THE “GEORGE THE FOURTH TAVERN,” CLARE MARKET.
It was “what ordinary people would designate a public-house,” and has been identified by most with the “Old Black Jack” in Portsmouth Street, or its next-door neighbour, the “George the Fourth Tavern,” both demolished in 1896. The last-named house was remarkable for entirely overhanging the pavement, the very tall building being supported on wooden posts springing from the kerb. In the words of Dickens: “In the lower windows, which were decorated with curtains of a saffron hue, dangled two or three printed cards, bearing reference to Devonshire cyder and Dantzic spruce, while a large black board, announcing in white letters to an enlightened public that there were 500,000 barrels of double stout in the cellars of the establishment, left the mind in a state of not unpleasing doubt and uncertainty as to the precise direction in the bowels of the earth in which this mighty cavern might be supposed to extend. When we add that the weather-beaten sign-board bore the half-obliterated semblance of a magpie intently eyeing a crooked streak of brown paint, which the neighbours had been taught from infancy to consider as the ‘stump,’ we have said all that need be said of the exterior of the edifice.”
The “Black Jack,” next door, was in the eighteenth century the scene of one of the famous Jack Sheppard’s exploits. The Bow Street runners entered the house after him, and, as they went in at the door, he jumped out of a first-floor window. In thieving circles the house was afterwards known as “The Jump.” The “Black Jack,” however, romantic though the title sounds, did not owe its name to Sheppard, but to that old style of vessel, the leathern jacks or jugs of the Middle Ages. For their better preservation, the old leathern jacks were often treated with a coating of pitch: hence the name of “pitcher,” at a very early period enlarged to denote jugs in general, whether of leather or of earthenware.
The proverbial pitcher that goes often to the well and is broken at last could not possibly be a leathern one, for the greatest virtue of the leathern vessel was its indestructible nature, well set forth in the old song of “The Leather Bottel”:
And when the bottle at last grows old,
And will good liquor no longer hold,
Out of its sides you may make a clout
To mend your shoes when they’re worn out;
Or take and hang it upon a pin—
’Twill serve to put hinges and odd things in.
So I hope his soul in Heaven may dwell
Who first found out the Leather Bottel.
Such leather bottles, some of them very ancient, are often to be found, even at this day, in the barns and outhouses of remote hamlets, with a side cut away to receive those “hinges and odd things” of the verse. They are also often used to hold cart-grease.
The “Bull,” Whitechapel, whence Mr. Tony Weller “worked down” to Ipswich, was numbered No. 25, Aldgate High Street. It stood in the rear of the narrow entry shown in the accompanying illustration. Rightly, it will be seen, did Mr. Tony Weller advise the “outsides” on his coach to “take care o’ the archvay, gen’lm’n.” The “Bull” was long occupied by the widowed Mrs. Ann Nelson—one of those stern, dignified, magisterial women of business who were a quite remarkable feature of the coaching age, who saw their husbands off to an early grave, and alone carried on the peculiarly exacting double business of innkeeping and coach-proprietorship, and did so with success. Mrs. Ann Nelson—no one ever dared so greatly as to spell her name “Anne”—was the Napoleon and Cæsar combined of the coaching business on the East Anglian roads, and accomplished the remarkable feat—remarkable for an innkeeper in the East End of London—of also owning that crack mail-coach of the West of England Road, the Devonport “Quicksilver.” As Mrs. Nelson would permit no “e” to her Christian name, so also she would never hear of her house being called “hotel.” It was, to the last, the “Bull Inn”; as you see in the illustration, with Martin’s woollen-drapery shop, formerly that of James Johnson, whip-maker, on the one side and that of Lee, the confectioner, on the other. Richard Lee himself you perceive standing on the pavement, taking a very keen interest in the coach emerging from the yard, as he had every reason to do; for he, like William Lee, his father before him, was a partner, though not a publicly acknowledged one, with Mrs. Nelson, and the money he made out of his jam tarts he invested, with much profit to himself, in that autocratic lady’s coaching speculations.
From the date of the opening of the Eastern Counties Railway, in 1839, the business of the “Bull” began to decline, and the house was at length sold and demolished in 1868.[16]
