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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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:
Stop, traveller, this wondrous Sign explore,
And say, when thou hast viewed it o’er and o’er,
“GRANTHAM, now two rareties are thine,
A lofty steeple and a living Sign.”
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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “PACK HORSE AND TALBOT.” TURNHAM GREEN.]
[Illustration: THE “RUNNING FOOTMAN.” HAY HILL.]
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.”]
[Illustration: “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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: THE “THREE HORSESHOES,” GREAT MONGEHAM.]
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.”
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
Good lady! She soon learnt, in common with the countryside in general,
that the foundling thus “miraculously” given her was the offspring of her
husband and one Mary Oscatel; but the baby was adopted, was given the name
of Latham, and succeeded eventually to the family estates. In after years,
Isabel, daughter and sole heiress of this foundling, married Sir John
Stanley, ancestor of the Stanleys, Earls of Derby, who still bear the
“Eagle and Child” crest.
This custom of good knights casually finding infants when out walking with
their wives seems anciently to have been extremely common. A somewhat
similar incident is told of the infancy of Sir William Sevenoke.[7]
[Illustration: THE “EAGLE AND CHILD,” NETHER ALDERLEY.]
The old “Eagle and Child” at Nether Alderley, in Cheshire, is the property
of Lord Stanley of Alderley, but the licence was surrendered some thirty
years since, and it is now a farmhouse. A leaden spout-head bears the date
“1688,” but the house is obviously much older. A relic of old, unsettled
times is seen in the great oaken bar that serves to strengthen the front
door against possible attack and forcible entry.