Berkeley Square, the White Cliffs of Dover and All That

We used to live in a pretty village in Gloucestershire (GLOS-ti-sheer) called Ebrington. A typical village in the Cotswold Hills, it had a fair number of honey-colored stone, thatched cottages and one main winding road down the middle. Ebrington is located a couple of miles up the hill from the popular little town of Chipping Campden. All of this makes for a very nice place for tourists to visit.

The village has one pub, the Ebrington Arms, that in those days was a bit run down but still charming (it’s spruced up nicely now.) During our years there, we spent a lot of time in this pub. It was one of the social centers of village life, the other being the church. Now the landlord of the pub, a nice guy named Gareth, had previously been a professional musician and I guess that was the reason that there was an electric organ in the bar. Nobody ever played the organ; it just sat on one side gathering dust.

One of the clever things, from a business point-of-view, that Gareth arranged was to pay a small gratuity to coach drivers with tour companies out of Stratford-on-Avon to bring their coach loads of tourists, mostly Americans, out to the Ebrington Arms for a drink in the evening. This arrangement was a win-win-win: Gareth sold a lot of drinks to the tourists, the tourist gat to experience a nice country pub and the drivers had a few extra quid in their pockets. And, there was another win: the locals taking up all the stools at the bar had a great time teasing and joking with the tourists. It was all good, friendly fun. I was sometimes introduced as Ebrington’s own token Yank.

On summer evening a coach pulled up outside the pub and offloaded 20 or 25 American tourists. Once they got inside and everyone has a drink, the usual jollity got under way. But this particular evening something was different. One of the Americans noticed the organ, opened the lid and turned the thing on. It turned out that he played the piano and this organ wasn’t that challenging. This guy started playing old songs from the WWII era like A Nightingale Sings in Berkeley Square and Blue Bird Over the White Cliffs of Dover and most of the rest of the tourists gathered round and to sing the old songs. They were having a wonderful old time. Both Susan and I later said that we recognized the scene from the old war movies with the gallant pilots drinking and singing in their leather jackets before going out the next morning to die.

Of course, none of the locals joined in the singing. Nobody had ever heard the organ being played and singing in a pub was not something that normal people do.

After an hour or so of the fun, it was time for the Americans to get back on their coach and move on to the next experience organized by the driver. The last to leave was a well groomed, middle aged guy who stopped by the bar to say goodbye and thank you to Gareth. “I can’t wait to get back home to,” he named a town in Iowa or Kansas, “and tell the neighbors about our evening in a real English pub.”