More Inn Signs – Notable Ships and Those Who Sailed In Them
by Esmerelda Weatherwax (November 2009)
More pub signs.
The first Ark Royal was build for Sir Walter Raleigh and became the flagship of Lord High Admiral, Howard of Effingham and saw action against the Spanish Armada and at Cadiz.
350 years later the second Ark Royal was commissioned in 1914 as a seaplane carrier, which was quite innovative and saw action in the Dardanelles. The third Ark Royal was commissioned in 1938 as an aircraft carrier, was involved in the sinking of the Bismark in May 1941 and was torpedoed and sunk off Gibraltar 6 months later.
The fourth Ark Royal was commissioned in 1955 and was an aircraft carrier the size and stature if which has not been since. She could take 90 small or 40 larger faster aircraft.
The fifth and current ship of the name was launched in 1981 and is about a third of the size of her predecessor.
She now carries Chinook, Lynx, Apache and Sea King helicopters.
I am pretty certain that this sign left shows the current Ark Royal V. As you can see it is not a painted board but a metal work silhouette.
The ship depicted here is the fifth Enterprise of the British Navy, purchased by the navy in 1848 and fitted up for the arctic to boldly go in search of Sir John Frankin’s missing expedition to find the North West Passage, in the company of HMS Investigator. The two boats lost each other and spent the next few years searching separately.
I am confident in my identification because of the polar bear on the ice floe. He doesn’t look a bit like either Richard Branson or Captain Slog.
The Enterprise was away for five years and spent 4 winters in the ice. They came close to the remains of Franklin’s expedition but failed to actually find them.
Captain Collinson may not have been completely sane; at one point he had all his officers bar the surgeon under arrest on the ice bound ship. He wanted them court martialed – they wanted him court martialed. In the end, by some miracle, most of the crew of officers and men survived to return home. Their ordeal is described in the book Arctic Hell-Ship by William Barr of Canada.
Captain Cook and The Endeavour. Barking and Chelmsford.
The sign of the Captain Cook pub is in Barking Essex. Barking was a port of some importance on the approach to London; James Cook and his wife Elizabeth Batt of Wapping were married in Barking Abbey in 1762.
The sign of the Endeavour is in Springfield Road Chelmsford.
Like the Endeavour and the Resolution the prospect of Whitby, built in 1777, was a three-masted Whitby collier. Whitby built the boats which carried the coal south from the coal mines of Yorkshire, County Durham and the North East. Hence the phrase ‘carrying coals to Newcastle’.
The Mayflower – Leigh on Sea
While the voyage to the New World is generally considered to have begun in earnest from Plymouth in September 1620 the Mayflower was fitted out in Rotherhithe in London and berthed in Leigh on Sea on the north bank of the Thames Estuary to collect Essex pilgrims who had gathered in Billericay. There are many pubs named the Mayflower.
There are pubs named for his ship the Victory, which is still berthed in Portsmouth, I just have not photographed one yet. Give me time. The Battle of Trafalgar in Whitcombe Street near Trafalgar Square had no sign and is now a trendy bar called Gravity.
This is the Admiral Vernon in Dagenham near where I used to live.
What I didn’t know when I lived there, during which period I visited George Washington’s family home at Mount Vernon in Virginia, was that the pub and the estate were named after the same man.
His nickname was ‘old grog’ which was acquired from his habit of wearing a grogram coat. He introduced the mixing of the naval rum ration with water in an attempt to reduce drunkenness. As the water onboard ship tasted terrible he then ordered that lime juice be added and the resulting drink became known as ‘grog’ (hence groggy – even watered down it was still strong stuff). It became noticeable that his men suffered less from scurvy, a vitamin C deficiency, than others. The use of lime resulted in the American nickname for us, limeys.
At one time he served under Sir Cloudsley Shovell, about whom more below.
After his success against the Spanish at Porto Bello during the War of Jenkin’s Ear he became very popular with the American colonists. One of these who served under him was Lawrence Washington, elder brother of George Washington and he gave the family estate the name of his commander.
On return to England he became the Member of Parliament for Ipswich and died on the family estate at nearby Nacton on the Orwell Estuary in 1757.
He spelt his name several different ways in various documents. Sometimes, as in Barking (no longer with a sign, just a bare pole) it is spelt Ship and Shovel, leading people to believe it is something to do with stoking on the old steamships.
He was another Norfolk man, born in Cockthorpe in 1650. As a second Lieutenant he was part of the mission to Algiers to redeem English slaves. The fleet then went on to blockade the Barbary pirate port of Tripoli where the pirates had reneged on an earlier treaty.
He had a busy career through the reigns of King Charles II, James II, Monmouth rebellion, William and Mary, and with the accession of Queen Anne he was promoted to Admiral of the White. In the 18th century there were always three admirals, red, white and blue. The distinction between them all features in several of Jane Austen’s novels.
His death in 1707 and the circumstances in which his flagship and two others were wrecked on the Scilly Isles continues to exercise the minds of naval historians. He thought that he was further eastward that he actually was. This disaster motivated the Admiralty to set the competition for a way of calculating longitude which was eventually solved by John Harrison. Harrison’s sea clock was tested by Captain Cook in his second voyage in 1772.
As a child I asked my Dad “Dad, who was Rodney then?”
I now know that he was Admiral George Rodney 1st Baron Rodney, 1719 – 1792. He spent most of his career in the West Indies and his most famous achievement was defeating the French Admiral de Grasse at the Battle of Les Saintes on 12 April 1782 and saving Jamaica from invasion.
Eva Hart MBE JP – Chadwell Heath
This is a BBC interview with her in 1987
The new name is a historic one locally, that of the Beacon and Tree. The original Beacon and Tree was further up Green Lanes towards Ilford and was one of several to have that name, which was related to the message beacon and marker tree on the spot which gave the names Becontree and Beacontree Heath to two local neighbourhoods.
The Beacon Tree was demolished and a block of flats built on the site which is a common story. The Matapan experienced a change of management which I am told improved the pub which had declined in tone over the previous year; it was around this time that the name changed. While I am pleased that an old name is still current I am also sorry that a new and unique name of modern history has been lost so quickly. The Matapan followed in the tradition of pub names like the Heroes of Lucknow (Aldershot), the Waterloo and the Alma.
The picture below is taken from the Beer in the Evening website – it changed names in 2007 before I started this project.
There is also a picture I took of the Ark Royal in the Thames two years ago to compare the silhouette of the sign in Wells.
If you would like to see the pictures in a larger form please click on them to be taken to Flickr photoshare site.
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Esmerelda Weatherwax is a regular contributor to the Iconoclast our community blog. To view her entries please click