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Some think, others do...

Pub Guide

Opening Times

Issue 137 Winter 2008

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White Horse, Eaton Socon

St Neots in the 18th century was something of a focal point for the coach trade. It was an important crossing point of the River Ouse, where roads from Cambridge and Bedford fed into the Great North Road, and as the market town for a prosperous and fertile agricultural region, it also generated a large volume of local traffic.

How sad, then, the fate of its great coaching inns. Of the three in the town centre, the riverside Bridge Inn is a steakhouse; the big, rambling Falcon is closed for redevelopment; and the ancient Cross Keys is a shopping mall. Of those on the Great North Road itself, the Brampton Hut has vanished beneath an interchange of the A1. Only the White Horse at Eaton Socon survives, by-passed and fronting what is now a suburban street rather than the national aorta this quiet stretch of road once was; but it lives.

The attractive, brick-fronted creeper-clad Georgian inn you see today stands on foundations that go back at least to the 15th century if not further. Refronted as a posting house in the early 18th century, it did not become one of the great coaching inns until the large, rather square extension was added two or three generations later. Sir Albert Richardson proposes the picturesque pre-extension inn as the model for both the Black Lion in Tobias Smollett’s Sir Launcelot Greaves and the inn in Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village.

Smollett describes its kitchen, which we may take to be typical, thus: ‘The kitchen, in which they assembled, was paved with red bricks, remarkably clean, furnished with three or four Windsor chairs, adorned with shining plates of pewter and copper saucepans nicely scoured; a cheerful fire of sea-coal blazed in the chimney.’

Goldsmith takes us to the parlour:

‘The whitewashed wall, the nicely sanded floor,
The varnished clock that clicked behind the door.
The pictures placed for ornament and use,
The twelve good rules, the royal game of goose,
The hearth, except when winter ruled the day,
With aspen boughs and flowers of fennel gay,
While broken teacups, wisely kept for show,
Ranged o’er the chimney, glistened in a row.’

In 1838 the inn – extended by now – played host to Dickens, who was travelling north on the Glasgow Mail to research some local colour for Nicholas Nickleby and, in particular, Dotheboys Hall. He was so struck with the White Horse that he used it under the guise of the Cock, Eton Slocomb, for the scene in which Wackford Squeers and his caravan of doomed boys break their northward journey to dine.

At the time of Dickens’s visit the inn was run by a former Royal Mail guard, Charles Fox, who according to the census of 1841 had seven children and five servants, so the inn had expanded more than somewhat since it so enchanted Smollett and Goldsmith. Its location in the middle of a growing village, and the residue of local horse-drawn traffic, enabled it to survive the collapse of coaching.

Ted Bruning