Book Review W E Tate An Alphabet Of English Pub Signs

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1968 – Frank Graham Press Having shared some of my favourite pub and inn sign writings, I thought I should mention the worst book in my collection. The title suggests it is a guide to pubs and yet the front page attributes the work to a Tudor poet, John Taylor, The Water Poet. The short introduction betrays the truth. It is a mostly 20th century poetry collection by W E Tate, incorporating lines by, and supposedly in the style of John Taylor. The poems have a pub related theme but they are universally awful, mostly two line couplets or four line rhyming quatrains. The introduction provides a short, genuinely interesting biography of Taylor, who lived from 1580 to 1653. A naval officer serving James 1st, Taylor later became a Thames Ferryman in London and later still, ran his own pub, The Crown in Long Acre. A staunch Royalist who despised the Puritans (who tried unsuccessfully to close the pubs of England), Taylor was saddened by the execution of King Charles 1st and renamed his pub The Mourning Crown. That got him in trouble with the anti-Royalist Roundheads so he sarcastically renamed he pub again as The Poet’s Head, (on the grounds that he was lucky not to have his own head cut off). Much of his poetry was a celebration of pub life. A reprint collection of his verse would be fascinating. Unfortunately, Tate insists on filling up the A To Z with his own poems, and deliberately not saying which verse is his and which is Taylor’s. It is a case of an editor interfering with the text to the point of declaring himself co-author. It’s like the Harry Potter books might turn out if I added a few chapters of my own without saying which bits were not penned by J K Rowling. “Harry fired the Gatling gun. Take that, Voldermort.” The book fails therefore as a poetry collection and as an entertaining introduction to pub signs. Only by introducing me to John Taylor does it redeem itself at all. He is fascinating. W E Tate is not. Arthur Chappell