How did England's rural pubs manage before the advent of the motor car? Well, probably the countryside was more populous; and anyway, there was always the pony and trap, or the farm cart. A century and more ago, there was probably a boy to look after the horses while the master roistered inside. A pot-boy or publican's assistant, as the dictionary has it. Now the magazine Country Life looks gloomily at the picture. In the past three years, it reveals, no fewer than 400 country pubs have vanished. And now, writes its reporter, Camilla Bond, the new laws on drinking and driving "may put an end to thousands more: government proposals launched last month aim to cut the drink-drive limit to the equivalent of a single pint of beer."
The Cock O'Barton in the village of Barton, near Malpas in Cheshire is taken as an example. The boss, John Hair, claims they will lose 80 per cent of their customers. The village has a population of only 40 people, and only four of them drink. So he depends on the car trade. And who, he asks, "is going to drive three or four miles out to here if they can't even have a decent drink?" He finds the present limit of 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres blood fair enough, but a 50mg limit would be ridiculous. A group known as the Save Our Country Pubs Campaign claims that the new proposed limit would prove "fatal to a precious part of British culture".
Its founder says that Britain already has the safest roads in Europe. Germany, Greece and Finland, the group claims, have a lower legal alcohol limit, but their total of drink-drive deaths is still far higher than the British. Only 3 per cent of all British road accidents, it is said, are alcohol-related. Now the British government is putting out the view that the limit should come down to 50 mg. It has announced the "tentative conclusion", the magazine states, that a total of 50 deaths caused by drink-drivers each year would be avoided if the new limit were introduced.
Landlords, it is said, are already reacting. Some are adapting their premises to install bedrooms with en suite. One has refitted its kitchen and adds on a dining-room. The people polled pointed out that now that the village school, post office and village shop have in many cases gone, the pub, is more than ever a focus of village life. One pub-owner is thinking of buying a minibus and hiring a driver to see his customers safely home - and perhaps induce more to drink with him.
The article ends with Belloc: "But when you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England." Y