Friday’s ad is for Guinness, from 1948. While the best known Guinness ads were undoubtedly the ones created by John Gilroy, Guinness had other creative ads throughout the same period and afterward, too, which are often overlooked. This ad, one of many that used Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is entitled “Alice in Snowmansland,” and features a short story about a glass of Guinness, Alice, the Mad Hatter and a snowman, but has a different illustration from one I shared a few days ago from the 1950s.
Beer In Ads #2482: Bottle And Jug
Wednesday’s ad is for Guinness, from 1954. While the best known Guinness ads were undoubtedly the ones created by John Gilroy, Guinness had other creative ads throughout the same period and afterward, too, which are often overlooked. This ad, one of many that used Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is entitled “Bottle and Jug,” and the Mad Hatter is apparently a Guinness thief, or will be in the future. The Carroll-esque story is eerily similar to the Philip K. Dick story “Minority Report,” which was about stopping future crime, or precrime, before it happened. But the Guinness ad ran two years before Dick’s story was published in 1956. Maybe this was his inspiration for the story?
Beer In Ads #2481: Alice In Posterland
Tuesday’s ad is for Guinness, from 1952. While the best known Guinness ads were undoubtedly the ones created by John Gilroy, Guinness had other creative ads throughout the same period and afterward, too, which are often overlooked. This ad, one of many that used Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is entitled “Alice In Posterland,” and Alice is perched above a large aviary cage full of birds while the Guinness zookeeper is being chased around it while he holds a bottle of Guinness and a full glass. The illustration was done by Antony Groves-Raines.
Beer and Cider by George Saintsbury
Today is the birthday of George Saintsbury (October 23, 1845–January 28, 1933). He “was an English writer, literary historian, scholar, critic and wine connoisseur.
Although Saintsbury was best known during his lifetime as a scholar, he is also remembered today for his Notes on a Cellar-Book (1920), one of the great testimonials to drink and drinking in wine literature. When he was close to death, André Simon arranged a dinner in his honour. Although Saintsbury did not attend, this was the start of the Saintsbury Club, men of letters and members of the wine trade who continue to have dinners to this day.
Part of his work, Notes on a Cellar Book, was a chapter entitled “Beer and Cider.”
This is the introduction to this chapter, from a later volume of various works called “Modern Essays,” and edited by Christopher Morley. It was originally published in 1921, one year after Saintsbury’s death.
How pleasant it is to find the famous Professor Saintsbury — known to students as the author of histories of the English and French literatures, the History of Criticism and History of English Prosody — spending the evening so hospitably in his cellar. I print this — from his downright delightful Notes on a Cellar Book — as a kind of tantalizing penance. It is a charming example of how pleasantly a great scholar can unbend on occasion.
George Saintsbury, born in 1845, studied at Merton College, Oxford, taught school 1868-76, was a journalist in London 1876-95, and held the chair of English Literature at Edinburgh University, 1895-1915. If you read Notes on a Cellar Book, as you should, you will agree that it is a charmingly light-hearted causerie for a gentleman to publish at the age of seventy-five. More than ever one feels that sound liquor, in moderation, is a preservative of both body and wit.
BEER AND CIDER
By George Saintsbury
THERE is no beverage which I have liked “to live with” more than Beer; but I have never had a cellar large enough to accommodate much of it, or an establishment numerous enough to justify the accommodation. In the good days when servants expected beer, but did not expect to be treated otherwise than as servants, a cask or two was necessary; and persons who were “quite” generally took care that the small beer they drank should be the same as that which they gave to their domestics, though they might have other sorts as well. For these better sorts at least the good old rule was, when you began on one cask always to have in another. Even Cobbett, whose belief in beer was the noblest feature in his character, allowed that it required some keeping. The curious “white ale,” or lober agol—which, within the memory of man, used to exist in Devonshire and Cornwall, but which, even half a century ago, I have vainly sought there—was, I believe, drunk quite new; but then it was not pure malt and not hopped at all, but had eggs (“pullet-sperm in the brewage”) and other foreign bodies in it.
I did once drink, at St David’s, ale so new that it frothed from the cask as creamily as if it had been bottled: and I wondered whether the famous beer of Bala, which Borrow found so good at his first visit and so bad at his second, had been like it.
On the other hand, the very best Bass I ever drank had had an exactly contrary experience. In the year 1875, when I was resident at Elgin, I and a friend now dead, the Procurator-Fiscal of the district, devoted the May “Sacrament holidays,” which were then still kept in those remote parts, to a walking tour up the Findhorn and across to Loch Ness and Glen Urquhart. At the Freeburn Inn on the first-named river we found some beer of singular excellence: and, asking the damsel who waited on us about it, were informed that a cask of Bass had been put in during the previous October, but, owing to a sudden break in the weather and the departure of all visitors, had never been tapped till our arrival.
Beer of ordinary strength left too long in the cask gets “hard” of course; but no one who deserves to drink it would drink it from anything but the cask if he could help it. Jars are makeshifts, though useful makeshifts: and small beer will not keep in them for much more than a week. Nor are the very small barrels, known by various affectionate diminutives (“pin,” etc.) in the country districts, much to be recommended. “We’ll drink it in the firkin, my boy!” is the lowest admission in point of volume that should be allowed. Of one such firkin I have a pleasant memory and memorial, though it never reposed in my home cellar. It was just before the present century opened, and some years before we Professors in Scotland had, of our own motion and against considerable opposition, given up half of the old six months’ holiday without asking for or receiving a penny more salary. (I have since chuckled at the horror and wrath with which Mr. Smillie and Mr. Thomas would hear of such profligate conduct.) One could therefore move about with fairly long halts: and I had taken from a friend a house at Abingdon for some time. So, though I could not even then drink quite as much beer as I could thirty years earlier a little higher up the Thames, it became necessary to procure a cask. It came—one of Bass’s minor mildnesses—affectionately labeled “Mr. George Saintsbury. Full to the bung.” I detached the card, and I believe I have it to this day as my choicest (because quite unsolicited) testimonial.
Very strong beer permits itself, of course, to be bottled and kept in bottles: but I rather doubt whether it also is not best from the wood; though it is equally of course, much easier to cellar it and keep it bottled. Its kinds are various and curious. “Scotch ale” is famous, and at its best (I never drank better than Younger’s) excellent: but its tendency, I think, is to be too sweet. I once invested in some—not Younger’s—which I kept for nearly sixteen years, and which was still treacle at the end. Bass’s No. 1 requires no praises. Once when living in the Cambridgeshire village mentioned earlier I had some, bottled in Cambridge itself, of great age and excellence. Indeed, two guests, though both of them were Cambridge men, and should have had what Mr. Lang once called the “robust” habits of that University, fell into one ditch after partaking of it. (I own that the lanes thereabouts are very dark.) In former days, though probably not at present, you could often find rather choice specimens of strong beer produced at small breweries in the country. I remember such even in the Channel Islands. And I suspect the Universities themselves have been subject to “declensions and fallings off.” I know that in my undergraduate days at Merton we always had proper beer-glasses, like the old “flute” champagnes, served regularly at cheese-time with a most noble beer called “Archdeacon,” which was then actually brewed in the sacristy of the College chapel. I have since—a slight sorrow to season the joy of reinstatement there—been told that it is now obtained from outside. And All Souls is the only other college in which, from actual recent experience, I can imagine the possibility of the exorcism,
if lay-brother Peter were so silly as to abuse, or play tricks with, the good gift.
I have never had many experiences of real “home-brewed,” but two which I had were pleasing. There was much home-brewing in East Anglia at the time I lived there, and I once got the village carpenter to give me some of his own manufacture. It was as good light ale as I ever wish to drink (many times better than the wretched stuff that Dora has foisted on us), and he told me that, counting in every expense for material, cost and wear of plant, etc., it came to about a penny a quart. The other was very different. The late Lord de Tabley—better or at least longer known as Mr. Leicester Warren—once gave a dinner at the Athenæum at which I was present, and had up from his Cheshire cellars some of the old ale for which that county is said to be famous, to make flip after dinner. It was shunned by most of the pusillanimous guests, but not by me, and it was excellent. But I should like to have tried it unflipped.
I never drank mum, which all know from The Antiquary, some from “The Ryme of Sir Lancelot Bogle,” and some again from the notice which Mr. Gladstone’s love of Scott (may it plead for him!) gave it once in some Budget debate, I think. It is said to be brewed of wheat, which is not in its favor (wheat was meant to be eaten, not drunk) and very bitter, which is. Nearly all bitter drinks are good. The only time I ever drank “spruce” beer I did not like it. The comeliest of black malts is, of course, that noble liquor called of Guinness. Here at least I think England cannot match Ireland, for our stouts are, as a rule, too sweet and “clammy.” But there used to be in the country districts a sort of light porter which was one of the most refreshing liquids conceivable for hot weather. I have drunk it in Yorkshire at the foot of Roseberry Topping, out of big stone bottles like champagne magnums. But that was nearly sixty years ago. Genuine lager beer is no more to be boycotted than genuine hock, though, by the way, the best that I ever drank (it was at the good town of King’s Lynn) was Low not High Dutch in origin. It was so good that I wrote to the shippers at Rotterdam to see if I could get some sent to Leith, but the usual difficulties in establishing connection between wholesale dealers and individual buyers prevented this. It was, however, something of a consolation to read the delightful name, “our top-and-bottom-fermentation beer,” in which the manufacturer’s letter, in very sound English for the most part, spoke of it. English lager I must say I have never liked; perhaps I have been unlucky in my specimens. And good as Scotch strong beer is, I cannot say that the lighter and medium kinds are very good in Scotland. In fact, in Edinburgh I used to import beer of this kind from Lincolnshire, where there is no mistake about it. My own private opinion is that John Barleycorn, north of Tweed, says: “I am for whisky, and not for ale.”
“Cider and perry,” says Burton, “are windy drinks”; yet he observes that the inhabitants of certain shires in England (he does not, I am sorry to say, mention Devon) of Normandy in France, and of Guipuzcoa in Spain, “are no whit offended by them.” I have never liked perry on the few occasions on which I have tasted it; perhaps because its taste has always reminded me of the smell of some stuff that my nurse used to put on my hair when I was small. But I certainly have been no whit offended by cider, either in divers English shires, including very specially those which Burton does not include, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset, or in Normandy. The Guipuzcoan variety I have, unfortunately, had no opportunity of tasting. Besides, perry seems to me to be an abuse of that excellent creature the pear, whereas cider-apples furnish one of the most cogent arguments to prove that Providence had the production of alcoholic liquors directly in its eye. They are good for nothing else whatever, and they are excellent good for that. I think I like the weak ciders, such as those of the west and the Normandy, better than the stronger ones, and draught cider much better than bottled. That of Norfolk, which has been much commended of late, I have never tasted; but I have had both Western and West-Midland cider in my cellar, often in bottle and once or twice in cask. It is a pity that the liquor—extremely agreeable to the taste, one of the most thirst-quenching to be anywhere found, of no overpowering alcoholic strength as a rule, and almost sovereign for gout—is not to be drunk without caution, and sometimes has to be given up altogether from other medical aspects. Qualified with brandy—a mixture which was first imparted to me at a roadside inn by a very amiable Dorsetshire farmer whom I met while walking from Sherborne to Blandford in my first Oxford “long”—it is capital: and cider-cup who knoweth not? If there be any such, let him not wait longer than to-morrow before establishing knowledge. As for the pure juice of the apple, four gallons a day per man used to be the harvest allowance in Somerset when I was a boy. It is refreshing only to think of it now.
Of mead or metheglin, the third indigenous liquor of Southern Britain, I know little. Indeed, I should have known nothing at all of it had it not been that the parish-clerk and sexton of the Cambridgeshire village where I lived, and the caretaker of a vinery which I rented, was a bee-keeper and mead-maker. He gave me some once. I did not care much for it. It was like a sweet weak beer, with, of course, the special honey flavor. But I should imagine that it was susceptible of a great many different modes of preparation, and it is obvious, considering what it is made of, that it could be brewed of almost any strength. Old literary notices generally speak of it as strong.
Beer Words: Gambrinous
This morning, Quite Interesting tweeted an obscure beer word that I was not familiar with: Gambrinous. The Collins Dictionary, and others, defines it simply as “full of beer,” but I much prefer the more elegant definition from the Urban Dictionary; “To be content and happy due to a stomach full of beer.”
Ballantine’s Literary Ads: A.J. Cronin
Between 1951 and 1953, P. Ballantine and Sons Brewing Company, or simply Ballentine Beer, created a series of ads with at least thirteen different writers. They asked each one “How would you put a glass of Ballantine Ale into words?” Each author wrote a page that included reference to their beer, and in most cases not subtly. One of them was A.J.
Cronin, who was a Scottish author, best known for The Citadel, “the story of a doctor from a Welsh mining village who quickly moves up the career ladder in London.”
Today is the birthday of Archibald Joseph Cronin (July 19, 1896–January 6, 1981), who was “was a Scottish novelist and physician. His best-known novel is The Citadel, the story of a doctor from a Welsh mining village who quickly moves up the career ladder in London. Cronin had observed this scene closely as a Medical Inspector of Mines and later as a doctor in Harley Street. The book promoted what were then controversial new ideas about medical ethics and helped to inspire the launch of the National Health Service. Another popular mining novel of Cronin’s, set in the North East of England, is The Stars Look Down. Both these novels have been adapted as films, as have Hatter’s Castle, The Keys of the Kingdom and The Green Years. Cronin’s novella Country Doctor was adapted as a long-running BBC radio and TV series Dr Finlay’s Casebook, revived many years later.”
His 1952 piece for Ballantine was done as a reminiscence of his first taste of Ballantine in America, just after a well-played round of golf:
My first meeting with Ballantine Ale is still vivid in my memory.
It was a sweltering summer day at York Harbor, Maine, shortly after I first came to these United States. I thought it would be a memorable day because I shot the lowest golf score I ever made — a 72.
But in the locker room after the game, a friend said: “Try a Ballantine.”
I did — straight from the icebox. And as it flowed over by parched throat — tangy and refreshing in every swallow — I realized with a big thrill that my search for my favourite beverage was ended. I had always like ale, but here was something lighter, something better than anything I’d ever had abroad.
Well, my discovery outweighed by golf course. I remember that day as the time the “three rings” first rang the bell for me.
The Drunkard And His Wife
Today is the birthday of Jean de La Fontaine, who “was a famous French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, and in French regional languages.” One of his fables is called “The Drunkard and His Wife.” It’s an odd little story about a wife who came up with a novel cure for her husband’s drinking. Why it hasn’t caught on is anybody’s guess.
This is a modern translation, done by Craig Hill for “The Complete Fables of La Fontaine: A New Translation in Verse.”
Just for fun, here’s an earlier version from 1886, translated by Walter Thornbury, and with an illustration by Gustave Doré:
FABLE LIII.
THE DRUNKARD AND HIS WIFE.
Each one’s his faults, to which he still holds fast,
And neither shame nor fear can cure the man;
‘Tis apropos of this (my usual plan),
I give a story, for example, from the past.
A follower of Bacchus hurt his purse,
His health, his mind, and still grew each day worse;
Such people, ere they’ve run one-half their course,
Drain all their fortune for their mad expenses.
One day this fellow, by the wine o’erthrown,
Had in a bottle left his senses;
[Pg 168]His shrewd wife shut him all alone
In a dark tomb, till the dull fume
Might from his brains evaporate.
He woke and found the place all gloom,
A shroud upon him cold and damp,
Upon the pall a funeral lamp.
“What’s this?” said he; “my wife’s a widow, then!”
On that the wife, dressed like a Fury, came,
Mask’d, and with voice disguised, into the den,
And brought the wretched sot, in hopes to tame,
Some boiling gruel fit for Lucifer.
The sot no longer doubted he was dead—
A citizen of Pluto’s—could he err?
“And who are you?” unto the ghost he said.
“I’m Satan’s steward,” said the wife, “and serve the food
For those within this black and dismal place.”
The sot replied, with comical grimace,
Not taking any time to think,
“And don’t you also bring the drink?”
And here’s one more translation of the fable:
Each has his fault, to which he clings
In spite of shame or fear.
This apophthegm a story brings,
To make its truth more clear.
A sot had lost health, mind, and purse;
And, truly, for that matter,
Sots mostly lose the latter
Ere running half their course.
When wine, one day, of wit had fill’d the room,
His wife inclosed him in a spacious tomb.
There did the fumes evaporate
At leisure from his drowsy pate.
When he awoke, he found
His body wrapp’d around
With grave-clothes, chill and damp,
Beneath a dim sepulchral lamp.
‘How’s this? My wife a widow sad?’
He cried, ‘and I a ghost? Dead? dead?’
Thereat his spouse, with snaky hair,
And robes like those the Furies wear,
With voice to fit the realms below,
Brought boiling caudle to his bier –
For Lucifer the proper cheer;
By which her husband came to know –
For he had heard of those three ladies –
Himself a citizen of Hades.
‘What may your office be?’
The phantom question’d he.
‘I’m server up of Pluto’s meat,
And bring his guests the same to eat.’
‘Well,’ says the sot, not taking time to think,
‘And don’t you bring us anything to drink?’
Yest Or Yeast?
While searching for something else this morning, I came across some word nerdery about the word “yeast.” In “Sharpe’s Diamond dictionary of the English Language,” by John Sharpe, John Thompson, and William Harvey, which was published in 1841, they list the following:
Yest, or Yeast, s. the froth in the working of ale or beer
Yest’y, Yea’sty, a. frothy; smeared with yest
I confess to not often paging though old brewing books the way I imagine Martyn and Ron do, so I had not seen this spelling before.
Merrian-Webster states simply that “yest” is an “archaic variant of yeast.” And Webster’s 1913 Dictionary just refers you to Yeast: “n. 1. See Yeast.” And my 1971 O.E.D. states that it’s an obselete form of yeast.
That same O.E.D. gives a number of different forms of the word yeat, most of which I was unfamiliar with.
Forms 1. zist, zyst, 3. zest(e, zeest, yeest 6-9 yest, 7 eyst (?) 8-9 dial. east, dial. yist, 7- yeast.
From what I can tell, the first evidence of “yest” in print is from 1530: “Yest or barme for ale” whereas our modern spelling, “yeast” doesn’t show up until 1600.
Jean Verdenal’s Letter To T.S. Eliot
This will probably only be of interest to the most hardcore literati among you, but if you like poetry, literature or weird history, read on McDuff. According to Wikipedia, Jean Jules Verdenal “(May 11, 1890–May 2, 1915) was a French medical officer who served, and was killed, during the First World War. Verdenal and his life remain cloaked in obscurity; the little we do know comes mainly from interviews with family members and several surviving letters.”
Verdenal was born in Pau, France, the son of Paul Verdenal, a medical doctor. He had a talent for foreign languages. He was athletically inclined. Verdenal as a student was interested in literature and poetry and possessed copies of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Poésies and of Jules Laforgue’s Poésies and Moralités Légendaires. It was perhaps Verdenal’s literary inclinations that led him to become friends with American poet T.S. Eliot, whom he met in 1910 at the Sorbonne. After they parted ways, Verdenal and Eliot corresponded through letters. Verdenal was killed on May 2, 1915, while treating a wounded man on the battlefield. This was just a week into the Gallipoli Campaign and a few days shy of his twenty-fifth birthday.”
T.S. Eliot, of course, was an American-born poet, who most people know of because his 1939 collection of poems, “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” was later adapted by Andrew Lloyd Webber into the popular musical, “Cats,” which debuted in 1981. But here’s the basics, again from Wikipedia:
Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888–January 4, 1965) was a British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and “one of the twentieth century’s major poets”. He moved from his native United States to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling, working, and marrying there. He eventually became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39, renouncing his American citizenship.
Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), which was seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement. It was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922), “The Hollow Men” (1925), “Ash Wednesday” (1930), and Four Quartets (1943). He was also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.”
There is also speculation that Verdenal was the inspiration for the character “Phlebas the Phoenician” in Eliot’s long-form poem “The Wasteland,” which he published in 1922. Eliot certainly dedicated some of his works to Verdenal, including “his first volume of poetry, ‘Prufrock and Other Observations,’ which was published two years after Verdenal’s death, in 1917.
Here’s another account of their meeting and friendship:
In 1910 T.S. Eliot, then a graduate student studying philosophy at Harvard University, went to Paris to study a year at the Sorbonne. He took a room at a pension where he met and befriended Jean Verdenal, a French medical student who had another room there.
Eliot returned to Harvard in the autumn of 1911 to continue his work toward a doctorate.
Eliot and Verdenal carried on a correspondence at least through 1912. Seven letters from Verdenal to Eliot (written in French) are archived at Harvard University’s Houghton Library. The Verdenal letters have also been published in The Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922 (Vol 1). Apparently no copies of Eliot’s letters to Verdenal survive.
So why I bring this is up is the following passage, from a letter that Verdenal wrote to T.S. Eliot in July of 1911.
“My dear friend, I am waiting impatiently to hear that you have found some notepaper in Bavaria, and to receive an example of it covered with your beautiful handwriting, before German beer has dulled your wits. As a matter of fact, it would have some difficulty in doing so, and we see that even few natives of the country escaped its effects; history tells us that the formidable Schopenhauer was a great beer-lover. He also played the clarinet, but perhaps that was just to annoy his neighbours. Such things are quite enough to make us cling to life. The will to live is evil, a source of desires and sufferings, but beer is not to be despised — and so we carry on. O Reason!”
Verdenal has an interesting take on German beer. ANd the clarinet, which I used to play, too.
And this is passage from “The Wasteland,” about which some scholars believe Verdenal was the inspiration for Phlebas the Phoenician. You can read more about why at this page about T.S. Eliot and Jean Verdenal.
IV. Death by Water
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Ballantine’s Literary Ads: Anita Loos
Between 1951 and 1953, P. Ballantine and Sons Brewing Company, or simply Ballentine Beer, created a series of ads with at least thirteen different writers. They asked each one “How would you put a glass of Ballantine Ale into words?” Each author wrote a page that included reference to their beer, and in most cases not subtly. One of them was Anita Loos, who was an American author, best known for her popular book “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” was she adapted into a successful film, along with several other well-known screenplays.
Today is the birthday of Anita Loos (April 26, 1889–August 18, 1981), who was “was an American screenwriter, playwright and author, best known for her blockbuster comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She wrote film scripts from 1912, and became arguably the first-ever staff scriptwriter, when D.W. Griffith put her on the payroll at Triangle Film Corporation. She went on to write many of the Douglas Fairbanks films, as well as the stage adaptation of Colette’s Gigi.”
Her 1953 piece for Ballantine was done in the form of a short story about dropping a bottle of beer out her hotel window, somewhere with a cold climate:
It took an elevator man and a snowbank to show me how much I really appreciate Ballantine Ale.
One wintry evening I set a bottle of Ballantine on my hotel window ledge to chill. My only bottle — wouldn’t you know it? — toppled off into a snowbank on the rood next door. Immediately the thought occurred to me that the elevator man could climb out of a downstairs window and retrieve it.
But would he wade through the snow for a bottle of ale? My maid, Gladys, who evidently shares Lorelei Lee’s belief that diamonds are indeed a girl’s best friend, solved the problem by telling him I dropped a diamond bracelet, and he never learned the truth until he was standing in the snowbank with the bottle. At that, he seemed to think more of the ale than a bracelet!
I might add that I like Ballantine Ale because it refreshes me. And because it’s so light, it never takes the edge off my appetite. But most of all I like it because it has a flavor all its own that’s beyond anything else I have ever tasted.