A Cock and Bull Story. Part 2.
- Stewart
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
In the previous post we met the Bull Inn, or sometimes the Black Bull Inn, in the village of Great Sampford in Essex. If you've read that post you my recall that I intended to include this bygone boozer as well, but George Killingback suggested that it was time to stop and take a break. Well, Mr. Kinningback is once again a tile maker and not a nineteenth century tele-marketer, so it's time for Part 2.
Great Sampford's Cock Inn stood on High Street, now the B1053, and is shown on the Ordnance Survey's 1896 mapping of the village.
Whilst it was a boozer back in 1896, it had certainly ceased to be one by the 1980s. The building which housed it was made Grade II listed in February1980 and dates from around 1686. Whether or not it was a pub from the outset I don't know, but it gets a mention in a notice published in the Ipswich Journal on 16th October 1756 when it was in the hands of John Andrews.
The next mention of the place that I've found is in Pigot's 1839 directory when the appropriately Robert Cocke is at the Cock.
He's back in the directory the following year, but by the time of the census in 1841 he'd moved on and John Belsham had replaced him.
John moved on to the Fox and Hounds in Thaxted, now another bygone, and by 1848 another John, wheelwright John Metcalf, was at the Cock.
He was still there on census night three years later...
...but had been replace by William Piggott by the time that the headcount came around once more.
William was there for over forty years, appearing in numerous census returns and Kelly's directories, right up to their 1906 edition...
...but in 1910 Kelly's has Edmund Goldsmith at the Cock.
He'd gone by the following year...
...and Mr Snowball had melted away by the time the 1912 edition of Kelly was published.
William Boyes wasn't there for long either...
...and it seems very likely that Thomas Stracey could've been the person who poured the last pints in the Cock, for the East Anglian Daily Times reported on 6th February 1914 on its closure on the grounds of redundancy.
Today the former Cock Inn is known as Hillcrest and is in residential use.
With this piece completed, that's two of the village's bygone dealt with. There is a third, the White Horse, which may appear in these pages in the future. The Red Lion, I'm pleased to report, seems to still be going strong.
The Ordnance Survey map extract is copyright and has been reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland under the terms of this CC BY licence.
The newspaper images are courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).
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