THE CARLISLE SYSTEM
Snt,—Mr. Mammatt, in criticising my article " The Pub and the Club," complains that I make Mr. Pickwick " repeat the old teetotal canard that the trade's only business is to sell drink." I did not use the word " only." But that the trade's business is to sell drink is not merely teetotal opinion. The overwhelming majority of the Royal Commission on Licensing in England and Wales, reporting in 1931, said, " The ordinary public-house today is still a place where both externally and internally the predominating, and very often the exclusive, emphasis is on the sale of intoxicants." Why did the breweries buy up 95 per cent. of the public-houses if not as a means of selling their beers? The test of a good tied tenant of a brewery is whether he increases the barrelage in his house.
But this is not the test of a good manager at Carlisle. Mr. Mammatt is wrong is suggesting they are any less " genial" than mine host in the ordinary public-house, or that State ownership has no advantage " either in the service it renders or its effects on sobriety." Chapter XII of the report of the Royal Commission comments on the State ownership at Carlisle, and contains the following: " We doubt whether anywhere else in the country, so uniformly high a standard has been reached " (384) ; " The social and material results have been, we think, striking " (379); " The attendance is willing and obliging " (383) ; "Police witnesses with practical experience of the district were unanimous in testifying to the great improvement in public order " (399) ; " We think it (public ownership) is theoretically sound, and that experience in Carlisle has gone far to show it to be sound in practice also " (416).
I quite realise that the trade has put up some good new public-houses and improved others, but, as the Royal Commission said; " there are still large numbers of houses, particularly in the industrial districts, which are poor, and cramped in structure, gloomy, often insufficiently ventilated and sometimes even deficient in standards of cleanliness."
There are none such now at Carlisle.—Yours, &c., R. L. Riiiss. ,St Brockswood Lane, Welwyn Garden City.
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