Above left is a reduced-size reproduction of a famous essay by the renowned Engliah Author, George Orwell (1903-50), in which he superbly describes, in some detail, why "The Moon Under Water" is his favourite pub. It is a scan of a copy (from microfilm) of part of Page 6 of a London newspaper, the Evening Standard (www.thisislondon.co.uk), of Saturday, the 9th of February, 1946; it can be clicked on to see a bigger version, but this is still difficult to read, so the full text of the essay, as it appears in the newspaper, is given below. The copy was made, in June, 2005, by John White, in the British Library's Newspaper Library, in North London, in Colindale (Colindale Avenue, NW9 5HE, www.bl.uk/collections/newspapers.html). This library is very close to Colindale Underground Train station (turn right on leaving it and the library is soon reached on the left); the station is on the Edgware branch of the Northern Line (Zone 4). Information on the main British Library is given below. There is a pub called The Moon Under Water, in Colindale, at 10 Varley Parade, NW9 6RR, tel 020 82007 7611, GPS: 51.587402o N, 0.251110o W (Varley Parade is separated from Edgware Road (the A5) by a barrier and a pavement). In the photo, above right, which was taken by Joyce White, in June, 2005, I am enjoying a pint of Hook Norton Old Hooky (4.6%) (www.hooknortonbrewery.com), in this pub; the poster in the background features George Orwell and a Moon, and mentions the 1946 Evening Standard article that inspired the adoption by the J D Wetherspoon chain of the name The Moon Under Water, for this, and a number of their other pubs. The wording on the poster is as follows: "The name of this J.D. Wetherspoon freehouse originates from an article written by George Orwell, in a piece first published in the London Evening Standard in 1946. In the article Orwell described his ideal pub, which he called The Moon Under Water. It would have an excellent atmosphere, with food and drink to match. There would also be elbow room, and no loud music. J.D. Wetherspoon felt that this name and Orwell's description suited the company's style of pub. Welcome to The Moon Under Water." In 1979, Tim Martin, opened his first pub, which he called The Moon Under Water; it was in North London. There are now around thirteen Moons Under Water, owned by J D Wetherspoon (www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk), a chain which has hundreds of pubs in the UK, their website providing details of them all. Tim is Wetherspoon's Chairman. The photo to the left, which was taken by John White, in June, 2005, is the sign for The Moon Under Water, in Colindale, North London, see the previous paragraph. It is a typical Wetherspoon's establishment in that it is a genuine free house, as per the wording on the sign, in that it technically can have Real Ales from anywhere, although, no doubt for price reasons - Wetherspoon's are justly renowned for having low-cost Real Ale - some beers seem to be present in every Wetherspoon's that you go in, such as Marston's Bitter and Pedigree and Greene King Abbot. The pint featured in the photo, above right, which was the most expensive on offer, on my June, 2005 visit, cost only £1.69, which is very reasonable for a 4.6% Guest Beer in a London pub; I paid £3.80 for a 3.8% beer, elsewhere in London, a day later (and 10% service was added to the bill); click here for details. I am sorry, George, if you are turning in your grave, but, as you can see from the photo at the top of the page, I am not drinking out of a strawberry-pink china mug with a handle, but out of a handleless glass, see below for George's pronouncements on these two, contrasting drinking vessels. Wetherspoon outlets are often particularly splendid conversions of buildings such as banks. George Orwell (1903-50), who was born in India (real name Eric Arthur Blair), is a particularly famous English author, some of his many titles including Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Bengal Days, and Down and Out in Paris and London. George Orwell was also a prolific writer of articles for newspapers, periodicals and the radio. Of course, there is a Moon Under Water, in Wigan, Greater Manchester (Lancashire in George Orwell's time) (5-7a Market Place, WN1 1PE). The Moon Under Water, 68-74 Deansgate, Manchester, M3 2FN, is reckoned to be the biggest pub in England; a well-known example in London is at 26 Leicester Square, WC2H 7LE, next door to the Famous Odeon Leicester Square cinema; there is no evidence of George Orwell inside this Moon Under Water. Note that there was a Moon Under Water at 105-107 Charing Cross Road (with an entrance also at 20 Greek Street), WC2H 0BD. This was a conversion of the famous Marquee Club, where Eric Clapton, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, and members of The Rolling Stones performed before hitting the big time. Wetherspoon's have subsequently converted it into one of their Lloyds No.1 outlets, these having piped music, unlike "conventional" Wetherspoon's; it is now called The Montague Pyke. Note that M3 2FN, WC2H 7LE, etc, are post codes; plugging them into www.streetmap.co.uk provides location maps, as does the more versatile maps.google.co.uk. Information on a number of the best pubs in London are to be found in the eighty-three page White Beer Travels notes that can be obtained from the site's Downloads page. Click here to see the "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" (en.wikipedia.org) entry for "The Moon Under Water", which contains a link to this White Beer Travels Web page. As is typical, the Wikipedia article links to other Wikipedia articles, covering, for example, the Evening Standard, and, of course, George Orwell. The following is George Orwell's essay on "The Moon Under Water", which is a very popular source of quotes on beer and pubs, for example, the world's most famous beer writer, Michael Jackson (1942-) (www.beerhunter.com, in his 1976 book, The English Pub mentions George Orwell's motherly barmaids (page 166); from this, Michael produces his own most memorable of quotes, when referring to buxom barmaids: "Happily, there are still a few pubs which bulge with anachronisms." Note that Michael gives the correct source and date of publication of "The Moon Under Water". I point this out, as these are often misquoted; see below for background information on when and where it was actually published. As can be seen from the reduced size reproduction of the actual essay, at the top of this page, on the left, It was preceded by the following when it was originally made available to the public, in the Evening Standard, on the 9th of February, 1946: George Orwell in his Saturday Essay tells the secrets of his favourite public-house

The Moon Under Water

My favourite public house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.

Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of "regulars" who occupy the same chair every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer.

If you are asked why you favour a particular public house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its "atmosphere".

To begin with, its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian. It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries, and, on the other hand, no sham roof-beams, ingle-nooks or plastic panels masquerading as oak. The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull's head over the mantelpiece-everything has the solid comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.

Quiet enough to talk

In winter there is generally a good fire burning in at least two of the bars, and the Victorian lay-out of the place gives one plenty of elbow-room. There are a public bar, a saloon bar, a ladies' bar, a bottle-and-jug for those who are too bashful to buy their supper beer publicly, and upstairs, a dining-room.

Games are only played in the public, so that in the other bars you can walk about without constantly ducking to avoid flying darts.

In the Moon Under Water it is always quiet enough to talk. The house possesses neither a radio nor a piano, and even on Christmas Eve and such occasions the singing that happens is of a decorous kind.

The barmaids know most of their customers by name, and take a personal interest in everyone. They are all middle-aged women-two of them have their hair dyed in quite surprising shades-and they call everyone "dear," irrespective of age or sex. ("Dear," not "Ducky": pubs where the barmaid calls you "Ducky" always have a disagreeable raffish atmosphere.)

A good, solid lunch

Unlike most pubs, the Moon Under Water sells tobacco as well as cigarettes, and it also sells aspirins and stamps, and is obliging about letting you use the telephone.

You cannot get dinner at the Moon Under Water, but there is always the snack counter where you can get liver-sausage sandwiches, mussels (a speciality of the house), cheese, pickles and those large biscuits with caraway seeds in them which only seem to exist in public-houses.

Upstairs, six days a week, you can get a good, solid lunch-for example, a cut off the joint, two vegetables and boiled jam roll-for about three shillings.

The special pleasure of this lunch is that you can have draught stout with it. I doubt whether as many as 10 per cent of London pubs serve draught stout, but the Moon Under Water is one of them. It is a soft, creamy sort of stout, and it goes better in a pewter pot.

They are particular about their drinking vessels at the Moon Under Water and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handleless glass. Apart from glass and pewter mugs, they have some of those pleasant strawberry-pink china ones which are now seldom seen in London. China mugs went out about 30 years ago, because most people like their drink to be transparent, but in my opinion beer tastes better out of china.

The garden is a surprise

The great surprise of the Moon Under Water is its garden. You go through a narrow passage leading out of the saloon, and find yourself in a fairly large garden with plane trees under which there are little green tables with iron chairs round them. Up at one end of the garden there are swings and a chute for the children.

On summer evenings there are family parties, and you sit under the plane trees having beer or draught cider to the tune of delighted squeals from children going down the chute. The prams with the younger children are parked near the gate.

Many as are the virtues of the Moon Under Water I think that the garden is its best feature, because it allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.

And though, strictly speaking, they are only allowed in the garden, the children tend to seep into the pub and even to fetch drinks for their parents. This, I believe, is against the law, but it is a law that deserves to be broken, for it is the puritanical nonsense of excluding children-and therefore to some extent, women-from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing-shops instead of the family gathering-places that they ought to be.

Do you know of one ?

The Moon Under Water is my ideal of what a pub should be-at any rate, in the London area. (The qualities one expects of a country pub are slightly different.)

But now is the time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place as the Moon Under Water.

That is to say, there may well be a pub of that name, but I don't know of it, nor do I know any pub with just that combination of qualities.

I know pubs where the beer is good but you can't get meals, others where you can get meals but which are noisy and crowded, and others which are quiet but where the beer is generally sour. As for gardens, offhand I can only think of three London pubs that possess them.

*

But, to be fair, I do know of a few pubs that almost come up to the Moon Under Water. I have mentioned above ten qualities that the perfect pub should have, and I know one pub that has eight of them. Even there, however, there is no draught stout and no china mugs.

And if anyone knows of a pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio, I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms

Note that the lunch cost quoted of three shillings, in the above George Orwell essay on his favourite pub, The Moon Under Water, is fifteen pence (£0.15) in today's money, but would, of course, be much more expensive now, as a consequence of inflation.

I have already stated that the first publication of The Moon Under Water was in the Evening Standard on the 9th of February, 1946. This source and date is stated in an authoritative collection of his work, see below, although, elsewhere, other sources and dates are also quoted for it, such as: the 9th of December, 1946, in the Evening Standard; and the 9th of February, 1944, in the Tribune. I have confirmed the 9th of February, 1946 to be correct, and the others incorrect, by seeking out the originals in the British Library's Newspaper Library, in Colindale. The Tribune, see below, comes out weekly, on a Friday; it was not issued on the 9th of February, 1944, which is a Wednesday; the editions around this date are dated the 4th and the 11th of February, 1944, both having As I Please articles by George Orwell, see below, neither of which are anything to do with The Moon Under Water; I can vouch for this, as I have studied the actual copies of the Tribune in the Newspaper Library. Similarly, there is no article by George Orwell in the 9th of December, 1946, edition of the Evening Standard; this date is a Monday, hardly the day to publish a "Saturday Essay", see above. The Internet source I found giving this incorrect date, albeit in the correct publication, stated that it was quoted by the well-known BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Journalist, Jeremy Paxman (1950-), in his 1998 book, published by Michael Joseph: The English: A Portrait of a People. This later came out as a (Penguin Books Paperback, in 1999 (ISBN 0-14-026723-9). However, Jeremy, who extensively quotes from the essay (pages 9 and 10 of the Penguin edition), does, in fact, gets the date correct. Unfortunately, the book makes reference to hundreds of people getting drunk on frothy, imported American beer, in the Manchester Moon Under Water, without mentioning the many who enjoy, without getting drunk, the excellent selection of Real Ales from England and the rest of the UK, that are available in the place; this is a disappointment, given the title of the book. Jeremy Paxman also states that all the Moons Under Water are " ... owned by a vast brewing conglomerate ... ", which is simply not true. First of all, Wetherspoon's do not brew, and secondly, although quite a big company, such a description should be reserved for the significantly bigger companies that produce the frothy beer that he refers to; For the fan of Real Ale, Wetherspoon's is a most laudable company, so this description, which is clearly meant to be derogatory, is wholly undeserved, but then this is Jeremy Paxman. The frothy American beer is known as Lager in England; in Wetherspoon's many do drink Lager, but, in the main, it will be manufactured in England or Belgium.

The main British Library (www.bl.uk) is next to St. Pancras Railway Station, in London (96 Euston Road, NW1 2DB). The British Library is a less well-known, but truly world-class tourist attraction. One room is a sensation, where all the place's treasures are collected together: documents in the original hand of famous people such as Shakespeare; two of the four copies of the Magna Carta; etc, etc. If you are interested in rare stamps, then seek out the vertical draws holding thousands of particularly special ones, en route to the coffee bar, from which one can see a staggering display of old books donated by George III, the King's Library, see www.bl.uk/collections/early/georgeiii.html. Don't miss The British Library. Admission is free.

For a good deal of information on George Orwell, and the text of much of his oeuvre, including "The Moon Under Water", go to the MSN Group, groups.msn.com/EricArthurBlair (follow the ESSAYS Link and then the "The Moon under Water" Link), which, for access, requires one to follow a simple registration procedure. Most, if not all, of George Orwell's work is in the public domain, i.e. it is out of copyright; the MSN Group text of his "The Moon Under Water" article contains a few transcription errors, so my source of its full text for this Web page is the original Evening Standard essay. Many thanks to David Clifford, of the excellent "Fun in Hounslow!" website, homepage.mac.com/davidclifford, who alerted me to this MSN Groups source, which put me on the track of a book in which the full text appears, see below, which then led me to seeking out the original newspaper article.

A particularly excellent source of information on George Orwell on the Internet is "Charles' George Orwell Links", www.netcharles.com/orwell, which is based in Montreal, in Quebec, in Canada. To quote from this site's Home page: "On this site you'll find the best of Orwell's essays and books as well as reviews, news articles and images. In addition, there are hundreds of links to other Orwell web sites." This most professional of sites has been running since 1995. The version of The Moon Under Water on Charles' website is his scan and OCR from the twenty volume The Complete Works of George Orwell (1998, edited by Peter Davison, assisted by Ian Angus, and Sheila Davison, published by Secker & Warburg) (this contains the definitive text of all of George Orwell's work); the second occurrence of Moon Under Water in this is a hyperlink to this White Beer Travels page featuring this pub, as are links in Charles's text of As I Please (28 Jan 1944) (the text "a barmaid informed me that if you pour beer [into a damp glass it goes flat much more quickly.]") and A Passage from India (the text "Orwell had a couple of beers"). Charles is the RingMaster, or Ring Administrator, of the George Orwell Web Ring, which can be accessed at the bottom of this page.

Another most worthy site covering George Orwell, is Vienna (Wien) resident, Maros Kollár's "George Orwell 1903 - 1950", www.k-1.com/Orwell. It is a big site, readily navigable using its Sitemap. Interestingly another highly regarded site also comes from a long way from Wigan Pier, i.e. it is the most able work of Dag, who lives in Russia, www.orwell.ru. This site is in both English and Russian.

Much of George Orwell's main work (Novels and Essays) that is available from the George Orwell MSN Group has been sourced from the official Australian sister project, gutenberg.net.au, of the main "Project Gutenberg" organisation, www.gutenberg.org. This is the oldest and most well-known producer of free electronic books (eBooks or eTexts) on the Internet. Project Gutenberg is named after Johannes Gensfleisch Gutenberg (1400-68) (www.gutenberg.de), who was born in Mainz, in present day Germany; he is regarded as the inventor of printing. Click here for the appropriate pages of the Project Gutenberg of Australia website. Note that the main reason why there is a Project Gutenberg of Australia as well as the original US-based one is because of the different copyright laws that apply in the USA and Australia. There are thus other equivalent organisations, such as Project Gutenberg in European Union member states (Project Gutenberg EU) ( PG-EU)), www.gutenberg.nl.

George Orwell's "The Moon Under Water" appears on pages 44-47 of a book entitled Orwell. As I Please 1943-1946. Volume 3 Essays, Journalism and Letters, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (2000 paperback, published by David R. Godine (a Nonpareil Book, www.godine.com), 435 pages, ISBN 1-56792-135-3), which can be obtained from www.amazon.com and www.amazon.co.uk. Note that the "1946" of the book's title, incorrectly appears as "1945" on the cover of the paperback; the correct date is to be found inside the book, and on the cover of the original hardback, published by Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., in 1968. As I Please was a title of a regular article by Orwell, in the Tribune (www.tribweb.co.uk), a left-wing weekly magazine, of which he was the literary editor, a famous co-director being the Labour politician, Aneurin Bevan, who, as Minister of Health, introduced the revolutionary National Health Service to the UK, in 1948, after waging a one-man opposition to Sir Winston Churchill for much of the Second World War. Sonia Orwell (1918-80) married George Orwell, in late 1949, three months before he died, in 1950. She was the second of his two wives, Eileen, the first one, having died unexpectedly, in 1945.

Note that the text of The Moon Under Water as it appears in the book, mentioned in the previous paragraph, is the same as the original, as published in the Evening Standard, but it contains a few corrections or changes to the punctuation, for example: the Moon Under Water appears in quotes as "The Moon under Water", this also being the case for the two other example pubs named at the end of the article; "Dear," appears as "Dear",; clientèle gets the accent given here; "30 years ago" becomes "thirty years ago", etc; the inconsistent hyphen in public-houses does not appear in the book; the missing full stop at the end is not missing in the book; etc. The book also does not give the sub-headings that are in the original article.

John White (1945-), , page created in May, 2005, updated in June, 2007.

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