It is essentially the business of a sign to be in some way queer, for by attracting attention you also secure trade. The first problem of sign-painters was to attract the attention and to reach the intelligence of those who could not read—a class in times not so long since very large and grossly ignorant. For their benefit the barber displayed his parti-coloured pole, the maker of fishing-tackle hung out his rod and fish, the hosier showed his Golden Fleece, and the pawnbroker the three golden balls. In the same way the “Lions” of the various inns in town and country were pictured red, white, black, or even blue, so that the unlettered but not colour-blind should at least be able to use the sense that nature gave them, and from the rival lions make a choice. But lions were never familiar objects in the British landscape, and the sign-painter, lacking a model, in presenting his idea of that “king of beasts” often merely succeeded in picturing something that, unlike anything on earth, was often styled by Hodge a “ramping cat.” In such a manner the former “Cats” inn at Sevenoaks obtained its name. Its signboard originally displayed the arms of the Sackvilles, with their supporters, two white leopards, spotted black; but partly, no doubt, because the painting was bad, and in part because leopards did not come within the everyday experience of the Kentish rustic, the house became known by the more homely name. The “Leather Bottle” was once a sign understood by all; but in its last years that of the “Leather Bottle” public-house, in Leather Lane, Holborn, became something of a puzzle.
SIGN OF THE “LEATHER BOTTLE,” LEATHER LANE.
Removed 1896.
Perhaps the most ingenious and unusual sign it is possible to find throughout the whole length and breadth of the country is that of the little unassuming inn in Castlegate, Grantham, known indifferently as the “Beehive” and the “Living Sign.” A sapling tree growing on the pavement in front of the house has a beehive fixed in its branches, with an inscribed board calling attention to the fact during those summer months when foliage obscures it:
Stop, traveller, this wondrous Sign explore,
And say, when thou hast viewed it o’er and o’er,
“Grantham, now two rareties are thine,
A lofty steeple and a living Sign.”
The beehive being generally occupied, the invitation to “explore” it is perhaps an unfortunate choice of language. At any rate, the traveller is much more likely to explore the house than the sign of it.
The “Pack Horse and Talbot” may now, by sheer lapse of time, be regarded as a queer sign. It is the name of what was once an inn but is now a public-house, on the Chiswick High Road, Turnham Green—a thoroughfare which is also the old coach-road to Bath. The painted sign is a pictorial allusion to the ancient wayfaring days when packmen journeyed through the country with their wares on horseback, and accompanied by a faithful dog who kept guard over his master’s goods. This type of dog—the “talbot,” the old English hound—is now extinct. Probably not one person in every thousand of those who pass the house could explain what the “Talbot” in the sign means, or would think of associating it with the dog seen in the picture.
