What the blazes?!?!?

The Rock (Hotel), Cherry Hinton Road, Cambridge

Yet another makeover for the Rock.

This cheap-looking identikit piece of tat is, it would seem, the delightful new branding for GK’s ‘family friendly pub concept [sic], Flame Grill’. Sounds ghastly . . . A rich heritage of decorative and individual pub signboards cast aside in the interests of The Brand (and a crap one, at that).

OK, the previous signage at the Rock wasn’t much cop to start with, but the same fate is threatened for the Green Dragon, Chesterton, which would be a thoroughly unforgivable piece of cultural vandalism. Watch this space.

Uninspiring, insipid, bland, characterless . . . as a Camra colleague put it: ‘If I saw a pub sign like the one at the Rock I'd assume it was a temporary one until they got a decent one done.’

Quite.

Dis-arming

The Alexandra Arms, Gwydir Street, Cambridge

Reopened on 30 November 2012 after a rather fine refurbishment, including, of course, a spanking new signboard. Recently its name had been abbreviated – rather discourteously in my view – to The Alex, but now its full name has been officially restored: the Alexandra Arms. Arms.

That’s ARMS. As in ‘coat of’.

As were depicted in the previous sign, which was one of Greene King’s finer efforts.

The new sign, however, looks like this:

That’ll be a sort of portrait, then. Not a coat of arms. Nor even her actual arms. At all. This seems odd to me.

That said, I like this sign a lot, because it is unusual: I can’t think of any other pub signboards based on postage stamps except the odd one using a Penny Black for Queen Victoria. But this is even more unusual because British stamps during Alexandra’s lifetime bore only the image of the reigning Sovereign, so you wouldn’t expect to find a picture of her on a stamp at all.

Elsewhere in the Empire they were not so fastidious, and this image is taken from a 10c stamp from the Dominion of Newfoundland,[1] issued in 1911 to commemorate the coronation of her son, George V. The portrait used for the engraving seems to be derived from this photograph, the inversion and simplification presumably being introduced during the engraving process. Note the very high collar, reportedly worn to conceal a scar from a childhood injury. This, of course, became instantly fashionable – the ‘Diana haircut’ of its day.

So, it’s a good signboard, even if not heraldic. I hope the old one didn’t end up in a skip.

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[1] Specifically, judging by the tears on the perforations, this very one – yep, it’s another of those ‘found it on the Internet’ images.

One for sorrow. . .

The Live and Let Live, Mawson Road

Not only does this fine back-street local have the best-kept beer in Cambridge, it also has a most interesting two-sided signboard:



Live & Let Live, north-facing side of signboard





 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Live & Let Live, south-facing side of signboard



The signature and date reveal that it was painted in 1987 by one G. Jones, and is a copy of the last known sign of a pub called The Man Loaded With Mischief, which once stood on Madingley Road. The original sign now resides in the Cambridge Folk Museum (formerly the White Horse Inn) on Castle Street.

But what strange thing is depicted? Well, the theme is an old one, of a miserable-looking man laden with a magpie (harbinger of misfortune), a monkey (think of the phrase ‘a monkey on your back’) and a gin-swilling wife. The oldest known reference is to a sign believed to have been painted for an inn of that name on Oxford Street, London:

This is clearly very closely related to a wonderful print published by Robert Sayer in 1766, entitled A Man Loaded with Mischief, Or Matrimony: A Monkey, a Magpie, and Wife; is the True Emblem of Strife. ‘Drawn by Experience; engraved by Design.’ The Library of Congress describes it thus:

“Print shows a man chained to wedlock carrying a woman on his back, her breasts exposed, she holds a cup labeled ‘gin’ and toasts ‘My Bucks Health’, and according to a pig in a pen, ‘She is as Drunk as David's Sow’; a monkey sits on the woman's lap, removing the man's wig, and a magpie sits on the monkey's shoulders. In the background is a building (probably a brothel) with horns mounted above a sign showing two cats and labeled ‘The Christian Mans Arms or the Cuckolds Fortune.’ Includes six lines of verse.”

And where better for such a poor, downtrodden bloke to find refuge from the causes of his burdensome strife than the pub?

When all this was fields (2)

The Grove (formerly the Snowcat), Arbury Road, Cambridge

I’m not sure whether this thing (is it actually impressionist, or is it just very poorly reproduced by GK's normally oh-so-thoughtful sign producers?) was chosen to represent the idyllic past of the area in which this now closed and not much missed boozer sits, but Arbury sure as hell don’t look like that anymore!

Towering achievement

Panton Arms, Panton Street, Cambridge

There are eleven Pantons listed in Burke’s General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, some differenced versions of others, but none of them an exact match for what we have here. One corresponds in some parts, however. It is given as follows:

‘Per chev. gu. and or, in chief two towers ar. in base a lion ramp az. Crest: A lion couchant, the tail between the hind legs, az. bezantée.’

So the shield would look like this:

(Image created by me using software from www.inkwellideas.com/coat_of_arms.)

Close, but some simple errors (e.g. reading the chevron as a charge rather than a division), which leads me to suspect that whoever drew up the original design for this signboard misread or misinterpreted the blazon.

And does it have anything to do with the pub? I very much doubt it. The ‘Arms’ bit of the name seems a late and aggrandising addition (cf. the Kingston Arms) for what was once the Panton Brewery tap. The brewery itself gets its name from the street on which it sits, which was in turn named after one ‘Polite’ Tommy Panton, son of Thos. Panton (chief groom or equerry to King George II). In 1806 Tommy was instrumental in getting Parliament to pass the Barnwell Enclosures Act, which allowed this area of Cambridge to be developed. (See the History of Gwydir Street for more.) But I would be very surprised if he was an armiger, and even more surprised if these were his.

Hurley-Burleigh/Burley

Burleigh Arms, Newmarket Road, Cambridge

So. You’re a brewery who has just acquired a pub from pubco that needs to realise some of its assets by selling off some of its property portfolio estate. Obviously you’ll want to put your shiny new branding on it, and that includes, hopefully, an impressive signboard that represents your brand values. But what to have on it? Well, often the name of the pub itself will suggest a pretty obvious theme, and you’ve already provided a fine sign for another pub in the town only three or four years ago, so you have a pretty good idea what to do.

Now, do you go to the trouble of maybe doing a bit of research to see what’s appropriate, and then commissioning a signwriter to come up with something special? Or do you just reproduce something you find on the Internet?

Here's the new sign. Which approach do you think they took?

(Here’s a clue.)

Yep, it’s a direct lift from one of those ‘your family crest’ companies that I have commented on before (those ghastly scrolls give the game away). And as before, it is an unfortunate choice.[1]

Checking with a more authoritative source reveals that these arms (vert three boars heads couped argent armed or) belong to a Burley (note the spelling), from Leicestershire and Wiltshire. So (needless to say) it has nothing to do with the Burleigh in question here, who was a certain James Burleigh, a prominent local landowner and carrier in the late 18th century (and of course no armiger). Burleigh Street, on which the original Burleigh Arms once stood, is named after him (incidentally, its continuation, Norfolk Street, is named after his father-in-law, William Norfolk, who was mayor of Cambridge in 1769).

It wouldn’t have taken very much effort to have done this much better.

[1] I do hope, incidentally, that the proper channels were gone through and permission to reproduce was granted (for the appropriate fee) – those American copyright lawyers can get pretty nasty.

References

Ronald Grey and Derek Stubbings, Cambridge Street-names: Their origins and associations, CUP, 2000, pp. 55f.

When all this was fields. . .

The Haymakers, High Street, Chesterton

Looking at it now, it's strange to think of Chesterton as a rural idyll. Yet even by the time this pub was built, in the middle of the 19th century, the rural nature of Chesterton was beginning to turn suburban following inclosure in 1836 and the subsequent influx of ‘townies’ from Cambridge. So the name of the Haymakers, and of the Wheatsheaf which used to stand on the corner opposite, were already harking back to a ‘lost’ age.  

As well as providing a popular (albeit often ersatz) name for a pub, images of haymakers resting (or sometimes frolicking) after a long day working (or sometimes frolicking) in the fields have long been a popular theme amongst artists. The scene on this sign is based on La Charette by Louse Le Nain (1600–1648).