Fellowship of the Lamb: how we’re saving Tolkien’s pub

I’ve just bought Tolkien’s pub in Oxford. Well, to be more precise, I and more than 300 fellow drinkers have bought the Lamb and Flag, the 400-year-old Oxford pub where the Inklings group of writers – including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis – drank.

Like so many pubs across the country, the Lamb and Flag closed, in January last year, thanks to the pandemic trading slump. Across the road, the Eagle and Child pub also closed, in 2020, because of Covid. Tolkien and Lewis drank there, too – they called it ‘the Bird and Baby’. It remains shut.

What rare survival stories these two pubs are – or were. The Eagle and Child, owned by St John’s College, opened in 1650. The Lamb and Flag, also owned by St John’s, opened in 1613 – there’s said to be a lost smuggling tunnel leading from the cellar, dug during the Civil War when Royalist Oxford was besieged by the Parliamentarians.

The Lamb and Flag was altruistic, too. When the going was good in the 2000s, St John’s wisely used the pub’s £50,000 profit to provide £12,000 scholarships for PhD students – a list of St John’s College Lamb and Flag Scholars hangs on one of its walls.

How tragic it would be if these two ancient, bewitching pubs disappeared, along with four centuries’ worth of memories of old drinkers, including some of the most famous writers in the English language. How worrying, too, for the British pub if they couldn’t survive, given their location at the heart of the world’s most famous university, with millions of tourists on their doorstep. I used to drink in both pubs when I was at the university 30 years ago. They had the unchanging, comforting feel of pubs that had lasted for ever and would continue for eternity. It was one of those little punches in the stomach which the cruel passage of time delivers when I heard both were closing.

How heartening, then, that the Lamb and Flag is reopening for a new generation of Oxford freshers. ‘It will hopefully be the first “normal” freshers’ week since Covid wreaked havoc and closed our beloved pub,’ says Dave Norwood, a director of the modern Inklings Group, the band of fans of the Lamb and Flag who’ve got together to save it. ‘In 1911, a young man arrived at Exeter College, Oxford, to read classics. A couple of years later, he changed courses to read English language and literature, which turned out to be quite significant. We reopen our pub at 6 p.m. on Thursday 6 October 2022, which is possibly, or exactly, 111 years to the day that J.R.R. Tolkien arrived in Oxford.’

As Tolkienologists will know, the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, opens with Bilbo Baggins’s 111th birthday – or his eleventy-first birthday, as Bilbo put it. The new Inklings – locals, Oxford graduates and undergraduates – each paid a minimum of £1,000 for a renewable 15-year lease on the pub. I paid the minimum. Many paid much more – including one anonymous Inkling who paid for extra building work with a generous donation.

It isn’t an investment or a money-making opportunity – just a chance to save a unique pub. Financially speaking, the Inklings Group is a community interest company, with each Inkling having ordinary shares in the business.

The Lamb and Flag will have a renovated snug, celebrating the original Inklings in the spot where they liked to drink. The Georgian front room has been returned to its original dimensions, with an ugly 30-year-old bar removed. Events will be held in this room for the public, including talks by scientists, politicians and Oxford dons, and book launches.

It’s easy to mythologise pubs and never go near one. I certainly don’t drink in pubs nearly as much as I did at university, because it’s so much more expensive now. And some pubs aren’t really very nice, with unbearably loud music and other unwelcome additions. Tolkien and Lewis moved their pint glasses from the Eagle and Child to the Lamb and Flag when the landlady installed a dartboard – you can imagine their reaction to today’s modernising horrors.

But a good pub – particularly a really old one with these unique literary connections – is irreplaceable. Thank God the Lamb and Flag hasn’t been replaced.