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:

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:

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-rural inn, 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:

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:

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:

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 its own 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. This extraordinary apartment is said to have formerly been an oubliette dungeon 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 of As 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:

or, Englished:

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:

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 read Pickwick before he composed the following, which, like “Bill Stumps his Mark”—

+
BILST
UM
PSHI
S.M.
ARK

—is easily to be rendered into English:

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:

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,

This hero, however, is fully furnished with both.

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

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:

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

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

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:

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

while

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,

and on the other,

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 an example 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 be invidious, 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.

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