Lowry refers to a pub on the island in his novel Ultramarine"; "Perim in the Red Sea, they have red-headed n...... I don't know if any of you fellers ever been ashore there. There's one pub, the Red Lion. And its as flat as a flipper and bloody hot. We took a chap out there once to be a signalman”. (Pg 175.). The pub remains unidentified to date though there was hotel as seen above on the island. Read more
Lowry did not stop at the island on his voyage to the Far East in 1927.
Red Lion is the name of over six hundred pubs in the UK. It thus can stand for an archetypal British pub. The lion is one of the most common charges in coats of arms, second only to the cross, and thus the Red Lion as a pub sign probably has multiple origins: in the arms or crest of a local landowner, now perhaps forgotten; as a personal badge of John of Gaunt, founder of the House of Lancaster; or in the royal arms of Scotland, conjoined to the arms of England after the Stuart succession in 1603.
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