Lord's Day Liquor
By JAME
S TUCKER FWelsh countids and four county r boroughs have' just 'celebrated the first anni- versary of the opening of their pubs on Sunday. It was a fairly muted celebration. There wasn't much triumphant smoke-room community sing- ing. Few people were carried home. After a year, Sunday-night drinking in Welsh pubs remains a sombre—you might almost say sobering—experi- ence. Men tend to come out in their best suits and wear formidable collars. They bring their older relations, especially women, and the roaring boys of the week nights occupy a meek spot in a stiff, self-conscious family group. If a War Cry girl looked in she'd have a ready-tnade depiction of the sadness of sin.
Not everyone finds it depressing though. Wives who, over the years, have become bruised and tired as they shared the fierce routine Saturday- night fight for a drink, a seat, an allocation of breathable air, look upon Sunday as a rich sub- stitute. And since the South Wales Saturday night out is an almost involuntary procedure for properly brought-up husbands they are now get- ting an extra weekend session—as blades on Saturdays and escorts on Sundays. Many of them seem willing to put up with this extension of
social life, despite the comparative melancholY Of Sunday pubs. No fortunes are yet being made out of Sul opening. Nor have any drinking clubs—Whic.0 have always opened on Sundays—been °reed ru close. All the breweries say that the extra Pii.1", trade has not been enough to make any great dibt Terence to profits. But they all claim that thefig s to get opening was well worth while since it giv.ce them the chance to offer the public a servirch previously denied. It is astonishing hoW 11111:_, cant has been spouted—and is still being about Sunday booze. When the seven-daY he oKe campaign was on, the pro-opening people 35 of the need for Sunday pub-drinking as if a:,..,,1) written into Magna Carta. And the opP°s'"t-he spoke of it as if it was foreshadowed in lling for Revelation. Now we have the brewers ca recognition as a kind of Society for wr. Uneconomic Propagation of Lord's DaY Despite the opening of the pubs and eitlene the central streets of Cardiff still have that ""_s Sabbath evening pall about them; the citizeaPy look demoralised and aimless, as if they find entertainment, but not joy. But the irjb, urban locals appear to he doing much
better. MY
Sunday-evening business,' one landlord told me, IS as good as any I do from Monday to Thurs- day.' There is lunch time, too, of course. I don't think the gloom of evening reaches these midday bouts. In fact, I don't see much difference between Welsh Sunday lunch-time drinking and English. There's the same collection of Marks's sweaters, drill slacks and suedes or sandals; in my own local I've even seen 'a yellow kerchief, but this is in the dead centre of salesmen's and surveyors' commuter country. The chat booms—mostly about gardens and power tools. It could be Wimbledon.
A new kind of Sunday traffic has developed during the year. Cars and coaches used to trek for the nearest English counties before there were wet' Welsh ones. In particular, it was an accepted therapy for landlords from Wales to drive anything up to a hundred miles each way to get a Sunday drink. Some coach companies used to organise what were virtually motorised pub-crawls of the towns and villages over the English border. Now, that need has gone. Many of these English pubs are conscious of the fall in business: Some of them, it must be said, are not altogether sorry that they will no longer be in- vaded late at night by large numbers of Welsh- men desperately filling themselves before cross- ing back into their arid Sunday homeland. Since last November the coaches and cars have been making inter-county, rather than international, Sunday excursions. There is an urgent flow from Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire into Glam- organ and Breconshire. Some publicans in these areas are opposed to any campaign to extend Sunday opening farther west.
But the preparations for the 1968 tussle—when another referendum is due—are already in hand. The Sunday Opening Council still have as their glorious goal the winning of the whole of Wales to seven-day freedom, all-the-week liberty. 'I hear the opposition are preparing as. well,' a Council spokesman said An anxious, eiffmping inflection had suddenly come into his voice, replacing the militant lilt with which he had mentioned the scheme to capture the dry counties in 1968. 'I don't know,' I said. 'I hear they've got a special coordinating committee, or something.' I don't know.' I phoned the South Wales Temperance Union immediately but a woman said there was nobody around just then. She sounded pretty Cagey, I must say.
'They're all cutting their ears off'
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