The Drinking Man's Guide to Victorian Shelford

The George and Dragon

            The George and Dragon might well have been the first pub in Great Shelford, and it was the house near the school that we all call Old Thatch.

     Fanny Wale tells a story about it:

‘There is ... a picturesque, reed-thatched house in a garden belonging to Mr. Arthur Tress Grain…In 1902 this house was given to the Parish by the Vicar, the Rev. T. Orpin and in 1908 it was used as a Club for men. It was here that the Fire engine was kept in 1842, and in this same year it was also a Public House known as the “St George and The Dragon”.

The Public House was kept by Mr. Roger Gillingham, son of the Rector of Shelford Parva, who was then living at the Manor House. Gillingham married a woman of no fortune and so displeased his father that he disinherited him. There are several descendants of this family still in Shelford Parva...’ . We know that Roger Gillingham was Rector of Little Shelford from 1709-1747.

                  Like most pubs of the time, it had a host of outbuildings, part farm, part pub - barn, stable, dovecote, yard and garden. You can still see the higgledy-piggledy quality of the house. From 1815 to 1858 the landlord was Allington Maris, but it was owned by Thompson’s Lane Brewery of Cambridge, which had 50 tied houses. When the brewery owner died in 1858, the brewery and houses were all sold off, and the George became just a farm, and now just a house.

Here are a few remnants of the George's pub sign. You can see the word "dragon" and a few scales. I bet it was a gloriously folksy sign.

The Peacock and The Black Swan

    These two pubs sat shoulder to shoulder on Church St.

    In 1830 the Beer House Act abolished beer duty and allowed any rate-paying householder to sell beer on his premises at the cost of a 2 guinea licence. This represented a considerable relaxation of the rules. Previously pub landlords had had to apply to the magistrates at Quarter Sessions and have two guarantors to back them. A wave of new alehouses opened across the country, including in Shelford. Naturally this gave rise to concern among the better off, who thought that it would make the labourers even more idle and drunken than they thought they were already. And indeed, relaxing the licensing laws is rarely a good thing.

    So the Peacock opened up some time after the Enclosure in 1835. Its first licensee, like most pub landlords had two jobs, being also a tailor.

        In the 20th century, the Peacock became the headquarters of Shelford Rugby Club, who therefore adopted the peacock as their logo. For a while they enjoyed enviable facilities, with changing rooms built by Len Baynes that had two team baths with coal-fired hot water. Eventually, in 1962, the club decided to go for its own premises, and moved up to the Davey Field, where it is now.

Jill Nicholas remembers her Great Uncle George (Arnold) as the publican:

 “I can't remember much about Great Uncle George, only that he had his hair parted in the middle, and it was really put down with Brylcream on each side, and a big moustache”.

He is listed as publican in 1937.

    It is hard to know how far back the Black Swan goes – certainly to the 18th century. It was advertised for sale in 1791:

 TO BE SOLD BY AUCTION – On the premises, on Monday 27 June inst. All that well known and good accustomed Public House called by the name of the BLACK SWANN situate in Great Shelford, now in the occupation of William Hopper, consisting of a kitchen, parlour, backhouse, cellar, pantry, four chambers, a large dining-room, garden, yard, stable and barn. The above premises are Copyhold and holden of the Manor of Buristead, in Great Shelford aforesaid.        CC 18 June 1791

By 1835 it was owned by the Trumpington Street Brewery. The publicans who ran it through the 19th century combined working as carriers and coal merchants with their running of the pub.

        I am told that it was nicknamed by villagers the Dirty Duck!

      In the 20th century both the Black Swan and the Peacock came into the hands of Fordhams Brewery of Ashwell. The Peacock only had a beer and wine licence and no parking, while the Black Swan had a full licence and a car park. Nevertheless the brewery clearly judged the Peacock the better prospect because it eventually closed the Black Swan and made it into a car park for the Peacock. But there were obviously too many pubs in the village. By 1970 the Peacock itself was disused, and it too has become a private house. But it keeps its name and the bracket that held the pub sign.

The Square and Compasses, or Compasses

    The Square is older than it looks – behind the brick casing is a timber-framed building. It’s difficult to know how long it's been a pub. Through most of the 19th century, the licensee was a blacksmith – John Land Wright, followed by his son Land. I can remember it when it had a public bar on the left, and a small lounge bar on the right. This was a fairly typical arrangement in the mid-20th century. The men went in the public, while they could take the wife (and her mother) in the lounge for a stout or a glass of port. In the early '80s the bars were switched round to make it much as it is today. There is a painting in the pub of the public bar showing it as it was before the makeover.

In the 1980s the Square was a pub for games, notably crib and dominoes. There was a dominoes league in and around Cambridge, of which the Square's team were members. There was also a dartboard. The pub is also HQ for Shelford's cricket team, and a home-from-home for the Bunch who organize our week-long Feast, highlight of the Shelford social calendar.

The Plough

There was a building on the site of the Plough in the 18th century, but the first mention of the pub was in 1832 as a “new-built public house, on site formerly known as Smiths shop”. It was another of those pubs built after the 1830 Beer House Act. By the 1870s it was occupied by Henry How who ran a baker’s as well as the pub. He built the house nextdoor, now Lloyd’s Bank, and also the bungalow next to that. He was at the Plough until he died in 1912, and then his wife carried on into the 1930s. There are still Hows in the village today.  Like most pubs it has passed from one brewing chain to another – Hawkes, Nash & Co of Bishops Stortford (in the 19th century), Benskins (1915 onwards), Ind Coope and now Greene King.

The Red Lion

    I can’t show you a picture of the Red Lion, because it was demolished around 1850 when the railway line to Royston was built. It stands either directly beneath the railway line or in the field on the village side of it. The inn went back to at least 1764, when we know that William Norris was the innkeeper. I imagine it would have been an old timber-framed house. William Moore (more of him later) ran it from 1822-8, and Allington Maris ran it from 1847 until its demolition. He was the son of the same Allington Maris who ran the George and Dragon at the other end of the village. As well as a publican, he was a tailor. The Red Lion was owned by the Lord of De Freville Manor, E H Green, and he later built a new pub, the De Freville Arms on the other side of the road.

The Greyhound

    The Greyhound stood roughly where Bridge Close is now. It is first mentioned in 1851, so it was another post-1830 beerhouse. It was built by William Moore, a small farmer, who was allotted the piece of land on which it stood at Enclosure. There was also a cluster of cottages behind it. The Moore family (William, his widow and his son) ran the pub until 1912.

    William Moore was a famous turkey breeder. His birds are mentioned several times in the newspaper, usually around Christmas:

Mr William Moore of Gt Shelford has 135 of the finest cock turkeys in England which will be in London in a few days for Christmas. He has a large number of hen turkeys for the same market. Mr Richard Brand of the same village, at the late Birmingham Show gained the two first prizes for fine turkeys. He has a hen turkey in his possession that weighs 24lbs alive.                      CC 9 December 1857

    In 1863 William’s son William – a platelayer on the railway - had obviously been partaking too freely of the family beer. He was found lying dead drunk on the railway line “with his head close to one of the metals. Defendant helped to gather up the remains of a man who had been smashed into a hundred pieces on the line; this ought to have been a warning to him”. The Great Eastern Railway Company prosecuted him as an exemplary case (CC 9 May 1863).

    Will Ellum remembered the Greyhound in the early 50s:

Every Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday night, all the coaches used to come back from Southend and Clacton.  They always poured into the Greyhound and the De Freville Arms the other side of the bridge.  You’d get about four or five coaches outside here, the same the other side of the bridge, and all you could hear was the piano and they was all singing. This was the main Clacton/Southend road in them days. When we was kids we used to come up here and just sort of sit over there and see, look and listen to them singing. It was really good. Most of the coaches come from Derbyshire and Leicester. They used to be there ‘til shutting time, 11 o’clock.  And then they’d go home.

My dad used to work at the cement works in Cherry Hinton, and they used to go on outings and that was the highlight.  They’d stop at the pub on the way back and stop there till closing time.  Then the coach  would carry on.  It would often be gone midnight before they got home.

    Martin Harmer remembers the pub being demolished:

I watched them pull it down. They had a great big bulldozer and a bloke came along with a wire hawser which he put all the way round the building and then he just drove up the Cambridge Road and the building just went. 

The De Freville Arms

The De Freville Arms was built some time in the 1850s by E H Green, who had owned the Red Lion. Its first licensee was the same Allington Maris who had run the Red Lion until it was demolished. In 1857, the newspaper reports a Victorian equivalent of car crime at the pub:

AUDACIOUS ROBBERY – On the afternoon of Saturday last, as Mr Creasey, a chemist and druggist of Linton and Sawston, was indulging himself and some friends with a pipe and a glass, and giving illustrations of his vocal abilities, his horse and cart were missed from the yard of the De Freville Arms Inn… where he was stopping. One of the company was also missed, whom Mr C. had picked up on the road, being a stranger in the neighbourhood. After a short time, Mr Creasey became uneasy at his horse and vehicle not being returned. At length the policeman was applied to; a search was made; but no horse, cart or driver could be heard of for many hours. Eventually the horse and cart were discovered at West Wratting, where they had been offered for sale, but detained. The thief escaped, and we have not heard whether he is yet captured. CC 31 January 1857

    In the 1930s the publican was Henry Carter. Jill Nicholas remembers him and his wife:

Once in a while, Mum would go up to the De Freville pub, and Mrs Carter lived there. She would take me with her, and we would go into Mrs Carter’s lounge. Mum would have a Guinness and I would sit in front of the fire and have a lemonade, and then, of course, they’d talk. Once in a while they had a cup of tea, but I think usually Mum liked the Guinness, or a stout, and she would pour a little tiny drop into my lemonade. Mr Carter drove the taxi. He let people park in the field at the back of the pub. The field has now gone, of course. Mr and Mrs Wright (they called Mr Wright  ‘Shivery’) used to be with Thurston’s Fair, and over the winter or rest times they could park the caravan in the back field. As children, we would go up and we could sit on the steps and talk to Mrs Wright, and she would make toffee. I can see it now. Mrs Wright made the toffee, and then she would get it in her hand, and she would keep pulling it. To start with, it was dark brown and then it would get a lovely goldy colour and then she would pull it, and cut it with scissors into the shapes of sweets that you buy at the Fair.

    The field behind the Arms used to stretch back to where the entrance of De Freville Road now is. Betty Kennedy remembers it being used for various village events before the War:

We used to have the fair, and it used to be parked at the back of what was the De Freville Arms. That was there every year.   Then later on in the year they had a very, very big flower show. They had a sort of fair come to that as well.  You’d get swinging boats and shies and various other things, and a big flower show as well where you could enter everything from flowers and fruit, veg.

    Memories from villagers show how central to the life of the village the pubs could be. Harry Parish was in the cricket club:

I particularly remember we used to play St John's College team every year. They called it St John's College Willows. The reason it was called the Willows, was because we used to play for a bit of a broken cricket bat. That was the trophy. That became an annual fixture, and they used to bring players back from Scotland and Wales, put them up in college and we used to have a very good all-day game. And we'd go to the De Freville for lunch, and tea afterwards.

    Equally, Peter Amis remembered the end of the war being announced:

I remember it on the wireless. We had a Pye battery radio in those days. I remember my mother crying. It was a Sunday and all the local boys and my father included they was all celebrating over at the De Freville Arms.

I remember the pub myself in the early 1980s. Most people went in the public bar on the left-hand side. The private bar was deserted and very dismal. Like most pubs on a Friday night, it would be visited by members of the Salvation Army selling the War Cry. It closed in the late 1980s, and became a sofa shop, Sofa and Co, then Mark Elliot Furniture.

A few years back, the building was considerably extended. Now it houses the Co-op, and Noel Young Wines.

The Road and Rail

    The corner plot between London Road and Woollards Lane, where a village sign now stands, and opposite what we call Freestones Corner, belonged to Joseph Austin in the early part of the 19th century. When he died he left the plot, with a house on it, to his son, bricklayer John Austin, who at some point built the Road and Rail. It was yet another beerhouse. In 1869, when John Austin died, it was occupied by William Herring Smith. It was bought by Charles Whitmore, who was a wheelwright – a man who made wheels for wagons. He also built carts. As a sideline, he was a publican. He would close his wheelwright’s shop at 6, and at 6 the pub opened. His wife and daughters would serve the customers, while Charles sat in the corner keeping order. The pub had closed by 1925. The site also accommodated a paint shop (a place where waggons were painted) and three cottages.

The 1904 Licensing Act was to have big consequences for the Road and Rail. The effects of too much drink were well known, and the Temperance Movement had gained much ground. The act decreed that Licensing Magistrates could refuse to renew a pub’s licence if the pub was considered unnecessary to the needs of the public: usually meaning that there were too many pubs in the neighbourhood. A levy was placed on licences granted, and this was used to provide compensation for the owner of the premises, and also a lesser sum to the licensee. This process of review was normally called being “referred for compensation”, and in 1915, when the licence was up for renewal, it was the turn of the Road and Rail. Possibly the fact that it was wartime had given greater impetus to the reduction of beerhouses – the authorities were trying to reduce the amount of work lost through drunkenness. The pub sold about a barrel and a half of beer a week. It doesn’t sound a lot. Further, it was a mere 150 paces from the Railway Tavern. There were nine licensed houses in Great Shelford. None had been closed. Mr Whitmore wished to carry on the trade. He did a good trade, and had occupied the house for 44 years (and owned it for “many years”). If he lost the licence he lost the chief part of his business. Does this mean that his wheelwright trade was not prospering? The magistrates found against him, and the house was referred for compensation (CIP Mar 12 1915).

    Whitmore’s daughter-in-law lived on in the closed pub as a widow. She had lodgers, including “German Joe” whom I will discuss in another context. It was largely on account of Joe that pressure built up to clear the site, and when Mrs Allen died in 1963, pub and house were demolished and a small green made.

The Ancient Shepherd

    This is a pub about which we have relatively little information. In 1865 the Cambridge Chronicle reported that

Thomas Willows, beerhouse keeper of Great Shelford, was convicted of having his house open for the sale of beer, during prohibited hours, on Sunday, April 10th – he was fined 10s and 13s costs, which he paid.  (CC 29 April 1865).

Doubtless the landlord was, as they say, holding a “private party for a few friends”. But the Protestant Sunday was sacrosanct – no drinking allowed.

    The pub appears to have been in the house that is now called The Woodlands on Woollards Lane. Another newspaper article tells us that it was called the Ancient Shepherd.

    Thomas Willows or Willers appears in Woollards Lane in 1841 as a dealer, in 1851 as a jobber (basically a man who buys goods and resells them), and in 1861 as a victualler (ie pub landlord). So it’s hard to tell if he was running the beerhouse all that time. The very term beerhouse suggests it was a low-class place. By 1871 Willows had retired , and presumably the pub then became a private house.

The Railway Tavern

    Two events occurred in 1835 and 1845 respectively, namely the Enclosure and the coming of the railways, which overturned the old ways of life in Shelford. The railway’s arrival encouraged one landowner, Richard Headley, to build a brewery and maltings beside the new line. He rounded off with a pub, the Railway Tavern.

    In September 1852 the Ancient Order of Shepherds, a friendly society, announced:

“The Members and Friends of the ‘Hope for Better” Lodge will hold their opening dinner at Mrs Fuller’s, the Railway Tavern, on Tuesday next. To give éclat to the day’s amusement a small band is engaged.”

This was a friendly society, a mutual benefit society to which working men contributed for burials, help in sickness and so on.

    The pub was also the venue, in 1851, for the horticultural show:

The annual show of the Horticultural Society established in this village, will be held at the Railway Tavern on Wed. next. The numbers of the society have increased since last year, so that a pleasant party may be anticipated: those who joined the one which assembled last year will readily believe this. The subscription is very low, and the good effect the society has already had upon the morals of the labouring portion of the inhabitants, in fostering habits of industry, unquestionable. CC 21 June 1851.

The middle classes of the village were always trying to improve the morals of the labouring classes; I can't help but wonder if holding the show in the Tavern didn't rather mitigate its improving effects!

Here is the report of a typical pub ruckus from 1864:

David Robinson, Peter Powter and Robert Page, all of Great Shelford, were charged with obstructing and resisting P C Longstaff in the execution of his duty on the night of December 13th - it appeared that Powter and Robinson, on the night in question, were fighting at the Railway Tavern; the PC, hearing the disturbance, went to the place and was requested by the landlord to clear the house. The parties refused to leave, and here Page interfered, and all three resisted the policeman. When, at last, they were got outside, they were again noisy, and Page challenged anyone to fight. Powter had been before the bench on a previous occasion on a somewhat similar charge. They were fined £3 each, and the costs, and in default were committed for 6 weeks. CC 16 January 1864

    George Freestone was a baker with premises on the corner of London Road and Station Road. When his son Bert married, in the 1920s, he decided to retire and take over the Railway Tavern, leaving Bert to run the bakery. He devoted himself to the creation of a fine bowling green at the back of the pub. He can be seen here rolling it. Behind him is the signal box and the railway.

   Tom Higgins remembered the Tavern of the 1950s:

“The reason the lads went in there was the landlord didn’t ask their age. I had my first pint there when I was 16!”

    For a while in the 2000s there was a Thai chef at the Tavern, and it was very popular. After his departure, trade declined, leading to the pub's closure in 2009. The pub has since been demolished. Flats were built on the site.

The Hilltrees

    Although this pub is in the parish of Great Shelford, it is miles away from the village centre. It is on Babraham Road, just beyond the roundabout which marks the junction with Hinton Way. At the time of the Enclosure (1835), there were no dwellings in this part of the parish. Soon afterwards, however, the site seems to have been developed. At first it was merely the home and workplace of a limeburner – there are limekilns behind the site, which is on the chalk of the Gog ma Gog Hills. Somewhere around 1861 a pub is first mentioned. Presumably it was intended to pick up passing trade from the road. At first it was called the Hills Trees, but it seems to have turned into Hilltrees. Its last landlord  - about 1949 - was ex-Sgt Oliver of Cambridge Borough Police. The pub seems to have closed about 1969, and was then converted into a house. It looks very tatty these days. 

A note on pubs

                  Brewing was one of the boom industries of the Industrial Revolution, and soon became big business. Brewers took to the new technology of steam, and made economies of scale. Beer, which had been produced by the farmer’s wife in the 16th century, now came from an industrial process. Small (weak) beer was the traditional home-brewed ale, and was often given, even in the 19th century, as part of a labourer’s wages. Porter was the brewery beer in Victorian days, a dark hoppy beer, and strong. It developed in London in the 18th century, and soon spread to the provinces.

            Alcohol has its good and its bad sides. The Gin craze in 18th century London demonstrated amply how bad it could be, and resulted in strong controls which were again relaxed in 1830, leading to a flood of new beerhouses. As the 19th century progressed, efforts were made to tighten up drinking laws again. New licensing laws in 1869 gave magistrates control of drinking establishments. Licences were generally granted to respectable individuals such as ex-policemen or ex-soldiers (who presumably also had the experience and strength to deal with troublesome clients!). Tight control was exercised over drunkenness, gaming and prostitution on the premises.  During the First World War very restricted licensing hours were introduced – lunchtime opening from 12 to 2.40 and evenings from 18.30 to 21.30. Lloyd George had declared: “Drink is doing us more damage in the War than all the German submarines put together”. Well, would you want to work in a munitions factory after a few beers? Though these hours were extended somewhat after the war, the separate lunchtime and evening sessions remained until 2005.

                  The pub was, for a very long time, a male preserve. As far as the labouring classes were concerned, the 19th century was a time when men spent a lot of time in male company, and women in women’s company. The house was the woman’s domain, and, with maybe 9 children filling the house, a labourer could easily feel the urge to retreat to the pub, and many did.  A woman’s appearance would not necessarily be welcome, or indeed seemly. Even into the 1950s and 1960s, it was not considered nice for a woman to go into a pub alone, though women might go in groups. They were more likely to go into the lounge bar. Now food is the mainstay of many pub businesses, as drinking in the pub has declined.

                  I’ve mentioned how, recently, so many of our pubs have gone out of business. It happens when there isn’t a living to be made out of the business. In Victorian times, for all that so much beer was consumed, it was unusual for a publican, at least in the country, to live solely on his pub business. You will have seen how most of our Shelford publicans had more than one string to their bow. The pub business could comfortably be left to the wife and children, who could serve the drink, while the husband would be around to keep order and deal with drunken labourers. Probably there was only sporadic trade through much of the day, and the wife could do her housework and serve the odd pint. The pub trade was one of the few trades where a widow could carry on alone. In most of our pubs, when the husband died, the wife simply carried on, sometimes with the help of a son or two, or with her daughters. This was an important consideration. Widows could often be reduced to pauperism if their husbands died or were infirm.  Running a pub was a suitable job for a woman, it seems.

            Breweries came and went with bewildering rapidity. If you are interested in the history of Cambridge Breweries, there is a small book on the subject:

Cambridge Breweries by R J Flood