This will be a quick one, for the lost pub in question stopped serving way back in the middle of the nineteenth century.
I'd travelled to the south Derbyshire town of Melbourne to visit a mate and inform him of the loss of a mutual friend. Arriving a little early, and with it being a fine, sunny day I decided to have a short stroll around. Walking along Potter Street I passed the lost Roebuck, which appeared in this earlier post, and next door to it is this building. Now known as Nut House, it used to be a pub. The Melbourne Historical Research Group have discovered that it was originally called the Sir Francis Burdett and that it was run in the 1820s by the Buck family who proceeded to build a new inn and move into it, taking the name with them. That pub is now is also a bygone boozer and featured here, along with a number of similarly named lost hostelries. The building they vacated was renamed the Three Tuns and continued serving.
Pigot's directory of 1831 tells us that it was run by Gregory Brown as well as that there was an identically named hostelry in nearby Smisby.
Of the pubs that I know of in Smisby, extant or extinct, I have to say that I've not come across one by this name before. Something worth a bit of investigating, I feel. It might even appear in a future post.
Gregory was at the Tuns for a fair bit of the 1830s, but by1841 he'd been replaced as landlord by John Pickering. The census of that year shows him and his family living next door to Joseph Brooks at the Roebuck.
The census taken a decade later shows us that James Waterfield was in residence, next door to the Brooks at the... White Hart Inn. Something makes me think that the enumerator just looked at the pub sign rather than actually finding out what the pub was actually called.
The Pickerings had moved out by the time Freebody published their directory the following year and the pub was being operated by one Samuel Stafford.
Samuel died in 1866 and the Three Tuns died with him. And speaking of death, Brian and I retired to the Lamb – sorry, The Melbourne Inn as it now calls itself – to raise a glass, of Boltmaker in my case and Bass in Brian's, to Andy, loyal supporter of the late Golden Lion and Butchers Arms, and remember the numerous nights we'd spent in his company in some hostelry or other. It took us quite a while, for there was no shortage of visits to recall.
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