When I was eighteen I had a girlfriend who was studying at University College, London. She lived in a hall of residence in deepest Bloomsbury and we spent a lot of time walking around the area, frequently ending our evenings in a pub. The Lamb in Conduit Street, just around the back of Great Ormond Street hospital (where my brother had died eight years before – but that’s another story) was one of these. Although the pub’s sign was, predictably, a lamb, it was in fact named after a William Lamb who in 1577 improved upon an existing conduit to bring clean water down from Holborn as an act of charity to benefit the neighbourhood. The pub itself was built in the mid-eighteenth century and one of its distinctive features was that it still had all its frosted glass ‘snob screens’ (it still has some – the ones in front have been taken away now). These were etched glass screens placed above the bar which hid the customer from the publican when he or she ordered drinks. Particularly popular in the 1890s, the screens gave the customer privacy but their hinges allowed the the bar staff to keep an eye on things. At my Uncle Danny’s funeral today I got talking with one of my father’s cousins, David, who had recently been approached by an amateur genealogist. This lady, a distant relative, had been able to shed some light on my paternal great-grandfather, Arthur, about whom we Westlakes knew very little. He moved down to London from Harrogate to seek his fortune and ended up in Holborn. His ‘local’, where he would go of an evening to drink and eat was … the Lamb in Conduit Street.