Wednesday, April 02, 2014

Lady Chatterley's ale lover – naming a literary pub

DH Lawrence's home town has named a new inn after his most famous novel. What would you like to read on a pub sign?

Pub
What would you like? … a customer drinks in a Wetherspoons pub. Photograph: Roger Bamber

The DH Lawrence Society is an august institution based in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the former coalmining town where Lawrence was born in 1885. So when it teamed up with the local newspaper, the Eastwood Advertiser, to ask readers to vote for the name of a new pub, one might have expected a choice from the respectable end of his oeuvre – The Rainbow, perhaps, or, for a bit of added glamour, The Plumed Serpent.

But no. Beneath a notice in the Advertiser that the next DH Lawrence Society talk would be Helen Baron on Lawrence's Exploitation of Trains in his Fiction comes a slightly surprising announcement: "The DH Lawrence Society is delighted that readers of this paper voted to name the new public house on the Nottingham Road The Lady Chatterley and are looking forward to the opening on Midsummer's Day, June 24, when it is hoped, subject to the agreement of Wetherspoons, that members will be able to assist with the appropriate launch of this venue by reading some short passages from Lady Chatterley's Lover and other works by DH Lawrence."
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