page_title: The Crown and Greyhound
section_title: Literary Associations
hierarchical_section_title: The Crown and Greyhound / Literary Associations
caption_attribution_description: English: Poster advertising Alan Sillitoe poetry reading at the Crown and Greyhound, Dulwich.
context_page_description: The Crown and Greyhound is a Grade II listed public house at 73 Dulwich Village, Dulwich, London. It is classified by CAMRA as a pub with a regionally important historic interior. The pub is affectionately referred to by locals as "The Dog", and sometimes as "The Dog and Hat". The pub is particularly noteworthy for its post-war connection to the British poetry movement. It is described by Nikolaus Pevsner as, "a cheerfully cross gabled pub".
context_section_description: The Greyhound pub in Dulwich Village, demolished (along with The Crown Inn) to make way for construction of The Crown and Greyhound, was where the Dulwich Club held its meetings. This association was established in 1772, for the purposes of friendly converse and social cheer among a large body of literary gentlemen, and entertained many distinguished guests, including Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Mark Lemon, and others.
  The Crown and Greyhound was home to a branch of the British Poetry Society, founded by local poet Lionel Monteith in 1949. The foundation of this branch was almost certainly in response to ongoing turmoil at the Poetry Society, precipitated by 29-year-old Muriel Spark falling out with the society's old guard whilst combining her role as General Secretary with editing the Poetry Review. Another local Dulwich poet, and Spark's lover, Howard Sergeant, resigned his position on the Executive Council of the Poetry Society, and became an influential figure in setting up the Dulwich Poetry Group in 1949, and again, when it re-formed in 1959. Guest poets such as Stephen Spender, Laurie Lee, Dannie Abse, Marie Stopes, and Michael Croft are recorded as attending meetings at the pub during this first incarnation of the Dulwich Poetry Group. It is recorded that the audience was invited to an hour and three-quarters of readings by poets, for a suggested donation of one shilling. The first recorded sighting of Michael Croft in the Crown and Greyhound was in autumn 1950, after an Alleyn's School Old Boy was stopped on the street by a burly figure in a duffel coat who inquired amicably, "Where can an old sailor get a drink around here?" Croft was then 29 years old, and had just started teaching at the school. 
  The Crown and Greyhound is particularly associated with the "Bards in the Boozer", who met there monthly during the 1960s. B. S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose, were invited by Howard Sergeant to organise some of the meetings, and celebrated writers and poets reading at the Crown and Greyhound during this period included Alan Sillitoe, Ted Hughes, Edwin Brock, and Jenny Joseph. A photo exists of B. S. Johnson "looking bored senseless at a Dulwich Group poetry reading", upstairs at the Crown and Greyhound. Zulfikar Ghose describes the Dulwich Poetry Group as, "not formed as such, but evolving into one", and states that the contemporary photos of a reading at the Crown and Greyhound, taken for the cultural magazine Scene were, "all posed". He also recounts that Harold Pinter and Theodore Roethke were both persuaded to give readings.
  In the aforementioned article in Scene magazine, B. S. Johnson writes that the inaugural meeting of the reformed Dulwich Poetry Group took place in September 1959. Nicholas Hagger recalls attending a meeting of the Dulwich Poetry Group at the Crown and Greyhound, and talking to B. S. Johnson, a conversation which carried on while they had a pee, during which Johnson said: "I am concerned to push the technical experiments in the novel to their utmost." B. S. Johnson himself, in his 16 April 1966 article for London Life magazine entitled, "A Hard Glance at the Poetry Business", describes the Dulwich Poetry Group readings upstairs at the Crown and Greyhound as the best in London, "and audiences of over a hundred (on one sweltering occasion, three hundred) are common." He ascribes this success to the "informal atmosphere", and fact that, "the audience can meet the poets down in the bar afterwards."
  The poet George MacBeth, described as "the slim Edwardian dandy", is recorded as performing a reading at the pub in 1963. Edwin Morgan, widely recognised as one of the foremost Scottish poets of the 20th century, describes reading his poetry at The Crown and Greyhound in 1972. Alasdair Aston is recorded as being a leading light in the Dulwich Poetry Group which met at the Crown & Greyhound, being involved in the revival of poetry at the Crown and Greyhound in 1959, and serving as chairman of the Group from 1969-1975. In the 1986 book "At the Dog in Dulwich: Recollections of a poet", Pat
caption: Alan Sillitoe at the Crown and Greyhound, Dulwich
exif: {}