For a relatively short time I worked in High Holborn at a branch of the large ad agency: S H Benson. I was in the recruitment department. We specialised in ads trying to recruit staff of all sorts for a range of clients.We tried to recruit bus drivers for London Transport, and Train Staff for British Rail as it was then. I worked as a typographer ( not a very good one ) with an art director: Richard, and a couple of copywriters: Gordon and Hereward King. Hereward was of the old school, and he was quite old to be working in advertising even then. He looked a little bit like a Greggs version of Buffalo Bill Cody with white hair and a bit of a gut.

We worked with a variety of ‘account men’ who wore suits and faced the clients, and were tasked with then facing us with a briefing on what was required. They generally briefed the writers first and then the art director would try and come up with some sort of ad campaign for them with the writers.

It was advised that any briefing made to Hereward should be done before lunch as he was fond of the pub next door: The Princess Louise. He would regularly go there for his liquid lunch of Worthington White shield. A few bottles of that would set him up for the day. He became very relaxed in the afternoons. I recall one account man, who had a rather monotone voice, standing over him blethering on about what the client required. He stopped belthering when Hereward who was leaning forward in his chair towards his trusty typewriter, simply started snoring.

Hereward also wrote quite a lot of his tuff in long hand and was capable of falling asleep mid sentence and then waking up and finishing it as soon as someone walked into the office. The two halves of the sentence never really matching.

The Princess Louis had a dark and woody interior, plenty of smoke and some older regulars that you disturbed at your peril. Wooden divisions between bars and pork pies parked in plastic covers, generally with a friendly fly inside. Pickled eggs that were in a jar that had seemingly never been opened, packets of nuts on a card holder with a bathing beauty featured as each packet of nuts was torn from the card. A pile of pennies for charity that never seemed to get much bigger and the charity was normally associated with black taxis. The pub is still there, it’s not far from the British Museum and frankly should be preserved by them as a treasure to the nation, it might be too late, it may well have been ‘upgraded’. Hereward would not have liked that.

I just looked up the old pub and it seems to be very like it was in the 70s but smarter. Unlikely to be pickled eggs in a jar there any more.