Lowlife 131 - The Last Days of the Roman Empire

The Last Days of the Roman Empire

By Dominic Horton

So finally the game is up. The Pirate's more than quarter century ownership of the Flagon & Gorses is at an end. The real ale public house specialists Black Country Ales now own the iconic drinking den and it currently stands shut and in the middle of a substantial renovation. The end of the Pirate's reign was protracted and drinking in the place became almost like sitting at the bedside of an ailing, elderly relative waiting for the Reaper to drop in to complete the formalities. Except in the Flagon it was the drinkers taking the medicine.

The Flagon & Gorses prior to the start of the refurb.

There were numerous false alarms prior to the sale and “this Sunday will probably be the last” were words often uttered by Chilli Willy and the other bar staff only to find the place still going the following Sabbath. Sunday was used as a benchmark purposefully as it was the quintessential Flagon & Gorses day, free of Friday and Saturday's day trippers and full of the usual inmates, both in the bustling and boozy afternoon and in the more sedate and civilised evening.

For years Sunday was my main day, the day when I simply had to go to the Flagon come hell or high water. As long as I could get to the Flagon on a Sunday then the rest of the week was tolerable, regardless of what slings and arrows were thrown at me and of what lay in wait in the days that followed. The obligations and duties of the week at an end, on a Sunday evening I could sit, pint in hand, and let the drink, the conversation and the camaraderie work its magic. The atmosphere somehow seemed heightened on a Sunday, more highly charged but also more relaxing at the same time. Spirits were always high, regardless of the various football results. Even the beer seemed to taste better, though it was always in pretty good nick regardless.

There had been rumours and counter rumours about the pub's sale for many, many months and during this time panicking punters had taken their personalised glasses home with them for fear of never seeing them again. Eventually the sale to Black Country Ales became an open secret (or a badly kept one) and ultimately everyone accepted the inevitability that there would be an end to the Pirate's era. But as Jolly Dave said at the time, “I'm fed up of this sale dragging on now, we need closure.”

Jolly Dave sitting in Tom Corneronly's seat in

The Flagon & Gorses

Another supposedly “final Sunday” came round but this time things seemed to have taken on a more serious, concrete edge. The whisper was that the Pirate had to move out the following day and on my arrival Carla Von Trow-Hell delivered this news over the bar together with my pint of stout. The Pirate was upstairs in his quarters sleeping off the afternoon's excesses. “As it is his last night he wants to pop down to have a drink,” Trow-Hell informed me, “and we decided that you should go upstairs to wake him up.” The Pirate's rooms in the pub were, to put it mildly, like a scene from a disaster movie where a 70's charity shop and The Great British Beer Festival had exploded leaving the combined miscellany strewn everywhere. So I was less than keen to disturb him from his slumber.

Fortunately the Pirate managed to wake and descend the stairs to the bar all of his own volition. The atmosphere was dark, odd at best. He shook a few hands, without really saying much, which wasn't like him. Instead of taking up his customary seat he stood at the end of the bar, on his own, facing the rest of us. I was sat in the corner at the other end of the bar, where Joe Attwood's boxing gloves used to be, and I was laughing at a funny comment that someone had made but the laughter seemed to be at complete odds with the somberness of the situation. The air seemed heavy. The Pirate made no speeches and there were no grand gestures. He was unusually subdued, withdrawn even. And after half an hour or so he went back upstairs, without a fan fare. I seem to remember he briefly, silently waved and that was it, he was gone.

In the weeks running up to the sale nobody really knew what the Pirate's plans were as he had been keeping a low profile. Would he return to his roots in Hampshire? Or move to Burton, where his youngest daughter is? Or start a new business, a micropub maybe? In the end it transpired that no one knew his plans as he didn't seem to have any. The Pirate didn't even have any accommodation lined up on the day he left the Flagon and it was only the kindheartedness of Pat De Bilder that saved him from a night in his motor by fixing him up with a rented safe house in the Lye.

The following evening, the Monday, was interesting. Contrary to the pessimistic doom-mongering of many inmates in the time leading up to the sale the pub had not crumbled into dust. It was still standing and thriving on that night under the stewardship of a bewildered Nick, a temporary manager that Black Country Ales had installed. Nick seemed nervous and I think he had thought that he was walking into a powder keg situation where the regulars would be disgruntled to the point of driving them to stage a coup d'état to get the Pirate back in. But that was not the case exactly – everyone just wanted a pint. All quickly warmed to Nick and his good humour and easy manner but like Edward VIII his reign was short and after a few weeks he was soon packed off to Leicester to skipper a new Black Country Ales house there called The Salmon.

Weston's Old Rosie, by request of Tony In-Tents

A few weeks ago Mick, who will be new gaffer of the Flagon moving forward, left the Court House pub in Dudley to take over from Nick. And then the place shut. Inevitably most of the punters have migrated the short distance up the road to The Edward, which has taken on the look of a refugee centre for displaced drinkers from the Flagon. I have flirted briefly with the Edward but good a public house as it is it's not the Flagon and I haven't bothered going out for a pint much since the pub shut.

I popped into the Loyal Lodge pub by my Codger Mansions home last week to have a look as it has just re-opened after a facelift. Although they have done a decent job with the décor and fittings the real ale situation is sadly pretty dire. They only had two beers on and one of them was the dreaded Doom Bar, a drink so named as it gives you a sense of doom when you go to the bar. So I had to drink Weston's Old Rosie, the one real cider they had on, but it did me no favours as it weighs in at a heavy weight 7.3% ABV. I think Old Rosie was the first scrumpy that I drank as they used to serve it in the Flagon and it was attractive to me as a youth trying to reach a state of Beervana on a tight budget.

Like Steve Austin they can rebuild the Flagon, though I suspect it won't cost $6,000,000. And it won't be, it can't be, the same as it was under the dynasty of the Pirate. Inevitably things will change, some for the worse, some for the better. The organised chaos, the modus operandi of the pub, will disappear to be replaced by a new sanitised, businesslike approach. The toilets will be in tip top condition and the electrics will no longer be a funeral waiting to happen. But the ongoing soap opera of the place, where something entertaining or ludicrous was always happening, is at an end.

The Pirate & the author, not in The Flagon & Gorses.

The silver lining is that unlike so many pubs The Flagon has not been turned into a Tesco Express, Dixie Chicken or a block of flats and it will remain as a traditional real ale pub. But the great fear that I have is that I will walk into the place once it is re-opened and instead of it feeling like my front room, as it did before, it will feel like someone else's front room, with an unfamiliar smell and aura. I know I will be treated well as a guest but it is not the same as sitting in your own comfy chair with your slippers and t*rd catchers on.

The one thing I will miss is having the comfort of knowing that I could pop in The Flagon pretty much any afternoon to find the Pirate in his seat, wearing his Flagon sweatshirt and preposterous salmon pink trousers ready to share a drink and do the crossword. It was not something I did very often, I have to work after all, but when I did it was a magical feeling having a becalming pint while the world went busily about its business outside.

But life goes on, onward and downward, as ever. 

© Dominic Horton, March 2016.

* Lowlife is dedicated to the memory of the late Jonathan Rendall