FANCIFUL SIGNS AND CURIOUS SIGNBOARDS

The antiquarian magazines of the last century are full of correspondence and ingenious explanations of such signs as the Pig and Whistle, Cat and Fiddle, or Goat in Boots. Many of the suggestions offered are far more whimsical in character than the devices they profess to explain. “Cat and Fiddle” is supposed to be a corruption of Caton FidÈle, a certain incorruptible Governor of Calais. Pig and Whistle has been traced to “Peg and Wassail,” with reference to the pegged tankards formerly passed round for the loving cup, each guest being expected to drink down to the next peg. “Pix and Housel,” in honour of the Blessed Sacrament, or the Danish Ave Maria, and “Pige Washail” have also been suggested by the learned. Mr. T. C. Croker, in his “Walk to Fulham,” attempted to derive the Goat in Boots at Fulham from der Goden Boode, the “Messenger of the Gods,” or Mercury; the idea being that the house was originally a posting inn. The Pig and Whistle may possibly be a rustic corruption of the Bear and Ragged Staff on a somewhat faded signboard.

Animals masquerading in human attire or performing human actions were a favourite conceit of the mediÆval craftsman, as may be seen by the carvings on the stalls of our old cathedrals. Most likely we owe these humorous signs to the sign-painter himself. He was commissioned to design an advertisement that would puzzle inquisitive people and so attract customers.

The Goat and Compasses is supposed to be a corruption of a motto set up over inns during the period of puritan tyranny, “God encompasses us”; Bag of Nails of “Bacchanals.” In default of better explanations we must accept these. Until recently a public house existed in St. James’ Street, called the Savoy Weepers—a name which might open up an endless mystification if we did not know that the house was previously occupied by the Savoir Vivre Club. The Goose and Gridiron is, according to the Tatler, a parody of the favourite trade-mark of early music houses, the Swan and Harp; while the Monster in Pimlico may have been the monastery inn, built during the time that the monks of Westminster Abbey farmed this estate.

Why Not, and Dew Drop Inn are, of course, invitations to the wayfarer; Bird in Hand and Last House, or Final, suggestion that he should not waste his opportunities to imbibe.

In the village of Sennen, Cornwall, is one of the best known inns, having for its sign the First and Last, which is quite obviously not intended as a limit to the drinker. It has reference, of course, to the fact that if you should be journeying to the south-west the inn will be the last one you will meet with before reaching the sea, whereas it will be the first should your journey be by ship coming eastward. As a matter of actual experience, hundreds of ships which in the course of a year “pick up” the light at Land’s End have not been in sight of a public-house for months, during which they have been crossing thousands of miles of ocean. So that in the case of sailors working these particular vessels the name of the inn has a very appealing significance.

He would be a bold man who would venture to assert positively which is the best-known inn in London; but if the map be consulted, the Elephant and Castle will be seen to occupy a position at the junction of several great roads to the south, and if the volume of traffic which must daily go past the doors is considered, it needs very little more to convince most people that the Elephant is probably better known by name at all events, than any other public-house within the four-mile radius of Charing Cross. In coaching times the inn was passed by every traveller bound for the south-east, and some authorities have contended that when Shakespeare recommended that “In the south suburbs at the Elephant is best to lodge,”[14] he had in his mind the celebrated hostelry of Newington Butts. But this is probably a mistake, for the Elephant and Castle did not come into existence until long after Shakespeare’s time. In 1658, the ground upon which it now stands was not built upon, but probably the first inn on the site came into existence about twenty years later. In 1824, the inn was rebuilt, and since then there have been many additions and alterations which have got farther and farther away from the original building as it was in the seventeenth century. The Elephant and Castle, as far as the antiquarian is concerned, is now merely a curious name. Another extremely rare sign in London is the Sieve, which as late as 1890 stood in the Minories. In 1669 there was a Sieve in Aldermanbury, but more is known of the one in the Minories. It was referred to in the “Vade Mecum for Malt Worms,” 1715, and was then considered one of the oldest and most noted public-houses of London. It adjoined Holy Trinity Church. Underneath were crypt-like cellars which may originally have had connection with the adjoining convent of the nuns of St. Clare. In the records of the Parish of Holy Trinity, which was all included within the ancient precincts of the convent, there is mention of the appointment of a “vitler to the parish.” On February 13th, 1705, is a record of a vestry meeting at the Sieve “about agreeing to pull down the churchyard wall.” On this occasion so serious was the discussion that as much as six shillings was spent in refreshments before the matter was settled. A good deal of speculation on the origin of the name of this old inn has been indulged in, one solution being that the chalk foundations in the crypt may have suggested the sign. The Metropolitan Railway Company acquired the property, and closed the house in 1886, before its final disappearance four years later.

Sign of Fox and Hounds, Barley

The Adam and Eve, another common London sign, is, we have reason to believe, frequently a repainting of the Zodiacal sign of the Twins, the city having according to astrologers, its ascendant in Gemini, the House of Mercury, who rules merchandise and all ingenious arts.

An odd sign to find in the heart of Essex is the Whalebone, and in the same county at Great Leighs, there is a Saint Anna’s Castle, which is supposed to stand on the site of a hermitage made sacred by the presence of some local saint.

Dean Swift was once asked by the village barber of Co. Meath, by whom he was regularly shaved, to assist him in the invention of an inscription for the sign of the Jolly Barber, a house which it was intended to conduct as an inn and a barber’s shop combined. Swift at once composed the following couplet, which remained under the painted sign depicting a barber with a razor in one hand and a full pot in the other, for many years:

The Three Loggerheads, generally in the form of two silly looking faces and the motto:

is an attempt to take a mean advantage of the unwary spectator. Sometimes two asses appear on the signboard with the inscription “When shall we three meet again?” and this sign is alluded to by Shakespeare in “Twelfth Night.” At Mabelthorpe is a unique sign called the Book in Hand. It is not so much on account of its name that it is curious, for this might have occurred to anyone, particularly in days when the ability to read was not so conspicuously common as it is to-day. But the sign itself is so odd. A rudely shaped hand and forearm sticks out straight from the brick wall and in the hand is an open book with three Latin crosses on the right page and one on the left. The origin of the sign is lost, but it seems obviously to have had at one time some ecclesiastical connection.

Many names of inns have arisen from the puns on the landlord or locality. The Black Swan in Bartholomew Lane, once a resort for musical celebrities was kept by Owen Swan, parish clerk of St. Michael’s Cornhill. The Brace Tavern, in Queen’s Bench Prison, was opened by two brothers of the name of Partridge. Hat and Tun was the sign of a public-house in Hatton Garden, and the Warbolt in Tun of the little inn at Warbleton, in Sussex. At least one Three Pigeons began business with a worthy surnamed Pigeon for landlord, although this sign is usually derived from a coat of arms charged with three martlets. According to a correspondent, the Bell Inn of a village not far from Oxford was formerly kept by John Good, who set up this inscription under a gigantic representation of a bell:

Ben Jonson in the “Alchymist” satirised this kind of wit:

The last Honest Lawyer in London has just ceased to exist, but there is still an Honest Miller at Withersden, near Wye, in Kent. It is approached by devious ways and difficult to find. Hence perhaps the name. Like the Silent Woman, the honest lawyer was represented with his head cut off. A very famous signboard, said to have been painted by Hogarth, was The Man loaded with Mischief, in Oxford Street. The man was carrying a woman, glass in hand, a magpie, and a monkey. Underneath was the rhyme:

At Grantham, an eccentric lord of the manor about a century ago insisted on having all the signs of public-houses on his estate painted with the political colour which he favoured. Thus the town possessed, in 1830, the following: Blue Boat, Blue Sheep, Blue Bull, Blue Ram, Blue Lion, Blue Bell, Blue Cow, Blue Boar, Blue Horse, and Blue Inn. By way of retaliation, a neighbouring landowner and political opponent actually named one of his houses the Blue Ass. Grantham also can boast of the original Beehive Inn with the motto:

On Gallows Tree Heath, near Reading, there stands a Reformation Inn, somewhat grim and tantalizing in its greeting to the unfortunate wretches who were led past it to execution, and had lost the opportunity to profit by the advice. A cynical humour of the same description must have suggested the Half Brick for the sign of an inn at Worthing. It is said that the aborigines of some towns in England invariably welcome a stranger by “heaving half a brick at him.”

The original Hole in the Wall is believed to have been either (1) a highwayman’s retreat, such as the Hole in the Wall in Chandos Street, where Claude Duval was captured, or (2) an aperture made in the wall of a debtor’s prison through which charitable people might offer gifts of money or victuals to the unfortunate inmates. At the Hole in the Wall in the Borough there is a museum of curiosities worth a visit, and another under the railway arches of Waterloo Station is a noted depot for Petersfield ales, much frequented by railway men and various odd characters. There is to this day a very suggestive hole in the wall at Turpin’s Cave, a small inn near High Beech, Epping Forest. In this hole it is commonly believed that the celebrated highwayman hid himself on many occasions when hard pressed by the police. The story can very easily be believed by anyone with a spark of imagination, for the inn lies in a secluded nook which even to-day is not at all easy to find, in spite of a signboard stuck up in the gorse bushes some little distance from the road. The hole itself is a kind of arched ruin, bricked over, and might at a pinch have held Black Bess and her famous rider.

Sign of Black’s Head, Ashbourne

Almost gone are the heavy frames and beams which once stretched across the highways and effectually proclaimed the name and style under which the innkeeper carried on his business. On these beams a group of swans disported in effigy before the Four Swans at Waltham Cross. A fine magpie dangled from the centre at Stonham, Suffolk, while elsewhere a fox was represented crossing the beam and followed by a bevy of hounds. There is still remaining such a beam, from the centre of which a bell is suspended outside the Bell at Edenbridge. Another is still in use at Ashbourne, Derbyshire, where the Green Man and Black’s Head, an old Georgian posting house, announces its existence by a long beam stretched across the street, supported at one end by a pole, the other end running into the red brick wall of the building, immediately over the typical archway leading to the inn yard. The black’s head is an effigy in carved and painted wood, planted firmly in the centre of the beam and looking for all the world as if it had only lately been cut off and put there to warn other blacks of a similar awful fate, if ever they should chance to come to Ashbourne. Under the head, suspended from the beam is a big framed picture, and a small secondary beam on each side has recently been placed to carry those two terribly modern words, “garage” and “petrol.” One can fancy the old driver of the four-in-hand, could he come to life again, scratching his head in perplexity over the hidden mysteries of these literary innovations to the familiar sign. Ashbourne, it may be remarked in passing, whilst perhaps not glorying in “one man one public-house,” is certainly as close to that condition of things as any town in England. To a stranger visiting Ashbourne in the middle of the week and feeling the charm of its quiet old-world streets with but few people walking about, it is a matter for wonder as to how all the licensed houses keep going. But go there on market days and note the waggons and farmers’ carts standing in rows outside every hostelry and the matter becomes much more easily understood. Ashbourne, like one or two other towns of the North Derbyshire and Staffordshire moors, has until quite recently been cut off from the run of the country’s traffic, and is still a market centre for a very extensive agricultural district. Within the last year or two a road motor service has placed it in rapid and frequent communication with the county town, so that this comparative isolation is likely to last very little longer.

The White Hart at Scole, in Norfolk, once had the most expensive and elaborate sign of this character ever produced. High above the road it stretched, on one side attached to the house, and resting on a brick pier at the opposite end across the way. In the centre was a noble White Hart, carved in a stately wreath, while on each side were no less than twenty-four allegorical figures in compartments. The whole was designed by John Fairchild, in 1655, and cost £1,057. An engraving was published by Martin in 1740. By the way, this inn also possessed “a very large round bed big enough to hold fifteen or twenty couples in imitation of the great bed at Ware.”

Sign of White Hart, Witham

Of existing signs, the most remarkable is the Red Lion of Martlesham outside an inn which is itself both old and curious. This monster, a byword all over Suffolk, was probably at one time the figure-head of a ship, and local tradition ascribes it to one of the Dutch warships destroyed in the battle of Sole Bay, fought off Southwold in 1672. Outside the Bear at Wantage stands a lifelike carved bear on a high pedestal; at the Bear at Chelsham, in Surrey, a large white bear lurks amongst the shrubs of the front garden in a way very startling to timid passers-by, especially at dusk. The Swan at Great Shefford, in Bucks, has a most effective sign, in the form of a large vane representing a swan; while the White Horse at Ipswich, as in Mr. Pickwick’s time, “is rendered the more conspicuous by a stone statue of some rapacious animal with flowing mane and tail distantly resembling an insane cart-horse, which is elevated above the principal door.”

The disused Sun Inn at Saffron Walden, built about 1625, has for its sign a noble piece of plaster work in the tympanum representing the Sun supported by two giants. A curious old piece of carving which displays a white swan chained to a tree flanked by the arms of England and France forms the sign of the Swan Inn at Clare, and probably is intended to commemorate some triumph of the House of Clarence over the Lancastrians. Another beautiful little inn, now disused and sadly neglected, the Angel at Theale, has angel heads introduced over each of its dainty oriels.

Angel Inn, Theale

Many of the White Hart inns retain painted signboards of quite passable quality. At Chelmsford, the animal is carved and rests on a projecting bracket. More prominent, though not conceived in a very artistic spirit, is the White Hart at Witham, cut out and painted on a huge piece of sheet copper. This is widely known as the most conspicuous and telling sign on the road from London to Ipswich.

The White Hart in the Borough, now converted into a club in honour of Sam Weller, possessed anciently the largest signboard in London. Perhaps this is why Jack Cade selected it in 1450 for his headquarters. Of existing signboards the most elaborate is the Five Alls at Marlborough, once a very common subject for the tavern picture. The first compartment portrays the Queen with the label, “I rule all.” In the second is a Bishop, “I pray for all.” Next comes a lawyer, “I plead for all,” followed by a truculent soldier, “I fight for all.” The last figure is the taxpayer, “I pay for all.” Some facetious innkeepers added a sixth, the Devil with the motto, “I take all!” This sign with local modifications is not unknown outside the drinking shops in Holland, and, according to Larbert, a characteristic example may be seen swinging under the blue sky in the sunny street of Valetta in Malta. The largest sign we have ever come across is the tile painting on the front of the Kentish Drovers in the old Kent Road.

But the number of these quaint and comical signs is diminishing every year. The innkeeper plies his trade under more difficult conditions and is glad to accept the tempting cash offers made to him by collectors. In place of the old carved figures or painting, last survival of the days when every building in a town was distinguished by some badge or device, the name of a public-house now generally appears written in gilt letters on the signboard. Even this is frequently lost amid the flaring advertisements of the brewer, and of the various brands of whiskey retailed in the establishment. In fact, the frequenters of such a house of entertainment, especially in the London district, are sometimes ignorant of its ancient designation, and refer to it either by the name of the landlord, or of the wholesale dealer, “Mooney’s” or “Guests,” for whose business it serves as a local branch.

Landlords of inns near London are not usually very original in their views of life, and rarely advertise any spark of humour. Perhaps they take their duties to the public too seriously. Occasionally, however, one comes across evidence that the keeper of an inn is sufficiently detached in mind as to admit within the walls of his house of business a jest or two in print. These are usually framed and hung up in the bar, and as they have never been seen quite new, but are frequently fly-blown and yellow with age, it would seem to follow that the race of facetious landlords has come to an end. In the Duke of Wellington Inn, near High Beech, Epping Forest, the following rules hang in the bar. They are probably from their phraseology American in origin, and the second was evidently designed as a sarcastic if not effectual check upon manners and customs in business houses of the States.

This notice hangs in an old frame over the door. On an adjoining wall is the following:

We copied the following from a placard either in the Windmill at Hollingbourne, or the Ten Bells at Leeds, in Kent:

In the General Wolfe at Westerham:

THE LANDLORD’S PUZZLE

More		Shall		Trust
Score		I		Sent
for		what		I
my		And		Have
Do		Beer		If
Pay		Clerk		Brewers
I		May		So
Must		Their		My

And at Groombridge:

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