Humphrey Smith might do a lot wrong but this isn't one of them.
From 'High Street Ken' in today's Independent...
Archbishop Nichols, Ann Widdecombe and a crack squad of angry Catholics have lost their battle to retain the name of a pub behind Westminster Cathedral. The Cardinal was named after Cardinal Manning, a churchman who supported a strike by dock workers in the late 19th century, but the Samuel Smith Brewery is rechristening the establishment "The Windsor Castle" when it reopens in a fortnight's time. Nichols had said changing the pub's name removed a reminder of Manning's good works. Fellow Catholics pointed out that Manning preached temperance ? so naming a pub after him wasn't the most appropriate way to honour his memory.
Ann Widdecombe's reasoning was less than, er, reasoned...
"I think it's extremely silly," she said. "Everywhere you go in London you find a pub has a connection to the area that they're in.
"There's absolutely no connection to Windsor Castle - it's miles away."
I think she would also find that Morpeth and Gloucester are also miles away, to name just two places with Westminster pubs named after them.
I wonder what Cardinal Manning himself would have made of all this? In 1873 he founded The League of the Cross, a total abstinence society. Some advocates for the retention of the pub name are suggesting that Manning would have supported drinking in moderation as a justification for their argument, but the evidence clearly shows this would not be the case.
Cardinal Manning in old age wanted his successor to follow his lead into the temperance movement: ?I pray God that my successor will humbly and with his whole heart go into the midst of the people as I have tried to do?, he wrote in 1890, ?and will give to the League of the Cross a warm and encouraging countenance.? He also wanted his successor to join the prohibitionist United Kingdom Alliance as ?the only real power outside of Parliament to hold the Drink Trade in check?. When Herbert Vaughan attended a dinner of Manchester publicans who advocated winter-gardens and light beers as the agents of temperance, Manning was furious and excluded him from the list of his executors. In many statements from the 1870s onwards Manning expressed his passionate enthusiasm for the temperance movement. His temperance speeches show that he took great trouble to keep his arguments up to date, and that he read widely in temperance literature. Here, then, was no passing enthusiasm, but a cause to which Manning devoted his life after 1868, and for which he laboured through literature as heavy as Dr F. R. Lees' Alliance Prize Essay and the report of the 1853?54 Select Committee on Public-Houses. He travelled about the country on temperance tours, gave evidence before a parliamentary committee on the drink question, and braved much hostility from within the Catholic world by creating the League of the Cross, an association of Catholic abstainers. A. E. Dingle and B. H. Harrison (1969). V. Cardinal Manning as Temperance Reformer. The Historical Journal.
Surely those supporting the petition to keep the name are doing the late Cardinal a posthumous disservice as it seems highly likely he'd be spinning in his grave at having a pub named in his memory!
The Windsor Castle was only renamed The Cardinal in the 1950s so the name is scarcely historic, and finally, do the Catholics of London not have more pressing matters to protest about?
