The Bookbinders' Arms

As I was reflecting the other day on my favourite pubs in Oxford, this was one of the first names that came to mind.

I hope it's still there, and still as it was; I probably haven't been there in 6 or 7 years now, and I haven't been a regular in more than twice as long.

It's one of the classic old working mens' pubs that used to adorn the corner of just about every block in the Jericho district, the residential area serving the industrial estate strung along the canal in the north-west of the city. It is, in fact, right next to the canal, and I fancy I may have first discovered it when some friends of mine and I in our undergraduate days rented a narrowboat for a canal holiday one summer from the adjacent boatyard.

Its special attraction - apart from decent beer and sandwiches, keen prices, and a general lack of pretentiousness - was its bar billiards table. Oxfordshire is one of the last areas of the country where this game still survives quite strongly, and the standard of the pub league in the county is really formidable. Quite a few pubs around Oxford have - or used to have - a bar billiards table (my beloved pool hangout, The Temple, for example; and the Donnington Arms, I think; and the Waterman's on Osney island; and The Cricketer's on Iffley Road - all also contenders for a spot in my Oxford 'Top 10'), but they were rarely very good ones. The Bookbinders' table, however, was just about perfect, the best I've ever played on. Their team was one of the strongest in the league, so they took it very seriously, and were at pains to make sure that their table was maintained in peak condition. Only two or three times did I see a league match (or a serious practice session) in progress there, but it was pretty awesome stuff. Very few players are good enough to ever play a perfect game, to stay on the table continuously for the full time limit (typically 17 minutes, I think; after that, a clock-triggered trap drops inside the table, shutting off the pockets so that balls are no longer returned for reuse; and the game ends when all remaining balls have been potted). However, with these guys, it did often come down to a test of nerve, a trial to see if one of them could stay on long enough in a single visit to the table to compile a game-winning total; if someone made an error too soon (or had scored too slowly, despite having used up more than half of the available time), then it was a near certainty that his opponent would play out the rest of game and seize the victory.

I don't think I've ever seen that jaw-dropping level of excellence firsthand in any other game - in pool or darts or any of the other pub games I've dabbled in myself. One of the guys who used to play in there was the national champion a few times back in the '90s, I think.

And I, of course, was embarrassed to play there if any of the regulars was around. I am nowhere near that good. I like bar billiards as an occasional change from pool or snooker, but I've never played regularly enough to even begin to master its intricacies. I would generally be quite happy if I could compile one or two breaks of a few hundred. And, as often as not, my occasional tussles with The Bookseller would be decided by which of us for once managed to avoid forfeiting our entire score by knocking over the black penalty skittle with a rash shot near the end of the game. No, I was really not very good at the game at all.

My dad, on the other hand.... Well, he'd apparently played quite a lot when he was a kid in the West Midlands and had become pretty useful; and, in the later years of the War, when he was in his mid-teens, he claimed he'd made a fair bit of money hustling American servicemen at the game (although I suspect they would have made fairly easy victims, since they would probably have falsely assumed that the game was similar to pool - and it ain't at all). He hadn't kept in practice, had hardly played at all since those far-off days, but he still had a few impressive shots in him and a good overall sense of the game. He could usually beat me fairly comfortably. My dad, alas, was an archetypal 'bad loser' and would sulk like a stroppy two-year-old whenever I bested him in something. As I grew up, and got better at games, I had to give up playing first Monopoly against him, then chess, then darts, then snooker and pool.... I was grateful to find one game where I could still lose to him consistently.

When I was living and working in Oxford again in the early '90s, The Bookbinders' was only a 10-minute walk away from my flat. I took my dad in there for a game the last time he visited me, shortly before his sudden death. I probably have rather more bad memories than good of him, but that last visit, and that session of bar billiards are amongst the better ones.