CHAPTER V

IN LOVING MEMORY OFWALTER,THE “ALBINO” SON OFALFRED AND CHARLOTTE BUDD,born Feby. 12th, 1867, died Feby. 18th, 1893.May God forgive those who forgot their dutyto him who was just and afflicted.This Cross was erected on the Grave inShipley Churchyard, and Removed by order ofH. Gorham(Vicar).Two Globe Wreaths placed on the Graveby Friends, and after being there overTwo Years were Removed byE. Arkle, Following (Vicar).

IN LOVING MEMORY OFWALTER,THE “ALBINO” SON OFALFRED AND CHARLOTTE BUDD,born Feby. 12th, 1867, died Feby. 18th, 1893.May God forgive those who forgot their dutyto him who was just and afflicted.

This Cross was erected on the Grave inShipley Churchyard, and Removed by order ofH. Gorham(Vicar).Two Globe Wreaths placed on the Graveby Friends, and after being there overTwo Years were Removed byE. Arkle, Following (Vicar).

It seems, then, that this is to the memory of a son of the innkeeper, who committed suicide by drowning, owing to being worried in some local dispute. The Vicar of Shipley appears to have considered some portion of the epitaph to be a reflection upon himself, and consequently, in that Czar-like spirit of autocracy not infrequent in rural clergymen, ordered its removal. The cross was thereupon re-erected here, and is so conspicuous an object, and is attaining such notoriety, that the vicar has probably long since regretted his not allowing it to remain in its original obscurity. A great many efforts have been made by local magnates of one kind and another to secure its removal from this situation, and the innkeeper’s brewers even have been approachedfor this purpose, but as the innkeeper happens to be also the freeholder, and the house consequently not a “tied” one, the requisite leverage is not obtainable.

Although the house looks so modern when viewed from the outside, acquaintance with its quaint parlour reveals the fact that one of the oaken beams is dated 1577, and that the old fireback in the capacious ingle-nook was cast in the year 1622.

THE “GEORGE AND DRAGON,” DRAGON’S GREEN.

The “White Bull” at the little Lancashire “town” of Ribchester, which still clings stoutly to the name of town, although it is properly a village, since its inhabitants number but 1,265, has some ancient relics in the shape of Romancolumns, now used to support the porch and a projecting wing of the building. They are four in number, of a debased Doric character, and between six and seven feet high. They are said to be remains of the temple of Minerva, once standing in the Roman city ofCocciumorBremetennacumthat once stood here, and were fished out of the river Ribble that now gives a name to Ribchester.

THE “WHITE BULL,” RIBCHESTER.

The effigy of the White Bull himself, that projects boldly from the front of the house, is a curiosity in its own way, and more nearly resembles the not very meaty breed of cattlefound in toy Noah’s Arks, than anything that grazes in modern meadows.

From Lancashire to Yorkshire, in quest of inns, we come to the cathedral city of Ripon, and the “Unicorn” Hotel.

BOOTS OF THE “UNICORN,” RIPON.

No inn could have possessed a greater curiosity than grotesque Tom Crudd, who for many years was “Boots” at the “Unicorn,” and by his sheer physical peculiarities has achieved a kind of eccentric fame. “Old Boots,” as he was familiarly known by many who never learned his real name, flourished from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, and lies, now that all his boot-cleaning is done, somewhere in the Minster yard.

This extraordinary person was endowed by nature with a nose and chin so enormously long, and so lovingly tending to embrace one another, that at length he acquired the power of holding a piece of money between them, and so turned his deformity to practical and commercial account.It was a part of his duty to wait upon travellers arriving at the inn, to assist them in taking off their boots. He usually introduced himself, as in the picture, with a pair of slippers in one hand, and a boot-jack in the other, and we are told that the company were generally so diverted by his appearance that they would frequently give him a piece of money, on condition that he held it between his nose and chin.

Other times, other tastes in amusement, and it is scarce possible that modern travellers would relish such an exhibition, even if provided gratis.

The “Castle Hotel” at Conway has an interesting and historic object, in the shape of an authentic contemporary portrait of Dame Joan Penderel, mother of the Penderel brothers of Boscobel, who secreted Charles the Second in the “Royal Oak.” It came to the hotel as a bequest to the landlord, from a friend who in his turn had received it from a man who had bought it among a number of household odds and ends belonging to two old maiden ladies of Broseley, connections of the Penderel family. It was then, to all appearance, nothing more than a dirty old stretched canvas that had long been used as “blower” to a kitchen fire; but, on being cleaned, was found to be a portrait of a woman wearing an old-fashioned steeple-crowned hat, and holding in her hand a rose. The portrait would never have been identified, but fortunately it was inscribed “Dame Pendrell, 1662.”

THE “RED LION,” CHISWICK.

A curious relic is to be seen to this day, chained securely to the doorway of the “Red Lion” inn at Chiswick. There are, in effect, two Chiswicks: the one the Chiswick of the Chiswick High Road, where the electric tramcars run, and the other the original waterside village in a bend of the river: a village of which all these portents of the main road are merely offshoots. In these latter days the riverside Chiswick is becoming more or less of a foul slum, but still, by the old parish church and the famous Mall—that roadway running alongside the river—there are old and stately houses, and quaint corners. It is here you find the “Red Lion”; not an ancient inn, nor yet precisely a new: a something between waterside tavern and public-house. It has a balcony looking out upon the broad river, and it also displays—asdo many other waterside inns—drags and lifebelts, the rather grim reminders of waterside dangers. At hand is Chiswick Eyot, an island densely covered with osier-beds; and hay- and brick-barges wallow at all angles in the foreshore mud. The relic so jealously chained in the doorway of the “Red Lion” is a huge whetstone, some eighteen inches long, inscribed: “I am the old Whetstone, and have sharpned tools on this spot above 1000 years.” Marvellous!—but not true, and you who look narrowly into it will discover that at some period an additional “0” has been added to the original figure of 100, by some one to whom the antiquity of merely one century was not sufficient. This is readily discoverable by all who will take the trouble to observe that the customary spacing between all the other words is missing between “1000” and “years.”

The whetstone has, however, been here now considerably over a century. It existed on this spot in the time of Hogarth, whose old residence is near at hand; and at that time the inn, of which the present building is a successor, bore the sign of the “White Bear and Whetstone.” The stone then had a further inscription, long since rubbed away, “Whet without, wet within.”

The whetstone is thus obviously in constant use. And who, think you, chiefly use it? The mowers who cut the osiers of Chiswick Eyot. It was for their convenience, in sharpening their scythes—and incidentally to ensure that they “wetted their whistles” here—that thelong-forgotten tapster first placed the whetstone in his doorway.

Among inns with relics the “Widow’s Son” must undoubtedly be included. Unfortunately it is by no means a picturesque inn, and is, in plain, unlovely fact, an extremely commonplace, not to say pitifully mean and ugly, plaster-faced public-house in squalid Devons Road, Bromley-by-Bow.

The history of the “Widow’s Son” is a matter of tradition, rather than of sheer ascertainable fact. According to generally received accounts, the present house, which may, by the look of it, have been built about 1860, was erected upon the site of a cottage occupied by a widow whose only son “went for a sailor.” Not only did he, against her wishes, take up the hazardous trade of seafaring, but he must needs further tempt Fate by sailing on a Friday, and, of all possible Fridays, a Good Friday! Such perversity, in all old sailor-men’s opinions, could only lead to disaster; it would be, in such circles, equivalent to committing suicide.

THE OLD WHETSTONE.

The widow, however, expected the return of her rash son on the anniversary of his departure, and put aside a “hot cross bun” for him. Good Friday passed, and no familiar footstep came to the threshold, and the days, weeks, and monthssucceeded one another until at last Easter came round again. Hoping fondly against hope, the widow put aside another bun for the wanderer: in vain. Year by year she maintained the custom; but the son lay drowned somewhere “full fathom deep,” and the mother never again saw him on earth.

In the fulness of time she died, and strangers came and were told the story of that accumulated store of stale buns. And then the cottage was demolished and the present house built, taking its name from this tale. And ever since, with every recurrent Easter, a bun is added to the great store that is by this time accumulated in the wire-netting hanging from the ceiling of the otherwise commonplace bar. Then the story is told anew; not with much apparent interest nor belief in the good faith of it; but sentiment lurks in the heart, even though it refuse to be spoken, and the flippant stranger is apt to find himself unexpectedly discouraged.

On Good Friday, 1906, the sixty-eighth annual bun, stamped with the date, was duly added to the dried, smoke-begrimed and blackened collection.

HOT CROSS BUNS AT THE “WIDOW’S SON.”

We must perhaps include among inns with relics those modern public-houses whose owners, as a bid for custom, have established museums of more or less importance on their premises. Among these the “Edinburgh Castle,” in Mornington Road, Regent’s Park, is prominent, and boasts no fewer than three eggs of the Great Auk,whose aggregate cost at auction was 620 guineas. They were, of course, all purchased at different times, for Great Auk’s eggs do not come into the country, like the “new-laid” products of the domestic fowls, by the gross. The Great Auk, in fact, is extinct, and the eggs are exceedingly rare, as may be judged by the price they command. “Great,” of course, is a relative term, and in this case a considerable deal of misapprehension as to the size of the eggs originally existed in the minds of many customers of the “Edinburgh Castle.”In especial, the newspaper reports of how Mr. T. G. Middlebrook, the proprietor, had given 200 guineas for the third egg in his collection, excited the interest of a cabman, who drove all the way from Charing Cross to see the marvel. When he was shown, reposing in a plush-lined case, an egg not much larger than that of a goose, his indignation was pathetic.

“Where is it?” he asked....

“Wot?Thet?’Corl thet a Great Hork’s Hegg? W’y, from wot they tole me, I thort it was abaht the size of me bloomin’ keb!”

But they have no roc’s eggs, imported from the pages of theArabian Nights, at the “Edinburgh Castle.”

One of the most cherished items in the collection is what is described as “Fagin’s Kitchen,” the interior of a thieves’ kitchen brought from an old house on Saffron Hill, pulled down some years ago. You are shown “the frying-pan in which Fagin cooked Oliver’s sausages,” and “Fagin’s Chair,” together with an undoubted “jemmy” found under the flooring, and not identified with any Old Master in the art of burglary.

Down in the Vale of Health, on Hampstead Heath, the pilgrim in search of cooling drinks on dry and dusty public holidays may find a public-house museum that cherishes “one of Dick Turpin’s pistols”; a pair of Dr. Nansen’s glasses; a stuffed civet-cat; the helmet of one of the Russian Imperial Guard, brought from thebattlefields of the Crimea; and the skull of a donkey said to have belonged to Nell Gwynne: a fine confused assortment, surely!

More serious, and indeed, of some importance, is the collection of preserved birds, beasts, fishes, and insects, originally founded by the East London Entomological Society, shown at the “Bell and Mackerel” in Mile End Road. The exhibition numbers 20,000 specimens in 500 separate cases.

In the same road may be found the public-house called “The 101,” containing an oil-painting of three quaint-looking persons, inscribed, “These three men dranke in this house 101 pots of porter in one day, for a wager.” The work of art is displayed in the bar, as an inducement to others to follow the example set by those champions; but the age of heroes is past.

TAVERN RHYMES AND INSCRIPTIONS

Beer has inspired many poets, and “jolly good ale and old” is part of a rousing rhyme; but much of the verse associated with inns runs to the hateful burden of “No Trust.” Thus, along one of the backwaters in Norwich city there stands the “Gate House” inn, displaying the following:

The sun shone bright in the glorious sky,When I found that my barrels were perfectly dry.They were emptied by Trust; but he’s dead and gone home,And I’ve used all my chalk to erect him a tomb.

A metrical version, you see, of that dreadful tale, “Poor Trust is dead.”

Another version of the same theme is found at the “Buck and Bell,” Long Itchington, Warwickshire, in the lament:

Customers came and I did trust them,Lost all my liquor and their custom.To lose them both it grieved me sore;Resolved I am to trust no more.

A little public-house poetry goes a very long way. It need not be of great excellence to be highly appreciated, and, when approved, is very largely repeated all over the country. There was once—a matter of twenty years ago—a semi-ruralinn, the “Robin Hood,” at Turnham Green, exhibiting a picture-sign representing Robin Hood and Little John, clad duly in the Lincoln green of the foresters and wearing feathered hats, whose like you see nowadays only on the heads of factory girls holiday-making at Hampstead and such-like places of public resort. This brave picture bore the lines:

If Robin Hood is not at home,Take a glass with Little John—

a couplet that most excellently illustrates the bluntness of the English ear to that atrocity, a false rhyme.

The experienced traveller in the highways and byways of the land will probably call to mind many repetitions of this sign. There is, for instance, one in Cambridgeshire, in the village—or rather, nowadays, the Cambridge suburb—of Cherry Hinton:

Ye gentlemen and archers good,Come in and drink with Robin Hood.If Robin Hood be not at home,Then stay and sup with Little John.

But, although such examples may be numerous, they cannot rival that very favourite sign, the “Gate,” with its sentiments dear to the heart of the typical Bung, who wants your custom and your coin, rather than your company:

This gate hangs wellAnd hinders none;Refresh and payAnd travel on;

or, as an American might more tersely put it, “Gulp your drink and git!” That, shorn of frills, is really the sentiment. It is not hospitable; it is not kindly; it would be even unwise did those who read as they run proceed to think as well.

THE “GATE” INN, DUNKIRK.

To catalogue the many “Gate” signs would be a lengthy and an unprofitable task. There must be quite a hundred of them. Two widely sundered houses bearing the name, each picturesque in itsown way, are illustrated here: the one, a rustic wayside inn near Dunkirk, on the Dover Road; the other, picturesque rather in its situation than in itself, nestling under the great Castle Rock in the town of Nottingham. The Nottingham inn is a mere tavern: a shabby enough building, and more curious than comfortable. Its cellars, and the kitchen itself, are hewn out of the rock, the kitchen being saved from reeking with damp only by having a roaring fire continually maintained. The shape of the room is not unlike that of a bottle, in which a shaft, pierced through the rock to the upper air, represents the neck. Thisextraordinary apartment is said to have formerly been anoubliettedungeon of the Castle. An adjoining inn, similarly situated, has the odd sign of the “Trip to Jerusalem,” with a thirteenth-century date.

THE “GATE HANGS WELL,” NOTTINGHAM.

The exiled Duke ofAs You Like It, who, in the Forest of Arden, found moral maxims by the way, “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones,” and so forth, would scarcely have gone the length of hostelries; but there are stranger things in the world than even moralising exiles dream of, and among the strangest are the admonitory inscriptions not uncommon upon inns, where one would rather look to find exhortations to drink and be merry while you may. Among these the most curious is a Latin inscription carved, with the date 1636, upon an oak beam outside the older portion of that fine old inn, the “Four Crosses,” at Hatherton, near Cannock:

Fleres si scires unum tua me’sem,Rides cum non sit forsitan una dies;

or, Englished:

Thou would’st weep if thou knewest thy time to be one month: thou laughest when perchance it may be not one day.

A little grim, too, is the jest upon the sign-board of the “Chequer’s” inn at Slapestones, near Osmotherley, in the North Riding of Yorkshire. It reads:

Be not in haste,Come in and taste.Ale to-morrow for nothing.

But “to-morrow never comes.”

The Slapestones inn is not remarkable on account of its architecture. Indeed, with a box of toy bricks, as used in building operations conducted in the nursery, you could readily contrive a likeness of it; but it has a kind of local celebrity, both on account of the cakes baked upon its old-fashioned hearth, and by reason of that fire itself, traditionally said never to have been once quenched during the last 130 years. Moreover, the spot is a favourite meet for the Bilsdale Hounds.

A former landlord of the inn at Croyde, near Ilfracombe, must have been a humourist in his way, and probably had readPickwickbefore he composed the following, which, like “Bill Stumps his Mark”—

+BILSTUMPSHIS.M.ARK

—is easily to be rendered into English:

Here’s to Pands PenDas Oci Al HourinHa! R: M: Les SmirThand FunletFri Ends Hipre:Ign Be Ju!Stand KinDan DevilsPeak of No! ne.

The composition of this could have been no great tax on the tapster’s brain.

More pleasing is the queerly spelled old notice displayed on the exterior of the “Plough” at Ford, near Stow-on-the-Wold:

Ye weary travelers that pass by,With dust & scorching sunbeams dryOr be he numb’d with snow and frostWith having these bleak cotswolds crostStep in and quaff my nut brown aleBright as rubys mild and staleTwill make your laging trotters danceAs nimble as the suns of franceThen ye will own ye men of senseThat neare was better spent six pence.

The genuine old unstudied quaintness of it must, in the course of the century and a half of its existence, have sent many scorched or half-frozen travellers across Cotswold into the cosy parlour. Recently a new and ornate wing has been added to the solitary wayside house, and the poetic sign, sent up to London to be repaired, has come back, bravely gilded.

Some very hard, gaunt facts are set forth on tavern signs; as on that of the “Soldier’s Fortune,” at Kidderminster, where, beneath a picture of a mutilated warrior, the passer-by may read,

A soldier’s fortune, I will tell you plain,Is a wooden leg, or a golden chain.

This hero, however, is fully furnished with both.

When Peter Simple travelled down to Portsmouth for the first time, to join his ship, he askedthe coachman which was the best inn there, and received for reply:

The Blue PostessesWhere the midshipmen leave their chestesses,Call for tea and toastesses,And sometimes forget to pay for their breakfastes.

The “Blue Posts” inn was burned down in 1870, but many who had known it made a renewed acquaintance with the house in 1891, at the Chelsea Naval Exhibition, where a reproduction attracted much attention. There are still other “Blue Posts,” notably one in Cork Street, in the West End of London, rebuilt a few years since. The sign is the survival of a custom as old as Caxton, and probably much older, by which houses were often distinguished by their colour. Caxton, advertising his books, let it be known that if “any one, spiritual or temporal,” would purchase, he was to “come to Westmonester into the almonestrye at the Reed Pale”; and there was in the neighbouring Peter Street a “Green Pales” in the seventeenth century.

The modern building of the “George and Dragon,” Great Budworth, Cheshire, has this admonitory verse over its doorway, the production of Egerton Warburton, the late squire of Arley Hall:

As St. George, in armed array,Doth the Fiery Dragon slay,So may’st thou, with might no less,Slay that Dragon, Drunkenness,

a moral stanza that has its fellow in a couplet carved upon an old oak beam over the door ofthe rebuilt “Thorn” inn at Appleton, in the same county:

You may safely when sober sit under the thorn,But if drunk overnight, it will prick you next morn.

A similar moral tendency used to be shown by the sign of the “Grenadier” at Whitley, near Reading, in the verse:

This is the Whitley Grenadier,A noted house of famous beer;Stop, friend, and if you make a call,Beware, and get not drunk withal,Let moderation be your guide,It answers well where’er ’tis tried,Then use, and don’t abuse, strong beer,And don’t forget the Grenadier.

It was probably when the inn became a “tied” house that this exhortation to drink moderately disappeared. It will readily be understood that a brewery company could have no sympathy with such an inducement to reduce their returns.

A frank invitation to enter and take your fill, without any further stipulation, is to be seen outside the picturesquely placed “Bee-hive” inn at Eaumont Bridge, between Penrith and Ullswater; in the words painted round a bee-hive:

Within this hive we’re all alive,Good liquor makes us funny;If you be dry, step in and tryThe virtue of our honey.

The same sentiment prevails at the “CheneyGate” inn, between Macclesfield and Congleton, on whose sign you read:

Stay Traveller, thyself regale,With spirits, or with nut-brown ale,

while

Once aground, but now afloat,Walk in, boys, and wet your throat,

says the sign of the “Ship” at Brixham, South Devon.

The “Cat and Mutton” inn, near the Cat and Mutton Bridge of the Regent’s Canal, and facing London Fields, formerly had a pictorial sign with the inscription on one side, slightly misspelled,

Pray puss, do not tare,Because the mutton is so rare,

and on the other,

Pray puss, do not claw,Because the mutton is so raw.

The “Cat and Mutton” is nowadays just a London “public,” and the neighbourhood is truly dreadful. You come to it by way of the Hackney Road and Broadway, over the wide modern bridge that now spans the silvery waters of the Regent’s Canal, just where the great gasometers and factory chimneys of Haggerston rise romantically into the sky and remind the traveller, rather distantly, of Norman keeps and cathedral spires. How beautiful the name of Haggerston, and how admirably the scene fits the name!

Broadway is a market street, with continuous lines of stalls and uninviting shops, where only the bakers’ shops and the corn-chandlers are pleasing to look upon and to smell. The new and fragrant loaves, and the white-scrubbed counters and brightly polished brass-rails of the bakers look cleanly and smell appetising, and the interesting window-display of the corn-chandlers compels a halt. There you see nothing less than an exhibition of cereals and the like: to this chronicler, at least, wonderfully fascinating. Lentils, tapioca, “bullet” and “flake,” blue starch and white, haricot beans, maize, split peas, and many others. Split peas, the amused stranger may note, are, for the “best,” 1½d.a pint, the “finest”—the most superlatively “bestest”—2½d., while rice is in three categories: “fine,” “superior,” or merely—the cheapest—“good.”

The neighbourhood is dirty, despite the enamelled iron signs displayed by the borough authorities from every lamp-post—“The Public Baths and Wash-houses are now open.” It is, in fact, a purlieu where the public-houses are overcrowded and the baths not places of great resort.

The “Cat and Mutton” appears to do a thriving trade. That it is not beautiful is no matter. On the side of the house facing the open space of “London Fields” the modern sign, in two compartments, is seen, picturing a cat “tearing” a shoulder of mutton lying on the floor, and again “clawing” a suspended joint. The spelling is now orthodox.

A curious inscription on a stone let into the brick wall of the “George” at Wanstead, hard by Epping Forest, is variously explained. It is well executed, on a slab of brown sandstone, and reads as under:

TABLET AT THE “GEORGE,” WANSTEAD.

The generally received story is that the house was at the time under repair, and that, as a baker was passing by with a cherry-pie in a tray on his head, for the clergyman, one of the workmen, leaning over the scaffolding, lifted it off, unawares. The “half a guiney” represents the cost of the frolic in the subsequent proceedings. Apparently, the men agreed to annually celebrate the day.

The “George” was rebuilt 1903-4, and is no longer of interest. Nor does it appear to be, as anexample of the ornate modern cross between a mere “public-house” and an “hotel,” so popular as before. The observer with a bias in favour of the antique and the picturesque may be excused a certain satisfaction in noting the fact that, in almost every instance of a quaint old inn being ruthlessly demolished to make way for a “palatial” drinking-shop, its trade has suffered the most abysmal—not the most extraordinary—decline. Not extraordinary, because not merely the antiquary or the sentimentalist is outraged: the great bulk of people, who would not ordinarily be suspected of any such feeling for the out-of-date and the ramshackle, are grossly offended, and resent the offence in a very practical way; while the carters, the waggoners, and such-like road-farers, to whom the homely old inns were each, in the well-known phrase, a “good pull-up,” are abashed by the magnificence of polished mahogany and brass, and resentful of saucy barmaids. The rustic suburban inn did a larger trade with the carters and waggoners than might be suspected, and the loss of its withdrawal in such cases is not compensated for by any access of “higher class” business. We regret the old-time suburban inn now it is too late, although we were perhaps not ourselves frequenters of those low-ceilinged interiors, where the floor was of sanded flagstones, and the seats of upturned barrels.

To name some of the many houses thus mistakenly, and disastrously, modernised would beinvidious, but instances of trade thus frightened away are familiar to every one. It should not have been altogether outside any practical scheme restoration, to repair, or even to enlarge, such places of old association without destroying their old-world look and arrangements; and this has in numberless instances been recognised when the mischief has been irrevocably wrought.

THE HIGHEST INNS IN ENGLAND

As there are many inns claiming, each one of them, to be the “oldest,” so there are many others disputing the point which is the highest situated. I must confess the subject—for myself, at least—lacks charm. I know—how can you help knowing it?—that to reach those eyries you must use incredible efforts, scaling preposterous heights and faring over roads that are, as a rule, infernally rough. And when you are come, in summer hot, in winter searched through and through by the bitter blast that—Shakespeare notwithstanding—is by a long chalk more unkind than man’s ingratitude, to these unkindly altitudes, what, oh my brothers, do you see? Without exception some plaguy ill-favoured shebeen, presiding over starve-all fields at the best, but generally president over some aching solitude that the hand of man—man being a reasoning animal—has never sought to bring under cultivation. The best you can say of such spots—and it is bad at the best—is that they usually command fine views of better places, whence, you cannot help thinking, you were a fool to come, and from which, you suspect, the innkeepers removed from misanthropical motives,rather than from love of bracing air, or for the mere idea of earning a livelihood.

The peculiar honour of being the highest-situated inn appears, after much contention, to belong to the “King’s Pit,” usually called the “Tan Hill” inn, in midst of a ghastly hill-top solitude in the North Riding of Yorkshire, between Reeth and Barras. You get to it—I will not say most easily and conveniently, for convenience and ease in this connection are things unknown, but with less discomfort and fatigue—by way of Richmond, and, when you have got there, will curse the curiosity that brought you to so literally “howling” a wilderness. For there the winds do generally blow, and, when theydo, heaven send you have not to face them, for it is a shelterless common where the “Tan Hill” inn stands in loneliness, and not a tree or a hedge is there to break the stinging blast.

“TAN HILL” INN.

Cheerfulness is not a characteristic of those who keep hill-top inns: hence the suspicion thatthey are misanthropes who, hating sight or sound of their kind, retire to such unfrequented spots, and, when the stray traveller seeks refreshment, instead of weeping salt tears of joy, or exhibiting any minor sign of emotion, grudgingly attend to his wants, and vouchsafe as little information as they safely can.

The “Tan Hill” inn stands on the summit of Stainmoor, at a height of 1,727 feet above sea-level, and it is one of the most abject, uncompromisingly ugly buildings that ever builder built. The ruins of a toll-house stand near by, silently witnessing that it was once worth the while of somebody to levy and collect tolls on what is now as unfrequented a place as it is possible to conceive; but railways long since knocked the bottom out of that, and for some years, until the autumn of 1903, the licence of the inn itself was allowed to lapse, the house being first established for sake of the likely custom from a coal-pit in a neighbouring valley, now abandoned. The innkeeper lives rent free, with the half of his licence paid on condition of his looking after that now deserted mine.

But there is one day in the whole year when the “Tan Hill” inn wakes to life and business. That is the day of Brough Horse Fair, and the traffic then is considerable: the only vestige of the former business of the road now left to it by the Bowes and Barras Railway.

THE “CAT AND FIDDLE,” NEAR BUXTON.

Between Macclesfield and Buxton—five miles from Buxton and seven from Macclesfield—just, by about 1,500 yards—in Cheshire, although commonly said to be in Derbyshire, stands the next highest inn, the “Cat and Fiddle,” at a height of 1,690 feet. It is only a little less dreary-looking a house than that of “Tan Hill,” and wears a weather-beaten air earned by the fierce storms and snow blizzards to which it is in winter exposed. The wooden porch and the double doors within are necessary outposts against the wind. In the winter the inhabitants are sometimes weatherbound for days at a time, and generally take the precaution of laying in a stock of provisions. One may no more visit Buxton without going a pilgrimage to the “Cat and Fiddle” than it would be reasonable to visit Egypt and not see the Pyramids; and consequently, however lonely the place may be in winter, it is in summer visited by hundreds of trippers brought in waggonettes andbrakes named after advertising generals and other puffed-up bull-frogs of the hour. The manner and the expressions of those trippers form an interesting study. You see, plainly enough, that they are bored and disillusioned, and that they wonder, as they gaze upon the hideous house, or over the wild and forbidding moorland and mountain-peaks, or down into the deep valleys, why the devil they came at all; but they are all slaves of convention, and merely wait patiently until the time for returning happily comes round.

There surely never was so demoniac-looking a cat as that sculptured here. Of the derivation of the sign there are, of course, several versions, the local one being that the sixth Duke of Devonshire was especially fond of this road, and used often to travel it with his favourite cat and a violin!

The “Traveller’s Rest,” at Flash Bar, in Staffordshire, on the Leek to Buxton Road, occupies the third place, at an altitude of 1,535 feet, while in the fourth comes a house called the “Isle of Skye,” at Wessenden Head, in Yorkshire, near Holmfirth, 1,500 feet.

The fifth highest inn is the “Traveller’s Rest,” at the summit of the Kirkstone Pass, in Westmoreland, 1,476 feet above the sea, a very considerably lower elevation; but you may still see on the front of the inn its repeatedly discredited claim to be, not merely the highest inn, but the highest inhabited house, in England—which, as Euclid might say, “is absurd.” But what the situation of the Kirkstone Pass lacks in height, it has ingloomy grandeur. Probably more tourists, exploring the mountainous country between Ambleside, Windermere, and Patterdale, visit the Kirkstone Pass inn than any other of these loftily placed hostelries—the “Cat and Fiddle” not excepted.

THE “TRAVELLER’S REST,” KIRKSTONE PASS.

The “Newby Head” inn, Yorkshire, between bleak Hawes and lonely Ingleton, stands at a height of 1,420 feet; and the Duchy Hotel at Princetown, on Dartmoor, in far distant Devonshire, seems to be on the roof of the world, with its 1,359 feet.

GALLOWS SIGNS

It is an ominous name, but the signs that straddle across the road, something after the fashion of football goals, have none other. The day of the gallows sign is done. It flourished most abundantly in the middle of the eighteenth century, when travellers progressed, as it would appear from old prints, under a constant succession of them; but examples are so few nowadays that they are remarkable by reason of their very scarcity, instead of, as formerly, by their number, their size, and their extravagant ornamentation.

The largest, the costliest, and the most extravagant gallows sign that ever existed was that of “Scole White Hart,” on the Norwich Road. The inn remains, but the sign itself disappeared somewhere about 1803, after an existence of 148 years, both house and sign having been built in 1655. Sir Thomas Browne thought it “the noblest sighne-post in England,” as surely it should have been, for it cost £1,057, and was crowded with twenty-five carved figures, some of them of gigantic size, of classic deities and others. Not satisfied with displaying Olympus on the cross-beam, and Hades, with Cerberus and Charon, atthe foot of the supporting posts, James Peck, the Norwich merchant who built the house and paid for this galanty-show, caused the armorial bearings of himself and his wife, and those of twelve prominent East Anglian families, to be tricked out in prominent places.[2]

THE “GREYHOUND,” SUTTON.

It does not appear that Grosley, an inquiring and diligent note-taking Frenchman who travelled through England in 1765, noticed this remarkable sign, but so soon as he had landed at Dover he was impressed with the extravagance of signs of all sorts, and as he journeyed to London took note of their “enormous size,” the “ridiculous magnificence of the ornaments with which they areovercharged, and the height of a sort of triumphal arches that support them.” He and other foreigners travelling in England at that period soon discovered that innkeepers overcharged their signs and their guests with the utmost impartiality.

Misson, another of these inquisitive foreigners, had already, in 1719, observed the signs. He rather wittily likened them to “a kind of triumphal arch to the honour of Bacchus.”

It will be seen, therefore, that the surviving signs of this character are very few and very simple, in proportion to their old numbers and ancient extravagance. If we are to believe another eighteenth-century writer on this subject, who declared that most of the inscriptions on these signs were incorrectly spelled, inquiring strangers very often were led astray by the ridiculous titles given by that lack of orthography. “This is the Beer,” said one sign, intending to convey the information that the house was the “Bear”; but the reader will probably agree that the misspelling in this case was more to the point than even the true name of the inn. To know where the beer is;thatis the main thing. Who cares what the sign may be, so long as the booze is there? Swipes are no better for a good sign, nor good ale worse for a bad.

The Brighton Road being so greatly travelled, we may claim for the gallows sign of the “George” at Crawley[3]a greater fame than any other, although that of the “Greyhound” atSutton, on an alternative route, is very well known. The once pretty little weather-boarded inn has, unfortunately, of late been rebuilt in a most distressingly ugly fashion. The gallows sign of the “Cock” at Sutton was pulled down in 1898.[4]

THE “FOUR SWANS,” WALTHAM CROSS.

The “Greyhound” at Croydon owned a similar sign until 1890, when, on the High Street being widened and the house itself rebuilt, it was disestablished, the square foot of ground on which the supporting post stood, on the opposite side of the street, costing the Improvements Committee £350, in purchase of freehold and in compensation to the proprietor of the “Greyhound,” for loss of advertisement.

At Little Stonham, on the Norwich Road, the sign of the “Pie”[5]—i.e.the Magpie—spans the road, while at Waltham Cross, on the way to Cambridge, that queer, rambling old coaching inn, the “Four Swans,” still keeps its sign, whereon the four swans themselves, in silhouette against the sky, form a very striking picture, in conjunction with the old Eleanor Cross standing at the cross-roads.

An equally effective sign is that of the rustic little “Fox and Hounds” inn at Barley, where the hunt, consisting of the fox, five hounds and two huntsmen, is shown crossing the beam, the fox about to enter a little kennel-like contrivance in the thatched roof.

THE “FOX AND HOUNDS,” BARLEY.

One of the most prominent and familiar of gallows signs is that of the great, ducal-looking “George” Hotel at Stamford, on the Great North Road. It spans the famous highway, and is the sole advertisement of any description the house permits itself. There is nothing to inform the wayfarer what brewer’s “Fine Ales and Stouts” are dispensed within, nor what distiller’s or wine-merchant’s wines and spirits; and were it not for that sign, I declare you would take the “George” to be the ducal mansion already suggested, or, if not that, a bank at the very least of it. There is an awful, and an almost uncanny, dignity about the “George” that makes you feel it is very kind and condescending to allow you to enter Stamford at all. I have seen dusty and tired, but stillhilarious, cyclists come into Stamford from the direction of London and, seeing the “George” at the very front door of the town, they have instantly felt themselves to be worms. Their instant thought is to disappear down the first drain-opening; but, finding that impossible, they have crept by, abashed, only hoping, like Paul Pry, they “don’t intrude.” Even the haughty (and dusty) occupants of six-cylindered, two-thousand-guinea motor-cars with weird foreign names, begin to look reverent when they draw up to the frontage. The “George,” in short, is to all other inns what the Athenæum Club is to other clubs. I should not be surprised if itwere incumbent upon visitors entering those austere portals to remove their foot-gear, as customary in mosques, nor would it astonish to hear that the head waiter was the performer of awful rites, the chambermaids priestesses, and to stay in the house itself a sacrament.

THE “GEORGE,” STAMFORD.

It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that the “George” at Stamford, in common with the many other inns of the same name throughout the country, derived the sign from the English patron saint, St. George, and not out of compliment to any one of our Four Georges. The existing house is largely of late eighteenth-century period, having been remodelled during those prosperous times of the road, to meet the greatly-increased coaching and posting business; and can have little likeness to the inn where Charles the First lay, on the night of Saturday, August 23rd, 1645, on the march with his army from Newark to Huntingdon.

In that older “George,” in 1714, another taste of warlike times was felt. The town was then full of the King’s troops, come to overawe Jacobites. Queen Anne was just dead, and Bolton, the tapster of the “George,” suspected of Jacobite leanings, was compelled by the military to drink on his bended knees to her memory. He was doing so, meekly enough, when a dragoon ran him through the heart with his sabre. A furious mob then assembled in front of the house, seeking to avenge him, and very quickly broke the windows of his house and threatened to entirelydemolish it, if the murderer were not given up to them. We learn, however, that “the villain escaped backway, and the tumult gradually subsided.”

At the “George” in 1745, the Duke of Cumberland, the victor of Culloden, stayed, on his return, and in 1768, the King of Denmark; but I think the most remarkable thing about the “George” is that Margaret, eldest daughter of Bryan Hodgson, the landlord at that time, in 1765, married a clergyman who afterwards became Bishop of London. The Reverend Beilby Porteous was, at the time of his marriage, Vicar of Ruckinge and Wittersham, in Kent. In 1776 he became Bishop of Chester, and eleven years later was translated to London.

In 1776 the Reverend Thomas Twining wrote of the “distracting bustle of the ‘George,’ which exceeded anything I ever saw or heard.” All that has long since given place to the gravity and sobriety already described, and the great central entrance for the coaches has for many years past been covered over and converted into halls and reception-rooms; but there may yet be seen an ivied courtyard and ancient staircase.

Even as I write, a great change is coming upon the fortunes of the “George.” The motorists who, with the neighbouring huntsmen, have during these last few years been its chief support, have now wholly taken it over. That is to say, the Road Club, establishing club quarters along the Great North Road, as nearly as may be fifty milesapart, has procured a long lease of the house from the Marquis of Exeter, and has remodelled the interior and furnished it with billiard-rooms up-to-date, a library of road literature, and other essentials of the automobile tourist. While especially devoted to these interests, the “George” will still welcome the huntsman fresh from the fallows, and hopes to interest him in the scent of the petrol as much as in that of the fox.

THE “SWAN,” FITTLEWORTH.

It may be noted, in passing, that the “Red Bull” at Stamford also claims to have entertained the Duke of Cumberland on his return from Culloden, and that the “Crown” inn, with its old staircase and picturesque courtyard, is interesting.

A small gallows sign is still to be seen at the “Old Star,” in Stonegate, York, another at OtterySt. Mary, and a larger, wreathed in summer with creepers, at the “Swan,” Fittleworth, while at Hampton-on-Thames the picturesque “Red Lion” sign still spans a narrow and busy street.

THE “RED LION,” HAMPTON-ON-THAMES.

The “Green Man” at Ashbourne, in Derbyshire, has a sign of this stamp. That fine old inn, which has added the sign of the “Black’s Head,” since the purchase of a house of that name, is of a size and a respectable mellowed red-brick frontage eminently suited to a road of the ancient importance of that leading from London to Manchester and Glasgow, on which Ashbourne stands. The inn figures in the writings of Boswell as a very good house, and its landlady as “a mighty civil gentlewoman.” She and her establishment no doubtearned the patronising praise of the self-sufficient Laird of Auchinleck by the humble curtsey she gave him when he hired a post-chaise here to convey him home to Scotland, and by an engraving of her house she handed him, on which she had written:

“M. Kilingley’s duty waits upon Mr. Boswell, is exceedingly obliged to him for this favour; whenever he comes this way, hopes for the continuance of the same. Would Mr. Boswell name this house to his extensive acquaintance, it would be a singular favour conferred on one who has it not in her power to make any other return but her most grateful thanks and sincerest prayers for his happiness in time and in blessed eternity. Tuesday morn.”

Alas! wishes for his worldly and eternal welfare no longer speed the parting guest, especially if he “tips” insufficiently. As for “M. Kilingley,” surely she and her inn must have been doing very badly, for Boswell’s patronage to have turned on so much eloquence at the main.

SIGNS PAINTED BY ARTISTS

In the “good old days,” when an artist was supposed to be drunken and dissolute in proportion to his genius, and when a very large number of them accordingly lived up to that supposition, either in self-defence or out of their own natural depravity, it was no uncommon thing to see the wayside ale-house sporting a sign that to the eye of instructed travellers displayed merits of draughtsmanship and colour of an order entirely different from those commonly associated with mere sign-boards.

Fresh from perusing the domestic records of the eighteenth century, you have a confused mental picture of artists poor in pocket but rich in genius, pervading the country, hoofing it muzzily along the roads, and boozing in every village ale-house. You see such an one, penniless, offering to settle a trivial score by painting a new sign or retouching an old one, and you very vividly picture mine host ungraciously accepting the offer, because he has no choice. Then, behold, the artist goes his way, like the Prodigal Son, to his husks and his harlots, to run up more scores and liquidate them in the like manner; and presentlythere enters, to your mental vision, a traveller whose educated eye perceives that sign, and discovers in its yet undried and tacky oils the touch of a master. He buys that masterpiece for golden guineas from the gaping and unappreciative innkeeper, whose score was but a matter of silver shillings; and he—he is a Duke or something in the Personage way—takes that “Barley Mow” or “Ship and Seven Stars,” or whatever the subject may be, tenderly home to his palace and places it, suitably framed, among his ancestral Titians, Raphaels, or Botticellis.

That, I say, is the golden, misty picture of Romance presented to you, and, in sober fact, incidents of that nature were not unknown; but that they happened quite so often as irresponsible weavers of legends would have us believe, we may take leave to doubt.

Artists of established repute sometimes, even then, painted inn-signs from other motives. Hogarth, for example, that stern pictorial moralist, was scarcely the man to be reduced to such straits as those already hinted; but he was a jovial fellow, and is said to have painted a number of signs for friendly innkeepers. The classic example of those attributed to him is, of course, the well-known sign of the “Man Loaded with Mischief,” the name of a public-house, formerly 414, Oxford Street.[6]The name was changed, about 1880, to the “Primrose,” and the painted panel-sign removed. In its last years it—whether the originalor an old copy seems uncertain—was fixed against the wall of the entrance-lobby. The picture was one of crowded detail. The Man, another Atlas, carried on his back a drunken woman holding a glass of gin in her hand, and had on either shoulder a monkey and a jackdaw. In the background were “S. Gripe’s” pawnshop, the “Cuckold’s Fortune” public-house, crowned with a pair of horns, two quarrelling cats, a sleeping sow, anda jug labelled “Fine Purl.” This scathing satire, peculiarly out of place in a drink-shop, was “Drawn by Experience” and “Engraved by Sorrow,” and was finished off by the rhyme:

Back to Index Next