#pubbing

Pubs Open to Sunday Tipplers

The door of the Y Llew Du (The Black Lion) in Aberystwyth, Dyfed, swung open for business yesterday. It was the first Sunday that Mr. Mansel Beechey, the landlord, has served drinks after 108 years of Welsh prohibition on drinking on the Sabbath ended in the region with a referendum last week (Ronald Faux writes). It certainly felt a bit odd turning on the beer pumps on the Sabbath, he confessed, and he hadn’t been to the bank to get enough loose change fo rhte till, but as long as it did no harm to the cause of Welsh culture, it was a thoroughly good thing.

The Black Lion was joined by some 30 other pubs and hotels in Aberystwyth. Across the road at the Nag’s Head, Mrs. Breen Pryce was celebrating a hard-fought campaign in which householders, MPs and anyone able to set glass to their lips had been bombarded with publicity material.

“The crucial thing was that Christmas Eve this year falls on a Sunday, and at important times for trade we would not have been allowed to open,” she said.

(The Times, London, November 13, 1989)

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The politics of pubbing. What an interesting Welsh microhistory, and with a woman at the head of the campaign, too.