What's with all this Zetland stuff? I posed that question in the previous post about Grangemouth's lost Earl of Zetland, and then there was the floating pub of that name moored up in various locations around England's coast.
In the aforementioned previous post we saw that the port of Grangemouth was founded by Sir Lawrence Dundas whose family had the estate at Kerse House near Falkirk. Never heard of him? Well, some of you of a certain age may recall his great great great great great grandson. Lord, yes, Lord David Dundas (younger sons of a marquess are entitled to be styled as Lord) was getting his Jeans On in the long hot summer of 1976 when everybody else was doing his or her best to get theirs off in order to wear something rather cooler.
Anyway, I digress. Let's get back to pubs.
This post features yet another Earl of Zetland. Yes, another one! Once I start with something I tend to become a trifle obsessive. The third pub of that name to have featured in these pages could be found at 116 Princedale Street, known earlier as Princes Street, on the corner of Pottery Lane in Notting Hill. In addition, just to cause confusion, it was also sometimes listed as being at 31 William Street.
A pub of this name was in existence there by 1849 as its landlord of the day, one Job Way, found himself getting a mention in the London Gazette of 1st May.
Bankruptcy didn't prevent Job continuing in the trade as the 1861 census has him at the Crooked Billet in Wapping, before he emigrated to the USA four years later.
If Job was easy enough to trace through the years, the pub wasn't. It seems to have jumped enumeration districts for a while before re-emerging where I'd expected to find it for the 1871 one.
Pottery Lane had acquired its name as it led, at its northern end, to Notting Dale – also known as the Potteries on account of its many brickfields. In the mid-1800s London's pig keepers, forced to move westwards from Marble Arch and Tottenham Court Road by the city's expansion, settled in the area. In the 1851 census of the locality, if a person wasn't a brickmaker or a pig-keeper then they seemed to make pegs or baskets. Pottery Lane was also known locally as Cut-Throat Lane, so I doubt that it was the most salubrious of areas.
In1850, Charles Dickens wrote about the Potteries in his magazine Household Words. His piece included these descriptions:
...a plague spot scarcely equalled for its insalubrity by any other in London...
and
...many hundreds of pigs, ducks and fowls are kept in an incredible state of filth.
The atmosphere is still further polluted by the process of fat-boiling. In these hovels, discontent, dirt, filth and misery are unsurpassed by anything known even in Ireland.
He was only reiterating what a medical officer two years earlier had described as "...one of the most deplorable spots, not only in Kensington, but in the whole metropolis" It must've been pretty bad!
Amid all this filth, misery and discontent folks still wanted beer, and in 1853 it was probably provided by Richard Beek.
There seems to be no trace of him there in the census taken a couple of years earlier, or anybody else for that matter, and by 1860 he'd been replaced by Alfred Shelley...
...who did manage to meet the enumerator in the next head count.
Albert moved on to run the Black Horse in Old Boswell Court, where he died in 1866 and by the time of the next census Richard Kendall is residing at the Earl of Zetland on the corner of Princes Road and Pottery Lane.
The pub was marked on this Ordnance Survey map of the 1860s. It's the one near the top left of the image. The other pub shown, at the junction of Portland Road and Portland Road West (now Penzance Place), was the Portland Arms which closed in the early 1990s. The road running off to the left, with just the letter T of its name visible, is William Street, later renamed as Kenley Street before disappearing altogether in post WW2 redevelopment, which can account for why, at times, the pub's address would be given as 31 William Street.
Nobody seemed to stay, or perhaps that should be survive, for long in the pub. In1881 it seems to have changed its name to the Zetland Arms and has Alfred Bywater in residence...
...and before the next census one Charles Sutton was there...
...but he'd gone by the time the enumerator came a-knocking once again.
And George Butcher, who'd replaced him, had himself been replaced by another George by the time that the head-counter came around once more.
The area's condition had slowly improved through the second half of the nineteenth century and I can't help feeling that the place was rebuilt at some point. I've seen no evidence for this, but this building, surely, can't have been the home of Job Way.
The above image was taken by Charrington's surveyors as part of an audit of the brewer's estate. I'm presuming that it dates from around the time that Charrington acquired Hoare's brewery and pubs in 1933, and it would've been around that time that a period of stability for the place is starting.
In 1935 the Earl is being run by George and May Peachey.
When George died in 1946 May continued to run the pub. When she retired their daughter Pamela, together with her Canadian husband Olivier Porrell, continued the family's connection with the Earl. They were still pulling the pints at 116 Princedale Road in 1969...
...but had left by the following year, ending over thirty years of family association with the place.
Back around the time that David Dundas was putting his jeans on, when I used to visit west London, I rarely ventured east of the Holland Park roundabout, tending to limit my wanderings to W6 and W12. One of the few occasions when I did was to visit the still operating Stewart Arms on Norland Road. I mean, I just had to, didn't I? I'd have only been about ten minutes away from the Earl. Had I have ventured that little bit further east I'd have found that the landlord would have changed again. At least once. All that continuity offered by George, May and Pamela – gone.
As an aside, the sharp-eyed amongst you will have noticed that one of the Earls of Warwick had disappeared in the intervening seven years. In fact, all four of the above Earls are now bygones.
This Earl of Zetland continued on until around 2001, operating for a while as the Tuscan and then Bar One One Six before closing for the final time. This image captured by Chris Amies in around 2006 shows it still carrying the Bar One One One sign.
Standing empty for a number of years, the building fell into disrepair...
...before being renovated with the addition of an extra floor...
...and today is used for both commercial and residential purposes.
With the closure of the Earl of Zetland on Lee Road in Hackney having occurred in 1993, prior to its conversion to a Honeymoon Hotel and then subsequent demolition, and the loss of its Grangemouth namesake in 2022, the Earl of Zetland as a pub name now seems to be extinct. As far as I can work out, the title has also disappeared from the peerage of the United Kingdom, for the 3rd Earl was 'promoted' to Marquess in 1892. Taking his cue from his younger brother David, the 4th Marquess, has passed his genes on and has produced a son, so his Zetland line will continue.
With regards to pubs, there is still a couple of Zetland Arms in operation – one in South Kensington and the other in Deal. Hopefully neither will have cause to appear here in the near future.
The Charrington Surveyors' image is copyright and is reused under this CC BY-SA licence, as is that of Ewan Munro, whilst acb's one is reused under this one and Chris Amies' photograph is reused under this one.
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An interesting and enjoyable piece, and thank you for choosing one of my pictures to illustrate it. I'm also tracking extinct pub names though sometimes it isn't as clear as all that - pubs change their names, and suddenly the old one is extinct - e.g. the Sudeley Arms in Cheltenham, soon to reopen under a different name.