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Alistair Mutch argues that Sydney O. Nevile co-operated with social workers in Somers Town owing to his own position as the son of a member of the gentry. Whitbread's subsequent pub improvement programme, Mutch contends, reflected the firm's work in this London slum. This article challenges Mutch's thesis, and points to Nevile's social status as an outsider, who survived truly by his own wits, arduous effort, sense of social inferiority and as a result of sheer luck. Involvement with Somers Town pubs came late in Whitbread's pub improvements and had impact neither on the company nor on how Nevile subsequently approached reforming pubs.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank David Fahey and Trevor Lloyd for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Notes
1. Whitbread Archives, Notes of a Meeting with Cyril Graves, Whitbread Archives, 16 March 1990.
2. Nevile would let the Association run the Tavistock and Anchor, both on Stibbington Street in Somers Town, the most abjectly poverty-stricken district in all of England, as well as the King's Head (Cumberland Market).
3. Mutch incorrectly uses the term ‘reconstruction', which under licensing law meant something quite different than building or rebuilding. Public house licences, for example, were not removed to new sites for reconstruction. Reconstructions involved far fewer changes and less cost than a building or rebuilding. Grant of a new or removal of an old licence to a new site required magisterial approval at Quarter Sessions, whereas local magistrates could sanction a reconstruction on the existing site (Gutzke, 2006, p. 243; Mutch, 2010, p. 517).
4. Mutch also asserts a connection between brewers’ country estates and the use of the tenancy system. According to Mutch (2010, p. 520), ‘industry leaders often acquired rural estates in which they engaged in practices of stock rearing and farming which may have contributed to the predominant use of the tenant to run their estates of public houses’. No evidence is cited to substantiate this generalisation.
5. Mutch (2010, p. 519) argues that Nevile's connection with social workers ‘might have shaped the somewhat Olympian nature of the buildings supplied by the improved public house movement’. Their gigantic size had nothing whatsoever to do with the role of social workers. He offers no evidence for this belief.
6. In the US, see, Kolko (1963, pp. 2, 14, 284; 1965); Weinstein (1968). For Britain, see Blackburn (1987, pp. 85–102).