Quicker Than Amazon!
- Stewart
- 6 minutes ago
- 6 min read
It was time for a summer break, so Mrs. Bygone Boozer and I set off to see our Swedish friends, Deanne and Bertil, staying next door in what was Deanne's maternal grandparents' house.
Arriving in a hot (30+°C), settled spell of weather it gave me the chance to get out on the bike. Or, more accurately, the bikes.
Firstly the default machine. The gravel bike with its 38mm – soon to be replaced with 42mm – tyres which give it a plush ride over the gravel roads which abound in this area of Jämtland. To be fair, most of the gravel roads around here are smoother than many of Derbyshire's tarmac ones.
My second spin was on the lightest bike. A stripped-down machine with some lightweight components, including a far too narrow, unpadded saddle, which I threw together from the bits box, many years ago, to ride in the district hill climb competition. Now, with its ultralight carbon wheels replaced with some thirty-year-old more aerodynamic ones, it's nice to ride for a short, gentle pootle. It certainly accelerates quickly, although its top speed is fairly limited but that's simply down to the fact that it's me who's riding it.
The next outing was the first in three years for my wet weather training bike. Not having been seriously training for longer than that, and definitely not seriously training in the rain, the requirement for a mudguard-equipped machine has been very limited. But just so it wouldn't feel left out, I took it for a spin. In the sunshine!
Last, but not least, I took my old time trial bike out for a bit of a burn-up. Struggling to hold race position for five minutes I really wondered how I could have done so for about an hour. Ten years older and ten years loss of flexibility will probably account for it.
An awful lot of things have happened on the fitness and health front since this machine brought me, and the local town's sports club that I represented (even though I was riding in Matlock CC colours!) a gold medal in the district time trial championships a decade ago.
Having a cellar to store the bikes in and having rent-free accommodation is nice, but it does come with a cost. A casual remark one evening, whilst sharing a malt whisky or three with Bertil, that the house could really do with a lick of paint, lead to the arrival of fifty litres of the coloured stuff on the front porch the following afternoon. Even Amazon takes three or more days to get stuff delivered to this part of the world.
So it was down to a bit of unskilled/semi-skilled labouring: scrape off the loose old stuff and slap on the shiny new.
All this activity leaves its mark...
...and whilst large areas of my arms are now the same colour as the house, it's not due to the paint. Is my platelet level still OK? Hopefully the next quarterly blood test in a couple of week's time will say that it is. The near future, if it's not, doesn't sound particularly appealing.
And now from one painter's arms picture to another. The former Painters Arms in Greenwich. Did you see what I did there? You don't think that these posts are just thrown together like the bits on an old hill climb bike, do you?
The building was built in the second half of the eighteenth century by carpenter Messingham Shepherd and eventually went on to house a beer house. Situated on a street corner, its address seems to switch back and forth between Church Field, Churchfields, Strait's Mouth, Straitsmouth, Straightsmouth and any spellings in between.
The earliest that I've come across it mentioned by name is in 1842 when on 9th July the Kentish Mercury printed this piece.
Thomas Butler was a painter. I wonder if this was where the boozer got its name from?
What became of Thomas Butler? Did he come to an agreement with his creditors which would allow for his release? The following month the brewery was offering to help him, as reported in the same publication on 27th August...
...but what the final outcome was, I don't know. However, I do know that by the time of the 1851 census his wife, Margaret, had married again and that late the previous year the Kentish Mercury informed us that John Swalling was at the Painters Arms.
From the edition published on 21st December 1850:
Further newspaper reports in 1851 and 1852 name a James Swalling as the pub's landlord. Were these two Swallings father and son, two brothers, or just one Swalling and a typo? There is no Swalling recorded at the pub on census night 1851. Indeed, the pub isn't named, although there was a James Swalling living elsewhere in the vicinity.
One Swalling or two? He or they? Well the mystery is likely solved by a report of Mr. Swalling's departure from the Painters, which appeared in the Kentish Independent on 4th December 1852.
It seems that it was John after all, and as he'd been there for six years he must've the replaced the pecuniary-embarrassed Thomas Butler. But who replaced Mr. Swalling?
It may well have been John Nicholls. If he was not the immediate replacement, he was in residence in 1858...
...and in 1861...
..but by 1863 a new landlord, John Davis, was attracting attention, according to the Borough of Greenwich Free Press on 26th September.
Attention which cost him ten bob plus costs, according to the Kentish Mercury of 3rd October.
On 26th March the following year, the same publication reports that he's been at it again, with the same outcome.
On 14th December 1867, the South London Journal informs us that John Davis was still at the Painters and continued to be on the wrong end of legal decisions...
...but that's the last that I hear of him. By the autumn of 1870 one Richard Crock is at the Painters, as this report on bell ringing in the Kentish Mercury on 15th October informs us.
Richard Cronk brought years of stability to the Painters Arms, remaining the licensee until 1887 when, according to the Morning Advertiser of the 13th August, the licence was transferred to Charles Finch, who was married to his daughter Emma.
Richard died about three months later and the census of 1891 shows us that Charles and Emma were still pouring the pints at the Painters.
Charles himself died in1892 and the Kentish Mercury of 15th July that year shows that the licence was transferred to Emma...
...and that's the last trace of the boozer that I can find. There's no mention of it in the 1901 census, when Emma is living as a servant in Gravesend, and subsequent versions and directories similarly draw a blank. However, my personal painter's arms are still functioning and have managed to get a second coat on the south-facing wall although they still look like they've painted themselves too!
Thanks to Fredrik Tackman for the image of me on the bike.
The newspaper images are courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).
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