In the heart of England there is a pub which has stood little changed since round the time when Falstaff was the pub-keeper's terror. It was there when Spain's Philip LI sent his Armada against England, radioed Craig Thompson fo the New York "Times." It was there when Napoleon talked of taking the United Kingdom by force. It is still there now when Hitler is raining bombs around and making holes in good pasture land. It is strictly a country pub in a small village near the centre of England's agricultural area, intensively tilled by truck farms. It is a little, low building of brick, half-timbered above the first story, with walls that bulge and recede with serpentine effect. It is called "The Fleece," and is not far from the town of Evesham in the Midlands.
For the past 500 years this enterprise has been in the hands of one family. The owner today is Mrs. Ann Taplin, a strong-minded white-haired woman of 80 years who at the moment is in ill health, But her indisposition has nothing to do with the war or her age but is due wholly to the fact that she recently fell down a flight of stairs and severely injured her back. The family tradition was uninterrupted by the mishap, and Mrs, Taplin's "young daughter," a pleasant and competent woman of 40, runs the place just as it has been run for many years past.
In the taproom, with its lowbeamed ceiling, one meets today just the kind of people who have been drinking unchilled beer and bitters from heavy glass pint-sized mugs which have been there for centuries. They are farmers with rugged faces, gnarled broad hands, muddied breeches and high boots. They stand with their backs toward the warmth of a broad fireplace and thump their mugs on the polished top of an old oaken drop-leaf table that would fetch hundreds of pounds at a sale.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.