by Albert Jack
It was during the period of the War of the Roses that innkeepers would show their allegiance either to the king or to the Duke of York by displaying a red rose or a white one outside their establishments. Some canny landlords would have had both, switching from one to the other as appropriate. But this all came to an end soon after the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, after which the Lancastrian Henry Tudor established himself as King Henry VII, cleverly scotching the competition by immediately marrying Elizabeth of York. With the Houses of York and Lancaster finally united, their family symbols were also merged to form the famous red-and-white Tudor rose. Encouraged to show loyalty to both royal houses, innkeepers now displayed the bicoloured rose and the royal crown.
The Royal Oak
THE TREE THAT GAVE REFUGE TO A STUART KING ON THE RUN
On 30 January 1649, King Charles I of England and Scotland, wearing two shirts to avoid any shivering that might be mistaken for fear, climbed on to the scaffold outside the Banqueting House in London’s Whitehall and was beheaded (see THE KING’S HEAD). This event was intended to mark the end of the English Civil War and the victory of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army over the English monarchy.
But as the saying goes, ‘The king is dead! Long live the king!’ and his eighteen-year-old son, Charles, was soon proclaimed King of Scotland, an entirely separate kingdom at the time. Before long, the boy king was leading an army south to drive out Cromwell. By the spring of 1651, his force of 14,000 well-armed men had crossed the border into England.
However, Cromwell, the great military strategist, had already sent Parliamentarian forces north to disarm suspected Royalist sympathizers by confiscating weapons and horses from the country estates and securing them for his own use in secret locations. As a result, Charles failed to raise any meaningful support on his journey south, and when his army of just over 16,000 men reached Worcester, he was met by a well-prepared and determined force of nearly 30,000 battle-hardened Parliamentarian troops. Early on the morning of 3 September 1651, Cromwell ordered his field commanders to attack Royalist positions around the town and the Battle of Worcester was over within a few short hours. By mid afternoon Charles’s forces were on the run.
His advisers agreed that the king would be safer and draw less attention in a smaller group and one of his companions, Charles Giffard, took him to the White Ladies Priory (where, legend has it, Guinevere retired after the death of King Arthur) and then to Boscobel House on the Shropshire and Staffordshire border in the early hours of 4 September. With Cromwell’s men hard on their heels, Giffard knew they had to move fast. A reward of £1,000, a vast sum of money in 1651, had already been offered for his capture: anybody found to be hiding him was certain to be executed. In an attempt to disguise the king to help prevent his capture, Charles’s distinctive thick, black curly hair was cut short and he was dressed as a simple woodsman.
Tipped off that Cromwell’s forces were closing in, Giffard had nowhere else to go and he was desperate to hide the king. Charles himself later recalled the story for Samuel Pepys:
[Giffard] told me that it would be very dangerous to either stay in the house or go into the wood… that he knew but one way how to pass the next day, and that was to get up into the great oak, in a pretty plain place where we might see round about us, for the enemy would certainly search at the wood for people that had made their escape. Of which proposition I approving, we went and carried with us some victuals [provisions] for the whole day, viz. bread, cheese, small beer, and nothing else, and got up into a great oak that had been lopped three or four years before, and being grown out again very bushy and thick, could not be seen through, and here we stayed all day… While we were in this tree we saw soldiers going up and down in the thicket of the wood, searching for persons escaped, we seeing them, now and then, peeping out of the wood.
It took another six weeks of disguises and adventures before the young king was finally smuggled to safety in France. Charles then stayed in exile until 1660 when he finally returned to London on his thirtieth birthday, 29 May. In 1664 this day was made, by Act of Parliament, a national holiday to mark the restoration and officially called ‘Oak Apple Day’ in honour of the oak tree at Boscobel that had successfully concealed the king and protected him, years earlier, from certain death.
For nearly two hundred years, Oak Apple Day was celebrated all over the land. It was a hugely popular festival. Everyone, high and low, male and female, adult and child, would wear a spray of oak leaves in their lapel or hat: traditionally any child not wearing such an emblem was attacked unmercifully by their schoolfellows and could be pinched, stung with nettles or pelted with rotten eggs. And many taverns and inns were named the Royal Oak to demonstrate their loyalty and support for the monarchy.
By the early 1700s the original oak tree had been all but destroyed by souvenir hunters although, from a single acorn, another fine oak tree has grown alongside the site of the original, called the ‘Son of Royal Oak’. In 2001 Prince Charles, the future King Charles III, planted a sapling alongside this tree after it was severely damaged in a storm. Grown from one of the tree’s acorns, this makes it ‘Grandson of Royal Oak’.
To this day, there are thought to be over six hundred pubs and hotels bearing the name the Royal Oak, making it one of the most popular pub names in Britain. In many cases the traditional pub sign depicts a great oak tree and, if you look hard enough, you may just be able to make out the young king peeping through the branches somewhere near the top.
The Sandboys
THE YOUNG WORKERS WHO FOUND HAPPINESS AT THE BOTTOM OF A BOTTLE
In The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) Dickens describes an inn called the Jolly Sandboys, which has a sign outside depicting three drunken lads, or, as he puts it: ‘increasing their jollity with as many jugs of ale’. A moment of creative licence from the great man? Not if you look back a few years and find Dickens is known to have spent some time in Bristol, a place he also refers to in his 1836 novel The Pickwick Papers.
In those days the town’s landlords would spread sand on the floor of their inns and pubs to soak up any spillages, much in the way that sawdust would have been used in other establishments. The Redcliffe Caves in Bristol were known for the fine sand they contained, which was chiefly used for making glass bottles. The sand was also used for ship’s ballast and for sprinkling on floors. Hence innkeepers would send young lads off into the caves to provide them with a regular supply. Being a sandboy was extremely thirsty work and the youngsters were famous for their bottomless capacity for beer. They were partly paid in ale and consequently were usually half cut – hence Dickens’s invention ‘the jolly sandboy’ and the related phrase ‘happy as a sandboy’. Many pubs around Bristol used sandboys and some adopted the term as a name.
The Saracen’s Head
GRISLY MEMENTO FROM THE CRUSADES?
The reason there are so many Saracen’s Heads in Britain can be traced back to the Crusades, the series of military campaigns that took place in the Middle East between 1095 and 1291, pitting Christians against Muslims. It all began in March 1095 when the Pope (in this case Pope Urban II) called upon all good Christian nations to wage a holy war to recapture Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim rule and to prevent the expansion of the Seljuk Turks into Anatolia (essentially modern Turkey). The Seljuk Turks are better known today as Sunni Muslims, the largest denomination of Islam.
The Crusaders referred to their adversaries as ‘Saracens’, derived from the Arabic word ‘easterners’ but seemingly interpreted by them as ‘people I want to kill’. Indeed, in those days, the warring knights of England managed to slaughter their foes in quite impressive numbers. Legend has it that, on returning to their estates and castles, some brought with them the heads of their Saracen victims as souvenirs. As the Crusades progressed over the decades, many noble families were granted the privilege of using a Saracen’s head as part of their family coat of arms, leading to the long association retained to this day. And hopefully one that will continue,
although a Saracen’s Head pub in Birmingham was recently forced to change its name, for fear of offending Muslims, which will no doubt lead to a campaign for name changes everywhere on grounds of political correctness. Not a crusade I’ll be joining, that’s for sure.
In more recent times, King Charles I spent his last night as a free man at the King’s Arms in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, before surrendering to the Scots, who promptly handed him over to Cromwell. After the king’s execution in 1649 (see THE KING’S HEAD), the inn changed its name to the Saracen’s Head to show allegiance to Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army (maybe in mocking reference to Charles’s dark complexion) and it has kept the name ever since.
The Seven Sisters
THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF ATLAS WHO WERE TRANSFORMED INTO STARS
There are Seven Sisters throughout the world, the name applied both to natural formations – mountains, caves and waterfalls – and manmade ones: skyscrapers, churches and, of course, pubs. Some historians have suggested the chalk cliffs at Seaford on the south coast of England provide the origin of the pub name. But this is hard to justify, especially as I counted eight of them when I was last there. Or perhaps the area of the same name to the north of Tottenham in London may hold the key. Originally called after the seven famous elm trees thought to have been over five hundred years old when they were removed in 1840, they were symbolically replaced in 1885 by the seven Hibbert sisters. In 1955 the trees were again replanted, this time by the seven Basten sisters of north London.
But the real origin of the Seven Sisters can be traced much further back, to a cluster of seven stars called the Pleiades, used by mariners long ago to navigate their way at night. It is this famous and easily visible cluster of stars, part of the Taurus constellation, that has provided the inspiration for the eponymous pub sign, not to mention all those natural and manmade formations.
The Pleiades has played a part in many cultures throughout the world, each with a different story to tell about how the constellation came into being. In Australia the indigenous peoples believe the seven sisters were being chased by a man called Jilbi Tjakamarra and were transformed into stars to escape him, but then Jilbi transformed himself into the Morning Star and continues to chase them across the sky. In China the Pleiades are known as the Hairy Head of the White Tiger in the West, a mythological guardian of the skies. A Cheyenne legend called ‘The Girl Who Married a Dog’ claims the seven stars were the seven puppies a chief’s daughter gave birth to after being visited by a dog in human form. In parts of Europe the seven stars are believed to have been seven maidens who were taken to the heavens to dance for the gods, while the Vikings maintained they were the seven hens of Freya, the goddess of love.
In Greek mythology the original seven sisters were the seven daughters of Atlas, the Titan who supported the planet upon his broad shoulders, but then if you had been paying attention during Classics lessons at school, you’d already know that. Atlas’s daughters, Maia, Electra, Taygete, Alcyone, Celaeno, Sterope and Merope, were beautiful nymphs, six of whom engaged in love affairs with the Olympian gods, including Zeus and Poseidon. These represent the six stars of the Pleiades that shine brightly. One of the stars, however, much dimmer than the rest, represents Merope, who is being shamed for eternity for having an affair with, and becoming pregnant by, a mere mortal, like you and me. So the next time you are drinking in the Seven Sisters, or the Seven Stars, you will know which one to look out for.
The Spion Kop
THE HEROIC DEFEAT COMMEMORATED BY PUBS AND FOOTBALL STANDS
The Spion Kop, a rather unusual name for a pub, comes from a notorious battle in the Second Boer War (1899–1902). During the battle, Spion Kop – which, literally translated, means ‘the big hill to spy from’ (a small hill is a koppie) – was occupied by the Boers (white South Africans). On 23 January 1900, a very foggy night, the Boer lookouts were surprised by around fifteen British soldiers. The British drove the Boers from the Kop and, after being joined by a further 1,000 men, they then dug in their own defensive positions.
But as dawn broke and the fog cleared, the British were horrified to realize they were actually holding only a lower peak and the Boers were on higher ground, surrounding three sides of their position. When a Pretoria Commando unit scaled the rocky kop, they were completely surrounded, at which the Boers seized the opportunity and began to attack.
With their backs against the wall, the British fought valiantly, and despite heavy odds the Boers were forced back on several occasions although casualties were high on both sides. A young Winston Churchill who was in South Africa as a war correspondent, and who had recently escaped from Boer captivity, acted as a courier between the front line and British army headquarters. He noted at the time: ‘Corpses lay here and there. Many of the wounds were of a horrible nature as splinters and fragments from the shells had torn and mutilated them. The shallow trenches were choked with the dead and wounded.’ As darkness fell, the British launched a ferocious attack, gaining the higher ground, and the guns fell silent for the night.
Early the next morning the British commanders, unaware that the Boers had withdrawn during the early hours, ordered their own soldiers off the kop after hearing they were running low on ammunition and had no water. The retreating Boers were thus amazed to find the kop occupied by two of their burghers (civilians), waving down from the peak at them, with no British in sight except the dead and soon to be dead. The result was a rare but significant victory for the Boers: over 1,300 British were either wounded or captured; 243 were dead and many remain buried on the kop. But although the British had retreated, the Boers were too weak to take advantage of their victory and by the end of the year the British returned in numbers to crush the Boer uprising.
An ignominious British defeat seems an unusual choice of name for a pub, but it’s the courage of the soldiers, let down by the poor decisions of their commanders, that is being celebrated. The battle has even lent its name to an English village, near Mansfield in Nottinghamshire. And its name has provided inspiration in the sporting world, too. In 1904, four years after the event, a journalist likened the silhouette of the football fans standing on a newly raised bank of earth at the Woolwich Arsenal football ground to soldiers standing atop Spion Kop. Two years later, another journalist, Ernest Edwards, commented on the newly built open-air embankment at Liverpool’s famous Anfield Stadium: ‘This huge wall of earth has been termed “Spion Kop”, and no doubt this apt name will always be used in future in referring to this spot.’ Shortened to the ‘Kop’, it’s now one of the most recognized venues in the world of football.
The Spofforth
(Edge Hill, Liverpool)
THE DEMON BOWLER WHOSE VICTORY OVER ENGLAND INSPIRED THE ASHES
Also in Liverpool is a pub simply known as the Spofforth, taking its name from the Australian cricketer Fred Spofforth (1853–1926). Feared by batsmen around the world as the ‘Demon Bowler’, and the first man ever to achieve a hat-trick in test match cricket (three wickets taken by a bowler in three consecutive balls), Spofforth was, according to another cricketing legend, W. G. Grace, the ‘most difficult bowler I have ever played against’.
It was Fred Spofforth’s highly effective technique of ‘eye-balling’ a batsman after each delivery, used to devastating effect during the test match in 1882, that gave birth to the famous Ashes series. With England needing only eighty-five runs from their second innings for victory, Spofforth rallied his team and famously shouted: ‘Boys, this thing can be done.’ And the Australians narrowly won by seven runs, Spofforth taking a decisive fourteen wickets in the process. The next morning the Sporting Times wrote a famously satirical obituary for English cricket, declaring: ‘The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.’ The following year journalists wrote of the English tour of Australia as ‘the quest to bring back the ashes’, and so the legend was born, largely thanks to Fred Spofforth.
Sports fans were rather more forgiving in the nineteenth century and when he mo
ved to England in 1888, Spofforth was welcomed with open arms, so much so that he rapidly got married to an English girl. He then played for various English teams, including Derbyshire and the MCC (see LORD’S TAVERN), before turning to business, becoming managing director of the Star Tea Company. Proving himself to be as capable in business as he was talented on the cricket field, Spofforth steered the company to great success. At his death in 1926, he left a fortune of £165,000, a princely sum in those days. The combination of the two quintessential English loves (cricket and tea) had clearly civilized the Demon Bowler.
The Spread Eagle
PROUD SYMBOL OF A NATION OR A CRUEL FORM OF PUNISHMENT?
While the lion has long been regarded the king of the beasts, the eagle is the queen of the skies and, for that reason, the bird most favoured as a heraldic symbol. Implying courage, strength and immortality, the eagle was considered by the ancient Greeks to be Zeus’s messenger; the Romans also associated it with their king of the gods, Jupiter, and made it the symbol of their empire. To identify themselves to the enemy, Roman legions would display three or four standards (see THE STANDARD), the most important of these being the legionary eagle, made of fine silver and carried by a standard bearer wearing a lionskin headdress. This eagle had its wings proudly spread in domination.