3. Only Connect. With Real Ale.

The five friends, James, Jim, Phil, Andy and Gid, all met through a shared interest in pubs, beer, cycling and trivia. As post-grads they formed a pub quiz team, The Ale-ementals, which won the local league. It seems pub quiz team names have always been terrible. Anyway, linked in with their Sunday cycling they fixed Saturday night as their drinking night and always went on a pub crawl of five pubs. Five friends, five pubs. All in Oxford or very nearby villages, anything within drunken cycling distance.

Originally they just picked pubs that were close together but with time they started picking pubs that had a link between them. It started off very simply, like pubs with the colour “white” in the name. Morse has written a huge list here, including three white harts, two white horses and a white house. Or five pubs with occupations in the title (Mason’s, Plasterer’s, Bricklayer’s, Carpenter’s, etc). Easier to do in 1998 with more pubs in Oxford, apparently. Get the idea? But, when you get five stupidly clever people doing something like this it becomes increasingly more complicated. It became a game, or a quiz, or a challenge.

The rules were like this:

Every month, one of the five would be the Crawl Setter and the other four would play the game. At the end of the month the setter would swap.

Each week, the crawl now consisted of four somehow connected Mystery Pubs and a final, totally unconnected Gathering Pub where they’d all meet up at the end. The Gathering Pub would usually just be somewhere they all liked or close to one of their houses.

Each week the Setter would give out four cryptic clues to the identities of the four Mystery Pubs to be visited and also the actual name of the Gathering Pub where they’d all meet at the end. The players would have to work out which four pubs the mystery ones were, visit each of them, drink a pint in each and get a member of staff to sign a log sheet to prove they’d been there.

The players were given the clues in different orders and a strict timetable of what time to leave each mystery pub so that no two players would be in the same pub at the same time. They were allowed to walk, cycle or catch the bus between pubs. If they bumped into another player while on the crawl, they were not allowed to communicate to avoid cheating.

Having attempted to work out and visit all four mystery pubs, all five would meet at the fifth and final gathering pub. The players would each write what they thought the connection between the four mystery pubs was at the bottom of the log sheet and hand the log to the Setter. The Setter would check the logs, forfeits would be given for failing to log a pub and drinks or small prizes awarded to the players who worked out the connection correctly. Since the forfeits would often be in the form of drinks, the Gathering Pub would usually see several drinks consumed and five rather drunken dons staggering out at the end.

While the four players were off in the crawl, the Setter would usually be visiting other pubs and the city in order to create the following week’s puzzle. This might involve visiting more than four pubs to gather information, so the Setter often arrived at the Gathering Pub in worse shape than the players.

I’ll given an example of the very first game of this kind that they played. Jim was the setter. The four Mystery Pubs, hidden in clues, turned out to be the Castle, the Mitre, the Cavalier and the King’s Arms. The connection was therefore Chess (Castle, Bishop’s mitre, Cavalier=Knight, King). All four players got the connection. The Gathering Pub was the Kite as Jim lived on the same street at the time. Gid apparently joked that they should have gone to Jim’s college bar at Queen’s.

All very simple, huh? I thought the idea of a pub crawl was to go out with your mates. These guys invented a game where they mostly avoided each other. I think Morse, always more comfortable as a solitary drinker, would have approved. His comments in the notes sound like he was intrigued. He also drew up the plan of the planned proceedings for the week after the disappearance which I’ve included below.

Apparently, the connections between the Mystery Pubs only got more complicated from there…