The “Blue bell” again shut for lack of beer. Quite serious boozing for 4 or 5 days of the week, then drought. [Sometimes, however, when they are shut the local officers are to be seen drinking in a private room, the common soldiers as well as the labourers being shut out. The “Red Lion” in the next village, goes on a different system which the proprietor explains to me: “I don’t hold with giving it all to the summer visitors. If beer’s short, let the locals come first, I say. A lot of days I keep the pub door shut, and then only the locals now the way in at the back. A man that’s working in the fields needs his beer, ‘specially with the food they got to eat nowadays. But I rations ‘em. I says to ‘em, ‘Now look here, you want your beer regular, don’t you? Wouldn’t you rather have a pint with your dinner every day than four pints one day and three the next?’ Same with the soldiers. I don’t like to refuse beer to a soldier, but I only lets ‘em have a pint their first drink. After that it’s ‘Half pints only, boys’. Like that it gets shared out a bit.”].
