Norman Balon was much more than ‘London’s rudest landlord’
Norman Balon, who has died at the age of 99, missed the point when he defined himself as ‘London’s rudest landlord’. There, I think, he mingled self-publicity and self-defence. People didn’t go to the Coach and Horses, Soho, to be shouted at by him; they shouted at each other quite enough. Really he was the actor-manager of a twice-daily claustrophobic, drunken extemporisation in his pub which embodied bohemianism and self-destruction in the last two decades of the 20th century. Remember that 40 years ago the Coach was thick with cigarette smoke, that many customers were drunk daily, at lunchtime, and that no one was fearful of what they said. Things were not then as they are now. The Spectator contributed a lot to Norman’s decades of celebrity.
