You may well recall, if you read the recent post on the Quiet Woman in Rainow, that Mrs Bygone Boozer and I had been heading for Manchester Airport to do a little bit of pedalling in foreign lands. Well, just the one foreign land if truth be told. And if you had read that post you'll no doubt remember that the particular foreign land in question was Sweden. There's always a problem with holidays. You go away, ride a different bike – whose saddle just happens to be a picometer higher then your usual mount's – and WHAM! The old tendinopathy in the once-ruptured left Achilles' decides to make a reappearance. Just as I was after the ride to Eyam's lost Townhead Inn, I am once again taped up like some sort of proper athlete.
Strapped up, it allows for a bit of milking of the situation, especially if I bleat a little from time to time. Vacuuming? Sorry, not possible. Lawn mowing? Of course not. And as for wheelbarrowing logs...
With little gadding around going on, for this post I've resorted to using an old photo that I've had for a bit, and which I scanned almost a year ago to the day. It was the pub's name that caught my attention, not having heard of one called the Milking Pail before.
This drinking establishment was located in what was then known as Sheep Street in Mickleton, Gloucestershire and in spite of there being a number of beerhouse keepers named in earlier censuses, any one of which could've been, and probably was, at the Milking Pail, the earliest that I can pin a name down to actually having been there is in 1861 when Robert Penson, who supplemented the income the pub generated by making shoes, lived there.
Whilst the 1870 Post Office directory only names the Butchers' Arms and the King's Arms it does name a William Collett as a beer retailer in the village...
...the following year's census puts him in the Pail...
...where he remained for at least another decade.
In 1891 the pub was free of any brewery tie, being owned by a Courtenay Pearce and occupied by Louisa George.
Louisa was still there in 1901...
...as she was in 1903, by when the beerhouse had become tied to Stratford's Flower's Brewery. Louisa had moved on, however, by the time of the next census.
Recognise the landlord's name? Stephen Cowley. Here's a reminder. I hope all those barrels are empty ones. They'll take a while to settle otherwise.
And that is the last record of the Milking Pail operating as a pub that I can find. Possibly it closed as part of the compensation scheme produced by the Licensing Acts of the early part of the twentieth century. Today, in the early part of the twenty-first century, the Milking Pail is a private residence...
...going by the name of The Milking Pail.
Before I leave Mickleton, let's just look back at that 1901 census entry. Here it is again.
Look at the very top line in the extract. Yes, we have another pub on the page, being run by Emmanuel Grinnell. That pub turns out to have been next door to the Milking Pail. Not the building seen in the top image, but this one.
Now known as Lamb House, it was rather unsurprisingly called the Lamb Inn and was quite possibly the most southerly outlet for the wares of Leamington Spa brewers Lucas, Blackwell & Arkwright.
Like the Milking Pail, it was probably operating as one of the unnamed beerhouses mentioned above prior to its name appearing in the 1861 census when it was being run by William Farley alongside his butchery business.
If Mister Farley did happen to be its first landlord, the Grinnell family were the last to have it. Carpenter Emmanuel Grinnell was there in 1891...
...and we saw a little up the page – or twice if you were very observant – that he was there in 1901 as well. He died in 1904, but the pub was kept going by his widow Susan, with help from Frances, their daughter.
By the early 1930s the pub had closed but Susan and Frances were still living there in the building which had become Lamb House. In fact they both went on to breathe their last breaths in the place. Susan in 1934 at the grand old age of ninety-three and Frances in 1946, aged a mere seventy.
And there I will leave it, having milked the original stimulus photo for a bonus bygone. It's been a while since my last post, but the next is already well on its way, so no bleating please.
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