July 27, 2015
Wick, Scotland: The pub with no beer
YOU remember the faded mention of a temperance hotel, on the wall of Mackay's across the river?
We've arranged to meet Vikki and Russell tonight and we passed the time in the bar talking to a silver-haired and expansive man called Murray. He owned the hotel.
As ever, give people a chance to talk and you'll hear a story. Murray was no exception.
He took us back to the 1930s, when Wick had thousands working in the fish industry. They did it without solace, because for decades the city forbade alcohol. Which isn't, of course, to say that there were no illegal breweries, no hidden shebeens.
"They were fishing, packing and gutting, and man, woman and child, they were getting through a gallon of spirits a day. And that was at a time when people were concerned about drinking at munitions factories and so on, and the town voted to become dry.
"And that's how it stayed until 1946. And even after then, in this hotel, you ordered your drink through a hatch, because it was still seen as somehow disreputable.
"And on Sundays, because of the influence of the Scottish Free Church, for whom God preserve that you had any enjoyment in life, you couldn't get a drink unless you could prove you were a genuine traveller. So you used to go to the station and buy a ticket to the next station down the line, and people tottered from bar to bar, clinging to this thing and never using it."
He laughed at the idea, even though this must have been far from the first time he'd told the story.
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Most of Wick once belonged to the national fishing authority. When it sold it, the deeds required that a tin shack should be built where the hotel now stands. There's no record that it ever existed. A temperance hotel was built instead. Hence the letters on the outside wall. Some of the letters are more faded than others.
"That's my fault, actually," Murray confesses. "I heard that workmen across the river had decided not to stay because they thought they couldn't get a drink. It said Mackay's Hotel at the other end but I still decided to blast off the old name."
The letters T, E and M were as far as he got. Since then times have changed and the old name has historical charm.
There is little fishing now in Wick. It's no longer a licensed port, although for years there were tales of illegal night trawling and of drivers removing the haul in unmarked lorries.
"Local legend says that fishing ended here with the coming of steam trawlers," Murray explains. "They overfished the herring, so that it never recovered."
Wick is still an active town but you get the impression that, as the final medical bulletin said of Britain's last king, its life is "drawing peacefully to a close."
Today's ride: 2 km (1 miles)
Total: 2,672 km (1,659 miles)
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