On the Rose and Crown, Oxford

When living in Prague I heard a story- no great achievement in itself, for in that city there is a fable underneath every cobble- that stuck with me. Every day, without exception, there would shuffle into the Trade Fair Palace, wherein are stored the choicest specimens of the Czech national art collection, an old man. He would pay no attention to the staff, nor his fellow visitors, the jauntily curated collations of works were as nothing to him, as were the joys of every other painting except one: Edvard Munch’s Dance on the Shore. To this piece- charming enough but in no critic’s estimation an especially noteworthy effort, he would make a beeline and stand, transfixed for precisely an hour before leaving without so much as casting an eye in the direction of the Gauguins or Picassos or Muchas round about it. When he died, it was said that over the course of his long life he had stared at the painting for some tens of thousands of hours.

I cannot claim to have any such idea of numbers, but I do know precisely which piece of human artistic endeavour I have stared at longer than any other. It is a pair of porcelain Victorian men in bathing costumes that hang above the far-left urinal in the Gents loos in the Rose and Crown pub on North Parade in Oxford. It was- and remains, whether I find myself living in Prague or Grahamstown or Liverpool- my favourite pub on earth. You will have your own Red Lions or White Harts or Queen Vics I am sure but for me, there is nowhere on God's green earth I would rather watch the foam settle on my pint than the Rose and Crown, North Parade. 

As a student, hours melted into years in the courtyard at the back, the emptying of behandled beer pots and the demolition of pork pies innumerable seeming to last both an eternity and merely a twinkling of an eye all wreathed in the dancing silk smoke of a thousand cigarettes. Of course, the physiological effects of multiple pints are even more relatable and recognisable than the emotional, if a little less poetic. Regular staggers into the Gents, with the laughter of the last uttered joke or the notes from the out of tune piano (which resides in a small building at the end of the yard called ‘The Cottage’) still ringing in my ears, were the inevitable results of these carefree afternoons and evenings and so it was that I came to gaze on the porcelain men for quite so long.

This is not just rose tinting of memories on my behalf I promise- there is more than a hint of Wonderland about the Rose and Crown. It sits, like an oversized pink chocolate box, on North Parade which is, in true Lewis Carroll style, absurdly located to the south of South Parade. During the Civil War, North Parade marked the furthest point of the Royalist defences and South Parade the position of the Parliamentarian guns with a no-mans-land in between. Or so it is inscribed on a framed parchment on the pub wall- one of the many artefacts that fill the establishment’s three public rooms. There are quotes cut out and stuck onto beams, there are playbills from operettas performed several decades ago pinned to walls, there are oars and cricket bats and rugby paraphernalia, there are trophies and postcards and orders of service from funerals. But these are not idle bits of curios- for the Rose and Crown is as much a repository for the memory of the folk who love it as any parish church.

The characters who inhabit it are worthy of Carroll too. These are not the affected eccentrics that have plagued the student dominated city centre since the days of Wilde- oh no. These are true characters- writers and vagabonds, mercenaries and priests, porters and actors, boxers and hacks and all those of us in between such titans- all these might be found, without fail, dominating the bar or huddled in the courtyard’s quiet corners. They are as much part of the Aladdin’s Cave as the objects and articles hanging from its beams. I recall emerging blinking into an Oxford night, long after last orders, having spent the entirety of Grand National Day there in a haze of laughter and Hook Norton beer with a fellow undergraduate, a porter from St Anne's, a TV producer and the landlord himself. Such strange but happy mixes can only occur, I think, in places were all are truly at ease.

A conversation at the bar might begin with a shared interest identified by the landlord (for he acts as a jovial Barnum in the midst of it all; his prodigious memory for faces and names as well as his generosity of spirit keeping this closely packed powder keg of Oxford ego under perfect control). This spark could be rugby or racing but the conversation will inevitably meander round almost any facet of the human experience- from maths and metaphysics to libel and limericks. It is a home- for university institutions yes, for it is the chosen drinking den for groupings as diverse as the Rugby Blues and the Gilbert and Sullivan Society- but for all these individuals, and for all their stories, as well.

Just to the right of the porcelain men there is a window filled in with wooden slats. Much of the goings on in the courtyard of the Rose and Crown resembles the pre-Reformation liturgy: whispers here, loud noises there, smoke, wine, each movement along the narrow pathways between the tables governed by unwritten convention and the typed signage formatted in the landlord’s idiosyncratic style and all, crucially, to the uninitiated, baffling but to the regular, a source of near-spiritual comfort. Whilst it is a stretch too far, I think, to imagine Julian of Norwich micturating whilst standing up, the slats by the porcelain men allow one to play anchoress for a minute or two- catching snatches of the hubbubing liturgy that emanates from the huddled collections of the interested and the interesting on the other side of the wall. What I would give even to just be able to listen in thus now!

But back to the story from Prague (she will forgive our detour, for whilst she is undoubtedly a city of story, she is even more so a city of bonhomie and of beer)- the old man’s daily pilgrimages to the quite ordinary Munch painting were not, as you will have guessed, acts of artistic homage. He had, it is said, first met the woman who became his wife whilst they both looked at it. Having lost her much earlier than any lover could wish, the hour spent each day at the place where they had met was an act of sentimentality, of grief, of worship even. So it was that the small patch of marble in front of Dance on the Shore became for him a place of comfort, a repository for happy memories, a home.  I have suffered no such loss, but the fable of the old man inexorably puts me in mind of the multiplicity of stories that draw people to a particular place, of the stories in particular behind those fascinating people and objects that populate that hallowed ground in north Oxford, and of those hours spent- and those which, God willing, I hope to spend again in the future- staring at the porcelain men in bathing costumes on the loo wall.