When I started out in this game 50 years ago, on a now defunct weekly paper in Peterborough, we used to drink in a city centre pub called the Black Boy & Trumpet. Nobody gave the name a second thought. We had no idea that half a century later we would have been committing a hate crime. How long would it take today before an angry Black Lives Matter mob descended on the boozer, stoved in the windows and tore down the sign swinging over the front door? Greene King brewery is taking no chances. It has announced that four of its pubs are to be renamed due to ‘potentially offensive connotations’. The move affects three pubs called The Black Boy — in Bury St Edmunds and Sudbury in Suffolk, and Shinfield in Berkshire — along with the Blacks Head in Wirksworth, Derbyshire.