Regular readers of this rubbish will remember that I'm enduring an enforced rest from pedalling whilst I wait to see a man about a tendon. With no hours spent on the bike and with no rugby to watch since Leicester beat Saracens (Yay!) in the Gallagher Premiership Final at Twickenham it means that there's more time to dispense this drivel. Those same regular readers may well recall that a while ago I started taking them on a virtual bus ride home from Great Yarmouth to Gorleston with this post and that we've made a number of stops along the way, including at the Railway Hotel and the Anson Arms. Our most recent sojourn was at the Halfway House and this post continues the journey from there.
Just beyond the Halfway House the route home would follow one of two different courses, depending upon which bus I was on. The carriage of choice would normally be Great Yarmouth Borough Transport service 9 or 10, which would be heading towards Gorleston's beach or cliffs respectively, as this would save around a quarter of mile of walking. However, travelling home from school I'd often hop on a number 8 as that would get me home sooner. Outwith the three days of peak holiday season the 9 and 10 tended to be single-decker affairs...
...but the route to the 'Mag' always seemed to have a 'proper' bus.
In my early bus-journeying days GYBT designated their routes with letters as opposed to numbers. It was a semi-logical system. B went to the beach, C went to the Cliffs, E went to Elmhurst. Quite how they managed to choose A for the service to the Magdalen Estate I don't know. As I said, semi-logical. Exactly when they changed to a numerical system I do not recall but be it letters or numbers the routes diverged just beyond the Halfway House with some buses passing the pub marked in the centre of the map below to its left and others to its right. That pub was the Greyhound. The one just to its north was the aforementioned Halfway House and the other, the one towards the south-eastern corner, was the Ferry Boat Inn which appeared in this earlier post.
Sitting at the junction of High Road and Beccles Road, the records of Lacon's brewery show a William Allen was at the Greyhound as early as 1819.
Pigot's directory still has him there in 1830...
...as does the 1841 census...
...and White's directory published four years later.
But, after over a quarter of a century of tenure, William had moved out by the time the headcount of 1851 took place.
He'd not gone far though, just a little further along High Road where he could be found with wife Sarah, earning a crust as corn porter. Perhaps he still called into the Greyhound every now and then for a pint of porter to quench his thirst after all his portering.
The Greyhound served its last pint in October 1971 and was converted into a house. In the century and a half since William Allen was first recorded as being in the place nobody else could match his length of tenure. The only folks who came close were Charles Coe and his wife Alice who ran the place between them from around 1909 until about 1930.
As I was typing the final couple of sentences above I received a phone call. It appears that Mr. Tendon Man can't see me tomorrow because he has Covid. Does this mean that perhaps the prohibition on me pedalling is going to be prolonged? If so, expect some more memory-fuelled posts like this.
Thanks to Andrew for his shots of the GYBT buses.
The map extract is copyright and is reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland under this licence.
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