE
1975-85
In the turbulent waters of human life it is seldom possible to point to one person, let alone sixty as in this story, and truthfully say, ‘There is courage, undaunted by menace; there is perseverance, with no taint of self-seeking; there are virtue, and goodness, and the blazing inextinguishable light of human nobility, free of all that is unworthy, misjudged or base!’
Perhaps such words are most likely to be spoken when human beings confront a force of sheer, malignant evil, and find within themselves the resources to defeat it.
It was a bitter January night. A vicious sea breeze scourged the twisted, blackened streets of the port of Leith on Scotland’s east coast. Cobbles gleamed darkly as rainwater froze to ice. Gulls emitted desolate cries. This was no night to leave a warm hearth, and pedestrians were few.
Yet an obscure lane named Sandport Place was thronged with them. Hunched in their overcoats, staggering and sliding, they fought the very elements to reach a low ale-house that would one day be venerated as the birthplace of the resistance: an alehouse known as Jimmy Muir’s, or the Black Swan.
The scene within was chaotic. As a coal fire blazed and tobacco smoke blurred the air, a horde of drinkers besieged the bar, their faces reflected in the gantry mirrors, their ugly National Health glasses steamed up, their bodies decked in the highest mid-Seventies fashions – flared jeans, platform heels, floral shirts, dangling medallions, ‘Chopper’ bikes, all topped off with purple ‘Afro’ hairstyles that seemed to scrape the ceiling.
An alert observer would have noticed one thing more: the watchful determination on every face. These men had come together for a purpose.
They were living under a tyranny. Tonight they would pledge themselves to fight it – to the death.
By the time the Sixties gave place to the Seventies, a hideous shadow had fallen across Britain. A three-letter word haunted the nightmares of millions.
The word was ‘keg’.
Brewery after brewery had been taken over by larger breweries, which were then absorbed by even bigger ones, which would themselves be swallowed up by breweries so gigantic that the brain reeled at the thought of their sheer extent. There was nothing philanthropic about these metamorphoses. They were driven by money, and by men who cared for nothing else: graceless, sweaty, porcine men in sky-blue nylon suits who kept tubs of million-pound notes under their beds and took their holidays in gigantic five-star helicopter-hotels above Las Vegas.
There was a saying: ‘Money talks’. And when money talked, it said: ‘Keg.’
So what was keg? Few of those who were unwise enough to drink it have survived to tell us. Those who remain are leading dismal twilit lives in institutional care and are often incapable of speech. Listen to their screams in the small hours of night. That will tell you all you need to know.
As the Sixties ended, the United Kingdom was literally awash with keg beer. In every town and hamlet, the red squirrel of real ale fled before the marauding grey squirrel of keg. The island race who thirty years earlier had defied Adolf Hitler knelt now in subjection before such horrors as Tennent’s Lager and McEwan’s Special.
None dared dream of deliverance – until, in 1971, a handful of subversive journalists met by night in the cellar of a derelict London brewery and swore on the Collected Works of Hilaire Belloc to resist the tidal wave of keg, at the hazard of their own lives. In that dank pit, strewn with dead rats and malodorous dossers who drank hair lacquer and methylated spirits ‘because they’re better than keg’, the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) had been born.
But would it be allowed to breathe and grow?
Scotland was then, and is today, a land of towering mountains and misty glens, of freezing temperatures, baleful Calvinists and cumbrous national dress.
South of the border, millions of young folk had been caught up in the ecstasies of Beatlemania, marijuana, pirate radio and compulsory public nudity. Authority was flouted. Parents were scathingly addressed as ‘Shithead’. University administrators were pelted with sludge. A mob of drug-crazed police horses attacked the United States Embassy in Grosvenor Square. The old taboos were breaking down. By 1972 healthy young people were openly admitting to fantasising about having sex with all five of the Osmond brothers (excluding Jimmy) at once.
In this fevered atmosphere, the CAMRA infection spread rapidly. All over England the torch of real ale was taken up. A growing army of CAMRA activists let down the tyres of Watney’s lorries, sent obscene letters to brewers’ wives, and deliberately purchased pints of keg in order to swallow a mouthful, clutch their throats, make spluttering noises and have to be taken away in an ambulance.
None of this happened in Scotland.
Instead, gaunt and strenuous men – fathers of families, ministers of religion, provosts, rectors, procurators fiscal – worked ninety-hour weeks prohibiting things. All was stern and joyless. Every year in Inverness, twenty-five women were tarred and feathered for the crime of ‘displaying amusement’. Dour, fatalistic, suspicious of pleasure, the Scots were the ideal consumers of keg beer.
Not until 1974 was the CAMRA standard raised north of the border.
The fateful event occurred in Bishopton, Renfrewshire, at a mean hovel called the Golf Inn. In conditions of the utmost secrecy, three quaking people carved the five letters C-A-M-R-A into their own forearms with a Stanley knife before spitting on a kegful of keg and fleeing into the darkness.
They had hoped to do this in the teeming metropolis of Glasgow, but had failed to find there a single pub that still served cask conditioned ale. Truly, the task before them was fearful.
The muggy back room of the Black Swan was bursting at its seams. All seats were occupied. Latecomers had to stand, packed so closely together it was hard to see how a particle of air could circulate. Sixty people were present. Smoke streamed upwards from fifty-eight cigarettes. The gaslights flickered beneath their frosted glass shades. Outside, the sea wind lashed the howff. Inside, dissatisfaction rumbled – a dissatisfaction that was about to break out into open rebellion…
Who were they, these sixty paladins, taking up the sword against the evil fluid that had blighted the lives and rotted the intestines of their ain folk?
We do not know. What we do know is that they were taking a horrifying risk.
Leith was part of Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital city – famous for its beauties and infamous for the cruelty with which it was governed. Edinburgh’s police, lawyers and councillors belonged to a secret masonic organisation funded by the brewers, who supplied it with unlimited quantities of free keg beer. Known CAMRA supporters could be clapped in irons, branded, transported to Antarctica or forced to spend a whole afternoon in a Morningside tearoom without screaming.
We may be sure there were some fluttering hearts and trembling hands in the back room of the Black Swan on the night of January 16th, 1975.
By the time the gaslights were turned down and the conspirators passed through the heavy swing doors into the raw, slippery night, the Edinburgh branch of CAMRA had come into being. David had braced himself to defy Goliath.
Later that year a dissident publication began circulating in Scotland. Handwritten on five discarded paper napkins held together with Selotape, the Scottish Real Beer Guide disclosed (to anyone who could crack the simple numerical code in which it was written) the names and addresses of public houses where cask conditioned ale could be purchased ‘under the counter’.
Remarkably, twenty-three of them were in Edinburgh.
What the authorities did not yet know was that the editor of the guide was an outwardly respectable Edinburgh citizen, Kenneth ‘Kenny’ Garden.
Taunted throughout life by urchins screeching obscenities such as ‘A Garden isn’t a lovesome thing, God wot!’ and ‘Come into the Maud, Garden!’, Kenny had sought solace in beer. One terrible night he had inadvertently gulped down a half-pint of keg, causing him to turn magenta and do bad impressions of the Everley Brothers. It was a lesson he never forgot.
Now, in his booklined study in Wester Hailes, working by the light of a small pocket torch, he received reports from CAMRA’s scattered Caledonian outposts and worked them up into a revolutionary tract.
Among the Edinburgh taverns whose names he recorded for posterity to revere were the Blue Blazer in Bread Street, Sandy Bell’s in Forrest Road, Clark’s Bar in Dundas Street and the two bars named Bennet’s, one in Morningside, one in Tollcross. Also listed was the Oxford Bar in Young Street, whose fearsome landlord Willie Ross was said to have ejected Robin Cook, the future Labour Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons, from his pub. This required great courage as Cook was a huge, musclebound man who had learnt to fight dirty in the boxing clubs of the Gorbals. We can be confident there was seldom any trouble in the Oxford Bar.
The months passed. Kenny Garden was not apprehended. The trickle of furtive CAMRA reports swelled into a stream, and in 1976 he was able to compile a second edition of his Guide. How his heart must have swelled as he revealed that no fewer than fifty-four Edinburgh bars were now offering real ale to those who dared request it.
Scholars are uncertain how to interpret this new figure. Had twenty-one licensees, sensing which way the wind was blowing, leapt on to the CAMRA bandwagon when most thought it was merely a unicycle? Or had they been selling real ale all along, so discreetly that even CAMRA’s trained agents had failed to notice, probably because they were pissed?
In the same year Edinburgh witnessed a startling act of defiance, an event that would have been unimaginable even twelve months before.
Tucked away behind Waverley, the city’s principal railway station, stands a solid rectangular edifice known as the Fruitmarket Gallery. It had a curious history. Originally built as a venue for the exhibition and sale of modern art, it was invaded in 1955 by a crowd of boisterous people carrying crates of fruit, which they insisted on selling to each other. After some months they claimed squatter’s rights, the Court of Session upheld their claim, and a pitiful gaggle of slender youths with goatee beards and black polo-necked sweaters slunk out of the building with unsaleable canvasses under their arms, never to be seen or bothered about again.
By 1976 the Fruitmarket Gallery was a byword for bananas, apricots and melons. Now it was to lend itself to something still more shocking.
Going public as never before, the Edinburgh branch of CAMRA staged its first ‘beer festival’ there.
In the background, trains were clattering and roaring, while unintelligible female voices blared over tannoys. Within the gallery, trestle tables sagged under the weight of massive barrels of beer. Behind them stood the activists, sporting what became known as the CAMRA ‘uniform’ – fat bellies, stained pullovers and beards without moustaches.
Real ale devotees came hurrying in, white-faced, ducking into the doorway with their collars turned up, anxious not to be recognised. Some had drawn duelling scars on their faces with eyeliner. One woman born and bred in the city affected a heavy Bulgarian accent.
The atmosphere was tense. There were rumours that a leading brewery was plotting to seal the gallery’s doors and windows and pump keg beer through a hole in the roof, drowning everyone inside.
But all relaxed as the amber nectar did its work. Thirty kilderkins (18-gallon casks) of ale had been laid on and it was clear they were emptying rapidly. Slanderous songs about named brewery officials were chanted in hoarse unison. Ineffectual fights broke out, in which no one managed to hit anyone else. A dozen drinkers rushed out of the gallery intending to climb the Scott Monument and dive from the top into a bucket of Golden Syrup as an impassioned protest against keg beer.
Yes, it took courage to drink real ale, but real ale gave you courage enough to do anything. This lesson was not lost on the sixty gallant foot-soldiers of the Edinburgh branch of CAMRA.
Or rather, it wouldn’t have been lost on them had they been sober, but in fact they had to piece it together afterwards from police reports and by counting their pulled muscles.
Part Two will appear in due course, if the good Lord spares me.
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