'Monty' Porter once bought a second-hand tweed jacket which had a copy of Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867) in one of its side pockets. 'Monty' noticed that as soon as his fellow drinkers spotted his Walter Bagehot they would start giving far more careful consideration to the weight and bulk of his arguments than had previously been the case. The book's title triggered much debate. Welshmen, Scotsmen, and Ulstermen wondered how on earth a book on the United Kingdom's constitution could be called have the English Constitution. Dapper types with Queen Anne furniture in Queen's Square apartments never saw this as a problem. Soon the once solitary 'Monty' Porter was seen as the King's Arm's pre-eminent authority on constitutional issues. He would never dream of entering a public house without having Bagehot's elegantly written text somewhere on his person. The combined impact of a top-notch tweed jacket and Bagehot's The English Constitution transformed a bloke who had grown up in Peasedown with a gammy eye into a force to be reckoned with.
In his youth 'Monty' Porter had been fascinated by Oliver Cromwell and took a republican stance in public bar debates. The royalist and aristocratic lexiography of public house names in Bath became a source of irritation. He would compalin that "after a couple of pints in the Duke of Cambridge, or the Duke of York, or the Duke of Cumberland, or the King's Head, or the King of Wessex, or the King Bladud, or the Queen Charlotte, or the Queen's Head, or the Queen Adelaidey, you did not know which crowned lord to give a salutation to!"
Constant reading of The English Constitution led 'Monty' to take a different stance. Bagehot's line about the country being "a disguised republic" was taken to heart. He now saw the aristocratic and monarchical pub signs as performing a vital stabilising role in sustaining the political order. "Without them the political system would shatter into a million shards of glass, and Thomas Hobbes' war of all against all would tear the country apart." The transformation of the Peasedown champion of republicanism into a conservative who only drank in public houses which had royalist-affiliated names became the talk of his old village.
If 'Monty' had never bought his second-hand jacket with a copy of The English Constitution in one of its side-pockets he would have just been a solitary bloke with a gammy eye reading the Daily Mirror in a corner of the saloon bar. Thanks to his Walter Bagehot he had become someone with something to say.
In the 1950s almost a quarter of public houses had royalist or aristocratic names. What kind of ideological impact this had is hard to say. As for the old man he was always on the look out for a public house called The 'Smokey' White.