“Charles Collins liveth here,
Sells rum, brandy, gin, and beer;
I make this board a little wider,
To let you know I sell good cyder.”
The Cross-bullets, a name puzzling at first sight, was a sign in Thames Street in the seventeenth century, representing two bar-shot crossed, which the trades token elucidates by the equally puzzling legend, “at the Crose bvlets;” this was an instrument of destruction formerly used in naval engagements, and for that reason set up in the neighbourhood of the shipping.
If we may believe a jocular article on a quack handbill in the Spectator, No. 444, there was a Cannon-ball in Drury Lane; for he mentions that—
“In Russell Court, over against the Canonball, at the Surgeons’ Arms, in Drury Lane, is lately come from his travels a surgeon who has practised surgery and physic both by sea and land these twenty-four years. He (by the blessing) cures the Yellow Jaundice, Green sickness, Scurvey, Dropsy, Surfeits, Long sea voyages, Campaigns, and women’s miscarriages, lyings in, etc., as some people that has been lamed these thirty years can testify; in short he cureth all diseases incident on man, women, or children.”
Undoubtedly this bill had been slightly touched up in passing through the hands of the Spectator, who, like the mythological king, “quodcunque tetigit inaurat,” for it is rather “too good to be true.”
The Halbert and Crown was, in 1791, the sign of Paul Savigne, a cutler in St Martin’s Churchyard; whilst the Spear in Hand is at the present day the sign of a public-house at Norwich, being undoubtedly a popular version of some family crest.
In Jews’ Row, or Royal Hospital Row, Chelsea, there is a sign which greatly mystifies the maimed old heroes of the Peninsula and Waterloo, and many others besides; this is the Snow-shoes. It is the sign of a house of old standing, and was set up during the excitement of the American war of independence, when snow-shoes formed part of the equipment of the troops sent out to fight the battles of King George against “Mr Washington and his rebels.”
One of the low public-houses that stood on the outskirts of London, towards Hyde Park Corner, at the end of the last century, was called the Triumphal Car. There were a great many other houses of the same description in that neighbourhood, viz., the Hercules Pillars, the Red Lion, the Swan, the Golden Lion, the Horse-shoe, the Running Horse, the Barleymow, the White Horse, and the Half-moon, which two last have given names to two streets in Piccadilly. The sign of the Triumphal Car was in all probability bestowed upon the house in honour of the soldiers who used to visit it.
“These public-houses, about the middle of last century, were much visited on Sundays, but those contiguous to Hyde Park were chiefly resorted to by soldiers, particularly on review days, when there were long wooden seats fixed in the street before the houses for the accommodation of six or seven barbers, who were employed on field days in powdering those youths who were not adroit enough to dress each other’s hair. Yet it was not unusual for twenty or thirty of the older soldiers to bestride a form in the open air, where each combed, soaped, powdered, and tied the hair of his comrade, and afterwards underwent the same operation himself.”[479]