CAMRA pioneers are mourning the death of John Hanscomb, the first editor of the Good Beer Guide in the 1970s, who was a great campaigner and influential voice in the early days of the Campaign.
John, who lived in Croxley Green in Hertfordshire, was 88 and worked as a page planner in the print and newspaper industry, a demanding job in the days of hot-metal printing.
He was an active member of CAMRA from its early days and took up the challenge of producing a guide to pubs that sold what he called “proper beer” at a time when such keg beers as Watney’s Red Barrel, Worthington E and Double Diamond were being heavily promoted by national brewers.
“The problem was that we didn’t know where all the good pubs were,” he said. “We knew all Young’s pubs in the London area sold proper beer but other brewers wouldn’t tell us which of their pubs sold the real thing.”
John told Ray Bailey and Jessica Boak, who blog as BoakandBailey: “One lawyer told us ‘if you have a list of real ale pubs, you’ll be sued by the brewers’. But I wanted the bastards to take us to court!”
John recalled there weren’t many CAMRA branches at the time, and he spent a lot of the time on the road, often with his wife Rose.
“I remember spending a whole evening in Henley-on-Thames visiting 10 or 12 Brakspear pubs. There wasn’t the breathalyser in those days and there was much less traffic on the roads.”
The first Guide in 1972 listed 300 pubs and ran to 18 pages. It was typewritten and photocopied and put together like wallpaper on the kitchen table in the flat of Michael Hardman, who acted as production editor.
The first commercial printed guide appeared in 1974. It was backed financially by Waddingtons, a major printer, which took the financial pressure off the fledgling Campaign.
Major controversy occurred when in the breweries section John coined the celebrated warning: “Watneys – avoid like the plague”. John said: “I was upset by what Watneys was doing, in Norfolk especially.” The giant London brewer had bought all three breweries in Norwich, closed two of them and shuttered hundreds of pubs in the county.
When the Guide appeared, Waddingtons got cold feet and said it would have to pulp the entire print run and reprint it with a different description of Watneys.
Christopher Hutt, national chairman at the time and author of the seminal Death of the English Pub, said the issue was debated at a meeting of the National Executive. He recalled it was a heated debate, and he was drained at the end of it, but the majority felt CAMRA had no option but to agree with Waddingtons for fear of legal reprisals that could lead to the Campaign being wound up.
Fortunately, Waddingtons agreed to pay the costs of the reprint, which appeared with the Watneys description changed to “avoid at all costs”.
Michael Hardman said the horse had already bolted. “Many newspapers had published the ‘avoid like the plague’ description and it achieved widespread publicity. As a result, the guide quickly sold out.”
John Hanscomb stood down as editor following that edition and handed over to Michael Hardman. John, who worked at the enormous Sun Printers in Watford, said it was a difficult time for him as he had to work shifts, often late at night, and found it hard to continue to check out large numbers of pubs.
But he remained an active member of the Campaign. Les Middlewood of the South Hertfordshire branch says John would often attend socials at the West Herts Sports and Social Club in Watford, which had been a flagship entry in the Good Beer Guide from its inception.
His enduring contribution to the Campaign is summed up by founder member Graham Lees: “John brought colour, character and campaigning instinct to the early days of CAMRA.”
