Good Honest Beer

H&V 116 – August 2004

So, as you enter the magic kingdom for the first time in three months, what’s changed? Not much, you may think, but take another look. More than likely the advertising signs will have altered. People who describe their seat location by the board opposite will have to redefine where they are. It’s impossible to say which advert you’re behind because you never see it.

Villa Park has become a giant advertisement hoarding. Fly-posting given official sanction. No virgin space allowed to remain untouched, it must be covered with a grotesque inscription urging you to spend your money on something you neither want nor need.

Even when there’s a tiny pristine space, as at the Holte End, it gets draped with a home-made banner. And Ellis isn’t going to go, however big you make it.

Occasionally the ball will get passed out to the wing and the pitch-side billboards will move instead. All to the distraction of those present and to the intense irritation of the armchair viewer at whom it is really aimed. But hey, aren’t those advertising boffins clever? No. Sending men to the moon and back, that’s clever. Changing a board by pressing a button, that’s childish.

Then there’s those centre-circle adverts that a couple of blokes struggle to remove just as the decibel level on the PA rises above screech and the teams come out – again. At least they haven’t got around to painting them on the grass yet. And if sky-writing had not been banned following an incident at Highbury when Villa were the visitors in October 1958 (another Villa last, so to speak) there’s no saying what that would be used for.

It hasn’t always been thus. There used to be precisely twelve advertisements at Villa Park.    Now if you try counting them no two people would agree on how many there are.

There were hoardings above the two scoreboards, nine of equal size along the frontage of the Witton Lane stand and Good Honest Beer across the ends of the three sections of the curved roof. It was something of a coup by M&B to advertise their beer at Villa Park because it was made in Smethwick, deep in Albion territory. When beer was beer Villa Park was Aston, heartland of Ansells. With the promotion of the weaker export ales the advert was changed to Export Pale Ale, and beer and the Villa have never been the same since.

No advertisement was ever allowed to spoil the claret and blue fascia of the wonderful edifice that was the Trinity Road Stand.

Pre-war spectators in Trinity Road looked across at an advert for “Palmers Tyres – fastest on earth” on the corrugated iron Witton Lane roof, but when the roof was renewed nobody deigned to spoil the symmetry. After the war the adverts for theatres and hotels (you lived in Birmingham so why stay in a hotel here?) were replaced by those for gas and electricity companies. Competition was fierce between the two over the choice of fuel for lighting and heating. Your local swimming baths invited attendance long before fitness fanatics roamed the earth.

The adverts did not change much year by year. The author of the MEB advert displayed a sense of humour when “Electricity Makes a House a Home” was changed to the oft-quoted “Electrify your Villa and score.” And who can forget “Well saved in the Municipal Bank“? Even though Municipal Bank is now lost in the Lloyd’s empire.

The Gothic script of the Birmingham Mail header needed no embellishment, it was a subtle dig at its rival, the Evening Despatch, as much as being an advert. “Smoke Grand Cut – it never burns the tongue” was enough to make any would-be teenage smoker wonder what the other tobaccos did. Next came “Gittins – the Lucas agent”. Nobody needed to ask who Lucas was even though few could afford the spare parts, much less the car. But many of them worked there. 

There was clothiers – “Foster Brothers – outfitters”. Quaint words even then, especially to every schoolboy in the crowd who would be dragged along to Fosters every summer for his new school uniform. One size too big, “because he’ll grow into it”.

John Russell.