What's In A Name?

Some of our pub names are centuries old, and help to preserve the memories of local legends, traditions and people. Now many of them are at risk from woke corporations and meddling activists.

A few days ago I posted a note about a furore over a pub in Abingdon. The Midget, owned by brewery giant Greene King, commemorates the famous MG sports car of the same name, which used to be manufactured in the Oxfordshire town. However, the brewery is planning to change it.

Early this year Dr Erin Pritchard, a disability studies professor at Liverpool Hope University, decided she didn’t like the name of the pub and wanted it changed. Pritchard, who suffers from dwarfism, has a bit of a track record for pestering companies into changing the names of things; if you’ve ever wondered why Marks & Spencer turned Midget Gems into Mini Gems, it’s Pritchard’s fault. Why did she pick on The Midget as her next victim? I have no idea; as Abingdon is 140 miles from Liverpool it’s unlikely she’s a regular drinker there. I suspect she spent some time on Google searching for things to be offended about, and found the pub that way. Then she started a petition demanding Greene King change the “offensive” name, and once it had collected a not exactly overwhelming 1,344 signatures she sent it to the brewery. Greene King immediately caved in and announced they would rename the pub “The Roaring Raindrop”, after a one-of car built in 1957 as a world speed record challenger.

This is absurd, of course. Nobody who’s familiar with The Midget could think for a moment that its name is anything other than a commemoration of the car. The sign outside makes this very clear; even the windows have the MG logo etched into them above the name. It has nothing to do with dwarfism. Any “offence” Dr Pritchard feels exists only in her own mind.

A petition started by an Abingdon resident calling on Greene King to keep the original name has now collected 4,501 signatures - well over three times as many as Pritchard’s - in just nine days. You can sign it here.

This Isn’t The First Time

While I hope Greene King will back down and let The Midget continue celebrating the iconic car, I’m not actually very optimistic. It turns out Greene King is a worryingly woke company, and has previous when it comes to renaming pubs over the objections of locals. Take the sad case of The Willow Tree in Linlithgow, which until February 2022 was called The Black Bitch. In December 2021 Greene King announced they were going to change it “in line with [their] diversity policy”. Initially they planned to call it The Black Hound. Locals were furious, and responded with a petition - which gathered over 11,000 signatures - and a demonstration outside the pub. The brewery ignored them, and in fact doubled down; it dropped The Black Hound, which at least clearly derived from the old name, and went for The Willow Tree instead, breaking the connection entirely.

Another link to our history that was deliberately destroyed to serve the woke agenda.

According to Greene King they “consulted widely” about the pub’s name, and said “people from a range of backgrounds” found it “offensive and upsetting”. It turns out, of course, that the brewery only “consulted” with left-wing activist groups, not with the black bitches who actually live in Linlithgow.

Yes, that’s right; Linlithgow people are called “black bitches”, even though 48.3% of them are male and 96.6% of them are white. Of course the nickname, like the former name of the pub, has absolutely nothing to do with racism. It actually relates to a local legend. Centuries ago, apparently, a local man was sentenced to be exiled to an island on Linlithgow Loch and left there to starve to death. However, his loyal black greyhound bitch kept him alive by finding food and swimming out to the island to deliver it. When this was discovered the dog was chained to a tree on a different island and also left to starve - but the townspeople honoured her loyalty by adopting the nickname and, when the pub was built almost 400 years ago, its first landlord named it after the legend.

Nobody in Linlithgow thinks the phrase “Black Bitch” is racist, because it clearly isn’t. It’s a name the locals wear with pride. In 2020 the town council unveiled a new statue of the legendary Black Bitch, which stands on the main street. The well-beloved canine is even featured on Linlithgow’s coat of arms, and has been since at least 1679:

Greene King have renamed this pub because a woke manager and some party pooper activist groups decided the townspeople’s own name for themselves is offensive. In the process they’ve deliberately destroyed a link to our long, long history - something the woke take an unhealthy pleasure in. For four centuries the pub sat on Linlithgow’s main street, offending nobody. Now it’s had a new, unwanted name imposed on it by a virtue-signalling company based over 300 miles away in Bury St Edmunds. What has this name change achieved? Greene King management can feel smug satisfaction over sticking it to those evil racists in West Lothian. Some pushy activists are freed of an offence that, like Dr Pritchard’s, only existed in their own heads. And thousands of people in Linlithgow are unhappy about a childish and spiteful attack on their culture and identity. Others in the town are unhappy too, because Greene King’s corporate wokery has predictably backfired. Local resident Mukami McCrum blasted the brewery for not talking to ethnic minority people who actually live in the town, and added, “Now visible minorities are getting blamed for a decision that is not ours.” In other words, people who didn’t have anything against ethnic minorities before the name change have something against them now.

Over the last three years Greene King has also renamed four other pubs - three named The Black Boy, in Bury St Edmunds, Sudbury and Shinfield, and The Black’s Head in Wirksworth. The company claims it’s important to “work proactively to eradicate racism in our society today”, but how does changing pub names that have often existed for centuries achieve that? As Linlithgow resident Nidhin Chand said, “If people want to address that they need to tackle real racism, not a female dog.”

Is Your Local Next?

So what’s next? There are at least thirty pubs in Britain called The Saracen (or Saracen’s) Head, a name that recalls medieval raiders and pirates from Morocco and Algeria. The Saracens terrorised the coasts of Europe, mostly Italy, France and Spain but also Britain and Ireland, from the 9th century until the the navies of Britain, France and the USA finally burned out their nests in the early 19th century. During their thousand-year reign of terror they killed hundreds of thousands, looted vast quantities of wealth from coastal towns and villages, and forced millions of people into slavery - nobody’s quite sure how many, but historians believe between a million and 1,250,000 Europeans were enslaved by muslim raiders between 1530 and 1780 alone. Unsurprisingly, Europeans hated the Saracens with a passion. When Saracen pirates were captured in or around Britain it was quite common for their heads to end up on stakes on the village green, being used for archery practice, and that’s where the pub name comes from. Should it now be dropped down the memory hole lest it offend the descendants of the Barbary pirates, those thieving, raping, slave-trading scum who inflicted a millennium of misery on Europe’s shores?

Then there are 42 pubs (including my local) called The Black Lion, 49 called The Black Swan, 77 called The Black Bull and 133 called The Black Horse. These aren’t quite as open to deliberate misinterpretation by the perpetually offended as the luckless Black Bitch was, but should they be changed anyway? After all, during the first epidemic of political correctness in the 1990s there were people who insisted on talking about “chalkboards” and “coffee without milk” in an effort to avoid using the word “black”. Obviously I know these stories are apocrypha made up by sneering right-wingers and it never actually happened, but yes it did. It happened to me, in the snack bar at Glasgow Poly in 1991 or 1992; I ordered a black coffee, only to be told by some scowling little goblin in sensible shoes that “black coffee” is a racist term and I should ask for coffee without milk instead. I politely told her to go forth and multiply.

Pubs Are Part Of Our History

Many of Britain’s pubs are old. Very old. There are dozens of places where you can enjoy a beer in a room where Wellington’s redcoats, Henry V’s archers and even Alfred the Great’s Anglo-Saxon spearmen once drank. While there are many pubs that claim to be the oldest in the country, they’re so old that none of their claims can be verified. After all some of them have been in business since the Dark Ages, a period that got its name from the paucity of surviving historical records. Is the oldest pub in Britain Ye Olde Trip To Jerusalem in Nottingham, which says it’s been refreshing the thirsty since 1189? Perhaps it should be renamed to avoid offending muslims - because the trip to Jerusalem its name refers to is almost certainly the Third Crusade, ordered by Pope Gregory VIII in 1187. Or perhaps the oldest pub in Britain is Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans. That one claims it’s built on the 8th century ruins of King Offa’s palace, and became a pub in 973. Should it be renamed because it used to host cock fights, which violate today’s animal welfare standards? Once we start down the road of renaming pubs, where will it end?

Old pubs are places rich with history, and their names are an important part of that. Replacing a name that’s embedded into a place’s story with one chosen by corporate diversity managers diminishes that place. Greene King claim they’re making a “positive change for the better", but they’re not. They’re attacking our culture, and it needs to stop. Quite apart from anything else, it isn’t helping. As the splendidly named Mukami McCrum pointed out, the brewery’s efforts to “proactively eradicate racism” are actually making people racist.

When will woke corporations realise that ramming diversity down people’s throats is generating a vast pool of resentment that is now dangerously close to bursting its banks? Did the management at Boots really believe choosing a racist black actress to front a Christmas advert (which features they/them pronouns and portrays Santa as a lazy, useless white man) was going to go down well? And does Dr Pritchard not understand that if she didn’t want to be offended by a pub called The Midget, all she had to do was not Google it?