Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Pub, London - This Parrot is No More

Step through the narrow alley off Fleet Street and into another century at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, perhaps the most famous of all Historic London Pubs, and well known among Fleet Street pubs. In this debut episode of The Historic London Pubcast, Host & Travel Guide, Eric Blair walks us through London pub history, leading us beneath the low beams and gaslit corners of a London Pub that was rebuilt in 1667 on the site of an older pub destroyed by The Great Fire of London, 1666. This fun episode has history, mystery, famous patrons such as Charles Dickens, Samuel Johnson, and Mark Twain, and yes, a parrot with a sailor’s mouth – Polly The Parrot. Now deceased and perched, stuffed, above the bar. This is episode delights in being a funny history podcast, showcasing British pub culture in old London pubs. Come with us on The Historic London Pubcast for this is not just a London pub crawl, it’s an historic London pub crawl which makes it the best kind of historic London walk! When planning your London trip, and looking for London travel tips, be sure to listen to our podcast first.

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Google map with pubs covered in previous episodes pinned, courtesy of Andy Meddick:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/4/edit?mid=12c-WKa3XiT1qTLydK8psZocUR7Y_Wes&usp=sharing

Or TinyURL: https://tinyurl.com/bduca5dv

The following resources are referenced or quoted frequently in these episodes:

• Ted Bruning  -- Historic Pubs of London (ISBN 978-0658005022) and London By Pub (ISBN 978-0658005022)
• Wikipedia
• https://londonspubswherehistoryreallyhappened.wordpress.com/  by Ann Laffeaty

Additionally, the  following resource(s) were used in researching this episode:
https://londonist.com/london/history/elephant-ye-olde-cheshire-cheese-pub

Intro music:

Vivaldi - Spring Allegro by John Harrison with the Wichita State University Chamber
Photo:  Images George Rex

Website: https://historiclondonpubcast.com/

E-mail: hosteric@historiclondonpubcast.com

Transcript

This is The Historic London Pubcast, and before our Host, and Guide, Eric Blair joins us, Podcast Producer, Andy Meddick here for a quick introduction on what’s coming up in today’s episode.

This is our very first episode, and we’re kicking things off with a pub that’s as legendary as it is tongue-twisting: Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. It’s got history, mystery, famous patrons, and yes, a parrot with a sailor’s mouth. This place emerged in 1667, rebuilt after the Great Fire of London in 1666, and went on to hosting Charles Dickens and Mark Twain.

You’ll also hear about:

• Literary legends who raised a glass here.
• Victorian drinking customs that necessitated sawdust on the floors.
• A famous elephant who visited the pub for pudding.
• How this pub feels like stepping into a time machine.

Join us then as we leave the hustle and bustle of the modern beating heart of Fleet Street, wander down a narrow alleyway, open a dark, creaking door, and enter the dimly lit, wood paneled labyrinth of one of London’s oldest pubs. Eric will take it from here.

Welcome to this episode of The Historic London Pubcast. I’m Eric Blair, and I’d like to take you on a journey through the rich history of London’s iconic pubs. My goal is to share with you my passion for the great old pubs of London. I want to give you some facts to help you appreciate the history of these hallowed establishments, mixed in with some fun stories that make it all go down as smooth as a well poured pint.

Let’s start today with one of the truly grand pubs of London, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, with the first words spelled Y e and the second word spelled old e. Maybe your first question. What’s with the name? The E at the beginning. What’s that all about? Good questions.

Back in the Middle Ages, there was a letter called a thorn. It looked like a lowercase b with the vertical line extended down at the bottom. It represented the thah sound for some reason. Movable type at that point did not have the symbol, so y was substituted. But it’s my understanding, however, that it was always pronounced thah. Y eventually was replaced by t-h. But for the places that celebrated their oldness, the Y was left in there to emphasize that today.

Lots of folks say Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, but it really should be pronounced The Old Cheshire Cheese. Also, old is spelled with an e on the end for the same reason – to emphasize the pub’s antiquity. Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, not to be confused with another pub that is just called the Cheshire Cheese is on Fleet Street. 145 to be exact.

This is smack in the heart of London, a few blocks north of the Thames River, east of Covent Garden, west of the City of London and south of Holborn. There has been a pub here since 1538 which was called The Horn. Everything was going well for The Horn until The Great Fire of London came along in 1666. Like almost all the pubs and 80% of the buildings in London, The Horn went up in smoke. But you know, you can’t keep a good pub down. The pub was quickly rebuilt and by 1667 was up and running as The Cheshire Cheese. When the ‘The Old’ part was added, I don’t know.

Pub patrons access the pub from an alleyway just off the street. When you walk in you discover the lowered lighting and the nook and cranny layout give you the immediate feel that you’ve entered a time machine.

The pub is dimly lit. The only light filtering in from small windows high on the wall, and the soft glow of hanging gas lamps. The low beamed ceilings seem to press down close, and the dark wooden benches and tables are worn smooth from centuries of patrons. And, as a patron, you are in good company. Famous patrons include Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, PG Wodehouse, Winston Churchill, William Makepeace Thackeray, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Johnson (who we will say more about later), and of course, drumroll, please, Charles Dickens! Yes, Dickens drank here, among other places. Actually, a more manageable list would be the pubs in London that Dickens didn’t drink in. His name will come up a lot as we work our way through the classic pubs of London. But for The Cheese, it is believed that Dickens actually refers to it near the end of A Tale of Two Cities, when he talks about the characters,

“Going up a covered way on Fleet Street into a tavern where they enjoyed a good dinner and good wine.”

As we enter, this is probably a good place to mention a few changes the pub has made over the years. One source speculated that The Cheese was probably one of the last London pubs to abandon the practice of spreading sawdust on the floor. Spreading sawdust in bars was a common practice well into the 20th Century, and not just in Britain, but elsewhere in Europe, and even in America. There was a term, “Spit and Sawdust”, and when it was applied to a pub, it meant that it was a down and dirty basic establishment. But even with sawdust, that surely would never applied to The Cheese.

The Cheese has made some other small adjustments to keep up with the times. There used to be a series of erotic plaster of Paris tiles in one room, but don’t look for them now. In 1962, they were donated to The Museum of London.

The house rules that women would not be served at the bar, and the practice of giving imminent visitors a free pipe and tobacco upon entering have also gone by the wayside. But fear not, other than these small modifications, the pub has faithfully kept to its historic roots.

Right from the doorway, you’ll see that there is a labyrinth of narrow passageways leading to different rooms, each one seemingly smaller and more intimate than the last. However, the first room you come to on the right as you enter is special because it contains the earthly remains of Polly the Parrot. Polly was a pub mascot for 40 years – an African Gray parrot, particularly adept at imitating what she heard daily.

A feathered tape recorder listening to lots of mainly dudes drinking and smoking for four decades? What could possibly go wrong? You guessed it, Polly was world renowned for being lovable, but also for being a very foul-mouthed bird. No pun intended! Well, maybe it was intended. Anyway, Polly died in 1926, and something like 200 newspapers across the world wrote obituaries. But Polly’s spirit remains. She was stuffed and now sits on a perch above the bar.

But Polly was not the only critter of fame to visit The Cheese. We’ll get to that a little later. Exiting the room where Polly sits in her vow of silence since 1926, you can discover some of the other rooms on the first floor, all basically small cozy bar rooms. But let’s move on to the next special feature of The Cheese.

Across the hall from Polly’s room is a staircase leading down to the cellar bar. The steps go down a couple of levels and there is seating in rooms along the way. Continue to descend and you’ll reach one of my favorite places in all of London pubdom. I couldn’t find out just how deep this final level is, but I would guess it’s maybe 100 to 150ft below the street level. This lowest level has a bar and several tables. Keeping with its history of originally being a cellar storage area, there are wooden casts along the walls, some marked with the name Amontillado. Any subterranean location that prompts recall of my favorite Edgar Allan Poe story gets my blood pumping. The cellar bar is not always open, but even if it’s not, you can sometimes just walk down there with your drink. Do it. You will find it’s worth it!

The Cheshire Cheese is owned and run by Samuel Smith’s Brewery. Let me say a bit about the Samuel Smith Company. Samuel Smith is a North Yorkshire company that has been around since 1758. It owns about 200 pubs in the UK and around 20 of them are in London. They are known for their beers. I particularly like their stout. They also have their own line of liquors, and all products are known for being at reasonable prices, well, at least reasonable for London.

Okay, let’s climb back up the stairs. Let’s talk about what’s around The Cheese now. If you go out the way you came in, but turn right back away from the street, a two minute walk will take you to a courtyard with a small statue in the middle. This is Gough Square, spelled g o u g h. The statue is of a bronze of a cat. This is Hodge, Doctor Samuel Johnson’s cat. And the statue was placed here by London cat lovers who know of Johnson’s affection for his cat. Johnson himself lived in a building at the left end of the square, number 17.

Johnson was a man of letters and a literary celebrity of his time, well known for enjoying London pub life. He is quoted as saying,

“When a man is tired of London, he’s tired of life.”

Oddly enough, there’s no mention of Johnson going to The Cheese, but it was his local and his protégé, Oliver Goldsmith lived next door to the pub, so it’s almost certain that he was a patron.

There is a chair at The Cheese said to be the one that Johnson used, but other sources say it was a chair that Johnson indeed used, but it was imported from a pub that was demolished in 1819. That was several decades after Johnson’s death. Johnson is famous for his dictionary. He lived at Gough Square from 1748 to 1759.

The dictionary was finished during this period in 1755. He employed six Scottish lads, all working at his house in the attic, standing up. Wow! A day of that would make a visit to The Cheese particularly enjoyable. I hope it wasn’t too crowded so those guys could get a seat.

Let’s go back to Fleet Street. Fleet Street was a center of the newspaper industry until the 1980s. The street itself goes back to Roman times in 1702. London’s first daily newspaper was set up around Fleet Street. But the tradition of the street having print shops goes back all the way to the 1500s. Rupert Murdoch broke with the tradition when he moved a couple of his big papers out of central London in 1986. Several others follows. But there is still some presence of the publishing industry along the street.

Fleet Street is well populated by pubs. You know, newspaper folks are said to be enthusiastic imbibers. Okay, so how did the street get its name? It was named for the Fleet River, which ran down and emptied into the Thames. The name came from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning, ‘Tidal Inlet.’

The Fleet River was turned into an underground sewer in the mid-1800s  as part of the sanitation upgrade London put forward in response to the cholera and sewage problems, its growing population had developed.

Previously, I mentioned that the pub’s feathered mascot was not the only famous critter associated with The Cheese. I found an interesting story on the website The Londonist about a visit by a celebrity pachyderm.

This story was put together from newspaper accounts of the day. The Londonist author did a fine job of telling the story in a tongue in cheek style. So let me read a few paragraphs.

“The Cheese once enjoyed a visit from a celebrity elephant, Jumbo Junior, named after an even more famous beast who inspired the adjective for anything large. Jumbo Junior, though, was only a youngster, but he was already a favorite with the public at the Royal Italian Circus. The poor creature had been captured as an infant in Ceylon, and became the smallest elephant ever imported into Britain in 1903.

Jumbo was quite the celebrity. The pint sized tusker was invited to Buckingham Palace twice, a Covent Garden bar, the Stock Exchange, the Guildhall and, perhaps more appropriately, something called the Eccentric Club. He would often travel in a regular horse drawn cab. On the 3rd of August 1905 he was brought to the Fleet Street pub at the invitation of some admiring American ladies. After squeezing in through the ancient doors, Jumbo was led to Samuel Johnson’s corner. Here the elephant attempted to squat in the great lexicographers favorite chair and was treated to the pub’s famous pudding and some bananas.

Jumbo then met another animal celebrity, Polly the Parrot (what jumbo thought of Polly and vice versa was not recorded). Afterwards, Jumbo wowed the crowds by playing a selection of favorite airs on the mouth organ. Like any professional pub entertainer. He refused to take a drink. One of the papers reported he was the model of abstemious ness, “Not a drop of intoxicating liquors would he touch”. In spite of the many offers thrust upon him, it only remained to sign the visitors book. Jumbo’s trunk was smeared with ink and then daubed on to the paper. The handler wrote a note of explanation in the margin, “Jumbo Junior, Queen Alexandra’s pet, his mark.” The creature was then led back to Fleet Street, and his waiting carriage.”

All right, dear listeners, with that fun story, it’s time to do, like Jumbo and pack our trunk and get out of here.

I hope I’ve been able to pique your interest in this great London pub. Do check it out if you find yourself in London. And please come back for our next pub adventure. Cheers!

Podcast Producer, Andy Meddick  back for a quick wrap up and a look ahead.

That’s it for this first round of The Historic London Pubcast! If Polly the Parrot’s story didn’t make you laugh, groan, or Google “taxidermy etiquette,” I don’t know what will.

Thanks for being part of this tour through one of London’s oldest, and quirkiest pubs. There’s a lot more to come on The Historic London Pubcast – from royal regulars to haunted taprooms, so don’t miss what’s next.

Stick around for Episode 2 coming in a fortnight. We have a fun episode lined up. There will be Buckets of Blood at The Lamb and Flag, Rose Street. A backstory of satire and mistresses.  

Until next time, Cheers, and remember when you’re traveling in London, every pub has a story to tell, if you know where to look.