Labour in Vain

This curious name, known in London from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, was probably meant to imply that the pub bearing it served such excellent beer that anybody trying to find a better one would be wasting their time. The name itself is now rare, and few of the pubs using it still display the sign which traditionally illustrated it, for this is regarded as offensive – one side showed a woman scrubbing Negro child in a tub, while on the other side she was scratching her head to see that he was as black as ever. It was sometimes accompanied by the rhyme:

Washing here can now be seen,
She scrubs both left and right.
Although she’ll get him middling clean,
She’ll never get him white.

The underlying idea is that any attempt to change someone’s basic nature is futile. Various classical Greek and Roman authors wrote of ‘washing an Ethiopian white’ to mean that it is foolish to labour at an impossible task, while the Bible asks: ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?’ (Jeremiah 13:23). The joke, therefore, is against the woman for being stupid, not against the child for being black.

Some people preferred to think their pub commemorated a local scandal. At Albury in Hertfordshire and at Westergate in Sussex they said it was about a woman who had an affair with a West Indian and bore his child while her husband was away; now she was desperately trying to get it white, before he came home from his travels. The Albury pub was closed in the 1950s. The Westergate one still existed in 2003, though there was a plan afoot to remove its ‘racist’ sign; local people defended it, arguing that it showed a real episode of history dating from the eighteenth century. Local opinion prevailed at first, but two years later the pub was sold, and the new owners changed the name and turned it into a restaurant.

At Yarnfield (Staffordshire) the name remains and the original sign was re-hung in 2009, after having been removed in 1993 in response to protests. During the intervening years the signboard showed a farmer sowing corn, with a flock of birds gobbling it up as fast as he could sow it, so that all his labour was in vain.

See a list of Labour in Vain pubs

Jacqueline is the author of Green Men and White Swans, an enchanting guide to the stories and legends behind Britain's traditional pub names.