Bar Man: Columnist Jeff Hoyle recommends a visit to the Museum of Cambridge in former White Horse pub
In his weekly column, Bar Man Jeff Hoyle discusses a museum housed in a former coaching inn that’s worth a visit and old pub signs and their meanings…
There are some world-class galleries and museums in Cambridge such as the Fitzwilliam, the Botanic Gardens and the Scott Polar Institute.
The Museum of Cambridge, on Castle Street, might not feature on the list, but it’s well worth a visit.
Housed in a Grade II listed 16th century former coaching inn, it contains a wealth of exhibits relating to local life.
The White Horse closed as a pub in 1934, but the bar is preserved in the first room that visitors encounter, with objects such as bottles from some of the many brewers that once existed in the city.
There is also an old pub sign painted by Richard Hopkins Leach, of The Man Loaded with Mischief, which once hung outside a pub of that name situated on the Madingley Road.
There is a photo of the pub on the Capturing Cambridge website showing that it sold Bailey and Tebbutt’s celebrated ales and stouts from their Panton brewery, and a couple of minutes’ searching may lead you to a picture of the brewery that was bought by Greene King in 1927 and demolished in 1969, 12 years after brewing ceased. But what of the sign?
The inspiration apparently came from a famous pub that stood at 414 Oxford Street.
William Hogarth is thought to have painted the original sign which was included in an exhibition in 1762.
There are two versions, illustrated back-to-back on the sign on display in Cambridge, but both return to the same theme.
The poor husband staggers away from the pub with his drunken shrewish wife on his back who carries a bottle of gin, a monkey and a magpie.
These illustrate a saying, which I confess I had never heard before, ‘A monkey, magpie and wife are the true emblems of strife’.
The message is reinforced by the horns of a cuckold being visible in the inn in the background.
There is a pawnbroker to the right and a pigsty to the left with the inscription ‘She’s as drunk as a sow’.
Hogarth was a great artist, but I am not sure that subtlety was his strong point.
If the message has still not been absorbed, the reverse of the sign takes us a few minutes back in time to when the husband, sat in the pub enjoying a quiet pint is suddenly set upon by his wife and her menagerie.
Oh, and the poor man is weighed down with a giant lock and chain marked wedlock. This is part of a long tradition of artists depicting the battle of the sexes.
Chicheface, a skeletal cow who only ate honest wives, and Bicorn a plump, well-fed creature who devours kind-hearted and devoted husbands appear through the Middle Ages in works by writers and artists as diverse as Chaucer and Breughel.
The Norwich school painter, John Crome, more noted for his landscapes, painted a Load of Mischief sign for the Norwich pub now known as the Mischief, but in these more enlightened times, the sign now features a group of mice, the collective noun for these creatures.
Richard Hopkins Leach, who started me on this journey, painted other pub signs. The Castle, The John Gilpin and the Hopbine amongst them. The latter seems a bucolic scene of harvesters drinking beer on a break from their work.
But who is that riding by on horseback? It looks a lot like William Cobbett, the man who stole Tom Paine’s bones to take on a radical speaking tour and was thought by many to be Captain Swing, the rural equivalent of King Lud.
Et in arcadia ego…
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