There is a difference in what some people are lucky enough to get away with locally by de-fault and at the tail-end of legislation and preparing the ground for the way things are going to be under the new.               

She did it for years and in her previous pub too!!

I see nothing unique in this fine event as all the elements appear to some extent elswhere in the country.

Indeed as separate entities they may well do. Though I know of no other brewery that stops its landlords "ticking the box" to allow regulated entertainment. Wetherspoons allow nothing in their pubs except drinks and food,just like Sam Smith's, but they have no tradtional events as far as I am aware since they did not exist until recently.

What makes this particular event unique are the circumstances of a traditional event happening in a place where the brewery is stopping the landlord "ticking the box". If he were allowed to do this there would be no problem.

The history and fact that the carols may be 'traditional' makes it little different from a cockney knees-up around a pub piano.

As well as a piano it can be accompanied by organ, string quartets, brass bands and be unaccompanied. I know of no cockney knees up that people cross the Atlantic to come to on a regular basis and I am sure there is no cockney knees-up that can celebrate its existence with a biennial sell-out festival that attracts people from all over the world. Think of it as an event with music, a bit like Bampton or the Haxey Hood Game rather than as a session with carols.

The history of this remarkable singing is well documented and appears in Thomas Hardy novels exactly as it appeared in Sheffield all those years ago. As well as Sheffield and North Derbyshire, we know an identical tradition exists in Glenrock Pennsylvania USA, Padstow, Odcombe and Nottighamshire and that it existed in living memory in Lancashire, North Yorkshire and North Norfolk.

But that is not really the point - is it? Everyone everywhere should have the right to sing or make music in a pub for their own enjoyment. In fact they do have this right of freedom of expression - but we may need to fight together against those who would wish to take it away. Not with each other.

Absoutely totally and utterly agree. And to MC FAT, great sing yesterday.