World Travel Guide Online

Cambridge – the Eagle

Benet Street

It was 11am and I was feeling nervous. Richard Lionheart called out for us to be ready for the first patrons of the day as he opened the front doors. Luckily no one came in just yet.

I was on my first day of work at The Eagle pub in Cambridge. Bar work looked like it would be easy, but I had never done it before and didn’t even know what brands of drinks The Eagle sold. Upon arriving that morning, I’d been put to work sorting empty bottles into cartons for recycling. It had been a seemingly simple task but Richard hadn’t bothered to tell me that every different type of bottle went into a separate crate, so I had to spend half an hour re-sorting them.

I also met Arnold, who managed The Eagle along with his wife Gabrielle. He greeted me with his customary “alright?” to which I was unsure of just how to answer. So I said “Yes, I am quite alright, thankyou for asking.” He was a short, tubby man with a ruddy complexion and bushy moustache. He was prone to bouts of haughty bossiness and raging temper tantrums, which did nothing to improve his low popularity rating with the staff. Usually he was fairly reasonable however, if not a little peculiar.

I had been hoping that Thomas would be there, the guy I had first met when I got the job, but he was on his day off. But I soon met Andre, who like a true cliché, could be called Andre the Giant. He was tall, good looking and acted very cool. As we waited behind the main bar for people to arrive for their morning drink (if there were any), Andre showed me how to pull a beer and use the cash register. As I tried to settle into my surroundings I wondered how I was going to get through the day. The hours seemed to be absolutely brutal. I worked from 10am till 2:30pm, then had a two and a half hour break, then 5:00pm till midnight, with a half hour break chucked in. All in all, an 11 hour work day, five days a week. The good news was that a hearty pub lunch got thrown in for free.

As Andre was showing me how to operate the glass washer, Richard called out for him to come to the RAAF bar in the back room of the pub. Andre wordlessly left me to myself. I was standing behind the bar alone, feeling very nervous and praying that no customer would come in just yet when I heard someone clear their throat.

“Dzien dobry, nazywam si�e Noel.”

I looked around for the person who had uttered the words to see a tall, slim fellow with black disheveled hair joining me behind the bar. I regarded him quizzically and decided that no matter what language he had just spoken, he looked really rather English.

“Er, what did you say, mate?”

He grinned. “Sorry, that’s Polish for “good morning, my name is Noel”. He held up his hand and I discovered he was holding a tape recorder. “I’m learning the language because my fiancé is from Poland and I will be going there to meet my in-laws-to-be soon.” He grinned at me again. “But it’s OK, her father likes football, so if we can’t understand each other, we can always watch the football wordlessly together.”

I studied Noel with interest and decided that he was going to be interesting. And I liked him immediately.

The morning passed by quite quickly. Noel, who originally hailed from Norfolk, had only been working in the pub for one week, but cheerfully explained the ins and outs of the job, answered all the questions I had and talked about how busy the pub got in the evenings.

Noel

The Eagle was part of the Greene King chain of pubs in Cambridge, a large brewer of beers such as Abbott Ale and IPA, and was treated as their flagship pub. All this meant was that it was a popular place, the drinks were more expensive and the bartenders had to wear white shirts and bowties. The Eagle was a quiet pub, having no music, televisions or poker machines. It was Cambridge’s oldest pub and amazingly for me (as an Australian), there had been a pub on this spot for 600 years – a mind boggling amount of time! Being so close to many colleges of Cambridge University, it had been the watering hole of countless professors and brainiacs, including James Watson and Frances Crick as they discovered the DNA double helix. It was the pub that Crick walked into back in 1953 and announced that he had ‘found the secret of life’.

But by far the biggest feature of the Eagle was the ceiling in the RAF bar at the back room of the pub. During World War II, American and British fighter pilots had made The Eagle their hangout and spent countless hours drinking and socialising there whilst waiting for the call-up to fly on a mission. One day, egged on by his mates, a pilot, holding a candle, stood up on someone’s shoulders and burnt his fighter plane squadron number on the ceiling. Other saw this as a good idea and followed suit, using their Zippos or candles, and soon the whole ceiling was covered with initials. I assume the publican allowed this to happen because, quite frankly, these boys were heroes. Not long after the war, the ceiling had been plastered over, but in the last ten years, the war graffiti was remembered and a restoration project took place. Frequently, gawking tour groups (often Americans) came into the pub and looked around, taking their photos and then stopping for a beer, so the pub was a bustling place during the day and night time.

I was really hungry by 2:30pm when my break came around. After meeting some of the kitchen staff, I launched into my lunch of shepherd’s pie, roast chicken and ham sandwich whilst sitting in the RAF bar. I sat with Andre, Noel and Krusty, a New Zealander, so named because his hair stuck out at the sides just like The Simpson’s Krusty the Clown. As we sat there eating and joking around, I gazed at the ceiling and was reminded of the striking symbolism of the occasion. Sixty years ago, countless young men had sat where we sat, also eating, drinking, smoking and joking around with each other. But they weren’t on a lunch break from a comparatively comfortable bar job; they were waiting for a call-up to maybe go on a bombing raid over Europe, a mission on which several of them probably wouldn’t return.

I felt affected by the history that was literally seeping from the ceiling. It was all just a bunch of artless graffiti on the ceiling but I thought, those pilots were probably my age or even younger – and how many of those boys, after burning some initials to cheers from his mates, never came home?

Noel was right, the place got busy in the evening. At 5pm, as if on cue, dozens of middle aged men who looked like university professors came in for a beer, and not long after that, hundreds of students joined the queues at the bar that had become three people deep. ‘Throw him in the deep end’ is the common sentiment for training a new bartender and I was forced to learn quickly that night. When the half hour break came around at 8pm I already felt ready to call it a night; but there were still hours to go.

“Let’s go to the regular mate, I’ll buy you a beer.”

It was Noel warmly making the offer, and the regular he referred to was the Bathhouse, the next pub down the road. The Eagle bartenders went there on their breaks and the Bathhouse bartenders went to the Eagle on theirs. It was an amicable arrangement.

Noel and I were walking out the front door of The Eagle. And the next moment I was on the floor. I wasn’t immediately sure how I’d arrived at the floor in such a quick fashion but it soon became clear. “Are you enjoying your first day, Waltzing Matilda?” I looked up from my comfortable spot on the ground to see Ricky the bouncer holding out a hand to help me up. I regarded that hand with suspicion, because seconds earlier, it had assisted its related leg in tripping and pushing me to the floor. As he yanked me up I looked over to see Noel rubbing his arm and frowning at the other bouncer Al. As we walked to the pub I asked Noel what the hell had just happened.

“Ricky and Al like to play around; I think they get bored otherwise. So they tripped the newcomer, (he pointed at me) you, over and they punched me in the arm several times”. He looked over to see my horrified expression. “But don’t worry mate, they do things like that to everybody at the Eagle. And after a while, the bruises seem to fade so much more quickly. They always do it with such warm humour and keep it just playful enough for you not to get really angry and complain.”

Noel had such a dry, matter of fact way of looking at things I thought, as he continued to rub his arm and I tried to clear the stars from my head.

After a drink in the Bathhouse and a calm, mischievous smile from Ricky and Al upon our timid re-entrance into the Eagle, we resumed our shifts. The place had a different atmosphere with so many people in it but it remained warm and friendly and all you could hear was talk and laughter. At 10:50 I rang the bell for final drinks and ten minutes later we were unsuccessfully trying to get people leave the pub. It was a marked difference from back home where a pub would often be just kicking into gear at this time. By midnight the last people had left and we were able to clean up the bar.

Soon after we all retired to the RAF Bar in the back room for a well earned beer ourselves. Also joining us was Tim – the other assistant manager, Andy – a terrifically funny guy from Newcastle, and Thomas, who had come in for a drink on his day off. It sounded like that was what a lot of people did at The Eagle on their day off, come in for a drink.

Ceiling of the RAF bar

It was an eerie atmosphere as we sipped our pints. Most of the lights had been turned off and I was very aware of the history that pervaded the place. So it seemed only fitting that the pub had ghosts. Richard and Tim had both been working there for five years and told us about the various ghost sightings that had occurred in that time. I’m as much of a sceptic as the next fellow, but the stories were exciting, and both managers were typically straight talkers, yet spoke with passion and conviction about the stories. One night, the cleaners had witnessed a ghost with legs that had been amputated from the knees down floating through the pub. Understandably, they freaked out and went home. The next day, the pub opened, but remained uncleaned from the night before. A bit of research revealed that last century, a drinker had left the pub and unwisely tottered on to the road, where he was swiftly run over by a horse and carriage. And you guessed it; he lost both his legs from the knees down. Another time, a lady had been sipping on her gin and tonic in the RAF bar when she started to shriek loudly. Tim tried to calm her down as best as he could as she described the ghost she had seen, fully dressed in a military uniform and sitting at the table immediately next to her. But when she had looked again, no one was there. The story could have been an isolated, cock and bull story but for one thing. Charles, an old regular to the RAF bar said that he had seen the same soldier at the same table before too.

But the story I liked the most was from Richard. He lived in a room on the floor above the pub and he had to leave his window open a little at all times. At all times. If he didn’t, when he got back from work each night, the window would had been opened slightly and sometimes opened all the way. Apparently one night several centuries ago, a massive fire had burnt the then pub to the ground. And in a room in a similar position to Richard’s room, a little boy had been unable to open his bedroom window to escape the flames and thus had perished in the flames. Richards told us this story with straight faced earnestness. But no matter the truth or not, what utterly fantastic stories they were!

We ended the night by going out to a nightclub, where we drank and danced until 4am. I was happy to have met an interesting, jovial bunch of people, but was tired and worried about how I would feel in the morning. Then I would have to return to the pub for the busiest day of the week, Friday. But I was to discover that this was the bartenders’ life, one very long social occasion. And one in which I also would find myself coming into the Eagle on my day off for a drink.