Welcome to our regularly scheduled audio Ovaltine twenty minutes before you lower your lamp: it's Episode Sixteen of our late summer caper by G K Chesterton, The Flying Inn - a novel published in 1914 in which the elites make common cause with Islam and go to war against the English village pub. Peter Fattorini, a UK Steyn Clubber, writes:
It is remarkable how prescient The Flying Inn is. This article from the local paper in Bradford concerns the last pub in the Heaton district.
The enclosed news story would have struck Chesterton as extraordinary. From Thursday's Bradford Telegraph & Argus:
A planning application to develop the prominent site of the vacant Hare and Hounds, a once-popular pub and restaurant on Toller Lane, Heaton, was first submitted last year.
The work would involve the ground floor of the building, the last pub in the area, being converted into three shops – including a convenience store, with its upper floors turned into flats.
Four townhouses would be built on the large car park area on the same site.
Peter adds:
I grew up in Heaton and there used to be several pubs there. Heaton also was home to St Cuthberts church, where Monsignor O'Connor was parish priest. He was a great friend of Chesterton and the model for his Father Brown character.
Heaton is actually quite a literary quartier, once home to J B Priestley (The Good Companions) and John Braine (Room at the Top), two very English authors in their different ways. Both would be astonished to find a Yorkshire district of just under 20,000 people can no longer support a single pub. I wonder why that might be. Well, Heaton has three seats on Bradford Council. The current councillors are a trio of Mohammeds: Nussrat Mohammed, Mohammed Amran and Mohammad Shabbir.
The original planning application for the former Hare and Hounds was rejected by the council, until the developers agreed to commit to a "net gain" in "biodiversity". Heaton has every kind of diversity except human diversity: population-wise, it's Mohammeds-a-go-go.
The Flying Inn is, as Peter says, prescient - but accidentally so. Chesterton hung his plot on an English political class that embraces the prohibitionist strictures of Islam because it was so obviously far-fetched that it provided almost unbounded opportunities for satirical fancy.
And yet the extinction of the village pub is happening before our eyes.
In tonight's episode, our heroes are taken on a wild joy ride by an Ivywood cousin's errant chauffeur - in the course of which Hump and Dalroy muse on ...the Yanks:
"It seems to me, Captain, you aren't quite fair to these foreign chaps. Take these Americans, now! There were many Americans went by Pebblewick, you may suppose. But in all the lot there was never a bad lot; never a nasty American, nor a stupid American—nor, well, never an American that I didn't rather like."
"I know," said Dalroy, "you mean there was never an American who did not appreciate 'The Old Ship.'"
"I suppose I do mean that," answered the inn-keeper, "and somehow, I feel 'The Old Ship' might appreciate the American too."
"You English are an extraordinary lot," said the Irishman, with a sudden and sombre quietude. "I sometimes feel you may pull through after all."
After another silence he said, "You're always right, Hump, and one oughtn't to think of Yankees like that. The rich are the scum of the earth in every country. And a vast proportion of the real Americans are among the most courteous, intelligent, self-respecting people in the world. Some attribute this to the fact that a vast proportion of the real Americans are Irishmen."
If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club you can hear Part Sixteen of our serialisation of The Flying Inn simply by clicking here and logging-in. All previous episodes can be found here.
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