‘The moon, like to a silver bow’

The Half Moon Inn, Little St Mary’s Lane, Cambridge

The Half Moon hasn’t been a pub for many years, long before my time in Cambridge, and I didn’t even know about it until about a year ago, when I began my quest for Cambridge’s ‘dead pubs’. The sign still remains, though, a silent witness.* Yet how many times have I walked past it over the years and not noticed?

As a point of historical interest, a pub of this name, a decent three-storey establishment, originally stood on the corner of St Mary’s Lane and Trumpington Street until in 1875 it had to make way for the Emmanuel United Reform Church. Presumably the name just moved down the lane to these smaller premises, which was certainly a pub in 1885.

(*Update: This sign is actually a copy. The original, which is gilded rather than white, sits in a cabinet in the Museum of Cambridge.)



Twisted

The Old Spring, Ferry Path, Cambridge

Yeah, right. Ha bloody ha. I suppose someone was trying to be clever. I won’t waste more words on this.

Mind your manors!

The Queen Edith, Wulfstan Way, Cambridge

According to Domesday Book, before the Norman Conquest the manor of [Cherry] Hinton (in which this part of Cambridge once lay) was held by one Edeva the Fair (‘Eddeve pulcra’), who is generally assumed to be Edith Swanneck, wife more Danico of Harold II Godwinson, though the authors of Cambridge Street-names: Their origins and associations propose that it may instead be his sister, Editha, wife of Edward the Confessor. Whichever one of the two it was, after the Conquest she was replaced as lord of the manor by the rapacious Count Alan of Brittany, who did rather well out of the redistribution of land after 1066. So I suppose having a pub named after her some 1900 years later is a small consolation.

Badge of honour

The Old Contemptibles, Edmund Street, Birmingham

Military medal buffs will recognise this at the 1914 Star (or ‘Mons Star’), here gilded and with added colour in true Nicholsons style. This is the campaign medal awarded to those members of the British Expeditionary Force serving in France and Belgium between 5 August and 22 November 1914.

Survivors of this phase of the war took to referring to themselves as ‘The Old Contemptibles’ after a supposed order of Wilhelm II referring to General French’s ‘contemptible little army’.

The local branch of the Old Contemptibles Association used to meet in this pub, then known as the Albion Hotel, which was renamed in their honour in 1953.

Arms and the Coronet

Crown and Castle, Warwick

Lots of interesting detail in this one. We’ll start at the back, with the ‘castle’ part. The tower is Guy’s Tower, part of Warwick Castle, completed in 1395. The smaller, slit windows are original, but the larger ones at the top date from 1642, during the English Civil War, when they were widened to allow cannons to be fired from the tower. So, a small anachronism, there.

Now the ‘crown’. The headgear that this chap is sporting may look like a crown to the layman, but in fact it’s a coronet, specifically the coronet of an earl (without its cap of maintenance), which in heraldry (and here) comprises eight strawberry leaves (four visible) and eight silver balls (five visible).

This is just one clue to the identity of the fearsome-looking chap who dominates the sign. He is an earl, and probably a local one. The second, and perhaps more prominent clue, is the shield, which bears the arms of Neville (gules a saltire argent) differenced by a label of three points compony (or gobony) argent and azure. This, then, must be Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, known to history as ‘the Kingmaker’, the differencing being in honour of his Lancastrian/Beaufort descent via his paternal grandmother, Joan Beaufort. And indeed these arms appear in the 3rd quarter of Richard Neville’s full achievement.

It seems such a shame, then, that having got the heraldry more or less right, the sword and armour are hopelessly anachronistic, belonging more to the late 12th century/early 13th century than the mid-15th. In fact the sword looks remarkably similar this modern replica, with 12th-century blade style and 13th-century crossguard.

Update:
When I returned in April 2015 I found the pub converted to a hotel, and the previous decent-ish sign replaced with this rubbish one:

Mixed-up prior(it)ies

The Priory, St Neots

St Neots used to have a priory, but this isn’t it: theirs was largely pulled down after the Dissolution and no trace now remains. What adorns this sign is a heavily processed but still identifiable picture of Castle Acre Priory, Norfolk.

Trainspotting

The Engine, Baldock

Now I may be a bit of an anorak about some things (heraldry, beer, pubs spring to mind), but trains aren’t my thing at all. So for this one I had to consult my mate Pete Wiffin, landlord of the Live & Live in Cambridge. Within a split second of seeing the photograph he had identified this as LNER 1306, a Thompson Type B1 locomotive (which I suppose means something to somebody), now bearing the nameplate ‘Mayflower’.

The engine still exists, in LNER livery, as can be seen in this photo, from a similar angle, although this is a little inauthentic as it wasn’t delivered until after nationalisation, and the Mayflower was a different locomotive altogether. Also, given that it saw most of its service in and around Hull and Bradford, I doubt it ever went near Baldock in its working life, but it’s a charming little sign nonetheless. I hope it doesn’t just get lobbed into a skip should Greene King get round to ‘refurbishing’ the place.

Baldock station building itself, viewed from about the same point, now looks like this: