Rab Ha’s, on Hutcheson Street in the Merchant City, is a traditional Scottish pub and small hotel — and its name, which sounds as though it belongs to a Glaswegian clown, in fact commemorates one of the city’s most extraordinary real characters. Rab Ha’ is short for Robert Hall, a nineteenth-century Glaswegian rogue whose prodigious appetite earned him the title of the ‘Glesga Glutton’ — and the pub, said to have been one of his favourite haunts, is named in his honour.
The Glasgow Glutton
Robert Hall was a genuine Glasgow legend of the early nineteenth century, known across the whole of the west of Scotland for his eccentric habits and his vast gastronomic powers. A powerfully built vagrant who abandoned settled work for the roving life of a ‘big beggarman’, he was rarely absent from a horse-race, fox hunt or coursing meet — and the tales of his eating were the stuff of wonder. It was said he could put away a stone of potatoes at a sitting, or devour an entire calf turned into pies. The children of the time chanted a nursery rhyme in his honour in the streets.
The scale of his appetite was the stuff of wonder and of nursery rhyme — the children of the west of Scotland chanted verses in his honour. It was said he could put away a stone of potatoes at a single sitting, or devour an entire calf once it had been turned into pies, and that no ordinary meal could satisfy him. He was less a glutton in the shameful sense than a kind of folk champion of appetite, a big-hearted vagrant whose feats of eating were celebrated rather than condemned, and whose legend grew with every telling in the taverns of the city.
The Eating Contest
Rab Ha’s most famous moment, gloriously, connects to another pub in this very chapter. His celebrated victory came in an eating contest against an Englishman dubbed the ‘Yorkshire Pudding’ — a duel of appetites held at the old Saracen Head in the Gallowgate, the great coaching inn that this site describes elsewhere. That the Glasgow Glutton should have won his greatest triumph at the Sarry Heid ties two threads of the city’s pub folklore neatly together, and is exactly the sort of story Glasgow keeps and burnishes.
A Character Kept Alive
Robert Hall came to a characteristically hard end — he was found dead in November 1843 in a hay-loft in Hutchesontown where a kindly proprietor had let the vagrant shelter from the winter. But his legend outlived him, and the pub on Hutcheson Street keeps it alive, its passion for good food a fitting tribute to the man. Today Rab Ha’s is one of the most quietly admired eating pubs in the Merchant City — a warm, quirky, traditional room with an open fire, celebrated for its haggis, neeps and tatties, its fish and chips and its enormous plates of macaroni, and for a welcome that sends visitors away resolving to come back. It is a reminder that Glasgow’s pub heritage is not only architecture and dates but people — the rogues, characters and legends whose names live on above the doors of the city’s bars long after the people who knew them are gone.
Rab Ha’s earns its place in this chapter as the keeper of one of Glasgow’s great character-stories — a good Merchant City pub named, with the city’s characteristic relish, for a big-hearted beggar who could out-eat any man in Scotland.