Last Year it Was my Cowin' Changer...
WARNING! THIS POST HAS CONTENT WHICH SOME FOLK MAY FIND DISTRESSING. IT CERTAINLY DISTRESSED ME!!
Yes, it's that time in early autumn when Mrs Bygone Boozer and I migrate to Andalusia for a week or three to combine a bit of cycling with a bit of cat-sitting. Regulars to this drivel will have met both of our charges, Delilah and Tilda, in previous posts about bygones.
Last year I managed just four rides before my cowin' front gear changer broke. This year I'd arrived with a replacement, inner and outer gear cables and some new handlebar tape to fix my folding bike, which no longer travels anywhere in its own suitcase but lives for around forty-nine weeks of the year in my sister-in-law's loft
Having messed with the mechanicals and having had our usual short shakedown ride to check the bikes were working OK, as well as our thirty-five miler to visit one of our favourite coffee stops, we thought that it was about time that we headed for the seaside. So off to Puerto Sotogrande it was, for a second breakfast in iCafe, with its view of one of the canals.
Pancakes with maple syrup, yoghurt and an assortment of fruits made for a great second breakfast...
...and after another Americano we thought that we'd pedal out to the helipad to get a view of Gibraltar.
Photos acquired, it was time to move on. I wheeled my bike away from the sign, stepped astride it and turned to switch on rear light for our return journey.
"Cowin' hell!"
Under the influence of the weight of the handlebar bag the front wheel turned and, as the rest of the bike tried to follow but couldn't, it simply fell to the ground. The bike suffered no damage, but during its interaction with one of the universe's four fundamental forces the left-hand pedal ran down my leg causing a tiny, but very sharp, burr on it to do this.
Cutting a long four-hour story short, my calf had been cut for a length of twelve centimetres down to the fascia of the muscle. End result was a somewhat complicated taxi ride, a saline flush out (another cowin' hell moment!) and tetanus booster at a local clinic, twenty stitches at the university hospital in La Línea de la Concepción and no more cycling for the duration of the stay. Last year my Spanish cycling activity was curtailed by my cowin' changer. This year it was brought to a close by my cowin' calf.
Almost half a century ago, back in September 1979, I was doing even less cycling. I'd just moved to Cambridge to start some post-graduate studies and serving behind the bar of my new local, the Salisbury Arms, was Paul. A Leeds lad of Irish descent, he'd put his embryonic medical career on hold to do a doctorate in a subject that I didn't understand at the time and can't remember now. He suggested that one night when he wasn't working that we should go to visit the Cow and Calf (see what I did there?) on Pound Hill. So we did.
At the time the pub was being run by Irish couple Noel Archdeacon and his wife, Hannah, who'd been there since moving from the Britannia on East Road when it closed in early September 1971. Its previous incumbent, Basil West, had moved to the Black Horse in Impington, which is also now closed. The Cow and Calf's interior had been remodelled about six month's before our visit and consisted of a large back room with a pool table and a much smaller front one with a fire. The clientele was made up of a significant proportion of ex-pats from the Emerald Isle. Reflecting this, the jukebox was full of Irish folk songs by the likes of Davey Arthur, The Dubliners, The Chieftans and The Fureys as well as rebel songs from The Wolfe Tones and their ilk. If my memory isn't failing me there was a map of a united Ireland on the wall. With the building being owned by Cambridge City Council and leased to Tolly Cobbold, it was no surprise that if offered Tolly Original on handpump. Also unsurprising is that the place had the reputation for serving the best pint of Guinness in the city.
The quality of its well-known stout is not the only thing that the Cow and Calf had a reputation for. Not that I noticed anything on my visit, but it seems that the place was frequented by a number of members of what Rudyard Kipling, in On the City Wall, dubbed the oldest profession in the world. According to the Cambridge Daily News, in March 1973 Noel had faced a charge listing thirteen specified dates between October and December the previous year when he'd allegedly allowed his premises to be the habitual resort of reputed prostitutes, "in that he did unlawfully allow them to remain on the premises for a longer time than was necessary for the purpose of obtaining reasonable refreshment." Whilst it was accepted that he wasn't running a brothel, magistrates still fined him £10 with £2.10 costs for allowing ladies of the night to use the pub.
When Rudyard Kipling was penning On the City Wall in 1888 the Cow and Calf was a different building in the possession of Albine Carter.
Albine was there for both the 1881...
...and 1891 censuses...
...but the pub harks back quite a bit further than that, sitting on the corner of Albion Row and Shelley Row. However, it appears that the street names in this part of the city seem to have been rather flexible and fluid over the years, with 14 Pound Hill being an address commonly attributed to this bygone boozer.
I have come across a directory entry from 1830 which gives a William Pigney at a Cow and Calf, but this one is said to be in King Street which, today at least, is quite a way from Pound Hill. I've also found reference to a William Kirkup being in a pub of the right name in 1839 with this one being in Castle Street. Current day Castle Street is only about a hundred yards from our bygone Cow and Calf, so they may possibly be one and the same. Things get a bit murkier in 1841 when Mr Kirkup is listed as being at the Cow and Calf on – wait for it – King Street!
Maybe the same pub or maybe not, but the place was certainly in existence in 1845 when it was named in an advert in the Cambridge Independent Press on 4th January...
...and by 1851 the Carter family are there. The above-mentioned Albine's father James is given as a grocer and publican and Albine himself was an apprentice baker.
James is still a publican in 1861 but had died in the first quarter of 1871 and when the enumerator called on Pound Hill on 2nd April that year he didn't seem to record the pub's presence. By the time of the next census in 1881, as we've seem above, Albine was back there. In 1871 he'd been recorded as a baker and publican, not a million miles away, at 71 Castle Street. I have unable to tie a pub to his given address, so maybe he was living in Castle Street whilst running the Cow and Calf.
We've already seen that Albine was there in 1891 but he had gone by 1896 when Kelly's directory lists a William Warren at the Cow and Calf, putting the pub on St Peter's Street.
This change of landlord my well have coincided with the demolition of the original building and its replacement with the one which I visited. It's pretty certain that it's the right pub as five years later William Warren and family are at the Cow and Calf on Pound Hill in the 1901 census.
William died a couple of months later and by the time of the next headcount, his widow Haidee was living in the nearby almshouses on Shelley Row and the Cow and Calf was in the hands of James Hunt.
The snowballing of events following Franz Ferdinand's driver taking a wrong turning in Sarajevo on 28th June 1914 led to James finding himself in Flanders a couple of years later where, on 24th May 1916, he died of his wounds.
The Cambridge Independent Press, on 7th July, reported that James' widow Minnie took over the licence...
...and on 4th May the following year that she'd been replaced by Thomas Johnson.
Thomas was at the Cow and Calf at the time of the 1921 census and he died in 1926. From this point, until Basil West left and the Archdeacons took the place on, what I've been able to dig up about the Cow and Calf is a bit thin. A 1935/6 directory of the city gives a Mr Codling in residence...
...and Richard Codling, along with wife Emily , is recorded there in the 1939 Register. Other than this I've managed to ascertain from electoral registers that in 1949 one Harry Collins was there and in 1964 the Cow and Calf seems to have been run by a Lionel Pryor. What I am certain about is that the Cow and Calf was taken on in the summer of 1995 by Les and Anne Shiert who were there until it closed in February 1999. The former Cow and Calf has since been demolished and on its footprint now stands a block of flats.
Returning from Cambridge's Cow and Calf to Derbyshire and my cowin' calf. The twenty stitches...
...were removed yesterday. Despite having twelve days' notice and operating on three different sites, my cowin' GP's practice could not offer me an appointment to take them out. Instead I had to visit the cowin' minor injuries department of the local cowin' hospital and wait my turn. I can't help but compare this with the treatment I received in Spain where the longest wait I had was about forty minutes when arriving unannounced at a clinic to check on the wound's progress.
I'm still not allowed to pedal, or do too much walking, for another couple of weeks. This means that there's likely to be plenty of time for directory delving and census crawling thanks to my cowin' calf. I might even do another one about another cowin' Cow and Calf.
The newspaper image is courtesy of the British Library Board/British Newspaper Archive, the 1970s image and some information were taken from Capturing Cambridge and are reused under this licence and the Ordnance Survey extract is reproduced from the National Library of Scotland under this one.
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