Pub-talk

The pub is a central part of English life and culture. That may sound like a standard guidebooky thing to say, but I really mean it: the importance of the pub in English culture cannot be over-emphasized. Over three-quarters of the adult population go to pubs, and over a third are ‘regulars’, visiting the pub at least once a week. For many it is a second home. It also provides the perfect ‘representative sample’ of the English population for any social scientist, as pubs are frequented by people of all ages, all social classes, all education-levels and every conceivable occupation. It would be impossible even to attempt to understand Englishness without spending a lot of time in pubs, and it would almost be possible to achieve a good understanding of Englishness without ever leaving the pub.

I say ‘almost’ because the pub – like all drinking-places, in all cultures – is a special environment, with its own rules and social dynamics. My colleagues at SIRC and I have conducted quite extensive cross-cultural research on drinking-places²¹ (well, someone had to do it) which showed that drinking is, in all societies, essentially a social activity, and that most cultures have specific, designated environments for communal drinking. Our research revealed three significant cross-cultural similarities or ‘constants’ regarding such drinking-places:

In all cultures, the drinking-place is a special environment, a separate social world with its own customs and values

Drinking-places tend to be socially integrative, egalitarian environments, or at least environments in which status distinctions are based on different criteria from those operating in the outside world

The primary function of drinking-places is the facilitation of social bonding

So, although the pub is very much part of English culture, it also has its own ‘social micro-climate’²². Like all drinking-places, it is in some respects a ‘liminal’ zone, an equivocal, marginal, borderline state, in which one finds a degree of ‘cultural remission’ – a structured, temporary relaxation or suspension of normal social controls (also known as ‘legitimised deviance’ or ‘time-out behaviour’). It is partly because of this caveat that an examination of the rules of English pub-talk should tell us a lot about Englishness.

The rules of english pub-talk The Sociability Rule

For a start, the first rule of English pub-talk tells us why pubs are such a vital part of our culture. This is the sociability rule: the bar counter of the pub is one of the very few places in England where it is socially acceptable to strike up a conversation with a complete stranger. At the bar counter, normal rules of privacy and reserve are suspended, we are granted temporary ‘remission’ from our conventional social inhibitions, and friendly conversation with strangers is considered entirely appropriate and normal behaviour.

Foreign visitors often find it hard to come to terms with the fact that there is no waiter service in English pubs. Indeed, one of the most poignant sights of the English summer (or the funniest, depending on your sense of humour) is the group of thirsty tourists sitting patiently at a pub table, waiting for someone to come and take their order.

My first, callously scientific, response to this sight was to take out my stopwatch and start timing how long it would take tourists of different nationalities to realise that there was no waiter service. (For the record, the fastest time – two minutes, twenty-four seconds – was achieved by a sharp-eyed American couple; the slowest – forty-five minutes, thirteen seconds – was a group of young Italians, although to be fair, they were engrossed in an animated debate about football and did not appear much concerned about the apparent lack of service. A French couple marched out of the pub, muttering bitterly about the poor service and les Anglais in general, after a twenty-four-minute wait.) Once I had obtained sufficient data, however, I became more sympathetic, eventually to the point of writing a little paperback book on pub etiquette for tourists. The field research for this book – a sort of nine-month nationwide pub-crawl – also provided much useful material on Englishness.

In the pub-etiquette book, I explained that the sociability rule only applies at the bar counter, so having to go up to the bar to buy drinks gives the English valuable opportunities for social contact. Waiter service, I pointed out, would isolate people at separate tables. This may not be a problem in more naturally outgoing and sociable cultures, where people do not require any assistance to strike up a conversation with those seated near them, but, I argued rather defensively, the English are somewhat reserved and inhibited, and we need all the help we can get. It is much easier for us to drift casually into ‘accidental’ chat while waiting at the bar counter than deliberately to break into the conversation at a neighbouring table. The no-waiter-service system is designed to promote sociability.

But not rampant, uncontrolled sociability. ‘Cultural remission’ is not just a fancy academic way of saying ‘letting your hair down’. It does not mean abandoning all inhibitions and doing exactly as you please. It means, quite specifically, a structured, ordered, conventionalized relaxation of normal social conventions. In English pubs, the suspension of normal privacy rules is limited to the bar counter, and in some cases, to a lesser degree, to tables situated very near the counter – those furthest from the bar being universally understood to be the most ‘private’. I found a few other exceptions: the sociability rule also applies to a more limited extent (and subject to quite strict rules of introduction) around the dart-board and pool table, but only to those standing near the players: the tables in the vicinity of these games are still ‘private’.

The English need the social facilitation of legitimised deviance at the bar counter, but we also still value our privacy. The division of the pub into ‘public’ and ‘private’ zones is a perfect, and very English, compromise: it allows us to break the rules, but ensures that we do so in a comfortingly ordered and rule-governed manner.