Jennings: Pub people are our trade’s shining stars

01-Jul-2012 - Last updated on 11-Mar-2017 at 17:56 GMT

Jennings: "The Great British Pub Awards embrace every aspect of our wonderful business"

One of my team recently made his annual pilgrimage to the PMA to engage in the preliminaries of the Great British Pub Awards. Since its inception nine years ago we have always supported this event and it gets permanent red-letter status in our beer calendar.

We support it because these awards are about the extraordinary people who make up the pub trade. There can be few businesses where success or failure hinge so totally on individuals.

The ethos of a pub is broken or made by the personalities in charge in a way that is simply not applicable to any other retail activity.

This is why pub people, be they owners or managers, are the kind of folk who like to plough their own furrow and don’t hunker down easily to corporate or official bullying.

Just consider Karen Murphy — and there are plenty of others out there like her — busy holding their particular corner. You can read about them practically every week in the PMA.

It’s this freedom of spirit, making our pub business an inspiring oasis of individual enterprises in a sea of grey conformity, that has also made it the target in recent years for the forces of a dull and sometimes vicious conformity.

This includes predatory mega-corporations, local and national Government, a medical profession that is wedded to bad science and prejudice — and their lackeys, the neo-prohibitionists, who come in various shapes and sizes.

This disparate bag of latter-day Puritans shares an overriding imperative to control our customers through our business. They would tell them where, what and how much they can drink and soon no doubt it will be about where and what and how much they eat.

They also want to dictate to everyone else on a myriad of other things, such as where and when live music can be enjoyed or where smoking may be allowed — not to mention all of the intrusive health and safety nonsense, as well as the general bureaucratic madness of the licensing laws.

That’s why I think the Great British Pub Awards — an all-inclusive event embracing every aspect of our wonderful business — should have a special category for the Davids or Davinas amongst us who every year see off the Goliaths hacking away at our great pub tradition.

They deserve to be celebrated and on such a high profile platform that it will show our determination as a sector to defend our own.