GALLOWS SIGNS
It is an ominous name, but the signs that straddle across the road, something after the fashion of football goals, have none other. The day of the gallows sign is done. It flourished most abundantly in the middle of the eighteenth century, when travellers progressed, as it would appear from old prints, under a constant succession of them; but examples are so few nowadays that they are remarkable by reason of their very scarcity, instead of, as formerly, by their number, their size, and their extravagant ornamentation.
The largest, the costliest, and the most extravagant gallows sign that ever existed was that of “Scole White Hart,” on the Norwich Road. The inn remains, but the sign itself disappeared somewhere about 1803, after an existence of 148 years, both house and sign having been built in 1655. Sir Thomas Browne thought it “the noblest sighne-post in England,” as surely it should have been, for it cost £1,057, and was crowded with twenty-five carved figures, some of them of gigantic size, of classic deities and others. Not satisfied with displaying Olympus on the cross-beam, and Hades, with Cerberus and Charon, at the foot of the supporting posts, James Peck, the Norwich merchant who built the house and paid for this galanty-show, caused the armorial bearings of himself and his wife, and those of twelve prominent East Anglian families, to be tricked out in prominent places.[2]
THE “GREYHOUND,” SUTTON.
It does not appear that Grosley, an inquiring and diligent note-taking Frenchman who travelled through England in 1765, noticed this remarkable sign, but so soon as he had landed at Dover he was impressed with the extravagance of signs of all sorts, and as he journeyed to London took note of their “enormous size,” the “ridiculous magnificence of the ornaments with which they are overcharged, and the height of a sort of triumphal arches that support them.” He and other foreigners travelling in England at that period soon discovered that innkeepers overcharged their signs and their guests with the utmost impartiality.
Misson, another of these inquisitive foreigners, had already, in 1719, observed the signs. He rather wittily likened them to “a kind of triumphal arch to the honour of Bacchus.”
It will be seen, therefore, that the surviving signs of this character are very few and very simple, in proportion to their old numbers and ancient extravagance. If we are to believe another eighteenth-century writer on this subject, who declared that most of the inscriptions on these signs were incorrectly spelled, inquiring strangers very often were led astray by the ridiculous titles given by that lack of orthography. “This is the Beer,” said one sign, intending to convey the information that the house was the “Bear”; but the reader will probably agree that the misspelling in this case was more to the point than even the true name of the inn. To know where the beer is; that is the main thing. Who cares what the sign may be, so long as the booze is there? Swipes are no better for a good sign, nor good ale worse for a bad.
The Brighton Road being so greatly travelled, we may claim for the gallows sign of the “George” at Crawley[3] a greater fame than any other, although that of the “Greyhound” at Sutton, on an alternative route, is very well known. The once pretty little weather-boarded inn has, unfortunately, of late been rebuilt in a most distressingly ugly fashion. The gallows sign of the “Cock” at Sutton was pulled down in 1898.[4]
