There's not been a lot of traffic to the blog of late, mainly because there hasn't been anything new on the blog recently. There's a couple of reasons for this. Firstly Mrs Bygone Boozer and I have had a few weeks of pedalling in the Scandinavian spring sunshine, with temperatures in the mid twenties, before returning to the nine degrees and rain of Derbyshire, and secondly, for a reason I will keep to myself for now, my research efforts have been focused elsewhere. But I'm back to a bit of directory delving and census crawling. At least for the moment.
Various versions of this old image have been littering up my hard drive for a while. I've been assured that it was taken in Derby and it looks as if it was...
...for, in 1881, Rupert Hall was a licensed victualler living at 52 Traffic Street...
...and Wright's 1874 Directory of South Derbyshire informs us that number 52 was indeed called the Stag.
The town plan from 1881/2 shows the pub on Traffic Street, next door to the substantial Congregational Chapel which, no doubt, is the building creeping into the left-hand side of the photograph.
When did the Stag first make an appearance on the pub scene? The earliest reference by name that I've come across is in the 1849 Post Office directory where the pub is seemingly called the Stag and Thorn and occupied by one William Ault...
...who eight years earlier had been at an unnamed pub on Traffic Street. I'm presuming that it was the same one.
William moved on to the Rising Sun in Friargate and by 1857 the Stag was occupied by Nathaniel Cross...
...who supplemented his income from the pub by doing a bit of chippying...
...something which is confirmed by the census of 1861.
The sharp-eyed amongst you may have noticed that the street number for the pub is given as 46 at this point and had changed to 52 by the time that Rupert Hall had taken it on. The number changed once again between 1881 and 1891 with more development in the area, becoming number 109...
...and that was the number that it held until its closure in 1912, when it's final licensee could very well have been Randal Humpson.
After closure the building was used as a shop for a while before being demolished. The site has altered quite a bit since and, whilst the blog's not seen a lot of traffic, nowadays quite a bit flows through Traffic Street's lost Stag, for it used to be located where the carriageway now is, in front of the left-hand tree by the Derbion shopping centre.
Of course, it's not just the Stag missing from this image. Debenhams has gone too. It's not just pubs that close. I believe it's been replaced by Frasers. That's something I could check out soon, on an up-coming visit to some of Derby's hostelries with an ex-workmate.
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.
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