Lord Jim Pub

Wednesday 25th May 1988

It was a grey morning and before long the rain started again. I bought breakfast in the big supermarket just down the road and loitered in the hostel with the other guests until we were kicked out at 12:00 hrs. noon. I went with José, the Portuguese guy, to a cheap restaurante which was upstairs from a virtually unmarked door on the street.

Here we got a damn good meal for 200 Cruzados. José left on the bus on his way to São Paulo and I went for a walk around the shops on Ribeiro Barata and N. S. Copacabana, taking and interest in those selling photographic film, vinyl records and beachwear. I got a dubious slide film for 1,300 Cruzados.

I went on to browse in an open-fronted record shop where a crowd had gathered watch a Girls of Rio Video. I walked through the sodden fruit and vegetable market, did a couple of pull ups on the deserted beach, bought some laundry soap powder, and then went to the flicks (cinema) to see “Razorback”.

This was a good Australian film released in 1984 and mostly shot in Broken Hill, New South Wales with some excellent photography. Director of photography Dean Semler was hired on the strength of his work in Mad Max 2.

As a vicious wild boar terrorizes the Australian outback, the husband of one of the victims is joined by a hunter and a farmer in a search for the beast. Back at the Youth Hostel I wrote a postcard recommending the film to my friend Austen Simmons, who considered himself something of a film buff.

Jim went off to the Rodoviário Bus Terminal to check out some bus times and I did some research on the way ahead with the South American Handbook 1988. When Jim returned, we walked into Ipanema for a meal at the Kozihna Brasileiro.

We then hurried through the pissing rain to the Lord Jim Pub on Rua Paul Redfern. This was billed as a Bar Inglês. It was a good copy of an English Public House with an old red telephone box outside. Inside there were horse brasses, English signs, a dart board and an English Sunday lunch atmosphere. Pubs in England were only open from 12:00 noon to 14:00 hrs on Sunday lunchtimes so there was some enthusiastic drinking to make the most of the two hours.

It made a change to hear a few English voices, although most were American. It was reputed to be Ronnie Biggs local when he was on the run. Great Train robber Ronnie Biggs was the best-known member of a gang that stole £2.6 million from a Glasgow-to-London mail train in 1963.

Biggs was caught after the robbery and received a 30-year jail sentence but escaped from Wandsworth prison in south London after 15 months and spent 36 years on the run, leading a playboy lifestyle in South America.

He became a familiar figure in the Lord Jim Pub in Ipanema, and around his neighbourhood in Santa Teresa, where he would invite paying guests to hear his stories as a way to make money after the robbery stash ran out.

He is still remembered in Brazil. Newspapers and magazines ran news of his death on the front of their websites yesterday. Veja described the Londoner as “the thief of the 20th century”, while Folha de Sao Paulo ran a photograph of Biggs giving a two-finger salute. Globo carried old newspaper pages reporting the attempts to extradite Biggs from his home in Rio.

We had a few Chopps beers and then took the bus back to Copacabana at 22:00 hrs.