Historic London Pubcast
If you know London's pubs, then you know the history of London. Every pub has a story to tell... if you know where to look. Host, Eric Blair takes us on a journey across London's historic pubs. Along the way we'll get all the quirky, fascinating stories of the architecture, antiquity, legends, and personalities that make up London's unique pub scene. Equal parts travel, story telling, architecture, history, and social commentary, join The Historic London Pubcast community. Not just London Pub Crawl, lots of fun stories along the way!
Historic London Pubcast
Ep 30 Fleet Street Pub Crawl Pt 1 - The Blackfriar, The Old Bell, The Tipperary
In this first of two episodes on Fleet Street pubs, we cover The Blackfriar, The Old Bell and The Tipperary – lots of history and interesting stories.
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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 / quoted in this episode:
The Blackfriar
https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/black-friar-pub
Dominicans
https://rosaryshrine.co.uk/about-us/history-of-the-dominicans-in-london/
Henry’s Divorce
Wynkyn de Worde
https://www.fleetstreetheritage.co.uk/128.pdf
https://www.wynkyndewordesociety.org/about
Alexander Pope
Reporters Notebook
https://www.dailydrone.co.uk/how-an-express-reporters.html
The Tipperary
https://zythophile.co.uk/2024/03/28/the-tipperarys-back-but-the-history-is-even-more-confused/
Intro Music: Vivaldi - Spring Allegro by John Harrison w/ the Wichita State University Chamber Orch
Photo: Art De Cade
Website: https://historiclondonpubcast.com/
E-mail: hosteric@historiclondonpubcast.com
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.
This is the first episode of two devoted to Fleet Street pubs, but only those we haven't covered in previous episodes. I'll mention those previously covered pubs as we passed them by. But let's start at a pub that is actually a couple of blocks south of Fleet Street. It's a good beginning point right next to the Blackfriars tube stop, and of course it is The Black Friar, a Nicholson pub with a street address of 174 Queen Victoria Street. I must compliment Nicholson’s on having a plaque on the outside of the pub that gives a good summary of the pub's history. It really is a condensation of what will elaborate on. So, think of it as an outline for our further discussion today,
“This Art Nouveau masterpiece was built in 1905 on the site of a former Dominican Friary, which existed from 1279 to 1539. Following the 260 years of Dominican Friars, the site of the Monastery became a Parliamentary Chamber. Is believed that the Emperor Charles the Fifth, the Papal Magistrate, and Henry The Eighth’s Court sat on this very site during the dissolution of Henry the Eighth’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon in 1532. The Black Friar has been a favorite watering hole for many since the merry monks first settled on this site. Its unusual shape is due to the fact that all the surrounding buildings have long since been demolished. Taking with them the small alleyways that were once the only access to the pub. This wonderful pub was due for demolition in the ‘60s, but public outcry led by Sir John Betjeman and Lady Dartmouth, saved the building.”
So, it all starts with the Dominicans. This is a religious order of the Catholic Church founded by Saint Dominic de Guzman in 1216. A website tagged in the notes gives us further information about their history,
“The Dominicans established a priory in Holborn in 1223. In 1276, Edward the First gave them permission to move to a site between the River Thames and Ludgate Hill. Until its dissolution in 1538, The Black Friars, as the Dominicans became to be called, had their great priory on this site, which is still called after them today.”
So why the name Blackfriars? Blogger Ann Laffertyhelps us there,
“When Friars first appeared in Medieval England, they were something of a novelty, since, unlike Monks who were cloistered in their monasteries, they traveled around spreading the word in exchange for money to sustain themselves.
There were two main groups of Friars in the early 13th Century London the Franciscans, who were invariably dressed in gray, The Greyfriars, and the Dominicans, whose long black mantles earned them the name, The Black Friars. These were later joined by the Carmelites, or the White Friars.”
The Dominican History site tells us a bit more about what went on at the site of the priory,
“The Medieval Blackfriars of London was used for great occasions of state, including the meetings of Parliament and the Privy Council. In 1529, the divorce trial of Queen Catherine of Aragon and Henry the Eighth was heard here.”
Ahh, so, as the plaque summary mentioned, an aspect of good old Henry the Eighth domestic turmoil spilled out here. How did the Blackfriars get involved in that? Well, Henry wanted a divorce from his wife, Catherine of Aragon, after a decade of marriage, but divorce was not permitted by the Catholic Church, so he first sought an annulment, which meant that the marriage never existed. Why would the marriage be invalid? Catherine was the widow of Henry's brother Arthur. Catherine was married to the sickly Arthur for about five months before he died. Catherine claimed that because of Arthur’s health problems, the marriage was never consummated. Nonetheless, Henry said that the book of Leviticus in the Bible says you shouldn't marry your brother's widow. Well, Henry, you had six kids with Catherine. Isn't it a bit late for that argument? Henry has a comeback for that one. It says right there in Leviticus that the consequence of taking your brother's wife is childlessness.
Of their six children. Only one has survived. And that child is, of all things, a girl, kind of childless, right? But Henry, Pope Julius gave a dispensation to allow you to marry Catherine. Once again, Henry has a reply. Yes, he did. He was wrong. Not even a Pope can go against God's law.
All this went to Rome for consideration by the then Pope Clement the Seventh. Clement was in a tight spot. He didn't want to overturn a previous Pope's decision. And the Holy Roman Emperor, who was much closer to him geographically than Henry, was, of all things, Catherine's uncle. So, the Pope punted. He would not agree to grant an annulment, but did allow Henry's case to be considered by a commission in Britain, perhaps a favorable ruling for Henry there would provide political cover for all involved.
In the spring of 1529, at the Legatine Court in Blackfriars, a public inquiry was held into the validity of the marriage. The outcome? The proceeding dragged on with things not looking good for Henry. It was adjourned for the summer recess and never reconvened, because around that time Pope Clement, possibly looking at how the case was proceeding, officially rejected the request for the annulment.
Henry had to resort to other tactics, finally dissolving the Catholic Church in Britain. You must admire Henry's persistence. The church land was confiscated, and the Priory of Blackfriars was dissolved in 1538. The Blackfriars, despite a brief return in the mid-1500s that lasted only four years, were basically on the outs in Britain for over 300 years. What ended their isolation from Britain? In 1829, the Catholic Emancipation Act, allowed Roman Catholics to participate in public life in the United Kingdom.
In 1861, the Archbishop of Westminster invited the Dominicans to build their new priory and church, dedicated to Saint Dominic, not on the original site by The Thames, but on what was known as Haverstock Hill, a site between Hampstead and Camden. Saint Dominic's Priory was opened in 1867 and the Priory Church completed in 1883. It stands there today. Clearly, The Blackfriars, like Henry, were persistent.
So that's the history of the site. What about the pub itself? A pub was built here in 1875, and it was named The Black Friar,but the remodel of 1905 took it to another level. And that is what we admire about the pub today. Ted Bruning, always terrific with descriptions, gives us three great paragraphs on the rebuild in his London by Pub book,
“The wedge-shaped Blackfriars is unique, built in 1875 and remodeled 25 years or so later. It would be a fairly straightforward old English pub, with the usual black oak beams and small pane leaded windows if it weren't for the astounding decorative scheme superimposed in 1902 by Henry Poole.
Poole was a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, starting with a theme of the site's past, the Dominican Friary, he decorated the whole place inside and out, with the most incredible copper-based reliefs of fat, jolly and distinctly unspiritual Friars engaged in various labors, all connected in one way or another with the pleasures of drink, and threw in for good measure trite aphorisms such as, Silence is Golden, Wisdom is Rare, Industry is All.
But that was just the start for Architect Poole. He then smothered the interior in marble. Everywhere. Plaques at the windows, on columns, and the whole ceiling of the snug at the back is vaulted with it, as if a side chapel in some Byzantine Basilica. There are mirrors, mosaics, bronze gargoyles, stained glass windowpanes, every decorative trick conceivable in an exposition of exuberant, a buoyant, effervescent and extravagant craftsmanship. It's truly an amazing feat. Almost too good a thing for a mere pub. The Blackfriars is a major achievement and a landmark in the history of English decorative art.”
Thanks, Ted. I told you his writing was great. How about that string of adjectives in the penultimate sentence? As his description implies, it is really an experience going into The Black Friar for the first time.
It does get crowded with the after-work crowd, so try to slip in during the off hours as you gaze at the splendor around you, remember, you are sitting on a site that goes back 800 years ago, and when Henry the Eighth was stomping around, pleading his case, 500 years ago. Incredibly, the pub was threatened with demolition in the 1960s as part of the area renovation plans. What were they thinking? But The Black Friar has lots of friends and some of them in high places. There was a public outcry. The charge to save the pub was led by Sir John Benjamin, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, and Westminster Council member Lady Dartmouth, who was also Countess Spencer, Princess Diana's stepmother. Congratulations to all involved. Our third example of persistence.
Today the pub is run by Nicholson’s, and is Grade II listed, so it is in good hands and in a safe place. One piece of trivia, the lettering chosen for the titles of the British Historical Comedy Blackadder 2 were heavily influenced by the letters on the outside of The Black Friar pub.
Before I take my last shift and get ready to depart, I wonder why we don't see more pubs named for Henry the Eighth? You can understand why The Black Friar was not named for him, given his rough treatment of the Dominicans, but I only found two in the UK, one in Edinburgh, one in Kent, but not one in London. There are, however, a couple of homages to Henry in the city. The Old Kings Head off Borough High Street has Henry's picture up as their sign. Evidently, he is the ‘Old King’ of the pub's name. As for the other homage, The Three Kings in Clerkenwell had a unique sign up for a while, depicting, I suppose, the three Kings that they were thinking about when they named the pub. Can you guess what three they are? Okay, Henry the Eighth. That's easy. What about the other two? Now think outside the box. Okay, here they are. King Kong and Elvis, the King of Rock n’Roll. That version of the sign was not up on my last couple of visits. I am sorry to see it go.
Okay, off now to Fleet Street, an area long associated with the newspaper industry. In fact, the name Fleet Street has become a metonym. That's a figure of speech where the name of a place is used to represent something associated with it. In this case, Fleet Street represents the entire British newspaper industry. In the 1980s, newspapers began to move to outlying areas like Wapping, but the phrase, ‘Fleet Street’ is still used and understood as referring to the British print press. We are headed to The Old Bell. On the way we will pass The Punch Tavern, and The Crown and Sugar Loaf. These two were covered in the Gin Palaces Two Episode. Across the street is the magnificent Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, which was the subject of the entire First Episode. So those are Fleet Street pubs we'll skip for this episode, but you can always pop in there for a quick one.
If you want a walk ahead. Before we get to The Old Bell, on our left will be Saint Bride's Church. The church has several links to our next pub, so let me give you a few historical points. It is one of the most ancient churches in London, being founded by Irish monks, missionaries proselytizing the English starting back in the sixth century. It was named for Bridget of Ireland, one of their patron saints. The current church is the seventh to have stood on this site. In the 1580s, Eleanor White married Ananias Dare in the church. The couple became part of the group that traveled to the New World and formed the Roanoke Colony. Their daughter, Virginia Dare, was the first English child born in North America. Sadly, the Colony's fate is shrouded in mystery, having disappeared between visits from English ships. The church was completely destroyed in The Great Fire of 1666, but was rebuilt to a totally new design, by who else? Christopher Wren of Saint Paul's fame. The new church opened in 1675, and in the early 1700s the church's famous spire was added. Its layered construction inspired Baker's Apprentice, Thomas Rich when he was making an elaborate wedding cake for his bride, thus starting the tradition of the layered design of wedding cakes that still exists today.
On January 16th, 1864, Mary Ann Walker, nicknamed Polly, married William Nicholls at Saint Brides. They had five children, but by 1880 things were not going well on the marriage. They separated. William took for the children and moved away. Polly fell into heavy drinking and began to collect a police record for drunkenness, disorderly conduct, and prostitution. By 1888, Polly was living in a common lodging. That's a house where she had to share a bed with another woman. On the 31st of August, she became Jack the Ripper first victim. Sad story. The church was gutted by firebombs in December 1940 during the Blitz. After the war, the church was rebuilt at the expense of the newspaper proprietors and journalists.
Famous parishioners over the years, including John Milton, John Dryden, Samuel Richardson and Samuel Pepys, all Writers who we have discussed in previous episodes. Finally, Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall were married at Saint Bride's in 2016. So, a church with a lot of history and famous folks associated with it were almost at The Old Bell, but let me first relate a personal story.
The church of Saint Brides is quite enticing when you gaze upon it from the street. On one of my crawls, we heard some choral music coming out as we walked by, and our small group turned into the churchyard to look further. We were taken by the elegance of the church, which particularly resonated with one of my fellow crawlers. He wanted to look further and started to dawdle a bit. Finally, I had to remind him that we were on a pub crawl, not a church crawl. That will come sometime in the future. We both laugh about that still today. Okay, we're at The Old Bell. As we did with The Black Friar, let's start with the history of the site.
This is where the very first printing press was set up on Fleet Street. The fellow that had the foresight to bring printing to Fleet Street was Wynkyn de Worde. The website fleetstreetheritage.co.uk gives us a great summary of his contribution,
“Wynkyn was originally from Germany. He moved to London in 1476 to take up employment with William Caxton, who first introduced the printing press to England after corrections death in 1491. The ward took control of corrections printing business and eventually relocating it in around 1500 from near Westminster Abbey to premises on Fleet Street. He was looking to attract business from the new mercantile and populous markets in the City of London, including the bookbinding trade.
In those days. Fleet Street was a suburb of the City of London, dominated by ecclesiastic residences set with large gardens. The houses of local tradesmen and taverns haphazardly fringed the streets with cap making and bookbinding comprising the earliest trades along the street. Wynkyn de Worde took some printing commissions from the Aristocracy. He shifted his emphasis to the creation of relatively inexpensive books, coins, and almanacs with popular appeal, and pioneered the inclusion of illustrations to attract wider commercial audiences.
The religious works dominated his output, but the word also published a wide range of contemporary literature, including romantic novels, poetry, children's books and volumes on practical household skills. In all it, it's estimated that from 1501 to the close of his career, Wynkyn printed over 600 titles. He is also known for his role in development and popularization of the English language, and credited with helping to standardize the spelling and grammar of English.
Wynkyn was one of the most innovative printers and prolific publishers of his era. He was the first printer to adopt italic typeface and the first to use English made paper. His business was very successful and attracted competitors to locate along Fleet Street, and thus gave rise to the newspaper industry.
Wynkyn de Worde continued working into his mid-70s. He died in 1535 and was buried (where else) at Saint Bride's Church. His name is perpetuated by the Wynkyn de Worde Society, founded in 1957 for, “All people, dedicated to excellence in all aspects of printing and the various stages of its creation, production, finishing and dissemination.””
Wow! So, where The Old Bell sits is where Fleet Street's printing and newspaper industry all started. His first shop at the site was small and squeezed in next to a pub called The Swan. Ted Bruning in London By Pub takes the story up from there,
“The Swan was just one of the names taken by the old pub at different times. The Ten Bells Twelve Bells. The Golden Bell. The great Tom of Oxford. Of course, the bell versions are a reference to nearby Saint Bride's Church. Whatever it was called in 1666, it was razed to the ground in the Great Fire, but was swiftly rebuilt as a canteen and hostel for builders engaging in reconstruction work. This claim, made by several city taverns, could well be true. Later developments often built a pub before anything else to cater for their workers, but also to get cash flow going while the building work progressed.”
Certainly, Christopher Wren's builders of the post-fire Saint Brides had to have been patrons. Non builders were also patrons of the reborn Bell, one being a man of letters, Alexander Pope. He lived from 1688 to 1744 and was an English Poet and Satirist, considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th Century. Some of the phrases from his works have become standards in our vernacular, like, “Damning with faint praise,” and “To err is human, to forgive divine.”
Pope, a feisty but very successful writer of his day, got into a long running feud with the bookseller and publisher Edmund Curl, an equally brash individual. At one point, Pope claimed he laced Curl’s drink with a poisonous emetic - that's a substance that induces vomiting, causing Curl to expel significant quantities of bile. Ted Bruning’s write-up implies that this event occurred at The Bell, or whatever it was called then. I can't find supporting confirmation of that, but it is a good story, and if Pope is to be believed, it did happen somewhere. So, I will go with Ted's view that it took place at The Bell.
In the 1860s, when changes in the law made it profitable to retail wine by the bottle, the front portion of the 17th Century tavern was turned into what would now be called an off license.
In 1897, the property was bought by a couple of private entrepreneurs, the Baker Brothers, who planned to demolish it and replace it with a glittering, opulent new pub, as they had already done at The Punch Tavern, almost next door. Fortunately for us, the Bakers went spectacularly bust, along with many others of their kind in the great collapse of 1899, and the pub was taken over by the Gin Distillers Nicholsons, to whom the Bakers owed rather a lot of money.
Somewhere along the line it went from being The Bell to being The Old Bell. Redevelopment plans were quickly shelved and Nicholson’s did nothing to the pub except appoint a Landlady they could trust. Nellie Bear acquired a formidable reputation in Fleet Street and kept The Old Bell operating right through the Blitz, even when a German bomb half demolished Saint Brides in 1940. She retired in 1946 after 40 years at the helm.
Not much has changed. The shop at the front has been reabsorbed into the pub to create an attractive entrance lobby with two semi-private little snugs to the side of it, and inevitably the internal partitions at some stage have been removed. What's left is a cozy bare boards boozer with a plain horseshoe bar counter, plenty of beams and dark woodwork, and a cheerful little fireplace. So that takes us up to our pub of today. Definitely worth a visit just to drink in all that history. Ha, ha. Pun intended. Before we leave The Bell, there's one more interesting story associated with the pub. Numerous sources relate this tale, but a website called dailydrone.co.uk does what I think is the best, so let me draw from that write-up,
“1951 the leaking of one of Britain's greatest state secrets was foiled when a Sunday Express journalist's notebook was left on the floor of The Old Bell pub in Fleet Street. The notebook contained never before seen details of Britain's top secret codebreaking site at Eastcote, which was later to become GCHQ - the Government Communications Headquarters. Sunday Express reporter Eric Tullett had received the hush hush information about Britain's operation to intercept and decode Soviet signals from Arthur Askew, the Foreign Office's former head of physical security, but Tullett extraordinary scoop was lost when he left his notebook on the floor of The Old Bell pub. At the time, the public were in the dark about the cold War cipher work being carried out at Eastcote. Nor did they even know about Bletchley Park, the wartime cryptography site which pioneered the art of using early computer technology to break encrypted messages.
The secret survived for another 23 years until the existence of GCHQ was finally revealed in the mid-1970s. Askew told Tullett of the code cracking operations going on at GCHQ, which had been transferred from Bletchley Park after the Second World War. His motive for the betrayal of Britain's intelligence service is not clear, but it is thought he was furious at newspaper reports that he was to blame for the escape of Guy Burgess and Donald McLean, part of the Cambridge Five spy ring.
Askew had retired soon after the news of the spy ring came out, and the press suggested his departure was because he shared some of the responsibility for the debacle. The police records of the time indicate that a man assumed to be Reporter Tullett, rang them, inquiring as to whether a notebook in a leather case had been handed in as found property at The Old Bell.”
Well, not exactly. A Barmaid had found the notebook, and noticing its pages contain words such as, ‘Cipher machines, Moscow and Secret’ alerted the police. The police handed the book to MI5, who then returned it to Tullet. The Foreign Office allowed part of its story to go ahead. But the explosive reference to GCHQ in its secret work was redacted.
Looking back in 2012, historian Christopher Moran of Warwick University gave some perspective,
“Buried within its notebook is a humdinger of a secret. The existence of GCHQ was not revealed to the public until the early to mid-1970s, yet Tullet has it in his notebook in July 1951.”
And all this happened right there at The Old Bell, maybe right where you were sitting.
Okay. On now, up the street, about a block or so to our last pub of this episode, The Tipperary, a well-known Irish pub. It is just reopened after what might be called a near-death experience. The pub closed in 2020, as they all did during the pandemic, but in the case of The Tipperary, it looked like it might be permanent. In April of that year, the Planning Commission gave the okay for a conversion to office use, but the office project fell away due to the reduced demand for space post-pandemic and the pub reopened in early 2024. Thank goodness this is a nice, cozy pub, and now there's an open area next to it that provides kind of a beer garden.
From my single post-reopening visit, having this open area was great because it reduced crowding in the original part of the pub and lets us historic pub fans appreciate its ambiance in greater solitude. The pub has a near Gin Palace motif, and its layout is what some of us Yanks might call a shotgun style. Long and narrow, there is an upstairs, but as I recall, it is more fun to be in the main part of the bar downstairs. If there's room, as you would expect.
They have a nice selection of Irish libations. I always take a bit of a whiskey break there when it's part of a crawl for me. Okay, what about its history? Well, now that's complex. There are many claims about The Tipperary past, and some of them are just not true. Longtime pub writer Martyn Cornell penned a definitive article on the subject that I have linked in the notes. It gets way into the details, so it's not for the faint at heart. Let me pick out a few points,
“Overall, the block that The Tipperary is part of is very historic, but the division between the buildings within the block has changed over the years. At or near the exact spot that today's Tipperary pub was a pub called The Boar's Head.
The Boar's Head existed before The Great Fire of 1666, was destroyed in the conflagration and was rebuilt, and it reopened with the same name. In the 1800s, The Boar's Head somehow morphed into a new pub slightly to the left, so there was likely some destruction, construction, and street renumbering.”
As Martyn points out, this part is murky.
“In 1898 to 1967, this new pub was called Mooney's Irish House. In 1967 it was renamed The Tipperary.”
So, all the claims about getting its name from the patronage of Irish soldiers on their way to World War One just doesn't hold up. All that aside, visiting The Tipperary is still a great experience, if only for its very appealing architecture, and hey, we do know that it's at least 125 years old. Stop in and drink to the fact that it is still around after a close call. Our final example today, of persistence, and that takes us to the end of the first of two episodes on Fleet Street pubs. The second Fleet Street episode is available now.
Thank you so much for listening. Please like, thumbs up, and subscribe, as is your want, and drop me a line, or comment at the email in the notes hosteric@historiclondonpubcast.com if the notion strikes you.
Until next time, then Cheers!