Number one Goth

With coffee and sandwiches

Nothing to do with stately homes, but I've been down this rabbit hole so now I need to drag you all down with me.

For no reason other than entertainment, I belong to a Facebook group which identifies old photographs. And I was interested in this because it’s of a pub not far from where I live in Somerset. (West Pennard is on the edges of the Glastonbury festival site, for non-locals).

Everyone else was interested in the car, but what really intrigued me was the “PRHA” on the sign. So I went digging.

It stands for the People’s Refreshment House Association, which was founded by a Bishop of Chester in 1891, with the aims of furthering temperance. But rather than try and take down pubs, their intention was to make them more welcoming to people who didn’t drink. And so they bought pubs and tried to make them into more than just drinking houses.

All PRHA establishments served tea and coffee at 1d a cup, along with food, and offered a separate entrance for non-drinkers. More radically, the landlords got commission on food and soft drink sales, but nothing on alcohol.

This might sound like quite a niche enterprise, but within 10 years the PRHA owned 61 pubs and at their peak between the wars, they ran 130, and distributed a map of their premises for travellers. They weren’t alone: a similar organisation, the Public House Trust Association owned another 150. So the temperance pub was quite the thing.

But that’s not the end of the story, because in Scotland, it gets really weird, with some help from Sweden. In Gothenburg in the 1860s, temperance campaigners set up a trust which owned all the pubs in the city. The investors could receive a maximum of 5% return on their investments, and all the other profits went to benefit the community. The idea was to discourage making money from drinking.

When this system arrived in Scotland in the 1890s, it got a bit more hardline. Thirty or so pubs were set up, but they set out not just to avoid profits but also to make drinking as miserable as possible. The inside was decorated as plainly as possible, and spirits were discouraged; there were no games and amusements, not even dominos.

But, amazingly, the pubs survived, even flourished. They also succeeded in putting money back into the community; funding halls, ambulances, bowling greens, district nurses and much more. And, brilliantly, they were known as Goth pubs. Here is the Red Goth in Lochore.

Dunfirmline had the Top Goth and the Bottom Goth, while Cardenden had the Number One Goth, which features in an Ian Rankin Rebus book. In Armadale, the Goth is a high street landmark.

There is no purpose to this other than as a reminder how many things we don’t know about - the Gothenburg System has a short article on Wikipedia, but the PRHA has almost disappeared entirely. And temperance is rarely heard of any more.