Landlord Norman Balon once threw a customer out of The Coach & Horses for ordering a snakebite. “We don’t serve cocktails here. Get out!” he announced. Notorious as ‘London’s rudest landlord’, inscribed on matchbooks and writ large over the door, he had worked there for 63 years until his retirement in 2006, aged 79. Somebody once complained that his beer was flat. Norman poured it into a new glass, frothed it up with his fingers and gave it back. His catchphrase, of sorts, was “You’re Barred, You Bastards”, serving as the title of his 1991 autobiography. He lived above the pub since he was 16 when his father became the landlord, latterly commuting from Golders Green but never missed a day.
Norman featured, off screen, at the end of a telephone, in Keith Waterhouse’s 1989 play ‘Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell’, based on Jeffrey Bernard’s ‘Low Life’ column in The Spectator, which he composed from his stool at the bar and dictated in from the public phone. It was described as “a suicide note in weekly instalments.” The play starred Peter O’Toole, another regular, to great acclaim. It was set around a, supposedly true, occasion when Bernard got himself locked in the Coach one night, having passed out in the gent’s, the set a faithful reconstruction of the pub’s interior. Balon referred to it as “My play.” It has recently been restaged, within the Coach itself, actor Robert Bathurst performing the title role.
Cartoonist Michael Heath’s series in Private Eye, ‘The Regulars’, inspired by Coach regulars, featured both Bernard (‘Has Jeff bin in?’) and Balon (‘Monty Balon, the genial meinhost’). For over 40 years Private Eye held their fortnightly lunches for informants and politicians in an upstairs room, once descried as ‘a National Health side-ward decorated from Army surplus stores’. The intention was to get the guests so bladdered as to lose all discretion and spill the beans. Famously, at one such debauched lunch, ‘thirsty’ MP John Hemming let slip that he had just got his mistress pregnant. Trebles all round, as the Eye would say.
A licence was first record on the site in 1724, although the current building dates from 1840, substantially altered in 1889. In 1978 it was listed Grade II with Historic England. The atmospheric interior, remodelled in the 1930s in a sort of deco style of the day, remains little changed. The doors of the screen, which divided the public bar from the saloon, were removed at some point and reused for the loos. The gents and ladies have been swapped over, for uncertain reason, from when I first emptied my bladder there. Certainly the carpets and lino are less threadbare than they were in those days. The Double Diamond and Inn Coupe signs above the back of the bar must have been added sometime in the 1960s. Otherwise all is much as it would have been the day Norman barred his very first miscreant.
When Norman retired he was succeeded, as leaseholder, by Alastair Choat. Against initial scepticism he made a good stab at it, respecting its history and culture. The beer was substantially improved, not a difficult task, adding an array of craft ales. Slightly controversially he made it vegan and vegetarian, although as Norman’s attempt at catering was, solely, a daily thick doorstop cheese sandwich which sat, drying out, at the end of the bar, for ever at the price of one pound, you could say that there was no change there then. Peculiarly afternoon tea was offered upstairs.
In 2012 Fullers bought the Coach, though continued to lease it to the incumbent Alastair Choat until, in 2019, they incorporated it into their pub portfolio. Choat, alongside the staff and regulars, put up a brave, rather imaginative, fight. They applied, and were granted, a nudist licence for a pub, the first and only one in the country. They put on a ticket-only ‘Nudist Cockney Sing-Along’, with regulars in the buff. ‘I’ve Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts’ would never be the same. I am uncertain what Norman made of it but it was in the true spirit of the institution.
When I first moved to the smoke nearly 50 years ago, I instinctively gravitated to Soho and immediately adopted the Coach as my regular howff. I am not sure why but it had, for a metropolitan boozer, the ambience of a genuine local, somewhere that arresting company and challenging conversation could be found. Every Christmas Norman would gift the regulars a unique mug, featuring a cartoon by Heath. It took a while but the day the old bastard belligerently proffered one to me I knew I was home but never dry. Against all odds it is still a great pub. ‘It’s not the same’ I hear. True. The beer is a lot better now.
The Coach and Horses
29 Greek St, London W1D 5DH