SIGN OF THE “RED LION,” GREAT MISSENDEN.
At Stourbridge, in Worcestershire, and at some other places, the sign of the “Labour in Vain” is met with, representing two busy persons in the act of trying to scrub a nigger white. The Stourbridge example shows two very serious-looking maid-servants striving to perform that impossible task, while the nigger, whose head and shoulders are seen emerging from a dolly tub, has a large, superior smile, only sufficiently to be expressed by a foot-rule.
SIGN OF THE “LABOUR IN VAIN.”
Queer signs are often the product of ignorant alteration of old signs whose original meaning has become obscured by lapse of time. The “Mourning Bush,” for example, was a sign set up originally by a Royalist innkeeper, grieving for the death of Charles the First. A bush, or bundle of twigs, was at that time the usual sign of an ale-house, and he swathed his in black. What if he could revisit this earth after these two hundred and fifty years, and find that sign corrupted, at a little inn near Shifnal, Shropshire, into the “Maund and Bush,” the sign representing a hardy-looking laurel and a basket—“maund” being a provincialism for a wicker basket!
The “Coach and Dogs” sign at Oswestry, a queer variant of the more usual “Coach and Horses” found so numerously all over the country, takes its origin from an eccentric country gentleman, one Edward Lloyd, of Llanforda, two miles from Oswestry, whose whim it was to drive to and from the town in a diminutive chaise drawn by two retrievers.
The “Eight Bells” at Twickenham, in itself no more than a commonplace public-house, has for a sign an oddly assorted group of eight actual bells, apparently gathered at haphazard from various marine-stores, for no two are exactly of a size. Hanging as they do from a wooden bracket, projecting over the pathway, and showing prominently against the sky, they help to make the not very desirable bye-lane picturesque. It is a lane that runs down to the river, where the Twickenham eyots divide the stream in two, and has not yet been levelled to the ordinary suburban respectability of the neighbourhood. Waterside folk and other queer fish reside in, and resort to it, and on Saturday evenings the usual beery hum proceeding o’ nights from the “Eight Bells” develops into a spirituous tumult, ending at closing-time with stumbling steps and incoherent snatches of song, as the revellers, at odds with kerbstones and lamp-posts, make their devious way home.
