THE INNKEEPER

A model to all innkeepers was Our HostÉ of the Tabard; a born leader of men, quick to understand each man’s individualities, and full of kindly sympathy for all. Ready of wit, he was ever careful to remove the sting before it could rankle. A man of education, he could adapt himself to his company and be skilful in devices for their comfort and recreation. Not least of his many qualifications as a landlord was his presence of mind in averting disputes by a judicious change of the subject.

We no longer send innkeepers to Parliament, nor do members of Parliament, as a rule, undertake the personal superintendence of hotels, as they often did in the fourteenth century. But the type of innkeeper portrayed as Harry Bailey of the Tabard, in Southwark, is by no means extinct. You may find him if you search well under many an old gable or Queen Anne cornice—sometimes even in a smart new red-brick hotel. Nor is he lacking on the great ancient trade routes that run right through Europe—not even in those establishments recommended by Baedeker or Bradshaw—though the new races of purse-proud tourists and Cook’s excursionists are fast expelling him in favour of the servile and mercenary business manager. In a humbler way, the village and wayside inns contain good men and true who follow in the footsteps of Harry Bailey. Such inns, often kept by retired tradesmen, blacksmiths or farmers, are a boon and a blessing to the neighbourhood. They are not only a centre of recreation for the village labourer; they tend also to educate and uplift him, ridiculous as the assertion may seem to those who have never put on an old coat and tramped through the by-ways into Arcady.

Diverse and sundry are the concerns in which the village innkeeper is called upon to give advice. He is the arbitrator in disputes, he solves weighty problems of rural etiquette. He knows the inner secrets of every home and can weigh the respective merits of his clientele to a nicety. To him it is that each one comes for help in trouble, social or financial, and his charity is given irrespective of politics or creed, given considerately as becomes a man of affairs, and without stint. The parish clergy know him as a valuable ally, and it is not unusual to find him acting as churchwarden. Nay, only the other day we saw a procession headed by the worthy village publican carrying the cross, and a manful and decorous crossbearer he proved himself.

It is surprising what good fellows innkeepers generally are, when one considers all the difficulties surrounding their occupation. They are the legitimate prey of every tax and rate collector. We know of one middle-class beerhouse where the rent charged by the brewers is only £50 a year, but which is rated at more than double that amount. The innkeeper, for the purpose of taxation, is merged in the licensed victualler. He is told that his business of selling fermented liquors is a valuable monopoly, and a very heavy licensed duty is exacted for the privilege. Yet he is expected to view with equanimity the dozens of bottles of beer, wine and spirits passing his door in the trucks of the grocer, who by virtue of a nominal licence can easily undersell him. Long after the hour when he is bound by law to close, he hears the shouts of the bibulous in the neighbouring political club; on Sunday mornings he sees a procession of jugs and bottles issuing from this same untaxed establishment. Blackmailed by the police, and spied upon by the hirelings of all kinds of busybody societies, he goes to the Brewster Sessions in each year in fear and trembling. The licensing justices must by law have no interest whatever either in a brewery or a licensed house of any description, but they may be, and frequently are, teetotallers. Every other subject of his Majesty is entitled to plead his cause before his peers. The licensed victualler, alone of all Englishmen since the days of Magna Charta, has to submit to be tried by enemies who have sworn his ruin.

How we all love to see, on the stage, at least, if not in real life, jovial, hearty old souls like Mine Host who entertained Falstaff at the Garter, or old Will Boniface (first landlord to be so dubbed) of the Beaux Stratagem. It is disappointing that Farquhar was such a wronghead dramatist as to make all his interesting characters vicious. We cannot believe this fat and pompous host with a wholesome faith in the virtues of his brew could really have been a scoundrel or capable of conspiring with footpads. No! Julius CÆsar was a better judge of fat human nature than Farquhar! Depend upon it, Boniface slept after his potations the sleep of an honest man. Just listen to him:

Hawthorne tried hard to find Mr. Boniface’s inn at Lichfield, but in vain. He had to content himself with the Black Swan, once owned by Dr. Johnson. Farquhar was careful not to indicate the particular inn referred to, if it ever existed there. Not that the dramatists in bygone days lived in fear of a libel action. Witness a farce by J. M. Morton, in which Mrs. Fidget, the landlady of the Dolphin at Portsmouth, is most cruelly pilloried for her dishonesty and meanness. In “Naval Engagements” Charles Dance portrays Mr. Short of the Fountain in the same town as a scurvy impudent rascal, taking advantage of customers who had spent the night not wisely nor too well, to charge them for an unordered and unserved breakfast. Short’s sanctimonious morality and his devices to detain customers in a hurry, so that they are compelled to stay in the inn for dinner, are a valuable humorous element of this play.

Fielding’s innkeepers are all exquisitely drawn, with the lifelike touches of a fine student of human nature in its infinite variety. We love best of all the host of that inn where Parson Adams met the braggart, untruthful squire who offered him a fine living and endless other benefits without the slightest intention of fulfilling his promises. Mine Host stands by chuckling inwardly at the good jest when the squire undertakes to defray the bill for the lodging and entertainment of the party. Nor does he lose his good-humour when he finds next morning the joke turned against himself and that the worthy curate has not a farthing in his purse.

“Trust you, master? that I will with all my heart. I honour the clergy too much to deny trusting one of them for such a trifle; besides, I like your fear of never paying me. I have lost many a debt in my lifetime; but was promised to be paid them all in a very short time. I will score this reckoning for the novelty of it; it is the first, I do assure you, of its kind. But what say you, master, shall we have t’other pot before we part? It will waste but a little chalk more; and, if you never pay me a shilling, the loss will not ruin me.”

By way of contrast we are given the termagant Mrs. Tow-wouse, whose ill-temper and selfish grasping ways were always counteracting her easy-going spouse’s mild attempts in the direction of generosity:

“Mrs. Tow-wouse had given no utterance to the sweetness of her temper. Nature had taken such pains in her countenance, that Hogarth himself never gave more expression to a picture. Her person was short, thin, and crooked; her forehead projected in the middle and thence descended in a declivity to the top of her nose, which was sharp and red, and would have hung over her lips, had not Nature turned up the end of it; her lips were two bits of skin, which, whenever she spoke, she drew together in a purse; her chin was peaked; and at the upper end of that skin which composed her cheeks, stood two bones, that almost hid a pair of small red eyes. Add to this a voice most wonderfully adapted to the sentiments it was to convey, being both loud and hoarse.”

Surely such a picture is worthy of being beside Skelton’s description of the frowsy ale wife of Leatherhead.

Dean Swift encountered a lady of the same contrary nature at the Three Crosses, on the road between Dunchurch and Daventry. He left his opinion of his hostess on one of the windows:

And here we may be permitted to introduce an adventure of our own. A party of three, we were engaged on a walk across the Dunes, near Nieuport, and had lost our way. Flemish was the language of the district, and this in its spoken form was a sealed book to all three. By and by we came to a little roadside estaminet which we entered, and in correct exercise-book French inquired the nearest way to Furnes. The proprietor replied by placing before us three large glasses of the local beverage. It was a hot, dusty day, we were thirsty and the beer light and harmless. So we drank it and then again inquired the way to Furnes. For answer our glasses were forthwith refilled. When we shook our heads in dissent, the obliging caterer brought out in turn every different kind of bottle and brand of cigar and cigarette the establishment could muster. It was no good. We did not wish to drink or smoke.

He was perplexed and sat down for a few moments to scratch his head and ponder over the puzzling problem. At last he decided to do what many wiser men before have done when in a quandary: he called his wife. Maybe female intuition might pierce into these mysteries where dull reason vainly groped in darkness.

She came, pink and rosy as some glorious dawn, tripping as lightly as a forty-eight inch waist and a weight somewhere near fourteen stone would permit. After darting a scornful glance at her lord and master she turned to us with a sweet smile. We asked in Parisian tongue the nearest way to Furnes. In a trice she placed before us three pint glasses of Flemish white beer. We manifested our disapproval very strongly; we did not want any beer, and her husband watched and smoked his pipe with a cynical grin as she brought us, in vain, the bottles and various other articles from the shelves.

Then a brilliant idea occurred to one of the trio. After all, the Flemish language is only a dialect of German! So in truly classic German he inquired of the puzzled dame—Would she kindly tell us the nearest way to Furnes?

A bright smile of intelligence illumined her features. She understood now exactly what we wanted, and popping into the kitchen behind, she soon returned with three steaming plates full of most delicious hotch-potch soup. There were haricots, lentils, cabbage stumps, garlic, chicken bones, sausages and other articles unidentified in that soup. But it was appetising; we remembered that we were hungry from a long walk and sat down and absorbed it with a good-will.That woman, we know for certain, became our devoted friend from the moment. She will never forget us. She demurred very strongly to our paying anything for the refreshment, and tried hard to force three more pints of that terribly mild beer on us before we left. Not only had we appreciated her cooking at its fullest value—we had also proved her abilities as a cosmopolitan woman of business—and, depend upon it, the fact has been rubbed into her partner in life many times since then!

But of worthy, buxom good-tempered landladies there is always a plentiful supply, faithful and true in the defence of their friends, like the good widow McCandlish in “Guy Mannering,” or beneficent fairies, ready to adjust the difficulties of eloping young couples and their several guardians with the delicacy and tact of a Mrs. Bartick.[18] The fair sex have usually all the business qualities for the conduct of a good inn, and when with these are conjoined kindness of disposition the traveller is blest indeed.

Once upon a time, so tradition hath it—there was a barmaid in a Westminster tavern who married her master. After his death, she continued to carry on the business, and had occasion to seek the advice of a lawyer named Hyde. Mr. Hyde wooed and married her. Then Hyde became Lord Chancellor and was ennobled as Lord Clarendon. Their daughter married the Duke of York, and was the mother of Mary and Anne Stewart. So the landlady of an inn became the grandmother of two queens. Most history books are content to describe Lord Clarendon’s second wife as the daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury; but the supporters of the traditional view maintain that this was an invention of the Court Party.

The Recreation Room in the “Skittles” Inn, Letchworth

We have not yet encountered an innkeeper exactly of the same type as old John Willet, of the Maypole at Chigwell, that “burly large-headed man with a fat face, which betokened profound obstinacy and slowness of apprehension, combined with a very strong reliance upon his own merits.” We meet occasionally in other walks of life these small-minded individuals whom chance has endowed with pride of place and the opportunity to tyrannize over all around them. Like the sovereign owner of the ancient hostelry with its “huge zigzag chimneys and more gable ends than a lazy man would care to count on a sunny day,” not to speak of its diamond-pane lattices and its ceilings blackened by the hand of time and heavy with massive beams, they imagine that their reign will endure to the end. Is there in all literature a more pathetic piece of writing than that in which Charles Dickens depicts the humiliation of John Willet, when the Gordon rioters invade the Maypole, and the fallen tyrant finds himself “sitting down in an armchair and watching the destruction of his property, as if it were some queer play or entertainment of an astonishing and stupefying nature, but having no reference to himself—that he could make out—at all?”

Innkeepers have been reckoned among the poets. John Taylor, the “Water Poet,” so called because he commenced life as a waterman, and because so many of his voluminous works deal with aquatic matters, kept a tavern in Phoenix Alley, Longacre. Being a faithful royalist he set up the sign of the Mourning Crown over his house to express his sorrow at the tragic death of Charles I, but was compelled by the Parliament to take it down. He replaced it with his own portrait and the following lines:

The episode is commemorated in a rhyming pamphlet issued by him at the same time:

Of Taylor’s works, the mere enumeration of which occupies eight closely printed pages in “Lownde’s Bibliographer’s Manual,” the best known are his “Prayse of Cleane Linen,” and “The Pennyless Pilgrimage,” descriptive of a journey on foot from London to Edinburgh, “not carrying any money to and fro, neither begging, borrowing or asking meat, drink or lodging.” In 1620, he made a similar journey from London to Prague, and published an account of it.

Scarcely less eminent in his way was Ned Ward, the “Publican Poet,” immortalised in the “Dunciad.” His works are scurrilous and coarse, yet not to be despised by students of London topography in the reign of Queen Anne. His writings in the London Spy describe the London taverns and inns of his day, and he produced several imitations of Butler’s “Hudibras,” including a versified translation of “Don Quixote,” and “Hudibras Redivivus.” The latter work obtained for its author the privilege of standing twice in the pillory and of paying a fine of forty marks. His inn stood in Woodbridge Street, Clerkenwell, and his poetical invitation to customers includes a reference to the Red Bull Theatre, close by, made famous by Shakespeare and Edward Alleyn, the founder of Dulwich College:

Very different was the side in politics favoured by Sam House, “the patriotic publican.” Apprenticed as a brewhouse cooper, his active industrious habits enabled him, when only twenty-five years of age, to lease an inn at the corner of Peter Street, Wardour Street, Soho, called the Gravel Pits, which name he changed to the Intrepid Fox, or The Cap of Liberty. In 1763 he very warmly espoused the cause of John Wilkes, and sold his beer at threepence a pot in honour of the champion of freedom. Of unflinching political integrity, Sam House was in most respects a well-meaning, good-hearted man, with but one reprehensible vice—a habit of swearing most horribly, no matter what the company. Many are the unprintable anecdotes related with regard to this failing, when the most exalted personages were conversing with him. Another eccentric feature of his character was illustrated when he had laid a wager with a young man to race him in Oxford Road. Just when his victory seemed assured, a mischievous wag in the crowd suddenly shouted, “D——n Fox and all his friends, say I!” Forthwith Sam forgot all about his race, and regardless of protests from his backers, turned round and administered a sound drubbing to the blasphemer. This gave great amusement to the spectators, but meanwhile his rival had passed the winning-post. Sam cheerfully paid the penalty, consoling himself that he had lost the race in a good cause, while avenging an insult to his political idol.