In the post which featured the General Wyndham I explained that that post had resulted from some research that I had been doing for one about the Waterloo Inn at Taddington. This is that post, and it's been quite a while in the making.
Way back in June last year I had an early morning ride around my favourite time trial course in lieu of competing in it. That resulted in this post on the Rawson's Arms in Ashford-in-the-Water. In so doing I passed the Waterloo in Taddington. When racing, my arrival at this point always suggested to me that the race was almost over, that the hard stuff was behind me. However, if we look at the course profile we can see that that was by no means the case.
With barely a third of the distance covered, and with just as much total climbing to come, reaching the Waterloo was much more of a psychological boost than an indication that my efforts would soon be over.
It wasn't even 7a.m. that Saturday morning so there were no punters' cars in the car park and even if it were 7p.m. the car park would still have been empty, for the pub had closed.
I remember it as a Robinson's boozer, but they divested themselves of the place in 2017 and the Waterloo became a Free House, as evidenced by a sign which was still hanging from the front wall.
The road I'd pedalled from Ashford, apart form the short length of dual carriageway built to bypass Taddington village, follows the turnpike road to Buxton which was approved by Act of Parliament in 1810. It obviously took a year or so to construct but had been finished by 1817 as John Farey indicates so in his book, General View of the Agriculture and Minerals of Derbyshire, which was published in that year.
Wellington sorted out Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 and the road had been completed by 1817, so when did the inn first make an appearance? With its name and its position alongside a newly completed road it feels as if it ought to date from the same time but the earliest reference to it that I've been able to find so far is from the 1840s. There's no mention of it in earlier directories, not even in Glover's from 1829 which manages to list all of the others in the village, so I'm assuming that it was built a bit later.
The Waterloo Inn was marked on the Ordnance Survey's first one-inch map of 1842...
...and I'm assuming that its occupier at the time was Anthony Mason as he is shown to be a publican in the previous year's census...
...and whilst the pub wasn't named in the census return, the Post Office directory of 1849 does show him to be at the Waterloo.
Unlike a lot of inns of this nature, which passed through the hands of a number of generations of the same family, the Waterloo seemed to change hands quite regularly. Each decade's census and each new directory seems to throw up a new surname. One of those which is a little different from the rest is Kohli.
Eugene Köhli – yes, that's how Eugene spelt his name, with an umlaut – came from Neuchâtel in Switzerland and had run hotels in Ireland, as well as Buxton's now demolished Shakespeare Hotel, before finding himself in Taddington in the mid 1920s .
In 1939, John and Gertrude Paulger were mine hosts and the pub's appearance seems to be little changed...
...but today its exterior has lost its blocky look.
Quite when this happened I'm not sure, but I do have a clue. This postcard depicts the pub in its original clothes...
...and 16th April 1995 was PhONEday, when the digit '1' was added to all of the UK's STD codes. The significance of this little piece of trivia becomes clear when we see the postcard's reverse.
Both telephone numbers have the additional '1', so the card must've been produced since 1995. That doesn't necessarily mean that the images on it weren't taken earlier, but it does give us an indication of when Margaret and Norman Whitelaw were in residence.
The last occupants whilst it was owned by Robinson were Mark 'Corky' Ryan and his wife Tina who arrived there in 2013 and remained to take on the place when the brewery decided to offload it four years later. They developed it as a popular music venue, but possibly it wasn't popular enough for the pub closed in the late summer/autumn of 2022 and was for sale by auction at the end of the year. If you wish to have a look around the interior, at the time of writing the details are still visible by clicking here. Whether or not a sale went through I don't know, but it looks very much as if this pub has met its Waterloo. Much as my racing has!
The Ordnance Survey First Series map extract is copyright Great Britain Historical GIS Project/University of Portsmouth and is reused under this licence.
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