Back from France...

...having slept too much, read too much, eaten too much and drunk too much. The diet begins today!

Oh, the Good Granny Guide I mentioned before we went away proved a success after all.

Mars v Venus

I earned some disapprobation yesterday. I brought the Old Bat a present from the Lions' book fair - a book entitled The Good Granny Guide by Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall. I thought it looked as though it might amuse her, but I got it wrong again. 'Just like a man!' was her comment.



Not entirely unconnected with the previous paragraph, I saw a report in the newspaper this week of some research undertaken by an American (not that that is germane) professor who must need something useful to do in his life. Perhaps he should take up blogging - or even just reading other people's blogs.

It would seem that the said Prof researched why women like browsing the shops whereas men don't. He posits that this is a genetic thing, or liked to the X/Y chromosome, and can be traced back as far as the Stone Age. In those days, women went out searching for fruit, berries and nuts and had to be very careful to pick just the right ones, so they looked at them carefully, moving from one bush to another to make sure they selected only the very best quality. This makes them capable of going from shop to shop trying to ensure that the sweater or whatever is exactly the right shade of green, blue or red, and is made to just the right pattern. Men, on the other hand, set out to kill a bear or deer or bloody great dinosaur, and when they had done that they went home to their cave. Get out, get it, get home.

As I shall be out of contact with the bloggosphere for the next week or so, I shall leave you with this conundrum. My own research has been of a more limited extent, but I have noticed a strange thing. Maybe you have as well? When women talk about property which is jointly owned with their husbands - a house, for example - the refer to it as 'mine' - 'my house'. But men refer to it as 'ours' - 'our house'. I have yet to conduct any research into why this may be and will welcome comments.

A family connection

Researching my family tree has thrown up an astonishing number of ancestors who ran pubs. It all starts with my 7x great grandfather who, in 1702, appears to have been prosecuted for selling beer without a license. There is a document in the Hampshire Records Office which reads:
"Borough of Portsmouth
"Robert Hewett and William Tooth do formally make oath that this day how at Portsmouth Simeon Waldgrave did in his dwelling house sell and retail beer and those depositioners do further make oath that they have heard and believe that the said Waldgrave is not licenced to sell and retail ale or beer according to law.
Inv 14:9:1702 (signed) Robert Hewett the mark X of William Tooth"

Come forward to the 1880s and the Woodland Tavern. The licensee was Walter Cooke, a 2x great uncle.

The inn sign produced above has information on the back which reads:

"Some local cynics aver this inn was so named as a protest against 19th century planning, although there is little doubt a tavern of this name existed when the area was still largely wooded, and supplied much of the timber for His (or Her) Majesty's more picturesque but less efficient men-of-war." Those ships would have been built in Chatham Dockyard, where my grandfather was employed as a shipwright - but long after the ships were built of wood.

Sign ins

Before my granddaughter interrupted me I think I had just reached the fact that Whitbread's very soon produced a second series of fifty inn signs. By the end of 1952 I had collected several, but matters were put on hold for pretty much all of 1953 while I was away at school on the Isle of Wight (which is an altogether different story). The third, fourth and fifth series were produced in cardboard, and there was more information printed on the back. It wasn't until the fifth series came out (must have been 1954 or 55) that some of us twigged on to how best to collect them. Our father's had, of course, been encouraged to visit all the local outlets, a task taken up more eagerly by some than by others, but as my father was away with the Navy I wasn't able to adopt this approach. But for the fifth series, I somehow managed to obtain a complete list of the pubs covered. It was then a simple matter to write to the licensee of each pub, enclosing a stamped addressed envelope, and ask for an inn sign. Most were happy to oblige, or, if not exactly happy, they did oblige anyway. But some stuck to the letter of the law and refused to hand over a sign without a drink being bought. There were, I seem to remember, three of these, and each of those three pubs was in a pretty inaccessible spot as far as we Medway-towns-ites were concerned. I remember that two of them were the Red Lion at Stodmarsh and the Ypres Castle at Rye, but I can't remember the third. But there were ways and means.

Time for a break

I'll continue the inn sign saga later, but today, please meet my little princess.



Emily is 2½ and has just discovered that she likes oranges. She spotted the fruit bowl when she visited last Sunday and helped herself to one, although Grandma had to peel it for her. She can, of course, twist Grandad round her little finger, but hey, that's what Grandads are for, isn't it? I've noticed that Grandma isn't immune.

By the way, Emily is blonde, not ginger. I don't know what happened to the photo. Who said the camera never lies?

To continue

It must have been in 1950 or, more likely, 1951 that Whitbread's introduced a new marketing ploy. They selected 50 of their pubs and produced miniature copies of the signs of those pubs, each pub having a supply of its own miniature signs to be given to customers. Those miniatures were printed onto thin sheets of tin, 2" x 3", with just a minimum of detail on the back. It didn't take long before we schoolboys had started collecting the miniatures. Being printed onto tin, the pictures were particularly susceptible to scratching, so we protected out collections by wrapping each miniature in a sheet of toilet paper. Izal was the usual brand, probably because it was the most commonly used (no doubt price had something to do with that). None of this soft namby-pamby stuff we use nowadays, Izal was smooth and shiny on one side, slightly rough and matt on the other. And it was stiff, so it was easy to fold around the inn signs.

And I have just discovered that Wateringbury had at least two more pubs.

Inn signs

It was a tortuous thread that reminded me of a hobby I had rather more than 50 years ago, that of collecting inn signs. I don't mean to suggest that I crept out at the dead of night with a ladder and a toolbox to remove the signs from local hostelries. By way of explanation I should start by saying that there was at the time a brewery based at a village in Kent (which has since become a national name although it has no doubt been taken over by an international name by now). The said brewery also owned a fairly substantial chain of public houses which were known for their artistic and/or humorous hanging signs. Some of the pubs had unusual names themselves. I should imagine that Royal Oak or King's Head are possibly the most common names, although Red Lion could well be a contender.

The village where the brewery was based - Wateringbury - boasted at least three pubs. There was while a little further along the road wasand on the edge of the village was

I think perhaps we will return to this another day. Just looking at those pictures is making me thirsty!