"Has anybody in the UK ever spotted one of those coffee-house thingies over here?

I have only the haziest idea what Americans mean when they talk about them. Sounds like a restaurant that serves neither hot food nor alcohol and has both floor spots and resident musicians, which here would stay solvent for about a week. Is Tchai Ovna in Glasgow along the lines they mean? (They only keep going by using premises on the edge of going the way of the House of Usher and furnishing the place from skips).

Anyway, we never had them here to abandon and we certainly aren't taking them up now."

Oh, dear!

Jack, let me now attempt to plug a hole in your knowledge of history regarding coffeehouses. The following is from a book I am writing about the folk music scene in the Pacific Northwest during the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond, as I saw it.

I first began singing regularly in coffeehouses in 1958. By way of background for the book, I put in a considerable amount of research on the history of coffee, and of the phenomenon of the coffeehouse, a most important institution in the gradual development of Civilization. Really!

Pour yourself a—er—cup of coffee—sit down, and prop up your feet. This is a fairly long post.

        As early as Homer, there were stories of a black and bitter brew that had the power to endow increased alertness on those who drank it, but it was not until much later that the details of the discovery of coffee comes into sharper focus.
        One of the many legends that surround the discovery of this universal solvent of intellectuality and sociability holds that sometime in the 9th century, in the part of north Africa now called Ethiopia, a young goat-herd named Kaldi noticed that his goats became particularly alert, frisky, and playful after eating the red berries that grew on certain leafy bushes. Kaldi tried a handful of the berries, and soon found himself experiencing a refreshing lift of spirits and a pleasant sense of heightened awareness. He eagerly recommended the berries to his fellow tribesmen, who subsequently agreed that Kaldi's discovery had indeed been a worthy one.
        News of these wonderful berries spread quickly. Local monks heard of them, tried them, and noticed that the berries had the salutary effect of producing more alertness and less dozing off during prayers. They dried the berries so they could be transported to other monasteries. There, the berries were reconstituted in water. The monks ate the berries and then drank the liquid.
        Coffee berries soon made their way from Ethiopia to the Arabian peninsula where they were first cultivated in what today is the country of Yemen. Coffee then traveled north to Turkey. The Turks were the first to roast the beans. Then they crushed them and boiled them in water. The result was pretty stout stuff, hardly what we today would call gourmet coffee, but it was well on its way. They sometimes added spices to the brew, such as anise, cloves, cinnamon, and cardamom.
        Venetian traders carried coffee to the European continent sometime in the 16th century. Once in Europe, enthusiastic imbibers regarded this new beverage as the Elixir of Life and the Invigorator of Thought.
        But, as frequently happens when humankind discovers something pleasurable, there emerged those people whose lips are stiff and whose faces are grim. These unhappy souls declared coffee to be "the beverage of infidels" and "the Drink of the Devil." Some members of the Catholic Church called for Pope Clement VIII to ban it. Consider their dismay when instead, the Pontiff, wide awake and alert because he'd already had his morning coffee, blessed it and declared it a truly Christian beverage.
        The first coffeehouse in Britain, called "The Angel," opened in 1652, not in London, but in Oxford. This is, perhaps, not surprising. After all, Oxford had been a college town since the 12th century. Soon thereafter, coffeehouses began flourishing in London. They swiftly became gathering spots for artists, poets, and philosophers, along with their disciples and groupies. Since coffee at these establishments cost a penny a cup, coffeehouses became known as "penny universities." James Boswell and Samuel Johnson were two well-known coffeehouse habitués.
        King Charles II considered coffeehouses to be hotbeds of discontent and a breeding ground for revolt, so in 1700 he banned them. This act nearly caused a revolt. The turmoil was so great that eleven days later he rescinded the ban.
        In 1732, Johann Sebastian Bach composed his "Coffee Cantata." The work is an ode to coffee. At the same time, it takes a poke at a movement extant in Germany at the time that sought to forbid women to drink coffee because some people thought it made women sterile.
        In the late sixteen-hundreds coffeehouses made their way to the New World: to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, where they prospered just as they had in England. They were also patronized by musicians, artists, poets and other suspicious and undesirable characters. Such as Tom Paine and Ben Franklin. In fact, when the United States were still "The Colonies," the Continental Congress, in protest against the excessive tax the British levied on tea, declared coffee to be the national drink.
        So when coffeehouses sprang up like mushrooms in the dank undergrowth of the 1950s, they were nothing really new; they were just another phase of a centuries-old tradition. This renaissance spread through the previous sites: New York, Boston, and Philadelphia; then it vaulted across the continent to California, particularly to San Francisco, Berkeley, and Los Angeles.
        Coffeehouses tended to pop up near college campuses. Many of them became hangouts for students, mostly fledgling artists, writers, poets, and musicians. And hordes of chess players. Occasionally someone with a guitar might be quietly strumming away in a corner. Some places discouraged this sort of thing, but many did not. Many coffeehouses had a small stage, and on certain afternoons or evenings, a jazz combo might be trying out a few things. Or a string quartet, composed of student musicians with dreams of Carnegie Hall would hone their performing skills before a live audience by giving an informal recital. Or there might be a poetry reading. Or poetry and jazz. Some places had a more-or-less resident folksinger. Folksingers were not all that common then, but their numbers were rapidly increasing.
        Most coffeehouses didn't serve just coffee. They generally featured a variety of coffees: a demitasse of espresso, strong enough to take the enamel off your teeth and served with a twist of lemon to bring out the flavor(!); a rich and robust Swedish coffee; a dark, French roast; Turkish, thick, rich, and sweet; café au lait; cappuccino, and many others. In addition to these potent potions, the menu included a long list of teas, from English breakfast tea to aromatic brews with strange and exotic names, like "Oolong" and "Darjeeling." There were chocolate libations, from a regular (but very rich) hot chocolate, to café mocha, to mixtures that contained such components as orange rind, cinnamon, and other spices.
        And they often served light meals, such as sandwiches of various kinds (a bit more elaborate than peanut butter and jelly or ham and cheese), cheese boards (a variety of cheeses and slices of exotic breads along with fruit, such as orange sections or apple slices), and a variety of exotic pastries, sufficiently elegant to delight the most dissolute of sybarites.

© Copyright 2008, Donald Richard Firth

I don't know how things were in the British Isles, but in the United States, and I believe Canada as well (someone correct me if I'm wrong), starting in the mid to late 1950s, a strong association developed between coffeehouses and folk music. The first coffeehouse folksingers were often college students and they frequently sang for tips. But as more coffeehouses came into existence, a level of competition developed, and many of them hired regular singers. The pay was nowhere near what a singer might earn in a nightclub, but picking up anywhere from ten to twenty-five dollars per evening for singing four or five sets a couple nights a week was not bad. Many well-known singers cut their teeth and polished their acts in coffeehouses. For example, when I was singing at "The Place Next Door" in Seattle for $15.00 a night, Joan Baez as singing at the "Club 47" in Boston/Cambridge for $10.00 a night. And as far as the coffeehouses making money, they were usually jam-packed on weekends.

In a fascinating book entitled Around the World in Six Glasses, author Tom Standage, explains how early farmers saved surplus grain by fermenting it into beer, the Greeks took grapes and made wine, and Arabs learned how to distill spirits. Water was often unsafe to drink because of the prevalence of water-born diseases, and not knowing that the cause was bacteria, which could be killed by boiling the water, most people tended to avoid water and drank beer or wine, in which the alcohol killed the germs.

Which is to say, most people wandered about half-spashed most of the time!

When coffee spread from Arabia to Europe and coffeehouses became popular gathering places, for the first time in history since the early discovery of fermentation, people were drinking something which was not only safe to drink (boiling having killed the bacteria), but didn't send them into a foggy stupor! Suddenly, lots of people were alert and could think clearly! Standage credits coffee with being the Universal Solvent that brought about what we now call the Age of Enlightenment. He refers to coffeehouses as being "the Internet of the Age of Reason, facilitating scientific and rational thought."

So it seems that Charles II was right to be apprehensive about coffeehouses. The "Rights of Man" movement started over cups of coffee.

Respectfully presented for your enlightenment, edification, and general amusement.

Don Firth