Great Yorkshire Pubs 32 : The Whitehall Hotel, Hipperholme

The Whitehall Hotel, Leeds Road, Hipperholme, Halifax HX3 8NA  Tel : O1422 202088

Step over the threshold of the Whitehall Hotel in Hipperholme on some quiet lunchtime and you feel as though you are intruding on someone's private grief. It is not an unusual feeling in these days when the majority of beer sales are delivered via the supermarket check-out rather than the polished brass hand-pump. Don't let it put you off calling by : the Whitehall is a fine pub of a type that is rapidly vanishing from the villages and townships of Britain. But be prepared for a chaser of melancholy with your lunchtime pint.

The building dates from late eighteenth century and is currently Grade II listed. It probably took its name from the nearby White Hall House, but it is the pub which itself gave its name to the Leeds Whitehall Road which for much of the last two hundred years has been the main thoroughfare between Halifax and Leeds. In the 1830s the Inn provided one of the stops for the regular stagecoach service between the two West Yorkshire towns : a service which had the surprisingly modern name of the "Red Rover". A picture exists of the interior of the Inn at the turn of the nineteenth century and from my own personal observations it appears that little has changed other than some of the regulars depicted in the earlier picture no longer seem to be attending. The ring hanging from the ceiling is part of a once-popular bar room game called "ringing the bull" in which a ring suspended from the ceiling would be swung to try and connect with a hook hung on a wall, often on the end of a bull's horn.

Today the ring and the bull's horn are long gone but you still half expect the Dickensian gentleman with the stretched waistcoat to make his way back from the toilets (could that be his jacket which is still hanging from the bar?). The decor is strongly influenced by tobacco and although in the two years since smoking in public was outlawed the aroma has drifted away, the tint still remains. I sometimes feel that you should be able to make out a special case for the current anti-smoking laws to be annulled in certain premises in order to maintain historical authenticity. The Whitehall Hotel could serve as a test-bed for such an innovative approach : the low ceilings and the mullioned windows set in the thick stone walls cry out for a patina of Old Shag.

I had a pint of Copper Dragon Golden Pippin (3.9% ABV) which was probably historically an inappropriate choice - it should have been something old and dark and tasting vaguely of creosote. The Golden Pippin was none of these things and was rather refreshing. This goes to show that even I am willing to embrace modernity. Once suitably fortified by whatever your choice of beverage might be, and as you leave the pub and make your careful way across the busy main road, you might want to cast a glance back at the roofline of the pub. Is that a cat creeping along the ridge tiles? It has been frozen in the same position for many a year now - proof if ever it was needed that things move slowly around these parts.

Sepia Saturday : Three Men On A Plane

You know you are approaching your sell-by date when you discover that you are the subject of one of your own Sepia Saturday postings. Why the above photograph - which shows my brother Roger, myself, and my father at some funfair or other - should be sepia I don't know. It must have been taken about 1950 or 1951, long after the introduction of photographic paper coatings which no longer degraded over time to give the familiar sepia shades. I suspect that the monochrome print had been left in the sun for too long and the fading process just took the edge off the blacks.

It must have been taken in either Bridlington (on the east coast of England) or New Brighton (on the west coast). For some reason we would always alternate our family holidays between these two resorts - one year staying at a boarding house in Wellington Road, New Brighton, the next at a boarding house in New Burlington Road, Bridlington. Both streets still exist and I have just "visited" them using Google Earth and I am struck by how little seems to have changed - other than the fact that all the houses are now private residences. 

My brother is five years older than me and therefore must have been about seven or eight when this picture was taken. My father died in 2002 when he was 91 (I wrote about him last year in my Family Six Pack series). Roger went on to become an artist and a sculptor and he now lives on the Caribbean island of Dominica. And as for the cute little chap in the middle? He went on to do a little harmless blogging.

You can take a look at the other Sepia Saturday posts by visiting the Sepia Saturday Blog. Most people now tend to add their link after they have posted so you may want to delay the start of your tour until all the links are up which should be by the end of Saturday. 

Searching For Balance On A Canal Towpath And Discovering Thermodynamics

I have this grand dream : I will simplify my life by consolidating all my blogging activity into one super-blog. It will be the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young of Blogs, the Three Tenors of on-line journalism. Some days it will feature photographs, other days it will rely on the usual fare of circuitous ramblings that I call writing. It will incorporate my efforts on Theme Thursdays and Sepia Saturdays and serve up the whole thing accompanied by a glass or two of my meditations on beer and brewing. But if it is going to work I need to master the art of balance : when featuring images, for example, I need to know when to stop wittering on and let the images do the talking. 

I was musing on this problem yesterday whilst I took Amy The Dog for a springtime walk along the banks of the Calder and Hebble Navigation Canal just down the road in Brighouse. The canal is a grand old piece of industrial archeology, over 250 years old and brimming with history. The stone markers (above) that record the distance to the next lock deserve to be preserved behind a glass case in a museum, but - I am glad to say - are not.

Every time you come to a bridge you can trace where centuries of wear by the heavy ropes - used by horses to pull barges - have carved their story into the stone. You could sit a class of children around such stones and design a week's learning project on almost every aspect of science, history and art.

And there is the sheer tranquility of a place where a rich vein of nature intrudes into the original testbed of the industrial revolution. My third picture shows the lock-keepers cottage at Ganny Lock a few miles east of Brighouse. In the background you can just make out a featureless concrete warehouse defiling the rustic romance of the scene. 

But hold on a moment. When the great eighteenth century civil engineer John Smeaton, designed the canal his proposals represented the very latest thing in technology. His plans were opposed by many a land-owner who believed his stone-lined cut would ruin forever their slice of nature. But Smeaton was a modernist who worshiped at the altar of progress. Not only did he build canals, bridges, harbours and lighthouses, he was also a noted physicist. Did you know, for example, that old John Smeaton was responsible for some of the most important developments in the theory of thermodynamics in the eighteenth century. Without his work it is unlikely that the Wright Brothers would ever have managed top get their plane to fly. It all revolves around what is known as the Smeaton Coefficient (k) in the equation L=kV2ACl, where L is ....... Alright, I will stop right there. I don't want to lose my balance do I? Especially when I am walking along a canal towpath.

Theme Thursday - Scanning My Breakfast

This is going to be a relatively short post - I'm hungry and I want my breakfast. The reason I haven't had my breakfast already is because I decided to be clever today and to scan it as my Theme Thursday post. Silly idea really. First of all there is the tea and the orange juice. The only way you can scan that is in the appropriate receptacles and all you finish up with is a passing hint of orange through the glass bottom (you will have to take my word for it about the tea in the cup).

And then there was the toast - load of trouble that. If you put it on the scanner glass whilst it is still hot the whole thing steams up and you can't get a clear image. Wait until it is cold and not only do you have cold toast to look forward to, but toast which has by then had that weird electric blue scanning beam passing over it a couple of times. So I ditched the toast and turned to the tea only to discover that, by now, it had gone cold. So I ditched the tea and took comfort in the orange juice only to tip the whole bloody thing over on my desk. I have managed to mop it up but I have decided to abandon the exercise.

In place of my scanned breakfast let me give you a very short trailer publicising one of my favourite CD's of recent years, Stacey Kent's "Breakfast on the Morning Tram". There is a verse or two from the title song hidden away in this Blue Note clip.

To discover whether other bloggers had more success interpreting the Theme Thursday subject, take a look at the Theme Thursday blog.

Postcards From Nowhere : To my son Clement

Each week I try to pull out a random card from the vintage postcards collected by my Great Uncle Fowler and look at it in a little more detail. This week the postcard is a French World War I propaganda card. The words under the picture of four soldiers say "Unissons nos efforts dans la Fraternite, Qui combat noblement garde sa liberte" which, I guess, mean something like "Through our united efforts in brotherhood, we will fight to nobly defend our freedom" (if you have a more accurate translation please let me have it). All that is written on the back is "From your Father to my Son Clement" I don't know of any Clement's in my family so I am not sure how it came to be in Fowler Beanland's collection. But there is something strangely touching about those few brief words written on the back. It makes you want to weep for the war, weep for the death and destruction and weep for a time when father and son could only express their love through such stilted phrases

So What's This Blogging Thing Then?

I am sure we are all well used to the question. "What's all this blogging thing then?" The questioner normally has  a slightly incredulous look about them, unsure as to why you should list blogging as a pastime rather than some more suitable distraction such as dried flower arranging or amateur oxyacetylene welding. Blogging is often perceived as a form of latent exhibitionism for the functionally challenged, involving little else other than a list of what people might have had for their breakfast or what TV soaps they might be watching. Over the last 48 hours or so I have tried to explain the appeal of blogging to a couple of friends but I feel that I have fallen short of doing it justice. I have tried to enthuse about the variety of subjects and views you are exposed to and the variety of forms blogging can take. I have explained how some bloggers will use prose others poetry, some art, others photography. I have suggested that a blog is more like a self-published magazine than a catalogue of daily diary entries. I have tried to convey the richness and diversity of the world of blogging but have been left with the fear that my listeners still see blogging as a symptom of having too much time on your hands. It is a pity that I can't seem to get over the seriousness of blogging and the fact that it is up there with lace doily making as an art form. Had the technology been available, Shakespeare would probably have blogged rather than written all those plays. In many ways, Dickens did blog even though the technology wasn't available. We bloggers are at the cutting edge of a creative and artistic tsunami and it is just a shame that other people don't recognise this.

Well, having got that out of the way, let me tell you what I was doing yesterday. I had half a croissant and some Frosties for breakfast and then took a friend to Wakefield Station to catch her train. Then I had lunch with the Marsden Mafia Dining Club and washed the rather fine rump steak down with a pint or two-and-a-half of Black Sheep bitter. After that I had a lie down before watching the latest episodes of Coronation Street. ......

Sepia Saturday : Clovelly Unchanged

There are two things different about my Sepia Saturday photograph this week (three if you want to be pedantic and point out that it is monochrome rather than sepia). First it is of a place rather than a person. The place is the fishing village of Clovelly in Devon. It was taken by my father in the mid-thirties (either 1935 or 1936 I would guess) whilst he and my mother were on a motorcycling touring holiday in the south-west of England. In those pre-digital days, film and processing cost money and photographic subjects were normally limited to family and friends. If you wanted a picture of a pretty view, there were plenty of cheap postcards available, Occasionally, however, a view would have been so stunning that Great Uncle George would be ignored as the camera focussed on the background rather than the foreground. A visit to the near perfect fishing village of Clovelly where the fishing boats were dragged up the sloping beach must have been one such occasion.

The second difference with this particular picture is that it highlights constancy rather than change. Normally with Sepia Saturday pictures we are drawn to the changes : changes in clothing, changes in manner, changes in landscape. We don't need the creased corners nor the sepia toning to tell us the picture is old - it is obvious  for all to see. But with the above photograph we need to search more carefully for signs of the passage of time. I have managed to locate a photograph of the same scene taken within the last few years and it is easy to see how little has changed

The great Sepia Saturday pictures tell the story of people and their lives. They tell of challenges and hardship and change. But occasionally it is worth remembering that some things change at a much slower pace : the beach, the boats and the cottages of Clovelly are, thank goodness, a case in point.

Visit the Sepia Saturday Blog to find links to the other people taking part in Sepia Saturday this week

Theme Thursday : Hats

There was a character in a book I once read (I have long forgotten the title, the author or, indeed, the plot) who, when asked how on earth he knew whether he was coming or going, replied that he just had a look to see which way his hat was pointing. I feel a bit like that this week : except that I fancy I might have my hat on the wrong way around. Following the recent long holiday and the even more recent trip to France, I am having difficulty getting back into a routine. I don't know whether I am coming or going. I have managed to get a few blog posts up, but I am way behind on my visiting and I suspect that there is such a back-log of posts I need to read that my best hope is to simply wipe the slate clean and start afresh. If I have missed out great chapters in the colourful lives of my blogging friends, I apologise : I will carry on reading the tales as they unfold and fill the missing bits in with my imagination.

It is Theme Thursday and the subject this week is hats. I was tempted to let TT pass this week in order to carry out further research as to whether I was coming or going, but once I saw the theme I had to join in. Hats are a great favourite of mine on both an aesthetic and a practical level. Aesthetically, and with the possible exception of a macaw, nothing sits better on the top of a man's head than a good hat. How I wish that I could have been around in the days when a man could wear a decent hat without being accused of being dissolute : in the days when the Knapp-Felt Hat Company could introduce a new hat every month. On a practical level I do wear hats on many occasions in order to protect my precious cochlear implant from the ravages of the English climate. When you are walking around with a few thousand pounds of microscopic computer equipment stuck on the outside of your skull, it is always wise to provide it with as much protection as possible, whether it makes you appear rakish or not.

The top picture shows a selection of my hats. The one third from the left served me well during the recent visit to France as this final picture of myself and the Good Lady Wife, taken in Strasbourg, shows. 

Read how other people have interpreted this week's theme by visiting the Theme Thursday Blog. Sepia Saturday will be running again this week and if you would like to participate you can sign up over at the Sepia Saturday Blog. Now it is time that I started visiting a few of my blogging friends before they abandon me for ever. As Bob Dylan once nearly said, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way your hat blows"

Experiencing Boxes

Several people responded to my last post with questions : let me try and answer a few of them. Willow asked for more information about my visit to the Tate Modern. Because we spent so long looking around the Courtauld Gallery, we arrived at the Tate Modern about 45 minutes before it closed for the day. I could, however, put forward a reasonable argument for having compulsory limitations on the amount of time you are allowed to spend in an art gallery at any one time. A temporal sword of Damocles not only concentrates the mind, but also stops you from trying to cram too much in thereby risking visual indigestion. So all we had time to do was to take in the breathtaking building - for those not familiar with it, the Tate Modern is located in the old Bankside Power Station - and visit the wonderful Miroslaw Balka "Box of Darkness" installation. The installation is a gigantic grey steel structure which stands in splendid isolation in the Turbine Hall. You can walk up a featureless steel ramp into the inside which is totally light-less. As you enter a little light filters in from the open entrance, but as you move further down the structure the darkness is almost physically palpable. You can't set foot in the structure without being either moved or frightened or both. It is no coincidence that the artist Miroslaw Balka is Polish and Poland was the location of the killing camps of Treblinka or Auschwitz with their steel cattle trucks and death-black gas chambers. I thought it was a massively inspiring piece of art, one well worth experiencing.

Baino asked about suggestions for places to visit in France. Let me first of all stress that I am no expert on the country and there are many parts of it that I have yet to visit, but it was my first visit to the east of the country and I was very impressed. Obviously there is a very significant Germanic influence - as John suggested in his comment, this area has been French, German and French again in less than 100 years - and in some ways it has more in common with Rhineland than the rest of France. Strasbourg was visually stunning, with its old half-timbered houses and warehouses looking like rows of pastel-shaded boxes strung out along the riverside. Again, it is well worth experiencing.

Several people commented on my picture of the castle (Chateau De Saint-Ulrich, Ribeauville). It was not the only castle we visited whilst we were away, on Friday we went to the almost unbelievable Chateau Du Haut-Koenigsbourg. It differs from the other Alsace castles in that it has been fully restored to what it must have been like in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The restoration was carried out under the direction of Emperor Wilhelm II whilst it was under German control at the very start of the twentieth century. It stands high above the Alsatian plain like an impregnable fortified box. We visited it on a freezing cold day in early March and it was almost deserted. The arctic winds that seemed to penetrate the very stonework just added to the authenticity. And again, I would thoroughly recommend the experience.

Alsace Interlude

I am back following a most delightful few days spent in Alsace, Eastern France. It might have started as an excursion to see a Leonard Cohen concert - which, as I mentioned in my last post, was cancelled when the Sainted One fell off his exercise treadmill - but it finished up as a most successful exercise in cramming as much pleasure into five days as possible. There was a day spent in London which was evenly balanced between visits to public galleries (The Courtauld and the Tate Modern) and galleried pubs (the splendid George Inn in Southwark and several others to make up the set). There was a delightful day and a half spent in the small town of Ribeauville where we stayed at the almost unbelievable Inn pictured above, from where I climbed high into the hills to the even more unbelievable ruined castle pictured below. And there was a further delightful day and a half spent in the magnificent city of Strasbourg with its massive cathedral, ancient buildings and specially organised picturesque snowfall.

Many, many great memories and a few half-decent photographs. Thanks to Tim and Will for being such  amusing, eloquent and intelligent hosts and, of course, to Chrissy for being such a delightful travelling companion. There will, I am sure, be other chances to see and hear Leonard, but I wouldn't have missed my trip to Alsace for the half the perfect world.

First We Take Manhattan ....

It appeared to be a perfect confluence of fortune. My good friend Chrissy and I had long been great fans of the sainted Leonard Cohen. Leonard was due to perform a rare European concert in Strasbourg, France on Friday 5th March. Chrissy's eldest son Tim was spending a year in France as a teaching assistant as part of his degree in modern languages and was based in a small town about fifty miles from Strasbourg. We could kill two birds on a wire with one stone, and so a trip was planned which would take in Chrissy's second son Will, who is at University in London, a Eurostar journey to Strasbourg, a chance to see Tim, a chance to visit Strasbourg, and a chance to hear the sainted Leonard. But the best laid plans ... and all that. Leonard has suffered a sports-related injury and had been ordered to rest up for a few months and the concert is postponed until September. A case of  "first we take Manhattan, then we slip and fall on the way to Berlin".

But it matters not : Chrissy, the Good Lady Wife, and myself are still going on our trip. We will get the opportunity to visit some galleries - and some good pubs - in London and to explore Strasbourg and Alsace. And we will get the chance to meet up with both Will and Tim. We set out first thing Wednesday morning so I will miss out on both Theme Thursday and Sepia Saturday this week. However, the Linky list for Sepia Saturday 14 is already up so make sure you sign-up and I can catch up on all the posts on my return next Sunday. 

Please excuse my lack of posts this week and my tardiness in my visits to your blogs. I will be back soon, but in the meantime, so long Marianne .... and everyone else.