A curious inscription on a stone let into the brick wall of the “George” at Wanstead, hard by Epping Forest, is variously explained. It is well executed, on a slab of brown sandstone, and reads as under:
TABLET AT THE “GEORGE,” WANSTEAD.
The generally received story is that the house was at the time under repair, and that, as a baker was passing by with a cherry-pie in a tray on his head, for the clergyman, one of the workmen, leaning over the scaffolding, lifted it off, unawares. The “half a guiney” represents the cost of the frolic in the subsequent proceedings. Apparently, the men agreed to annually celebrate the day.
The “George” was rebuilt 1903-4, and is no longer of interest. Nor does it appear to be, as an example of the ornate modern cross between a mere “public-house” and an “hotel,” so popular as before. The observer with a bias in favour of the antique and the picturesque may be excused a certain satisfaction in noting the fact that, in almost every instance of a quaint old inn being ruthlessly demolished to make way for a “palatial” drinking-shop, its trade has suffered the most abysmal—not the most extraordinary—decline. Not extraordinary, because not merely the antiquary or the sentimentalist is outraged: the great bulk of people, who would not ordinarily be suspected of any such feeling for the out-of-date and the ramshackle, are grossly offended, and resent the offence in a very practical way; while the carters, the waggoners, and such-like road-farers, to whom the homely old inns were each, in the well-known phrase, a “good pull-up,” are abashed by the magnificence of polished mahogany and brass, and resentful of saucy barmaids. The rustic suburban inn did a larger trade with the carters and waggoners than might be suspected, and the loss of its withdrawal in such cases is not compensated for by any access of “higher class” business. We regret the old-time suburban inn now it is too late, although we were perhaps not ourselves frequenters of those low-ceilinged interiors, where the floor was of sanded flagstones, and the seats of upturned barrels.
To name some of the many houses thus mistakenly, and disastrously, modernised would be invidious, but instances of trade thus frightened away are familiar to every one. It should not have been altogether outside any practical scheme restoration, to repair, or even to enlarge, such places of old association without destroying their old-world look and arrangements; and this has in numberless instances been recognised when the mischief has been irrevocably wrought.
CHAPTER VI
THE HIGHEST INNS IN ENGLAND