The S P F Blog

The World was a scarier place.

Brian Revell, Unite national organiser, said:This is a dangerous industry and we intend to create a safer workplace for our members.

We intend to develop industry-wide health and safety standards and we are inviting the employers and the Health and Safety Executive to work with us to reduce accidents in this industry.

They might have started this campaign when I was a cellar lad and the beer came in 54 gallon ‘hogshead’ casks. We used to wear weightlifting belts on delivery days!

The delivery method was to roll a 22 down the slope onto a sack, and use this to cushion the hogsheads. The 22 would often be fired a couple of metres into the cellar on impact and you had to get it back into place PDQ, all you got was a ‘below’ shout before the next one came down and it was on you to get out of the way. We were pretty nimble in those days.

They always had a beer too, the draymen, even at nine and ten am they would knock a couple of pints back before getting back to work. So the guy next on their list had half-pissed draymen flinging half-ton missiles into impossibly small cellars at scared witless cellar monkeys.

Happy days…..

I never thought I would see the day,  but I got a list of the Laurel disposals yesterday and there are a whole heap of Yates’s and Hogsheads, plus some Bar Meds and Litten Trees (which are less of a surprise).

Yates’s were the barometer of the high street for many years, they were what a brand was all about. There have been a few sad days for me lately, in terms of the turmoil within our industry, but this is up there with the worst of them; I’m very, very surprised at what is on Laurel’s list.

The Health and Safety Executive has urged pubs to take simple measures to ensure staff safety. Slips, trips and falls are said to cost the catering and hospitality industry £31m a year, according to new figures from the HSE.

It can’t be only me who remembers the days when cellar hatches were routinely behind bars, they were pretty lethal. They were often, still are sometimes, a pair of cast iron flaps in the street; Mr Bean sketches waiting to happen all over the country.

I’m glad the deadly booby traps have gone, but I’m sad to see people getting thousands of pounds for falling over, sometimes very conveniently, in the pub.