by James Moore
In more recent times, pubs have played roles in cases of organised crime. Members of the gang that took part in the Great Train Robbery of 1963 hatched their plans in the pubs and clubs of London. Chief among these was the Star Tavern in upmarket Belgravia, the favourite drinking spot of the heist’s suave mastermind Bruce Reynolds. Other pubs, including The Spencer Arms in Putney and The Angelsea Arms in South Kensington, claim to have done their bit as the caper was organised. The robbers, who held up a Royal Mail train in Buckinghamshire, got away with £2.6 million. Then there was the Brinks-Mat robbery in 1983, which saw £25 million in gold stolen at Heathrow Airport, most of which was never recovered. George Francis, one of those thought to have laundered the loot, was gunned down dead in 2003. He had only narrowly avoided being killed in 1985 when he was shot by a hooded gunman at his pub, the Henry VIII, in Hever Castle, Kent.
The Star Tavern, Belgravia, West London, where the Great Train Robbery was planned. (© James Moore)
LOCATIONS: Sir John Falstaff, Gravesend Road, Rochester, Kent, ME3 7NZ, 01634 717104, www.sirjohnfalstaff.co.uk; The Bear Hotel, No. 41 Charnham Street, Hungerford, West Berkshire, RG17 0EL, 01488 682512, www.thebearhotelhungerford.co.uk; The Bull, No. 151 Shooters Hill, London, SE18 3HP, 020 8856 0691; The Black Horse, Main Road, Cherhill, Calne, Wiltshire, 01249 813365, www.theblackhorsecherhill.co.uk; Royal Anchor, Nos 9-11 The Square, Liphook, Hampshire, GU30 7AD, 01428 722244, www.hungryhorse.co.uk; The Sun Hotel, Sun Street, Hitchin, Hertfordshire, SG5 1AF, 01462 432092, www.oldenglishinns.co.uk; Jamaica Inn, Bolventor, Launceston, Cornwall, PL15 7TS, 01566 86250, www.jamaicainn.co.uk; The Lobster Smack, Haven Road, Canvey Island, Essex, SS8 0NR, 01268 514297, www.thelobstersmackcanveyisland.co.uk; The Star, High Street, Alfriston, East Sussex BN26 5TA, 01323 870495, www.thestaralfriston.co.uk; Ye Olde Smugglers Inne, Waterloo Square, Alfriston, Polegate, East Sussex, BN26 5UE, 01323 870241, www.yeoldesmugglersinne.co.uk; The Star Tavern, No. 6 Belgrave Mews West, London, SW1X 8HT, 020 7235 3019, www.star-tavern-belgravia.co.uk; The Spencer Arms, No. 237 Lower Richmond Road, Putney, London, SW15 1HJ, www.thespencerpub.co.uk; The Angelsea Arms, No. 15 Selwood Terrace, South Kensington, London SW7 3QG, 020 7373 7960, www.angleseaarms.com; The Henry VIII, Hever Road, Edenbridge, Kent, TN8 7NH, 01732 862 457, www.shepherdneame.co.uk
4
PLOTS, RIOTS
AND REBELLIONS
On 20 May 1604, a group of five men met for a secret meeting at an inn called the Duck and Drake near The Strand in St Clement’s parish of London. The inn was the place where a Catholic called Thomas Winter usually stayed when he was in the capital. Joining Winter were a small band of co-conspirators: Robert Catesby, the leader, along with John Wright, Thomas Percy and Guy Fawkes. It was here, no doubt fuelled by a little wine, that they formulated their plan to kill King James I. As Thomas Winter later confessed:
So we met behind St. Clement’s, Mr. Catesby, Mr. Percy, Mr. Wright, Mr. Guy Fawkes, and myself, and having, upon a primer, given each other the oath of secrecy, in a chamber where no other body was, we went after into the next room and heard Mass, and received the blessed Sacrament upon the same.
As every history student knows, the plot involved hiding barrels of gunpowder in a cellar underneath the House of Lords. The intention was to blow up everyone inside, including the monarch, on 5 November, during the opening of parliament. The scheme was uncovered at the last moment thanks to a tip-off.
Jack Straw’s Castle, a former pub which got its name from a fourteenth-century rebel. (© James Moore)
It was not the first occasion when one of the nation’s inns had been at the centre of an attempt to overthrow the ruling elite, nor would it be the last. An earlier rebellion, which originated in Kent, had seen Jack Cade head a popular uprising against King Henry VI and lead an army to London. He made the White Hart in Southwark his headquarters before storming across London Bridge into the city. The revolt was soon put down after a battle on the bridge itself. The White Hart, which was next door to the existing George, a similar inn on Borough High Street, was pulled down in the nineteenth century. Another failed rebellion, that of Thomas Wyatt against Queen Mary in 1554, ended outside another of London’s most historic lost inns, the Belle Sauvage. It was here that Wyatt rested in despair on a bench, realising that the game was up. Beheaded for treason, Wyatt didn’t get the accolade of having a London pub named after him like former rebel Jack Straw. One of the leaders of the Peasant’s Revolt, in 1381, Straw was also executed. But he was remembered at the Jack’s Straw’s Castle in Hampstead, North London. The pub, which closed in the 1990s, commemorated an earlier speech to followers made on the heath from a hay wagon.
In 1780, London was rocked by the Gordon Riots, which erupted after the government proposed legislation to reduce the restrictions imposed on Catholics. During the unrest 700 people were killed and 12,000 troops had to be deployed to put down the uprising. The leaders of the riots would meet at The Boot tavern in Cromer Street near King’s Cross. At one point during the disturbances a mob marched on Kenwood House in Hampstead, the home of the pro-Catholic Lord Chief Justice, the Earl of Mansfield. They intended to burn the villa to the ground, but on the way they stopped at The Spaniards Inn, already nearly 200 years old, for refreshments. The Spaniards has since been mentioned in both Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. On this occasion, a shrewd landlord plied his rowdy customers with free drink until cavalry arrived to protect the house. There were more religious disturbances in the Midlands in 1791 when the Birmingham Hotel in the city’s Temple Row was attacked because it was the venue of a dinner held by dissenters to celebrate the French Revolution.
The Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, North London, where eighteenth-century riots were thwarted by the landlord. (Courtesy of Mitchells & Butlers)
The Boot in Cromer Street, London. Leaders of the Gordon Riots assembled in a previous incarnation here. (© James Moore)
In the early nineteenth century another pub, the Horse and Groom in Cato Street, London, played a role in foiling the so-called Cato Street Conspiracy, an attempt to kill the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool and the cabinet. The conspirators were Spencean Philanthropists who believed in the common ownership of land and met in pubs like the Cock in Grafton Street and Nag’s Head in Carnaby Market as well as the Horse and Groom in Marylebone. The latter overlooked a stable where, on 23 February, in a hayloft, the plotters assembled to finalise their plans. However, a police spy was watching them arrive from the Horse and Groom. A magistrate and some soldiers were alerted and arrived to arrest the gang. A scuffle ensued in which one man was killed. Five of those involved in the plot, including Thistlewood, were hanged for high treason at Newgate Prison on 1 May 1820. The Horse and Groom is long gone, but there is a plaque in Cato Street to show the location of the original hayloft.
Despite the failure of this conspiracy, threats to the establishment would increase in the 1830s as elements of society began to press for reform. At this time the Swing Riots swept Southern England as agricultural workers protested against their poor conditions. On 20 November a mob of 300 labourers in Andover, Hampshire, set out from the Angel Inn to smash up a local ironworks. Several of those who took part were transported for life.
Rioters set out from The Angel, Andover, to destroy a local ironworks in 1830. (© James Moore)
In 1848, Europe was swept by a string of popular revolutions, and in England the Chartists, campaigning for electoral reform, were at the height of their influence. Members often met in pubs, like the One Bell in Crayford. The biggest Chartist meeting of some 150,000 people in April of that year on London’s Kennington Common had failed to prompt the government to meet any of their demands. And now a group of frustrated, prominent Chartists planned an armed insurrection in the capital. They first met in June at the Albion beershop on Bethnal Green Road, East London. However, police spies had been at work again and on 16 August the ringleaders were caught at the Orange Tree pub on Orange Street in central London while others were
rounded up at the Angel on Webber Street in Southwark. While Chartist leaders were locked up or transported, many of their demands, such as a secret ballot in elections and payment of MPs, did eventually become law. Today, in Huddersfield, there is even a pub named the Chartist.
In the twentieth century came a very different threat to the state in the form of terrorism. And during the Troubles in Northern Ireland para-military organisations would make pubs and hotels the focus of bombing campaigns both on and off the mainland. On 5 October 1974 the IRA targeted two pubs in Guildford, Surrey, because they were regularly used by British army personnel. The bomb that went off in the Horse and Groom at 8.30 p.m. killed five people and injured sixty-five. The Seven Stars was evacuated before the bomb there exploded at 9 p.m.
The following month, two more pubs in Birmingham were blown up. On 21 November bombs went off at the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town, killing a total of twenty-one people. The site of the Mulberry Bush is now a tourist centre and the Tavern in the Town was rebuilt as the Yard of Ale before becoming a Chinese restaurant.
In 1975 a device planted by the IRA went off in the lobby of the London Hilton on Park Lane, killing two people. Seven years later eleven soldiers and six civilians were killed by an INLA bomb at The Droppin’ Well pub in Ballykelly, County Londonderry, which later became the Riverside Bar.
Perhaps the best known attack of the Troubles was the Brighton Hotel Bombing on 12 October 1984. The Victorian Grand Hotel, built in 1684, was ripped apart by a bomb during the Conservative Party conference. It was aimed at killing senior members of the British government. The Prime Minister narrowly escaped death but five people perished.
LOCATIONS: The Boot, No. 116 Cromer Street, King’s Cross, 020 7837 3842; The Spaniards Inn, Spaniards Road, Hampstead, London, NW3 7JJ, 020 8731 8406, www.thespaniardshampstead.co.uk; The Angel, Andover, No. 95 High Street, Andover, SP10 1ND, 01264 365464; One Bell, No. 170 Old Road, Dartford, DA1 4DY, 01322 315444; The Chartist, No. 74 Commercial Road, Skelmanthorpe, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, HD8 9DS, 01484 864322; London Hilton, No. 22 Park Lane, London, W1K 1BE, 020 7493 8000, www.parklanehilton.com; The Grand Hotel, Brighton, Nos 97–99 King’s Road, Brighton, East Sussex, BN1 2FW, 01273 224300, www.grandbrighton.co.uk
5
BODIES IN THE BAR, POST-MORTEMS AND INQUESTS
Until well into the twentieth century, dead bodies that were discovered in mysterious circumstances were often taken to the local pub or hotel in the first instance. With few official mortuaries they were often simply the nearest ‘public’ place and usually had outbuildings where a corpse could be kept while investigations into how the person had come to die were carried out. In this way, many victims of murder have wound up in pubs, acting as temporary morgues, shortly after their deaths. Given the lack of refrigeration techniques, post-mortems needed to be done quickly and were often done in the pubs too by the nearest surgeon to hand.
On 7 May 1819 the corpse of Stephen Rodway, a coal merchant from Cricklade, was brought to the Bell at Purton Stoke in Wiltshire. The man had been travelling home with a good deal of money after conducting business in Wootton Bassett and had been found lying dead in the road. At 11 p.m. a local surgeon, William Wells, arrived at the Bell to examine the body and subsequently conducted an autopsy there. He found that Rodway had been shot three times. A man had been spotted riding away from the scene of the murder and a bare-knuckle fighter called Robert Watkins was arrested and tried for the murder. He was hanged in the village that July.
Conducting post-mortems in pubs was not always conducive to proper scientific enquiry, as in the case of the serial killer William Palmer. Palmer murdered a string of people in the mid-nineteenth century (see here) but was only brought to book after he poisoned his friend John Cook with strychnine at a hotel in Rugeley, Staffordshire. His medical credentials meant that Palmer was actually present at the post-mortem on Cook when it was carried out at the hotel, during which he tried to disrupt its conduct.
Unsurprisingly, when bodies turned up in a pub, gossip soon spread locally and often there was a clamour to view the body. Sometimes this was indulged, as in the strange case of the Sir William Courtenay who took part in what was dubbed the last battle in England in 1838. Courtenay was a self-styled knight whose real name was John Nichols Thom. He was an innkeeper’s son and wine merchant from Cornwall who later spent time in an asylum in Kent before becoming convinced he was the Messiah. Somehow he managed to recruit a band of disaffected unemployed farm labourers and launch a minor uprising in the county. The army had to be called out and, in a battle at Bossenden Wood near Faversham, Courtenay and seven of his followers were killed along with two soldiers. Having claimed he was immortal, the authorities were keen to show that Courtenay was very much dead in order to quash any more trouble. They exhibited his body, along with those of his dead comrades, in the stables of the Red Lion at Dunkirk. Such was the frenzy to see the bodies and take away souvenirs that the landlord eventually had to nail shut the windows and doors of the pub to protect his property from being ransacked.
Even into the twentieth century, before the advent of meticulous forensic examination of murder scenes and easy communications, the first thought in an apparent murder was not to leave the body where it lay but to remove it to a safe location. The Royal Oak in Stapleford Abbots, Essex, was PC George Gutteridge’s local, just 100yds from where he lived. He often popped in for a pint. And it was to the pub’s coach house that his body was brought after he was gunned down in 1927. George had stopped two men driving a stolen car in a nearby lane who had then shot him. The culprits were eventually tracked down and hanged.
The Red Lion in Dunkirk, Kent, where the body of Sir William Courtenay was put on view to the public. (Courtesy of The Red Lion)
Three years later, on 5 November, the charred remains of a body were found in a burning car in a lane near the village of Hardingstone in Northamptonshire. The remains were taken to the Crown Inn where they were the subject of a post-mortem conducted in the pub’s garage. Alfred Arthur Rouse, a 36-year-old salesman aiming to dodge his debts and start a new life, had hoped police would think that the body was his. It had been found in the Morris Minor that he owned. However, police discovered that Rouse had actually picked up a hitchhiker, clubbed him to death and intentionally set light to the car before going on the run. Rouse, who later confessed to the crime, went to the gallows in Bedford on 10 March 1931, even though his murder victim was never identified.
Until the end of the nineteenth century, inquests into suspicious deaths were routinely carried out at pubs. It may seem strange today but, until the advent of dedicated coroner’s courts, pubs and hotels were often the obvious choice, especially in rural districts, as they were large enough to accommodate all the necessary officials, witnesses and a jury. Plus, of course, refreshments were on tap. This fact led Charles Dickens to observe in his satirical novel Bleak House, published in the early 1850s, that the coroner ‘frequents more public houses than any man alive’. As we have seen, the body of the deceased was often already at the pub, making it easy for a twelve-strong inquest jury – hastily chosen from the ranks of local men – to inspect the remains. Then in the same location, evidence would be heard in front of the coroner. Often the public would be allowed in too. After the jury’s deliberations, sometimes aided by a little ale, the verdict on the cause of death was given; any murder or manslaughter suspect who had been identified was given up to the authorities for a full trial at the local assizes.
This state of affairs was often a recipe for chaos. Dickens was a noted campaigner for social reform and he, for one, did not approve of the habit of holding these serious affairs in an environment that was hardly sober or fitting for a modernising democracy. Bleak House features an inquest which is held at the fictional Sol’s Arms. The coroner finds it almost impossible to be heard above the noise of the pub’s customers busily playing skittles in the background. This was not a wild parody. In 1889 a medical journalist by the name
of Sprigge wrote a scathing appraisal of the pub inquest, saying that ‘The tint of the tavern-parlour vitiated the evidence, ruined the discretion of the jurors, and detracted from the dignity of the juror.’ He went on to complain that ‘the majesty of death evaporated with the fumes from the gin of the jury’. In 1847 an inquest at a pub into the deaths of three children in Ely, Cambridgeshire, descended into farce with the fathers of the deceased drunk in the bar and the mothers shouting obscene language. Despite the criticism, the practice of holding inquests in pubs was commonplace right up until the 1890s, with one piece of research showing that almost every inquest in Lancashire at the time was held in a pub.
The details of many of the most famous murder cases in British history first emerged at inquests in public houses. The case of Mary Ann Cotton, who has been described as Britain’s first female serial killer, initially came to the public’s attention following an inquest at the Rose and Crown, West Auckland, a pub which was then next door to the house in which she lived. By the time of the proceedings, Mary Ann had poisoned as many as twenty people, including three husbands, collecting lucrative insurance payouts along the way. In 1870 Mary Ann had hooked up with Frederick Cotton, but like many of her other victims, he died from stomach problems, followed by his son Frederick Junior and the couple’s baby, Robert. In July 1872 the last remaining Cotton child, Charles, died too, apparently from gastric fever. Yet a parish official had become suspicious after Mary Ann told him, ‘I won’t be troubled long. He’ll go like all the rest of the Cottons.’ A hurried post-mortem was inconclusive and the jury at the inquest returned a verdict of death by natural causes. But newspaper reporters began to look into Mary Ann’s past and found that a string of untimely deaths were linked to her. Meanwhile Charles’ doctor had kept samples of the child’s organs and they tested positive for arsenic. Mary Ann was found guilty of murder and executed at Durham Jail on 24 March 1873.
