Pub, a love story:Part Two

The Red Lion, Southampton

A drinking house has stood there for 800 years; the current building for 500. Legend says the Southampton plotters were tried for treason upstairs in 1415, condemned by Henry V before he sailed for Agincourt. Locals will tell you their ghosts still march through the bar, up the stairs, to the timbered room they still call Henry V’s Courtroom. The pub stands on the High Street, near Town Quay, where over seven million men embarked for the Great War. The landlord, Arthur White, opened the doors at 5am, pouring beer for dockers and boys in uniform before they boarded ships for France.

For many, the Red Lion was the last sight of “home” they would ever see.

The Red Lion

Throughout the First World War, the Lion watched boys leave as heroes and return as wraiths. A broken generation disembarking from hospital ships - limbless, disfigured, senseless. The sight of shellshocked men stunned and horrified locals who would gather at the Red Lion, hoping for news of sons, brothers, and fathers from the front.

They returned with symptoms that drinkers at the lion had never seen and could not understand; tremors, muteness, men that seemed blind, deaf, or lame without any visible wound. They had left in khaki and returned in “Blue Suits”: blue wool with white lapels and red ties - a uniform for the broken, marking them as serving men, warding off the white feathers handed to anyone judged a coward.

They’d left in khaki and came home in Blue Suits - a uniform for the broken.

A chance to fit back in

For many returning soldiers, the Lion was where they tried to fit back into the civilian world, to be a person again. To learn how to hold a glass, to smoke without flinching at the idea of a sniper - third light unlucky - while their growing numbers became a daily reminder of the human cost of war.

And the Lion welcomed them all

Soldier from the wars returning,
Spoiler of the taken town,
Here is ease that asks not earning;
Turn you in and sit you down.

from "Soldier from the wars returning" by A. E. Housman