Pub room names

This sort of thing happens to me quite often. I was rummaging through a pile of books looking for something. I didn’t find the book I sought, but tripped over another. One I’d forgotten I had. But very relevant to my current area of focus.

The book was “Beer in Britain”, a book based on a supplement which appeared in The Times newspaper in 1958. It’s a series of short articles on the subject of beer. I’ve owned it for a few years yet never really looked at it. That’s pretty typical of me. I buy books which I think might come in handy some day and then forget about them. Pretty sure I’ve still got a couple of books on bottling that I need to process.

I’ll be pestering you with plenty from “Beer in Britain”, starting with a useful guide to the terminology of pub rooms.

Sadly, most of these terms have disappeared along with the rooms that they designated. Few pubs retain the multiple-room layout. Those that do rarely have more than two these days. But even before the ravages of crap refurbishments in the 1960’s and 1970’s the number of rooms in pubs was being eroded. Pubs built before WW I, unless they were tiny, always had several rooms. Ironically, the larger “improved” pubs of the interwar years had fewer rooms. While those built after WW II were usually limited to just a Public Bar and a Lounge.

What isn’t mentioned in the list is a feature that was common in the North and the Midlands: a drinking corridor. The classic 19th-century design was to have a central serving area. The front of this was the bar counter for the taproom, the back faced onto a corridor, off which were all the other rooms. It’s not really a room in the sense of a Lounge or Public Bar, but was used for vertical drinking.

The names used for different rooms varied considerably from region to region. “Beer in Britain” rationalised that down to just northern and southern usage, using the River Trent as the dividing line. You may recall that I grew up in Newark, which is on the Trent. But on its southern bank. However, it was definitely a northern usage town.

Let’s take a look at those names in detail, starting with the South. 

Pub room names - Southern Usage
Public Bar	Where prices are lowest and furnishings simple.
Saloon Bar	A saloon was originally a spacious reception room in a private mansion, then in an inn; applied c. 1835 to the better-furnished room of a public house.
Lounge	Originally the hotel residents' sitting room. Now a superior saloon bar, often with waiter service and with no sale of draught beer.
Lounge Bar / Saloon Lounge	Midway in status between the saloon and the lounge.
Private Bar	Midway in status between public bar and saloon, intended for customers wishing to conduct private conversations, or for men accompanied by women: sometimes deputizing for a Ladies' Bar.
Ladies' Bar	Self-explanatory.
Bar Parlour	An inner room, without a street entrance, reserved traditionally for regular customers or the landlord's intimates. Now rare.
Four-Ale-Bar	Colloquial term for the public bar; so named because mild ale. the working man's drink, used to be sold at fourpence a quart.
Buffet Bar	A refreshment bar (1869). Modern equivalents are the Lunch Bar and the Snack Bar, of saloon bar status.
Tap Room	Originally (1807) a room where beer was tapped or drawn from a cask. Now an old-fashioned name for the public bar of an hotel or country alehouse. Not found in London.
Hotel Bar	A saloon bar in a hotel, without a street entrance, mainly for residents.
Shades	A basement bar. Rare.
Dive	Originally an illegal drinking den located underground (United States, 1882). now usually a basement Snack Bar.
Cocktail Bar / American Bar	Hotel bars, now tending to spread into public houses, sometimes taking over the place of the lounge under the title of Cocktail Lounge.
Source:
"Beer in Britain", The Times, 1960, page 69.

It’s incredible how long the term Four-Ale-Bar continued to be used. Mild hadn’t been 4d a quart since 1914, yet the expression was still in use almost half a century later.

I always considered names like Saloon Bar, Lounge Bar, Private Bar, etc. just to be synonyms for Lounge. Probably because the specific function of these rooms had fallen into misuse and been forgotten by the time I started drinking. There may have been different names on the door, but everyone just treated the rooms as part of the Lounge.

Next it’s the turn of the North:

Pub room names - Northern usage
Bar, Public Bar	As in the South.
Vaults	Originally a cellar for storing food or liquor; now on the ground floor—equivalent to the public bar. (Vault in Lancashire.)
Smoke Room	Northern and Midland equivalent of the saloon bar. There may be two: one for men only, the other (mixed) for both sexes.
Tap Room	A public bar. Sometimes a room reserved for playing games, without counter service.
Lounge / Parlour / Public Parlour / Bar Parlour	The best-furnished room.
Best Room / Best End	Colloquial names for the lounge.
Snug / Snuggery	Equivalent of the Southern bar parlour, but much more common. (Ireland only: one of a series of half-enclosed compartments within a bar.) Obsolescent.
News Room	An old-fashioned name for Tap Room, dating from the period when newspapers were supplied to customers.
Office Bar	(Midlands) An inner room without counter service, equivalent to the Southern bar parlour, generally located behind the scrvery or the hotel office.
Buffet Bar	North-Eastern variant of the lounge.  Not a snack bar.
Sitting Room	North-Eastern variant of the saloon bar.
First Class / Second Class	(Men's, Women's, Mixed.) Variants of the saloon and public bars, peculiar to the Carlisle State Management District.
Source:
"Beer in Britain", The Times, 1960, page 70.

I’m intrigued to see that the Carlisle State pubs had their own system of naming rooms. Not so surprising, as the scheme made radical changes to pub layouts, reducing the number of rooms and making decorations simpler.

You’ll note that there are considerable differences with southern practice. About the only names in common are Public Bar and Lounge. A couple of those terms I’ve never come across: News Room and Office Bar. And snug I only really know from Coronation Street.

The room names tally pretty well with what Mass Observation noted in 1930’s Bolton:

Vault — Vault, Public Bar, Saloon Bar.
Tap Room — News Room, Commercial Room.
Best Room — Music Room, Concert Room, Lounge, Parlour, Saloon, Commercial Room, Snug.
"The Pub and the People" by Mass Observation, 1943 (reprinted 1987), pages 92 - 94.

Odd that Music Room and Concert Room aren’t mentioned in “Beer in Britain” as I have seen those names etched into pub glass.

I was rummaging through my brain trying to think of other names for pub rooms. I’m sure the list above isn’t exhaustive. Let me know if you can think of any.

The taproom and the lounge

Time for the remaining two classes of pub room: taproom and lounge.

"The taproom is the same price as the vault. The same simplicity—it is often like the kitchen of any small farmhouse in the villages outside Worktown. But unlike the vault it is entirely a sitting-room, wooden benches round the wall and wooden stools; unpolished wood tables, spittoons, dominoes. This is more of a club room than the vault. The same people, same clothes, same percentage caps and scarves, but few casuals dropping in. Casuals are somewhat resented if they do drop into the taproom. It would be bad form for a stranger to go in there for a drink. And he would probably notice that the regulars in there were not very pleased to see him."
"The Pub and the People" by Mass Observation, 1943 (reprinted 1987), pages 105 - 106.

This fascinates me. The idea of  a second public bar type of room. Pretty much exactly like the vault, except with seats. And reserved for locals. The public bars my youthful boozing days in Leeds were more like the taprooms described here. Though there was no restriction on who went in. Quiet hostility to strangers isn't uncommon in pubs. Who hasn't walked through the door of a pub only for all conversations to stop and for everyone to turn and stare? It's happened to me on numerous occasions.

"In the lounge there are padded seats and chairs; a piano with a stool for the pianist; no standing. Aspidistras or other plants in 75 per cent; pictures on the wall, or modern wall decor; never stone floored, but lino, rubbercloth, etc. Generally a hearthrug. No games. Seldom a bookmaker's runner. Often adverts for non-alcoholic drinks. And always someone to bring you your drinks on a tray. You cannot see the bar from the lounge. In brief, the lounge is a large comfortable room with decorations such as may be found in any Worktown home, but on a large scale, on a middle-class level of comfort, with servant and service, everyone in smart clothes. You do not come to the lounge alone. If you do you are conspicuous. You come to the lounge with your social group, ready made, and sit at a table, having no especial intercourse with people at other tables. There is no sex division within the lounge. Each table tends to be a hetero-sexual group—though often these groups are exclusively of men or of women. Sixteen per cent of all pub-goers are women. About a third of all pub clients are in the lounges in pubs outside the town centre. The rest in the tap and vault. Average close on 45 per cent of the people in the lounge are women; in pubs where there are several lounges one may have 90 or more per cent women, it will have become a snug or bar parlour type, reserved for regular women in the same implicit way as the taproom is reserved for certain male regulars.

The saying "A woman's place is in the home" is still current in Worktown where 44 per cent of the adult women earn their own or their families' livings directly (over half these work in cotton mills). And the woman's place in the pub is that part of it which is a home from home, a better home from ordinary worker's home, where  — the only time in worker life in Worktown — you don't have to do any more than order someone else to serve your physiological need or wish. And, as usual, the woman's part is the one of cleanness, ashtrays, no random saliva, few or no spittoons. The vault is the place where men are men. In the lounge they are women's men, with collar studs. For that, as usual, they must pay another penny."
"The Pub and the People" by Mass Observation, 1943 (reprinted 1987), pages 106 - 107.

Carpet. That was on the floor of the lounges I remember. Lino was just too Spartan by the 1970's.

Waiter service was the biggest difference between the lounge and the rest of the pub. Waiters, as far as I can tell, disappeared in the 1960's. A few pubs have retained them, but very few. I've only ever been in two myself. (One was in Grimsby, the other Wigan, which isn't far from Bolton.) It was an odd experience. I didn't really understand how it worked, ordering from the waiter and having my beer brought to my seat. If it had been more common, I might have been more comfortable with it.

I've read this sentence a dozen times and still don't understand what it means: "Each table tends to be a hetero-sexual group—though often these groups are exclusively of men or of women." The groups are mixed but exclusively either of men or women? That makes no sense.

"women's men, with collar studs": what does that mean? Silver-tongued seducers, I think. As we'll learn later, there was plenty of shagging going on in 1930's Bolton.

Vault, Tap Room and Lounge

Think I'd forgotten about Bolton and its pubs? No way. Just got a little distracted by Irish Ale.
We're continuing with an entertainingly earnest description of the different rooms in a pub. Youngsters might find this as exotic as the researchers themselves. The biggest physical change in pubs since I've been drinking - and quite possibly the biggest in centuries - is knocking through all the rooms into one. I'm old enough to remember most pubs still being multi-room. Being a cheapskate, I almost always drank in the public bar. Why throw money away just to have a carpet on the floor? That was my thinking.

"Nomenclature of pub rooms varies. Colloquially the lounge or parlour is often spoken of as "the best room", and sometimes "the music room". A slang term for vault, occasionally used, is the "sawdust parlour", a reference that is more comprehensible when it is remembered that at one time the whole vault floor was strewn with sawdust or sand, a custom that no longer prevails here, but has been observed in some small country pubs in the south.

When we come to the "official" names written up on the doors of windows of the room we find the taproom sometimes called the News Room (cf. eighteenth century use of pubs for newspaper reading), and the best room called the commercial room. In other pubs it is named the Bar Parlour. A wide variation from normal nomenclature is shown in the following report:

. . . the landlord took me round to see the lounge proudly and said "This is what they call the Concert Room".
. . . The vault is labelled Saloon and another room Smoke Room. I ask if there is no vault here? The landlord, age 40, well built, pale but healthy looking, in a good suit and gold watch chain, says "This is a real new style pub. Well, this is the vault. It's called the Saloon. That's the thing in the newest. You don't properly have a vault in the town. Vault's outside the centre. That's the way things are, more highclass. He does not seem snobbish about this, in fact rather deprecating. He adds it is also a saloon because it has seats and tables
round it.

The class hierarchy of the various rooms—which we must now examine—is well illustrated by this, the landlord thinking that the name belonging to a higher class of room can make the vault "more highclass". Also the town centre pubs are more respectable. "You don't properly have a vault in the town" (this is in fact untrue).

In three or four of the big central pubs that have been rebuilt or redecorated the south of England nomenclature of Public and Saloon bars has been adopted. (In one of them castor oil plants are found in the saloon, as a distinct mark of "class"). Some other town centre vaults are called Saloon Bar. But normally, throughout all classes of pub the vault remains the vault. The use of the name Commercial and News Room is mostly confined to the middling-sized pubs, and in large ones the best rooms are invariably Lounges."
"The Pub and the People" by Mass Observation, 1943 (reprinted 1987), pages 90 - 91.

The use of Saloon Bar to descibe a public bar certainly is confusing. For me a Saloon Bar is the same as a lounge. Vaults I would recognice as a name for the public bar, though in the places I did most of my drinking - Nottinghamshire, Leeds and London - it wasn't used. Then again, Tap Room, for me, means public bar. That's how the phrase was used in Leeds. All very confusing, isn't it?

But let's continue.

"The following is a complete list of all the written usages for pub rooms that we have observed:

Vault — Vault, Public Bar, Saloon Bar.
Tap Room — News Room, Commercial Room.
Best Room — Music Room, Concert Room, Lounge, Parlour, Saloon, Commercial Room, Snug.

The original of the term "vault" is obscure. The New English Dictionary which gives considerable space to unusual and archaic usages of the word, such as an obscure seventeenth century writer who puts it in a context where it means an outside lavatory, simply fails to mention its current pub usage; considering it is a term in the daily vocabulary of millions in the North it is an indication of the ignorance of the pub in non-pub-going circles. Certainly the term must have originally been connected with its usage for the cellar. Wine bars in the south, where the term vault is not in use for the public bar, are often called wine vaults. But we have not been able to find any direct evidence of how its present pub usage came about. In this connection there is an interesting Worktown story that under the vault of the Man and Scythe, oldest pub, is a secret passage running to the Parish Church (200 yards). Now bricked up, it serves as a myth-umbilical between church and pub. That the church was once Publican Number One is beyond question. It is certain, therefore, that the pub has directly acquired religious associations. The whole set-up of the vault, the bar severing the landlord from the ordinary folk, the arrangements of bottles on the shelves, the often ornate windows, the beer-engine handles (generally three or four) sticking up like tapered candles, the shortly-to-be-described rituals of toasting, rounds, glass-swiggling—have much in common with forms of religious rite and invocation. The intricate build-up of pub rooms around the exclusive landlord sections is faintly reminiscent of the Catholic Church. And in each you come to the dividing-line between minister and ministered-to for alcoholic liquor.

The function of these different types of rooms cannot be understood until we have considered the types and habits of the drinkers that frequent them. Bearing this in mind we will make the following summing up:

VAULT and TAPROOM, tabu to women, patronized only by working class drinkers, form one group of rooms, in contradistinction to the

BEST ROOMS (lounge, parlour, etc.) where beer costs a penny a pint more, women are permitted.

THE VAULT is distinguished by the presence of THE BAR COUNTER.

THE TAPROOM, which has the same class of custom, is more of a club and games room.

Amongst best rooms the term LOUNGE is usually applied to the best rooms of the bigger pubs, PARLOUR to those of smaller ones. From now on, the former term will be used to cover all best rooms."
"The Pub and the People" by Mass Observation, 1943 (reprinted 1987), pages 92 - 94.

Now wasn't that fascinating? It comes as no surprise to me that the compilers of the New English Dictionary didn't bother to record northern working class vocabulary. They were probably oblivious to its existence and, even if they had noticed it, wouldn't have included it. I'd be interested in learning the etymology of the word. Thanks to class bias, it may prove difficult to uncover.

I'd never thought to draw parallels between the rituals of pubs and those of the catholic church. On reflection, it seems pretty obvious. But isn't everything once it's been explained? Handpumps like church candles. Love that image.

Once again, the book sheds its supposed cloak of anonymity by naming the oldest pub in town, the Man and Scythe. (Actually it's called Ye Olde Man and Scythe.) Which makes it a piece of piss to identify the town as Bolton. The pub still exists. I wonder when they last brewed their own beer? Probably quite a while ago. Halliwell's (whose name appears on the pub) were bought by Magee Marshall in 1910.

It's funny how you get odd combinations of events. The vault being men-only for example. I remember once seeing a "men only" sign on the door of a public bar. It was in Halifax in 1979. By then it was an anachronism, as equality legislation had made men-only rooms illegal several years before. Removing the possibility of keeping the public bar men only must have made knocking pubs through into a single room easier to implement. One less reason for keeping separate rooms.

Lots more to come from this particular pit of material. It won't be mined out for years yet.