It did the Youngsters good

I once saw a sign outside a pub in Scarborough that said: "Dogs and children allowed". Not welcomed, allowed. And dogs were preferable to children.

The British — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the English — have an odd attitude to children in pubs and restaurants. At best, they are tolerated, but in general many licensees and restaurant owners would prefer children to be neither seen nor heard.

It's different in mainland Europe. In one seaside Italian restaurant, the mamma of the establishment came out of the kitchen, went all gooey-eyed over my infant son and took him away while my wife and I enjoyed our meal.

I changed a nappy in a French bar. Fortunately, it wasn't an especially malodorous nappy and the other customers duly applauded my skills with pins and pads. I don't think the licensee of the Dog & Duck would be similarly impressed.

But in general licensees do have a more tolerant attitude to children today. The laws and regulations are now simpler and the much-hated "children's licences" have been abandoned. Children at 16 are allowed in to pubs as long as they keep well away from the bar, are accompanied by an adult and can even enjoy a drop of beer or cider as long as they are eating a meal as well.

No doubt, long before the law changed, there were many remote rural pubs where children were allowed in with a nudge and wink as long as the local bobby wasn't around. I'm sure this was the case with one of my all-time favourite pubs, the Butt & Oyster at Pin Mill in Suffolk. It's one of three pubs just bought by Adnams and I trust the brewery is as fascinated as I am with the Butt's history and literary connections.

I first came across it at the age of seven or eight. I was confined to bed with German measles — with a name like mine, the measles had to German — and my long-suffering father would come home every evening with a book from the local library to ease my suffering. I devoured each book at a sitting and one evening my father plonked a large tome running to around 400 pages on my bed and said: "That should keep you going for a day or two."

The book had the curious title of We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea. It was my introduction to the celebrated children's writer, Arthur Ransome and his series of Swallows and Amazon books. It was a curious world for me, in the East End of London, to enter, set around the adventures of middle-class children who went sailing, camped on islands and ate funny food called pemmican. But I was entranced and in particular found We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea heart-stoppingly exciting.

It's set in Pin Mill and the Butt & Oyster. The children in the story by mistake sail out to sea, get caught in a terrible storm and have to navigate their way across the North Sea to Holland.

Many years later, as I was driving from Ipswich to Shotley, I saw a faded sign pointing to Pin Mill. I drove down a narrow lane and found myself in a magical setting. There was the Butt & Oyster, standing proud on the quayside, overlooking the River Orwell. Craft of all sizes, including the famous Norfolk wherries, were tied up alongside. Inside, the main bar had a sunken, flagstone floor, with bowed windows overlooking the river and the wooded shore beyond. The beers in those days were supplied by Tolly Cobbold of Ipswich, with several tapped straight from casks at the back of the bar.

Whenever I was in the area I would drop in at the Butt for a pint. When my children came along, I was able to take them into a family room near the entrance. My most memorable visit to the pub was when I was took part in the Troubleshooter television series hosted by Sir John Harvey-Jones. One episode was filmed in the Butt. Tolly had been bought by its management and the directors were having a tough time. Sir John's advice was to sell the brewery and concentrate on pubs, which both the directors and I roundly derided. Tolly later went out of business so perhaps Sir John had the last laugh.

I also discovered around that time, when I read a biography of Arthur Ransome, that both the author and the Butt had a connection with the Young's brewing dynasty of Wandsworth, south London. Every summer, the Young children would spend several weeks at Pin Mill. They met and became close friends with Ransome. He taught them to sail, to tie sailors' knots and also enjoy good beer.

This meant they entered the Butt & Oyster long before they were of legal age, which would have been 21, not 18 in the 1930s. It did them no harm: they went on to run a successful brewing business and one of the children, John Young, became the legendary and long-running chairman of the brewery.

Of course, neither Adnams nor the licensees of the Butt & Oyster today would permit underage drinking. If I take my sons there now they could enter the bar rather than the family room and the elder one could join me in partaking of Southwold's finest.

And if there are young children around, I shall, in the finest traditions of the English, say: "Could you keep your brats under control — I'm having a quiet pint."