Book #43: The Old Dog and Duck by Albert Jack
The Old Dog and Duck: The Secret Meanings of Pub Names by Albert Jack
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Pub names in the UK are always fascinating, especially when they are unusual ones. As this book shows, they all have some kind of historical context. It's not simply a case of naming a pub after a random person or thing, there are a lot of hidden meanings. A lot of the pub names seem to have some significance to the Royals, and others are named after racehorses (there is a short section on this).
Other fascinating pub name origins included The Red Herring, named after the practice of hunt saboteurs to drag a fish behind them to put the hunting hounds off the scent, and the story behind The Drunken Duck, which involved a duck being plucked while it was still alive.
This didn't feel like a book that most people would sit and work their way through, but I decided to anyway. I could tell the author had researched it painstakingly, although at times it felt like a list of facts. There were a couple asides from the author about his own thoughts, and I wished there had been more of these.
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