Finished With my Woman 'Cause...
- Stewart
- Jun 8
- 4 min read
...She couldn't help me with my mind.
People think I'm insane because
I am frowning all the time.
It's OK. Mrs Bygone Boozer is still around and even commented that she saw me smile briefly earlier today as Alexa announced, "Shuffling The Wizard and similar songs" from Amazon's massive library of over a hundred million tracks.
For those who don't immediately recognise the lyrics of Paranoid, it was released in August 1970 and was part of that summer's soundtrack which accompanied the teenage testosterone turmoil caused by Kim, the August Amoureuse that we met in this earlier post. Precisely what its relevance is to this one on the General Elliott we will see in a bit.
I have to admit that I didn't know who the good general was and had to do a little bit of interrogation of Mr Google. It appears that George Augustus Eliott – his surname seems to be a bit spelling-fluid – was appointed Governor of Gibraltar in 1777 and was there when the garrison was besieged and attacked by the combined forces of France and Spain. The siege ended in 1783, Eliott was made a Knight of the Bath and was sufficiently significant to be painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Quite how, as a teetotaller, he would have felt about a boozer being named after him I don't know but a number were, including one in Birmingham which was built in the early 1870s. It is not shown on William Till's 1873 map of the city but Ordnance Survey's town plan of 1877-78 has the General Elliot marked on the corner of Hill Street and Station Street. Probably designed by Thomson Plevins, its curved frontage is visible on the plan.
Whilst the pub didn't feature on Till's map in 1873, it did appear in Kelly's directory of 1872. Tonk Street was to become part of Hill Street.
The Crown was known by some as Cutler's, probably without knowing why, right up to its closure, even though William Cutler only remained the manager until the mid-1890s. He is shown to be there in Kelly's 1895 edition...
...but the following one shows a couple of name changes,
The General Elliott has become the Crown Hotel, but has there really been a change of landlord or is this simply a mistake of swapping a C for a B? Well, it's probably not an error as William Butler is also shown at the Crown in the 1897 edition as well as in the 1899 one.
A thought now springs to mind. Could this be the William Butler whose brewery merged with Henry Mitchell's in 1898 to form Mitchells & Butlers? The hotel was certainly an M&B house.
Whether or not William Butler was the William Butler his name was soon replaced in the directories by John Webb...
...who, like William Cutler before him, remained there for some time.
Leaping forward half a century, the 1960s folk revival saw Ian Campbell run the Jug of Punch folk club at the Crown and in 1962 his folk group recorded Ceilidh at the Crown there.
But the Crown wasn't just a home for folk music. Henry's Blues House was established there in 1968 and in September of that year Anthony Iommi, Terence Butler, William Ward and John Osbourne gave their first public performance as Earth. The following year the foursome changed their name to Black Sabbath and the rest, as they say, is history. And there folks is the link to the lyrics at the start of this waffle.
.
The Crown closed in 2014 after purchase by a Japanese developer. A decade later the building was given Grade II listed status on account of both its architectural interest and music history. Plans were afoot to reopen it as a music venue and a boutique hotel along with a centre for digital inclusion to help disadvantaged communities with their digital skills. Will the Crown be like Black Sabbath's 1983 album, and be Born Again? We'll just have to wait and see.
The Ordnance Survey town plan extract is copyright and has been reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland under the terms of this CC BY licence.
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Great photo of the Crown PH and I had forgotten about the Ian Campbell Folk Group. A big favourite of mine many decades ago.