INNS RETIRED FROM BUSINESS
That striking feature of the last few years, the voluntary or the
compulsory extinction of licences, with its attendant compensation, has
created not a little stir among people with short memories, or no
knowledge of their country, who cherish the notion, “once an inn, always
an inn,” and forget the wholesale ruin that befell inns all over the land
upon the introduction of railways, causing hundreds of hostelries to close
their doors. The traveller with an eye for such things may still identify
these inns retired from business, chiefly by their old archways and
entries into stable-yards, but to the expert, even when those features are
absent, there is generally some indefinable air about a house once an inn
that singles it out from others. Such an one is the immense, four-square,
red-brick farm-house midway between Lichfield and Burton-on-Trent, once a
coaching- and posting-house famous in all that countryside as the “Flitch
of Bacon”; such was the exclusive “Verulam Arms” at St. Albans, where mere
plebeian coach-passengers wore not suffered, and only the high and mighty
who could afford post-chaises were condescended to. The “Verulam Arms”
had, however, the briefest of careers. Built in 1827, railways ruined it
in ten years, and, shorn of its vast stables, on whose site a church has
been built, it has ever since been in private occupation. In short, along
the whole course of the Holyhead Road the inns retired from business are
an especial feature, the village of Little Brickhill being little else
than a place of old hostelries and taverns of every class, whose licences
have long ago been surrendered, for lack of custom. Thus you may travel
through to Anglesey and be continually passing these evidences of the ruin
caused by railways, once so distressing to many interests, and a pitiful
commentary upon the activity of inventors; but long ago fallen back into
that historical perspective in which ruin and wrong become the sign-posts
of “progress.” The chief inns that are inns no longer on this
north-western road through England are numerous; the minor taverns and
ale-houses that have closed their doors innumerable. Among others, we
have--speaking merely at a venture--the aristocratic “Bull’s Head,”
Meriden, the “Haygate” inn, near Wellington, the “Talbot,” Atcham,
“Talbot,” Shrewsbury, and “Prince Llewelyn,” Cernioge--all establishments
of the first order; and if we turn to the Great North Road, a very similar
state of things is found. On that great highway the famous “Haycock” inn
at Wansford bravely kept its doors open until recent years, but could
endure no longer and is now a hunting-box belonging to Lord Chesham. The
“New Inn” at Allerton is now a farm-house; the celebrated “Blue Bell” on
Barnby Moor became a country seat, and the very moor itself is enclosed
and cultivated. The “Swan” and “Angel,” both once great and prosperous
coaching-houses at the busy town of Ferrybridge, have ceased their
hospitality, and the “Swan” itself, once rather oddly kept by a Dr.
Alderson, who combined the profession of a medical man with the business
of innkeeping, has been empty for many years past, and stands mournfully,
falling into ruin, amid its gardens by the rive Aire.
Quite recently, after surviving for over sixty years the coming of the
railway and the disappearance of the coaches from the Brighton Road, the
old “Talbot” at Cuckfield has relinquished the vain struggle for
existence, and old frequenters who come to it will find the house empty,
and the hospitable invitation over the doorway, “You’re welcome, what’s
your will?” become, by force of circumstances, a mockery.
There is a peculiar eloquence in the Out-of-Date, the Has Been.
Institutions and ancient orders of things that have had their day need not
to have been intrinsically romantic in that day to be now regarded with
interest. Whether it be a road much-travelled in the days before railways,
and now traced only by the farm-labourer between his cottage and his daily
toil, or by the sentimental pilgrim; or whether it be the wayside inn or
posting-house retired from public life and now either empty or else
converted into a farm-house, there is a feeling of romance attaching to
them really kin to the sentiment we cherish for the ruined abbeys and
castles of the Middle Ages.
Scouring England on a bicycle to complete the collection of old inns for
this book, I came, on the way from Gloucester to Bath, upon such a
superseded road, studded with houses that had once been coaching
hostelries and posting-houses and are now farmsteads; and others that,
although they still carry on their licensed trade, do so in strangely
altered and meagre fashion, in dim corners of half-deserted and
all-too-roomy buildings. It is thirty-four miles of mostly difficult and
lonely road between those two cities: a road of incredible hills and, when
you have come past Stroud and Nailsworth, of almost equally incredible
solitudes. You climb painfully up the north-westerly abutments of the
Cotswolds, to the roof of the world at a place well named Edge, and there
in a bird’s-eye view you see Painswick down below, and thenceforward go
swashing away steeply, some three miles, down into the crowded
cloth-weaving town of Stroud, where most things are prosperous and
commonplace, and only the “Royal George Hotel” attracts attention, less
for its own sake than by reason of the lion and unicorn over its portico:
the lion very golden and very fierce, apparently in the act of coming down
to make a meal of some temerarious guest; the unicorn more than usually
milk-white and mild-mannered.
[Illustration: A DESERTED INN: THE “SWAN,” AT FERRYBRIDGE.]
Beyond Nailsworth begin the hills again, and the loneliness intensifies
after passing the admirably-named Tiltups End. “How well the name figures
the gradient!” thinks the cyclist who comes this way and pauses, after
walking two miles up hill, to regain his breath. He has here come to the
very ideal of what we learned at school to be an “elevated plateau, or
table-land”; and a plaguy ill-favoured, inhospitable place it is, too, yet
not without a certain grim, hard-featured interest in its starveling
acres, its stone-walled, hedgeless fields, and distant spinneys. It is
interesting, if only serving to show that to our grandfathers, who
perforce fared this way before railways, their faring was not all jam. Nor
is it so to the modern tourist who--_experto crede_--faces a buffeting
head-wind in an inclement April, and encounters along these weary miles a
succession of snow-blizzards and hail-showers: all in the pursuit of
knowledge at first-hand. The way avoids all towns and villages, and all
wayfarers who can shift to do so avoid this way; and you who must trace it
have but occasional cottages, often empty and ruinous, or a lonely
prehistoric sepulchral barrow or so for company--and they are not
hilarious companions. Your only society is that rarely failing friend and
comforter--your map, and here even the map is lacking in solace, for when
it ceases to trace a merely empty road, it does so chiefly to chronicle
such depressing names as “Starveall,” an uncomplimentary sidelight on the
poor land where neither farmers can live nor beasts graze; or others as
mysterious as “Petty France,” a hamlet with two large houses that once
were inns. “Cold Ashton,” too, is a name that excellently figures the
circumstances of the route. Even modern portents have a ghastliness all
their own, as when, noticing two gigantic, smoke-and-steam-spouting
ventilators, you realise that you are passing over the long Sodbury tunnel
of the new “South Wales Direct” branch of the Great Western Railway.
Beyond this, in a wooded hollow at the cross-roads respectively to
Chipping Sodbury and Chippenham, you come past the wholly deserted
“Plough” inn to the half-deserted, rambling old coaching-and posting-inn
of “Cross Hands,” where a mysterious sign, unexplainable by the innkeeper,
hangs out, exhibiting two hands crossed, with squabby spatulate fingers,
and the inscription “Caius Marius Imperator B.C. 102 Concordia Militum.”
What it all means apparently passes the wit of man, or at any rate of
local man, to discover.
Passing the solitudes of Dodington and Dirham parks, with the forbidding,
heavy, mausoleum-like stone lodges the old squires loved to erect as
outposts to their demesnes, and encountering a toll-house or so, the road
at last, three miles from Bath, dips suddenly down. You see, from this
eyrie, the smoke of Bath, the roofs of it and the pinnacles of its Abbey
Church, as it were in the bottom of a cup, and, ceasing your labour of
pedalling, you spill over the rim, into the very streets, feeling like a
pilgrim not merely from Gloucester, but from all the world.
Notable among the inns retired from business is the little “Raven” at
Hook, on the Exeter Road, before you come to Basingstoke. It ceased in
1903 to be an inn, and the building has since been restored and converted
into a private residence styled the “Old Raven House.” Built in 1653, of
sound oak framing, filled with brick-nogging in herring-bone pattern, it
has been suffered to retain all its old-world features of construction,
and thus remains an interesting specimen of seventeenth-century builders’
work.
[Illustration: THE OLD “RAVEN,” HOOK.]
But it is on quite another count that the “Raven” demands notice here. It
was the wayside inn at which the infamous “Jack the Painter,” the
incendiary of Portsmouth Dockyard, stayed on the way to accomplish his
evil purpose.
James Hill, a Scotsman, and a painter by trade, went under the assumed
names of Hind and John Aitkin. Visiting America, he there acquired a
maniacal hatred for England, and returned with the design of setting fire
to all our great dockyards, and thus crippling our resources against the
foreign foe. On December 7th, 1776, he caused a fire at Portsmouth
Dockyard that wrought damage to the extent of £60,000. Arrested at Odiham
on February 7th, 1777, he was very speedily brought to trial at
Winchester, and executed on March 10th, being afterwards gibbeted, a good
deal higher than Haman, at Blockhouse Beach, from the mizzen-mast of the
_Arethusa_, especially set up there for the purpose, 64½ feet high. One of
the choicest and most thrilful exhibits at the Naval Exhibition of 1891 at
Chelsea was a tobacco-stopper made out of a mummified finger of this
infernal rascal.
The derelict inns of the Exeter Road are not so numerous, but a striking
example is found at West Allington, outside Bridport, where the old
“Hearts of Oak” stands forlorn, a small portion of it in private
occupation and a long range of stables and wayside smithy gradually
becoming ruinous and overgrown with ivy. The old lamp remains over the
door of the inn, and in it, typical of this picture of ruin, the sparrow
has built her nest.
The most singular instance of an inn retired from business must surely be
that of the “Bell” at Dale, near Derby, but more singular still is the
circumstance of its ever having become a public-house, for the building
was once actually the guest-house of Dale Abbey. Since it ceased to be a
village ale-house, some seventy-six years ago, it has become a farm.
[Illustration: THE “HEARTS OF OAK,” NEAR BRIDPORT.]
The illustration shows the extraordinary features of the place: on the
right-hand the farmhouse portion, which seems, by the evidence of some
carving on the gable, to have been partly rebuilt in 1651, and on the left
the parish church, surmounted by an eccentric belfry, greatly resembling a
dovecote. The interior of this extraordinary and exceedingly diminutive
church--one of the smallest in England--is a close-packed mass of
timbering and old-fashioned, high, box-like Georgian pews. A little
churchyard surrounds church and farmhouse, and in the background are the
tree-covered hills that completely enclose this well-named village of
“Dale,” an agricultural outpost of Derbyshire, on the very edge of the
coal-mining and ironworks districts of Nottinghamshire.
Should the ancient hermit, whose picturesquely situated, but damp, cave on
the hillside used to be shown to visitors, be ever suffered in spirit to
return to his rheumaticky cell, I think he would find the scenery of Dale
much the same as of old, but from his eyrie he would perceive a strange
thing: a gigantic cone-shaped mountain in the near neighbourhood, with
spouts and tongues of fire flickering at its crest: a thing that fully
realises the idea of a volcano. This is the immense slag-heap of the
ironworks at Stanton-by-Dale, impressive even to the modern beholder.
Of Dale Abbey itself, few fragments are left: only the tall gable
containing the east window standing up gaunt and empty in a meadow, and
sundry stone walls of cottages and outhouses, revealing that once proud
house.
The “Falcon” at Bidford, near Stratford-on-Avon, associated with
Shakespeare, is now a private house, and the once busy rural “Windmill”
inn at North Cheriton, on the cross-country coach-road between Blandford
and Wincanton, retired from business forty years ago. It is remarkable for
having attached to it a tennis-court, originally designed for the
entertainment of customers in general and of coach-passengers in
particular. Waiting there for the branch-coach, travellers whiled away the
weary hours in playing the old English game of tennis.
[Illustration: THE “BELL” INN, DALE ABBEY.]
Perhaps the finest of the inns that are inns no more was the famous
“Castle” inn at Marlborough. It was certainly the finest hostelry on the
Bath Road, as the inquisitive in such things may yet see by exploring the
older building of Marlborough College. For that was the aristocratic
“Castle” until 1841, when the Great Western Railway was opened to Bath and
Bristol, and so knocked the bottom out of all the coaching and the
licensed-victualling business between London and those places.
[Illustration: THE “WINDMILL,” NORTH CHERITON.]
I have termed the “Castle” ‘aristocratic,’ and not without due reason. The
site was originally occupied by the great castle of Marlborough, whose
origin itself goes back to the remotenesses and vaguenesses of early
British times, before history began to be. The great prehistoric mound
that (now covered with trees) still darkens the very windows of the modern
college buildings was first selected by the savage British as the site of
a fortress, and is in fact the “bergh” that figures as “borough” in the
second half of the place-name. From the earliest times the Mound was
regarded with awe and reverence, and was the centre of the wild legends
that made Marlborough “Merleberg” or “Merlin’s town”: home of the great
magician of Arthurian legend. Those legends had never any foundation in
fact, and even the otherwise credulous antiquaries of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries dismiss them as ridiculous, but the crest
surmounting the town arms still represents the Mound, and a Latin motto
dedicatory to “the bones of the wise Merlin” accompanies it.
The mediæval castle of Marlborough that arose at the foot of this early
stronghold gave place to a splendid mansion built by Francis, Lord
Seymour, in time for the reception of Charles the Second, who halted here
on one of his progresses to the West. This was partly rebuilt and greatly
enlarged in the time of William the Third, and then assumed very much the
appearance still worn by the main building of the present College. In or
about 1740 the great mansion became the residence of Lady Hertford, under
whose rule the grounds were planted with formal groves of limes and set
about with yews trimmed into fantastic shapes, and further adorned with
terrace-walks and grottoes, intended to be romantic. She converted the
spot into a modish Arcadia, after the ideals of her time; and fashionables
posed and postured there in the guise of Watteau nymphs or old Chelsea
china-ware shepherds and shepherdesses, and imagined they were being rural
and living the Simple Life when, in fact, they were being most artificial.
The real Wiltshire peasantry, the true flesh-and-blood shepherds and
shepherdesses of the surrounding wind-swept downs, who lived hardly upon
rye bread and dressed in russet and homespun woollens, looked with
astonishment, as well they might, upon such folk, and were not unnaturally
amazed when they saw fine ladies with short skirts, silken stockings and
high-heeled shoes, carrying dainty shepherds’ crooks tied with
cherry-coloured ribbons, leading pet lambs combed and curled and scented,
and decorated with satin rosettes. Those Little Bo-Peeps and their
cavaliers, dressed out in equally fine feathers, were visions quite
outside their notions of sheep-tending.
Here my lady entertained great literary folk, among them Thomson of _The
Seasons_, and here, in one of the sacred Arcadian grottoes, he and my lord
were found drunk, and Thomson thereafter lost favour; was, in fact, thrust
forth in haste and with contumely. This, my brethren, it is to love punch
too well!
Something of my lady’s artificial pleasance still survives, although
greatly changed, in the lawns and the trees, now grown very reverend, upon
which the south front of the old mansion looks; but in some eleven years
after her time, when the property came to the Dukes of Northumberland, the
building was leased to a Mr. Cotterell, an innkeeper, who in 1751 opened
what had until then been “Seymour House” as a first-class hostelry, under
the style and title of the “Castle” inn. In that year Lady Vere tells how
she lay “at the Castle Inn, opened a fortnight since,” and describing it
as a “prodigious large house,” grows indignant at the Duke of
Northumberland putting it to such debased uses, and selling many good old
pictures to the landlord.
Cotterell apparently left the “Castle” almost as soon as he had entered,
for we find another landlord, in the following year, advertising as
follows in _The Salisbury Journal_ of August 17th, 1752:
I beg leave to inform the public that I have fitted up the Castle at
Marlborough in the most genteel and commodious manner and opened it as
an inn where the nobility and gentry may depend on the best
accommodation and treatment, the favour of whose company will always
be gratefully acknowledged by their most obedient servant George
Smith, late of the Artillery Ground. Neat postchaises.
[Illustration: THE “CASTLE” INN, MARLBOROUGH.]
“The quality” loved to linger here on their way to or from “the Bath,” for
the inn, with its pictures, much of its old furniture, and its splendid
cuisine, was more like a private house than a house of public
entertainment. Every one who was any one, and could afford the luxury of
the gout and the inevitable subsequent cure of “the Bath,” stayed at the
“Castle” on the way to or from their cure: and there was scarce an
eighteenth-century name of note whose owner did not inscribe it in the
Visitors’ Book of this establishment. Horace Walpole, curiously examining
the winding walks the Arcadian Lady Hertford had caused to be made
spirally up the sides of the poor old Mound; Chesterfield, meditating
polite ways of going to the devil; in short, every great name of that
great, but very material, time. Greater than all others was the elder
Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and of his greatness and importance he was not only
himself adequately aware, but was determined at all costs that others,
too, should be fully informed of it. It was in 1762, travelling to London,
that he came this way, suffering torments from the gout that all the
waters of Bath had failed to cure, and roaring with apprehension whenever
a fly buzzed too near his inflamed toes. He was either in no haste to
reach home, or else his gout was too severe to prevent him being moved,
for he remained for many weeks at the “Castle.” That prolonged stay seems,
however, to have been premeditated, for he made it a condition of his
staying that the entire staff of the inn should be clothed in his livery,
and that he should have the whole place at his own disposal. That was
exclusiveness, if you like, and the modern traveller who secures a
first-class compartment wholly to himself cuts a very poor, ineffectual
figure beside the intolerance of company shown by the great statesman. The
proprietor of the “Castle” must have required a large sum, thus to close
his house to other custom for so long a time, and to possibly offend more
regular patrons. In fact, the fortunes of the “Castle” as an inn ebbed and
flowed alarmingly even before the coaching age and coaching inns were
threatened with extinction by railways. Early in the ’20’s, the innkeeper
was Thomas Cooper, who found the undertaking of maintaining it too much
for him, and so removed to Thatcham, where he became proprietor of the
“Cooper Company” coaches. Cooper, however, was not a fortunate man, and
coaching eventually landed him in the Bankruptcy Court. He lived his last
years as the first station-master at the Richmond station of the London
and South-Western Railway.
In 1842, when the road, as an institution, was at an end, the “Castle” was
without a tenant, for no one was mad enough to entertain the thought of
taking a new lease of it as an inn, and the house was much too large to be
easily let for private occupation. At that time a site, and if possible a
suitable building also, were being sought by a number of influential
persons for the purpose of founding a cheap school for the sons of the
clergy: and here was discovered the very place to fit their ideal. The
neighbourhood was rural and select, and was so far removed from any
disturbing influence that the nearest railway-station was a dozen miles
away, at Swindon: the site was extensive and the building large, handsome,
and convenient. Here, accordingly, what is now Marlborough College was
opened, with two hundred boys, in August, 1843.
Many changes have taken place since then. The original red-brick mansion,
designed by Inigo Jones or by his son-in-law, Webb, stands yet, but is
neighboured by many new blocks of scholastic buildings, and the
enormously large courtyard which in the old days looked upon the Bath
Road, and was a place of evolution for post-chaises and coaches, is
planted with an avenue, down whose leafy alley you see the striking
pillared entrance of what was successively mansion and inn. Inside they
show you what was once the bar, a darkling little cubicle of a place, now
used as a masters’ lavatory, and a noble oak staircase of astonishingly
substantial proportions, together with a number of fine rooms.
[Illustration: GARDEN FRONT, “CASTLE” INN, MARLBOROUGH.]
It was at the “excellent inn at Chapel House,” on the read to Worcester
and Lichfield, that Dr. Johnson, in 1776, was led by the comfort of his
surroundings to hold forth to Boswell upon “the felicity of England in its
taverns and inns”; triumphing over the French for not having in any
perfection the tavern life.
The occasion was one well calculated to arouse enthusiasm for the
well-known comforts of the old-time English hostelry. He had come, with
the faithful Boswell, by post-chaise from Oxford, on the way to
Birmingham; it was the inclement season of spring, the way was long, and
the wind, blowing across the bleak Oxfordshire downs, was cold. Welcome,
then, the blazing fire of the “Shakespeare’s Head”--for that was the real
name of the house--and doubly welcome that dinner for which they had
halted. Can we wonder that the worthy Doctor was eloquent? I think not.
“There is no private house,” said he, “in which people can enjoy
themselves so well as in a capital tavern.... No man but a very impudent
dog indeed can as freely command what is in another man’s house as if it
were his own; whereas, at a tavern, there is a general freedom from
anxiety. You are sure you are welcome; and the more noise you make, the
more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer you
are. No servants will attend you with the alacrity which waiters do, who
are incited by the prospect of an immediate reward in proportion as they
please. No, sir, there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by
which so much happiness is provided as by a good tavern or inn.”
The “Chapel House” inn took its name from a wayside chapel formerly
standing here, anciently belonging to the neighbouring Priory of Cold
Norton. At a later period, when education began to spread and the roads
were travelled by scholars and others on their way to and from Oxford,
Brasenose College took over the conduct of it, both as an oratory and a
guest-house for the succour of wayfarers along these then unenclosed and
absolutely lonely downs. A priest was maintained here until 1547.
Afterwards the site seems to have been occupied by a mansion built by
William Fitzalan, of Over Norton: a house that gave place in its turn to
the inn.
Few ever knew “Chapel House” inn by its real name. It doubtless obtained
the title from surviving traditions of Shakespeare having partaken of the
hospitality of the old guest-house, on his journeys between
Stratford-on-Avon and London. It is, indeed, singular how such traditions
survive in this neighbourhood, the “Crown” at Oxford being traditionally
the successor of the house where Shakespeare usually inned, and an old
Elizabethan mansion at Grendon Underwood, formerly an inn, a halting-place
when he chose another route and went by that village and Aylesbury to
London.
But guests at “Chapel House” no more knew the inn as the “Shakespeare’s
Head” than travellers on the Exeter Road would have recognised
“Winterslow Hut” by its proper title of the “Pheasant.” And now the great
coaching- and posting-inn has gone the way of all those other inns and
taverns where Doctor Johnson--that greatest of Samuels since the
patriarch--genuinely dined and supped and drank. Sad it is to think that
all the festive shrines frequented by him to whom a tavern chair was “the
throne of human felicity” have disappeared, and that only inns that were
contemporary with him, and _would_ have Johnsonian associations had he
ever entered them, survive to trade on that slender thread of
might-have-been.
As usual with the fine old roadside hostelries of this class, the coming
of the railway spelled ruin for it. The great house shrank, as it were,
into itself; its fires of life burnt low, the outer rooms became empty of
furniture, of carpets, of everything save memories. The stable-yards grew
silent; grass sprouted between the cobbles, spiders wreathed the windows
in webs; the very rats, with tears in their eyes for the vanished days of
plenteous corn and offal, were reduced to eating one another, and the last
representative died of starvation, with “sorrow’s crown of sorrow”--which
we know to be the remembrance of happier days--embittering his last
moments.
Why did not some student of social changes record intimately the last
lingering days of the “Chapel House” inn: why did no artist make a
pictorial record of it for us? It decayed, just as, centuries earlier, the
“Chapel” had done from which its name derived, stone by stone and brick
by brick, and there was none to record, in literature or in art, the going
of it. All we know is that it ceased in 1850 to be an inn, that the
remains of the house long stood untenanted; that the dependent buildings
became labourers’ cottages, and that the stables have utterly vanished.
[Illustration: “CHAPEL HOUSE” INN.]
What is “Chapel House” to-day? You come along the lonely road, across the
ridge of the downs, from Oxford, and find, just short of the cross-roads
to Stratford-on-Avon and Birmingham, to Banbury or Cirencester, past where
a milestone says “Oxford 18, Stratford-on-Avon 21, and Birmingham 43
miles,” a group of some ten stone-built cottages, five on either side of
the road, with the remains of the inn itself on the right, partly screened
from observation by modern shrubberies. A porticoed doorway is pointed out
as the former entrance to the tap, and the present orchard in the rear is
shown as the site of the greater part of the inn, once extending over that
ground in an L-shape. The house is now in use as a kind of country
boarding-house, where “paying-guests,” who come for the quiet and the
keen, bracing air of these heights, are received.
For the quietude of the place! How cynical a reverse of fortune, that the
busiest spot on the London, Oxford and Birmingham Road, where sixty
coaches rolled by daily, and where innumerable post-chaises changed
horses, should sink thus into slumber! The thought of such a change would,
seventy years ago, have been inconceivable; just as unthinkable as that
Clapham Junction of to-day should ever become a rural spot for picnics and
the plucking of primroses.
A curious feature in the story of “Chapel House” inn is that a small
portion of the house has in recent times been rebuilt, for the better
accommodation of present visitors. In the course of putting in the
foundations some relics of the old chapel were unearthed, in the shape of
stone coffins, bones, a silver crucifix, and some beads.
When evening draws in and the last pallid light in the sky glints on the
old casements of the wayside cottages of “Chapel House,” or in the dark
avenue, the spot wears a solemn air, and seems to exhale Romance.
London inns retired from business are, as may be supposed, comparatively
few. A curious example is to be found under the shadow of St. Alban,
Holborn, in “White Hart” Yard, between Gray’s Inn Road and Brooke Street.
It is the last fragment of an old galleried building, presumably once the
“White Hart,” but now partly occupied by a dairyman and a maker of
packing-cases. Local history is silent as to the story of the place.
Of all converted inns, there is probably no stranger case than that of the
“Edinburgh Castle.” It is not old, nor was it really and truly, in the
hearty, hospitable sense, an inn, although the landlord doubtless was
included in the all-comprising and often deceptive category of “licensed
victuallers,” who very generally do not victual you. The “Edinburgh
Castle” was, in short, a great flaring London gin-palace in Limehouse. It
has been described by a journalist addicted above his fellows to
superlatives--the equivalent in literature of nips of brandy “neat”--as
“one of the flashiest, most flaunting, sin-soaked dens in London,” which
is just so much nonsense. It _was_, however, a public-house on a large
scale, and did a big trade. It was ornate, in the vulgar, gilded
public-house way, and not what can properly be styled a “den.”
[Illustration: “WHITE HART” YARD.]
Those curious in conversions may easily see to-day what the “Edinburgh
Castle” was like, for its outward look is unchanged, and many an old
frequenter, come back from foreign climes--or perhaps only from H.M.
Prison on Dartmoor--shoulders his way in at the old familiar doors and
calls for his “four ’arf,” or his “two o’ brandy,” before he becomes aware
of the essential change that has come over the place. No more booze does
he get at the “Edinburgh Castle”: only coffee, tea, or the like--which do
not come under that head. The “Edinburgh Castle” has indeed been acquired
by the Barnardo Homes for the “People’s Mission Church.”
There are excuses for the mistake often made by old patrons, for the idea
of the management is to entice them in, in the hope of reforming them. But
if those old customers were at all observant they would at once perceive,
and make due deductions from, the odd change in the sign that still, as of
yore, is upheld on its old-fashioned post by the kerbstone. Instead of
proclaiming that So-and-So’s Fine Ales are sold at the “Edinburgh Castle,”
it now reads: “No drunkards shall inherit the kingdom of God.”
The sham mediævalism of this castellated house is a mean affair of grey
plaster, but the interior of the great building is surprisingly well
appointed. Mission services alternate with concerts and entertainments for
the people and drill-exercises for the Barnardo boys. The ex-public-house
is, in fact, whatever it may look like from without, a centre whence a
measure of sweetness and light is dispensed in an intellectually starved
purlieu.