QUEER SIGNS IN QUAINT PLACES

Thus did Horace Walpole moralise over the fickleness of sign-board favour:

“I was yesterday out of town, and the very signs, as I passed through the villages, made me make very quaint reflections on the mortality of fame and popularity. I observed how the ‘Duke’s Head’ had succeeded almost universally to ‘Admiral Vernon’s,’ as his had left but few traces of the ‘Duke of Ormonde’s.’ I pondered these things in my breast, and said to myself, ‘Surely all glory is but as a sign.’”

True, and trite. He might even, perhaps, by dint of scraping, have found upon those old sign-boards whole strata of discarded heroes, painted one over another. Vernon was, of course, the dashing captor of Portobello, in 1739. There were “Portobellos” and “Admiral Vernons” all over the country, for some years, but one would need to travel far and search diligently before he found an “Admiral Vernon” in these days. Six years only was his term of popularity, and there was no renewal of the lease. The Duke of Cumberland displaced him, and he, the victor of Colloden—little enough of a hero—was painted out in favour of our ally, the “King of Prussia” (Frederick the Great) about 1756. The “King of Proosher,” as the rustics commonly called him, had an extraordinary vogue, and the sign is still occasionally to be found, even in these days, when everything German is, with excellent reason, detested. But, as the poet remarks, “all that’s bright must fade,” and the greater number of “Kings of Prussia” were abolished after the battle of Minden, in 1759, in favour of the “Marquis of Granby.” The “Markis o’ Granby” is associated, in the minds of most people, with Dorking, with the Pickwick Papers, and with the ducking in a horse-trough of a certain prophet; but when the sign first became popular, it stood for military glory. The Marquis himself was the eldest son of the third Duke of Rutland: a soldier who rose to distinction in our wars upon the Continent, became Commander-in-Chief, and at length died in his fifty-eighth year, in 1779. There was another special appropriateness in selecting him for a tavern sign; for he was one of the deepest drinkers among the hard-drinking men of his age.

The actual labour of converting the Duke of Cumberland into the King of Prussia, and his Most Protestant Majesty into the Marquis of Granby could have been but small, for they were all represented in profile, and all were clean-shaven, and wore a uniform and a cocked hat; and it is probable that in most cases the sole alteration that took place was in the lettering.

But the vogue of all other heroes was as nothing beside that of Nelson. He, at least, is permanent, and the sign-boards in this significant instance justify themselves. Other heroes won a victory, or victories, and conducted successful campaigns. They were incidents in the history of the country; but Nelson saved the nation, and died in the act of saving it.

This exception apart, nothing is so fleeting as sign-board popularity. The hero of yesterday is sacrificed without a pang, and the idol of to-day takes his place; and just as inevitably the popular figure of to-day will yield to the hero of to-morrow. Would you blame mine host of the “Duke of Wellington” because he changes his sign for that of a later captain? Not at all; for we are not to suppose that the original sign was chosen from any motive of personal loyalty. The Duke was selected because of his popularity with all classes; for the reasoning was that the inn bearing his name would secure the most custom. He was the last of the giants, and no other military commander has come within leagues of his especial glory.

The sign of the “Duke of Wellington” long ceased to specially attract, but it survived for many years because of his own greatness, and, inversely, because of the smallness of the men who commanded our armies in the Crimean War, at the end of the long thirty-nine years’ peace between Waterloo and the Alma. It is true that there were, and still perhaps are, inns and public-houses named after Lord Raglan, the Commander-in-Chief in the Crimea, but they were comparatively few. In short, the line of heroes ceased with “the Duke,” and later generals have been not only intrinsically lesser personalities, but have suffered from being engaged in smaller issues, and under the eye of the “special correspondent,” whose foible has ever been to criticise the general-commanding in detail, to teach him his business, and show a gaping public what had been “a better way” in attack, in strategy, or in tactics. Indeed, one sometimes doubts if even “the Duke” himself would have become the great figure he still remains had the “special correspondent” been in existence during his campaigns.

The lineal successor of Lord Raglan and Lord Napier was Sir Garnet Wolseley, who first adorned a sign-board at the close of his successful campaign in Ashanti, in 1874. He was long “our only general,” and was such a synonym for rightness and efficiency that he even gave rise to a popular saying. “That’s all Sir Garnet” was for some years a Cockney vulgarism, but after the fall of Khartoum, in 1885, it was heard no more. For two reasons: the military knight had become a peer and his Christian name was being forgotten; and the failure of his Nile Expedition to the relief of Gordon broke the tradition of unvaried success.

The true story of a public-house at Dover—doubtless one of many such instances—points these remarks. It was originally the “Sir Garnet Wolseley,” and then the “Lord Wolseley,” and is now the “Lord Roberts.” “Alas!” said the Chairman of the local Licensing Committee, in 1906, “such is popularity!” He was evidently, equally with Horace Walpole, a moralist.

Lord Roberts is now the risen star on the public-house firmament. Sometimes Lord Kitchener shines with, and in a few instances has even occluded, him.

But when does a sign begin to be “queer,” and where does the quality of “quaintness” commence? Those are matters for individual preference, for that which is to one person unusual and worthy of remark is to another the merest commonplace. For my part, for instance, I regard the sign of the “Swan” at Charing as decidedly unusual, and of the quaintness of the old village of Charing there is surely no need to insist.

THE “SWAN,” CHARING.

It is essentially the business of a sign to be in some way queer, for by attracting attention you also secure trade. The first problem of sign-painters was to attract the attention and to reach the intelligence of those who could not read—a class in times not so long since very large and grossly ignorant. For their benefit the barber displayed his parti-coloured pole, the maker of fishing-tackle hung out his rod and fish, the hosier showed his Golden Fleece, and the pawnbroker the three golden balls. In the same way the “Lions” of the various inns in town and country were pictured red, white, black, or even blue, so that the unlettered but not colour-blind should at least be able to use the sense that nature gave them, and from the rival lions make a choice. But lions were never familiar objects in the British landscape, and the sign-painter, lacking a model, in presenting his idea of that “king of beasts” often merely succeeded in picturing something that, unlike anything on earth, was often styled by Hodge a “ramping cat.” In such a manner the former “Cats” inn at Sevenoaks obtained its name. Its signboard originally displayed the arms of the Sackvilles, with their supporters, two white leopards, spotted black; but partly, no doubt, because the painting was bad, and in part because leopards did not come within the everyday experience of the Kentish rustic, the house became known by the more homely name. The “Leather Bottle” was once a sign understood by all; but in its last years that of the “Leather Bottle” public-house, in Leather Lane, Holborn, became something of a puzzle.

SIGN OF THE “LEATHER BOTTLE,” LEATHER LANE.
Removed 1896.

Perhaps the most ingenious and unusual sign it is possible to find throughout the whole length and breadth of the country is that of the little unassuming inn in Castlegate, Grantham, known indifferently as the “Beehive” and the “Living Sign.” A sapling tree growing on the pavement in front of the house has a beehive fixed in its branches, with an inscribed board calling attention to the fact during those summer months when foliage obscures it:

The beehive being generally occupied, the invitation to “explore” it is perhaps an unfortunate choice of language. At any rate, the traveller is much more likely to explore the house than the sign of it.

The “Pack Horse and Talbot” may now, by sheer lapse of time, be regarded as a queer sign. It is the name of what was once an inn but is now a public-house, on the Chiswick High Road, Turnham Green—a thoroughfare which is also the old coach-road to Bath. The painted sign is a pictorial allusion to the ancient wayfaring days when packmen journeyed through the country with their wares on horseback, and accompanied by a faithful dog who kept guard over his master’s goods. This type of dog—the “talbot,” the old English hound—is now extinct. Probably not one person in every thousand of those who pass the house could explain what the “Talbot” in the sign means, or would think of associating it with the dog seen in the picture.

SIGN OF THE “BEEHIVE,” GRANTHAM.

Another London sign that tells of manners and customs long since obsolete is that of the “Running Footman,” Hay Hill, Berkeley Square, picturing a gaily uniformed man running, with a wand of office in his hand. In the middle of the eighteenth century it was as much the “correct thing” for noble families to keep a running footman to precede them on their journeys as it was for their Dalmatian dogs to trot beneath their carriages. Those “plum-pudding dogs” finally went out of fashion about half a century ago, but the running footmen became extinct half a century earlier. Extraordinary tales were told of the endurance of, and the long distances covered by, these men.

Everywhere we have the “Cat and Fiddle,” a sign whose origin still troubles some people, who seek a reason for even the most unreasonable and fantastic things, and lose sight of the fact that a whimsical fancy, a kind of nursery-lore imagination, in all likelihood originated the sign, which is probably not any debased and half-forgotten allusion to “Caton le FidÈle,” the brave Governor of Calais, to “Catherine la FidÈle,” the French sobriquet for the wife of the Czar Peter, or to “Santa Catherina Fidelius,” but simply—the “Cat and Fiddle,” neither more nor less. The rest of it is all “learned” fudge, and stuff and nonsense. Serious persons will object that cats do not play the fiddle; but they do—in nursery-land, where cows have for many centuries jumped over the moon and the table utensils have eloped together, and where pigs have played whistles from quite ancient times, a little to the confusion of those who derive the “Pig and Whistle” sign from some supposed Saxon invocation to the Virgin Mary: “Pige Washail!” ’Tis a way they have in the nursery, which nobody will deny.

SIGN OF THE “PACK HORSE AND TALBOT.” TURNHAM GREEN.

THE “RUNNING FOOTMAN.” HAY HILL.

SIGN OF THE “LION AND FIDDLE,” HILPERTON.

In some cases the “Cat and Fiddle” has become the “Lion and Fiddle”: notably at Hilperton, in Wiltshire, where a picture-sign represents a very mild and apologetic-looking lion walking on his hind-legs, with his tail humbly tucked between them, and playing a tune upon a fiddle—doubtless something doleful, to describe the folly of giving trust.

At Moulsford, on the banks of the Thames, is the rustic inn displaying the sign of the “Beetle and Wedge,” a puzzling conjunction, until we learn that the “beetle” in this case is no insect, but a heavy wooden mallet, and the wedge a wooden, iron, or steel instrument struck by it in splitting timber.

THE “SUGAR-LOAVES,” SIBLE HEDINGHAM.

At Sible Hedingham, in Essex, the sign of the “Sugar-loaves” strikes the traveller as curious, both in name and in shape. Sugar-loaves, of course, we never see nowadays, now that cube sugar prevails; and grocers no longer, as they did of old, receive their sugar in pyramidical-shaped loaves and cut it up themselves.

Manchester people are familiar with a very curious sign indeed: that which hangs from the “Old Rock House” inn at Barton. On the sign is seen the figure of a man wearing a “fool’s cap” and intent upon threshing corn, and in his hands is an uplifted flail, bearing the mysterious inscription, “Now Thus.”

The origin of this is found in the local story of how William Trafford, a staunch Royalist, outwitted Cromwell’s soldiery. Trafford owned South Lamley Hall, and when the troops of the Parliament were heard approaching, he caused all his servants and farm stock to be stowed away in a remote glen called “Solomon’s Hollow,” leaving him alone in the great house. When they were all gone, he collected his jewellery and plate, and, having buried them in a secret place, disguised himself in rough clothes, being discovered when the Roundheads arrived threshing corn over the place where the valuables were hidden.

As they entered the barn they heard him repeating mechanically at intervals the solitary expression, “Now thus”; and although he was questioned by the officers, who took him to be a servant, they could get nothing else out of him, being at length obliged to depart, with the belief that they had been talking to a harmless lunatic.

INTERIOR OF “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.”

“UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.” BLUEPITTS, NEAR ROCHDALE.

The De Traffords still live on this estate, whose wealth was thus saved by their ready-witted ancestor.

It will be conceded that the “Boar” inn, more generally known as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” between Heywood and Castleton, on the Rochdale Canal, is not only a queer sign, but a queer house, being nothing other than an old passenger barge that used formerly to ply along the Bridgewater Canal, between Heywood and Bluepitt.

The railway at last took away all the passenger traffic of the canal, and the old barge, after many years of usefulness, ceased to run. It was purchased by a man named Butterworth, who had it drawn on rollers to a position some three miles from the “cut,” and built walls against the sides, and roofed it over.

SIGN OF THE “OLD ROCK HOUSE” INN, BARTON.

One of the finest and most artistic old signs in the country is that of the “Three Horseshoes,” a little weather-boarded ale-house at Great Mongeham, which is, in a contradictory way, quite a small village, between Sandwich and Deal. It is a rare instance of the use of wrought iron, not as the support of a sign, but as a sign itself, and is so strikingly like a number of wrought-iron signs in Nottingham Castle Museum, the work of that famous artist in iron, Huntingdon Shaw, who wrought the celebrated iron gates of Hampton Court, that it would seem to be a product of his school. The vogue of the artistic sign is returning, and a good example of modern work in iron is to be found at Great Missenden, in Buckinghamshire, where the “Red Lion” inn displays an heraldic lion in silhouette, ramping on his heraldic wreath, and clawed and whiskered in approved mediÆval style.

THE “THREE HORSESHOES,” GREAT MONGEHAM.

SIGN OF THE “RED LION,” GREAT MISSENDEN.

At Stourbridge, in Worcestershire, and at some other places, the sign of the “Labour in Vain” is met with, representing two busy persons in the act of trying to scrub a nigger white. The Stourbridge example shows two very serious-looking maid-servants striving to perform that impossible task, while the nigger, whose head and shoulders are seen emerging from a dolly tub, has a large, superior smile, only sufficiently to be expressed by a foot-rule.

SIGN OF THE “LABOUR IN VAIN.”

Queer signs are often the product of ignorant alteration of old signs whose original meaning has become obscured by lapse of time. The “Mourning Bush,” for example, was a sign set up originally by a Royalist innkeeper, grieving for the death of Charles the First. A bush, or bundle of twigs, was at that time the usual sign of an ale-house, and he swathed his in black. What if he could revisit this earth after these two hundred and fifty years, and find that sign corrupted, at a little inn near Shifnal, Shropshire, into the “Maund and Bush,” the sign representing a hardy-looking laurel and a basket—“maund” being a provincialism for a wicker basket!

The “Coach and Dogs” sign at Oswestry, a queer variant of the more usual “Coach and Horses” found so numerously all over the country, takes its origin from an eccentric country gentleman, one Edward Lloyd, of Llanforda, two miles from Oswestry, whose whim it was to drive to and from the town in a diminutive chaise drawn by two retrievers.

The “Eight Bells” at Twickenham, in itself no more than a commonplace public-house, has for a sign an oddly assorted group of eight actual bells, apparently gathered at haphazard from various marine-stores, for no two are exactly of a size. Hanging as they do from a wooden bracket, projecting over the pathway, and showing prominently against the sky, they help to make the not very desirable bye-lane picturesque. It is a lane that runs down to the river, where the Twickenham eyots divide the stream in two, and has not yet been levelled to the ordinary suburban respectability of the neighbourhood. Waterside folk and other queer fish reside in, and resort to it, and on Saturday evenings the usual beery hum proceeding o’ nights from the “Eight Bells” develops into a spirituous tumult, ending at closing-time with stumbling steps and incoherent snatches of song, as the revellers, at odds with kerbstones and lamp-posts, make their devious way home.

THE “EIGHT BELLS,” TWICKENHAM.

At Bricket Wood, Hertfordshire, a Temperance Hotel displaying the unique sign of “The Old Fox with His Teeth Drawn” may be seen. It was, until 1893, a rural inn called the “Old Fox,” but was then purchased by the Hon. A. H. Holland-Hibbert, son-in-law of Sir Wilfrid Lawson, and, like him, a total abstinence enthusiast, who made the changes noted above. At his house at Great Munden he has a collection of the signs of inns he has in the same way converted.

SIGN OF THE “STOCKS” INN, CLAPGATE, NEAR WIMBORNE.

The “Stocks” inn, at Clapgate, near Wimborne, displays a miniature model of “stocks for three” over its porch, while the “Shears” inn at Wantage, a rustic ale-house in an obscure corner of that town, with the odd feature of a blacksmith’s forge attached, exhibits a gigantic pair of shears.

THE “SHEARS” INN, WANTAGE.

A sign that certainly, if not in itself unusual, is nowadays in an unwonted place, is that of the old “White Bear,” a galleried coaching inn that stood in Piccadilly, on the site of the present Criterion Restaurant, until about 1860. It is a great white-painted wooden effigy that is now to be found in the garden of the little rustic inn of the same name at Fickles Hole, a quiet hamlet on the Surrey downs to the south-east of Croydon. To the stranger who first catches sight of it, this polar bear among the geraniums and the sweet-williams is sufficiently startling.

SIGN OF THE “WHITE BEAR.” FICKLES HOLE.

At Nidd, Yorkshire, we have the odd sign of the “Ass in the Bandbox”; at Brixham, South Devon, the “Civil Usage”; at Chepstow the “Old Tippling Philosopher”; the “Cart Overthrown,” at Edmonton; the “Trouble House,” near Tetbury; the “Smiling Man,” at Dudley. At Bridgwater, Somerset, the pilgrim finds both the “Ship Aground” and the “Ship Afloat”; and a somewhat similar sign, the “Barge Aground,” in those places of barges and canals, Brentford and Stratford, at the western and eastern extremities of London.The “World Turned Upside Down” is the name of a large public-house in the Old Kent Road and the sign of an inn near Three Mile Cross, Reading, where a rabbit is pictured on one side with a gun, out man-shooting; while on the other is a donkey seated in a cart, driving a man.

The sign “Who’d have thought it?” at Barking, is said to express the surprise of the original proprietor at obtaining a licence; while the “Why not?” at Dover is probably a suggestion to the undecided wayfarer to make up his mind and have some refreshment. There are at least four of the “Hark to!”—hunting signs: “Hark to Jowler” at Bury, Lancashire; “Hark to [or “Hark the”] Lasher” at Castleton, Derbyshire; “Hark to Bounty,” at Staidburn, and “Hark to Nudger,” at Dobcross, near Manchester.

Of signs such as “The Case is Altered” and the “Live and Let Live” there is no end; nor is there any finality in the many versions of the incidents that are said to have originated them. The real original story of “The Case is Altered” is said to be that of the once-celebrated lawyer, Edward Plowden, who died in 1584: to him came a farmer whose cow had been killed by the lawyer’s bull. He was suspicious, as it seems, of lawyers, and came cunningly prepared with a trap to catch him out.

“My bull,” said the farmer, “has gored and killed your cow.”

“The case is clear,” said the lawyer, “you must pay me her value.”“I’m sorry,” then said the farmer, but with a contradictory gleam of triumph in his eye: “I should have said that it was your bull killed my cow.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Plowden, resignedly, “the case is altered.”

THE “CROW-ON-GATE” INN, CROWBOROUGH.

Nowadays, many of these signs no doubt derive merely from an improvement in the conduct of the house, indicating that better drinks and superior accommodation are to be had within, the “Case is Altered” in such cases being just a permanent form of the familiar and more usual and temporary notice, “Under New Management.”

The popularity of the “Gate” sign has already been mentioned. An odd variation of it is to be seen at Crowborough, in Sussex, where the “Crow-on-Gate” inn, itself the ne plus ultra of the commonplace, displays a miniature gate with the effigy of a crow over it.

THE “FIRST AND LAST” INN, SENNEN.

Land’s End, in Cornwall, is notable from our present point of view because it possesses no fewer than three inns, or houses of public refreshment, each one claiming to be the “First and Last House in England.” The real original “First and Last” is the inn, so-called, that stands next to the grey, weatherbeaten granite church in the weatherbeaten and grey village of Sennen, one mile distant from the beetling cliffs of Land’s End itself; but in modern times, since touring has brought civilisation and excursion brakes and broken bottles and sandwich-papers to the old-time savage solitudes of this rocky coast, there have sprung up, almost on the verge of those cliffs, two other houses—an ugly “hotel” and a plain white-washed tea-house—that have cut in to share this peculiar fame. The tiny tea-house, where you get tea and picture-postcards, and are bothered to buy shells, and tin and copper-bearing quartz, is actually the most westerly, and therefore the “Last” or the “First,” according to whether you are setting out from Penzance, or returning.

THE “FIRST AND LAST,” LAND’S END.

The “Eagle and Child,” a sign common in Cheshire and Lancashire, is heraldically described as “an eagle, wings extended or, preying on an infant in its cradle proper, swaddled gules, the cradle laced or.” The eagle is generally represented on inn-signs without the cradle. In the mere straightforward, unmystical language of every day, the eagle thus fantastically described is golden, the infant is naturally coloured, and the swaddling is red.

The origin of this curious sign is found in the fourteenth-century legend which tells how Sir Thomas de Latham was walking in his park with his lady, who was childless, when they drew near to a desert and wild situation where it was commonly reported an eagle had built her nest. Approaching the spot, they heard the cries of a young child, and, on bursting through thickets and brambles, the attendant servants found a baby-boy, dressed in rich swaddling-clothes, in the eagle’s nest. The knight affected astonishment; the good dame, unsuspecting, or, like the Lady Mottisfont who, under somewhat similar circumstances, in one of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s Group of Noble Dames, thought strange things but said nothing, was wisely silent and accepted the “gift from Heaven.” As the old ballad has it:

Their content was such to see the hap
That th’ ancient lady hugs yt in her lap;
Smooth’s yt with kisses, bathes yt in her teares,
And unto Lathom House the babe she bears.