The two inns of Ripley—the great red-bricked “Talbot” and the rustic, white-faced “Anchor”—are typical, in their individual ways, of old road life that called them into existence centuries before ever the cycle came into being. The “Talbot,” you see at a glance, was the coaching-and posting-house; the “Anchor” was the house where the waggoners pulled up and the packmen stayed and the humbler wayfarers found a welcome. When railways came, both alike fell into the cold shade of neglect, but came into their own once more during those years of cycling popularity already mentioned. Now that Ripley has ceased to be the popular place it was, another reverse of fortune has overtaken them in common.
At Rickmansworth, which seems to be the battle-ground of Benskin’s Watford Ales, Mullen’s Hertford brews, and the various tipples of half a dozen other surrounding townlets, in addition to the liquors of its own local brewery, there are extraordinary numbers of inns. How do they exist? By consuming each other’s stock-in-trade? Or is the thirst of Rickmansworth so hardly quenched? The inquiring mind is at a nonplus, and is likely to remain so.
A romantic history, in the barley-brew sort, belongs to Rickmansworth; for there, until a year or so later than 1856, by the wish of some pious benefactor—heaven be his bed!—the local authorities every morning placed a cask of ale by the roadside, at the foot of the hill, on the way to Watford. If, however, it were no better than the very “small” and ditchwater-flat ale that to this day forms the “Wayfarers’ Dole” at the Hospital of St. Cross, near Winchester, its discontinuance could have been no great loss.
There was a similarly great and glorious time at Hoddesdon, not so long since but that some ancients still speak of it with moist eyes and regretful accents, when beer was free to all comers. A brewer of that town, one Christian Catherow—a Christian indeed—left a bequest by which a large barrel of ale was placed in the High Street and kept constantly replenished, for the use of all and sundry, who had but to help themselves from an iron pot, chained to a post beside the barrel. Alas! in some mysterious way the ale gradually deteriorated from good strong drink to table-beer, then it became mere purge, and then small beer of the smallest, and at last, about 1841—oh, horrible!—water.
THE “ANCHOR,” RIPLEY, IN THE DAYS OF THE DIBBLES AND THE CYCLING BOOM.
Photo by R. W. Thomas.
Apart from the “Swan” at Rickmansworth, with quaintly carved sign of a swan, dated 1799, swimming among bulrushes, there are but two or three important hostelries in the town; the others are chiefly ale-houses of the semi-rustic type, most of them old enough and quaintly enough built to seem natural productions of the soil. Among them the “Halfway House” and the “Rose and Crown” at Mill End are typical; houses that are, above all else, “good pull-ups” for carmen and waggoners, where a tankard of ale and a goodly chunk of bread with its cousinly cheese are usually called for while the horses outside are taking their nosebag refreshment. Both these old houses are racy of the soil: the “Rose and Crown,” the older of the two, but the “Halfway House” the most curious, by reason of its odd arrangement of seats outside, with backs formed by the window-shutters that were formerly—in times not so secure as our own—put up and firmly secured every night.
THE “HALFWAY HOUSE,” RICKMANSWORTH.
