Maybe Richard can explain this for me. Yesterday I saw on a beer pump the label

Batemans
GOOD HONES T'ALES

I think there was a space before the T but the typeface used made it hard to be sure. It struck me as a very odd use of an apostrophe.

Non curo ! Si metrum no habet, non est poema.

Read all about my travels around the world here.
Read even more of my travel writing and poems on my weblog.

Interesting question. Is it a double meaning, with "to ales" and then "tales"?

I was able to, only once, try a Hog's Back T.E.A. However, interestingly, they do not have an apostrophe on their label.

It's no mystery!

Bateman's slogan is "Good Honest Ales" and the lettering must simply have been misread or miscopied.

The Hogs Back Brewery do not use an apostophe in their name but the physical feature after which the brewery has been named, the Hog's Back, does carry an apostrophe.

The Hog's back is a section of the A3, just west of Guildford, which is thus named because, from a distance, the ridge along which the road passes looks like a pig's back.

Richard English

quote:

---

Originally posted by Richard English:
It's no mystery!

Bateman's slogan is "Good Honest Ales" and the lettering must simply have been misread or miscopied.

---

It was actually on the brewery supplied facia attached to the pump for Lady Godiva's Ale so if it was a mistake then it was by someone who should have known better.

Non curo ! Si metrum no habet, non est poema.

Read all about my travels around the world here.
Read even more of my travel writing and poems on my weblog.

It seems to proves that Bateman's are also using traditional signwriters and compositers, does it not? It never fails to amaze me how organisations will spend quite large sums of money in producing and distributing things (in this case pump clips) and seek to save themselves miniscule amounts by eschewing proofreading!

I can't see that it was anything other than a mistake (unless there was some kind of local pun or other play on words, the meaning of which we don't understand).

Of course, it might just have been a rather tight spacing between the words and a dirty mark between "Honest" and "Ales".

Richard English

Are there any surviving witnesses here who can tell us what happens when one is served a pint of DISHONES T'ALE ???

Ask anyone who has survived a pint of US Budweiser, which is about as dishonest an ale as I can think of!

Richard English