The original Hole in the Wall is believed to have been either (1) a highwayman’s retreat, such as the Hole in the Wall in Chandos Street, where Claude Duval was captured, or (2) an aperture made in the wall of a debtor’s prison through which charitable people might offer gifts of money or victuals to the unfortunate inmates. At the Hole in the Wall in the Borough there is a museum of curiosities worth a visit, and another under the railway arches of Waterloo Station is a noted depot for Petersfield ales, much frequented by railway men and various odd characters. There is to this day a very suggestive hole in the wall at Turpin’s Cave, a small inn near High Beech, Epping Forest. In this hole it is commonly believed that the celebrated highwayman hid himself on many occasions when hard pressed by the police. The story can very easily be believed by anyone with a spark of imagination, for the inn lies in a secluded nook which even to-day is not at all easy to find, in spite of a signboard stuck up in the gorse bushes some little distance from the road. The hole itself is a kind of arched ruin, bricked over, and might at a pinch have held Black Bess and her famous rider.
Sign of Black’s Head, Ashbourne
Almost gone are the heavy frames and beams which once stretched across the highways and effectually proclaimed the name and style under which the innkeeper carried on his business. On these beams a group of swans disported in effigy before the Four Swans at Waltham Cross. A fine magpie dangled from the centre at Stonham, Suffolk, while elsewhere a fox was represented crossing the beam and followed by a bevy of hounds. There is still remaining such a beam, from the centre of which a bell is suspended outside the Bell at Edenbridge. Another is still in use at Ashbourne, Derbyshire, where the Green Man and Black’s Head, an old Georgian posting house, announces its existence by a long beam stretched across the street, supported at one end by a pole, the other end running into the red brick wall of the building, immediately over the typical archway leading to the inn yard. The black’s head is an effigy in carved and painted wood, planted firmly in the centre of the beam and looking for all the world as if it had only lately been cut off and put there to warn other blacks of a similar awful fate, if ever they should chance to come to Ashbourne. Under the head, suspended from the beam is a big framed picture, and a small secondary beam on each side has recently been placed to carry those two terribly modern words, “garage” and “petrol.” One can fancy the old driver of the four-in-hand, could he come to life again, scratching his head in perplexity over the hidden mysteries of these literary innovations to the familiar sign. Ashbourne, it may be remarked in passing, whilst perhaps not glorying in “one man one public-house,” is certainly as close to that condition of things as any town in England. To a stranger visiting Ashbourne in the middle of the week and feeling the charm of its quiet old-world streets with but few people walking about, it is a matter for wonder as to how all the licensed houses keep going. But go there on market days and note the waggons and farmers’ carts standing in rows outside every hostelry and the matter becomes much more easily understood. Ashbourne, like one or two other towns of the North Derbyshire and Staffordshire moors, has until quite recently been cut off from the run of the country’s traffic, and is still a market centre for a very extensive agricultural district. Within the last year or two a road motor service has placed it in rapid and frequent communication with the county town, so that this comparative isolation is likely to last very little longer.
The White Hart at Scole, in Norfolk, once had the most expensive and elaborate sign of this character ever produced. High above the road it stretched, on one side attached to the house, and resting on a brick pier at the opposite end across the way. In the centre was a noble White Hart, carved in a stately wreath, while on each side were no less than twenty-four allegorical figures in compartments. The whole was designed by John Fairchild, in 1655, and cost £1,057. An engraving was published by Martin in 1740. By the way, this inn also possessed “a very large round bed big enough to hold fifteen or twenty couples in imitation of the great bed at Ware.”
Sign of White Hart, Witham
Of existing signs, the most remarkable is the Red Lion of Martlesham outside an inn which is itself both old and curious. This monster, a byword all over Suffolk, was probably at one time the figure-head of a ship, and local tradition ascribes it to one of the Dutch warships destroyed in the battle of Sole Bay, fought off Southwold in 1672. Outside the Bear at Wantage stands a lifelike carved bear on a high pedestal; at the Bear at Chelsham, in Surrey, a large white bear lurks amongst the shrubs of the front garden in a way very startling to timid passers-by, especially at dusk. The Swan at Great Shefford, in Bucks, has a most effective sign, in the form of a large vane representing a swan; while the White Horse at Ipswich, as in Mr. Pickwick’s time, “is rendered the more conspicuous by a stone statue of some rapacious animal with flowing mane and tail distantly resembling an insane cart-horse, which is elevated above the principal door.”
The disused Sun Inn at Saffron Walden, built about 1625, has for its sign a noble piece of plaster work in the tympanum representing the Sun supported by two giants. A curious old piece of carving which displays a white swan chained to a tree flanked by the arms of England and France forms the sign of the Swan Inn at Clare, and probably is intended to commemorate some triumph of the House of Clarence over the Lancastrians. Another beautiful little inn, now disused and sadly neglected, the Angel at Theale, has angel heads introduced over each of its dainty oriels.
