The original Sun Inn at Calbourne, where my forebears served up beer and good cheer, was gutted by fire 130 years ago. But it lives on in the most unexpected of places.
verybody loves a landlord,’ sings roguish Monsieur Thénardier in Les Mis. It is certainly true of family historians. Indeed, few discoveries are quite as exciting as finding a publican among one’s ancestors.
I have come across several beer-sellers and licensed victuallers in my own family tree, but most were merely dabbling in the innkeeping trade. The same cannot be said of my late paternal grandmother’s forebears. Three generations were landlords of a quaint village inn on the Isle of Wight for the greater part of a century.
The public house in question, the Sun Inn at Calbourne, is not the same hostelry you will find there today, however. The original building – the attractive stone-walled and half-thatched establishment pictured above – was reduced to cinders in April 1894, nearly two years after my grandma’s great-uncle, the last of the family line, called time for the last time. That being so, a pilgrimage to my ancestral boozer now calls for a time machine, of the sort imagined by H. G. Wells.
Strange as it might sound, fiction can indeed transport us back (in the figurative sense) to the original Sun Inn; for the old pub lives on in the pages of a nineteenth-century novel. Published in 1886, The Silence of Dean Maitland is not as well known now as the works of Wells, but it was a popular bestseller in its day, and some of its scenes take place inside a fictionalised facsimile of Calbourne’s Sun Inn.
The Sun at Malbourne
Written by Mary Gleed Tuttiett, whose pen name was Maxwell Gray, The Silence of Dean Maitland is a Hardyesque morality tale unfolding over twenty years, beginning in the 1860s. Set largely on a fictionalised Isle of Wight, it concerns an ambitious clergyman, Cyril Maitland, who gets a young woman pregnant and later lands a fatal blow in a scuffle with her coachman father. Maitland’s college friend, Henry Everard, is blamed for the death and wrongly convicted of manslaughter. Years later, he returns from an Australian prison to confront and forgive an inwardly penitent yet hypocritically tight-lipped Maitland, who is about to be made a bishop.
Born and bred on the Island, Tuttiett was the daughter of a Newport surgeon. She knew Calbourne well, having accompanied her father on his rounds there. Drawing upon memories of the village in her work, she didn’t exactly go to great lengths to disguise it, however; nor other real-world locations for that matter.
In the novel, Calbourne becomes Malbourne, where Maitland begins his career as a deacon serving under his father, the local rector. Predictably, the Island’s principal town, Newport, becomes Oldport, while the manor of Swainston – on the road between Newport and Calbourne – becomes Swaynestone. And of course there’s Calbourne’s Sun Inn, whose name is unchanged in its fictionalised guise.
Even some of the minor characters’ names were blatantly adapted from real life. The fictional Garrett family, for instance, with their seat at Northover House, are based on the Moulton-Barretts of Westover Park, who were related to the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Malbourne’s Sun Inn makes its first appearance in Part I, Chapter III, in which the novel’s titular character is making his way home from the ‘sham Greek Temple’, modelled on the Swainston estate’s Doric folly, where the winsome Alma Lee lives with her parents.
A warm glimmer of ruddy light on the thick darkness told Cyril of the approach of the wheelwright’s house and shop, and, passing this and descending the hill, he became aware of the rich crimson which marked the lower windows of the Sun Inn, and found himself at the end of the wheelwright’s yard, at the meeting of four roads. Opposite the Sun, and coloured by its light, a sign-post reared itself at the corner, oblique, and appearing to gesticulate madly with its outspread arms. This corner turned, all the village sparkled out in a little constellation of cottage casements before his gaze; and there, beyond the brook, which murmured faintly in the stillness, the Rectory windows shone out among masses of foliage, or rather of branches, behind which the grey church spire lifted itself unseen in the mirk.
The rural highway described by Tuttiett would have been immediately recognisable as Gustar’s Shute (also known as Sun Hill) to the Victorian residents of Calbourne. Crossing the downs westward from Carisbrooke, on what is today the B3401, nineteenth-century travellers crested Sun Hill before descending to a staggered crossroads where the original Sun Inn stood facing oncoming traffic. In those days, local children would roll their hoops down the hill and in through the open front door.
On the right was a wheelwright’s shop, now a garage and car showroom, and at the corner, just as in the novel, was a fingerpost, which is marked on the six-inch map published by the Ordnance Survey in 1866. The view towards the church and rectory likewise tallies with a black-and-white photograph of the Sun Inn taken in the 1880s. Given Tuttiett’s scrupulously faithful descriptions of the village, is it too much of a stretch to suppose the fictional pub’s interior, and perhaps even its patrons, were also drawn from real life?
In Chapter V, we are introduced to the cast of gossiping rustics who form a sort of Greek chorus, led by Granfer, the village’s venerable raconteur. There’s George Straun, the burly blacksmith, and Tom Hale, the wheelwright. There’s also Stevens, the parish clerk, Wax, the schoolmaster, and Baines, the malcontent tailor. All had their real-world counterparts, as did the various ‘stout fellows’ in smock-frocks who worked on the local farms, and whose Island burrs undoubtedly nourished the novel’s dialogue. (Incidentally, Calbourne is the birthplace of W. H. Long, compiler of A Dictionary of the Isle of Wight Dialect, also published in 1886.)
After their day’s work is done, Malbourne’s villagers adjourn to the Sun to quench their thirst and chew the cud.
So the brave fellows, accommodating their pace to that of Granfer, which was more dignified than swift, turned in as one man beneath the low doorway of the Sun, and grouped themselves about the cosy, sanded bar, where the firelight was beginning to look cheerily ruddy in the fading afternoon.
The unnamed landlord chips in occasionally, ‘feeling that courtesy now obliged him to entertain the intellects as well as the bodies of his guests’, and the chapter concludes with an evocative description of nightfall over the village.
By this time it was dark night. The Sun’s windows threw a warm glow over the road; the stars sparkled keenly above the thatched roof of the little hostel; and the smell of wood-smoke, mingled with the appetising odour of fried pork, red herrings, and onion soup, rising all over the village, warned the topers that the hour of supper was approaching, and they would have dispersed, however unwillingly, but for the chimes of waggon-bells along the road, which beguiled them into waiting while William Grove deposited his parcels at The Sun, took the one glass offered by the host, and recounted the news from Oldport.
Our final visit to Malbourne’s Sun Inn comes years later, on a summer’s day in Part III, Chapter V, in which Everard returns to the village a changed man. He stops at the Sun to leave his portmanteau and compose a letter to his old flame, Lilian, Maitland’s twin sister. Growing restless as he waits for a reply, he steps into the garden, where from an open side window of the bar drifts ‘the familiar twang of the local dialect borne by rustic voices upon his ear’.
I wonder what the villagers of Calbourne made of their portrayal in fiction. Just as the tragic story of Alma Lee was discussed ‘for years to come in the snug bar of the Sun’, so too, I expect, was Tuttiett’s novel. The innkeeper at the time it was published was my three-times great-uncle Frank James Woodford, a third-generation publican descended from John Buckler, whose family had previously run the Sun in the eighteenth century.
Just as in Tuttiett’s novel, the pub was the centre of village life, and though never rocked by major scandal, Calbourne saw its fair share of tragedy and local drama. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Sun hosted coroners’ inquests, hustings, and property auctions. It was also a recruiting post for the Island’s rifle volunteers and a meeting place for the Simeon Lodge of Oddfellows. And whenever there was an excuse for an all-village knees-up, the royal wedding of 1863 being one, the master of the house always rose to the occasion.
Masters of the house
John Buckler (Abt. 1767–1858), four-times great-grandfather
Born in Calbourne, somewhen around 1767, John Buckler – not to be confused with an eminent cousin, another John Buckler, born three years later – came from a family of cordwainers. Shoemaking evidently wasn’t for him, however.
When a nominal roll for Calbourne was compiled in 1803, John Buckler was working as a servant to Sir John Barrington of Swainston Manor. In the same household, we also find the future Mrs Buckler, Christian Mew. John and Christian tied the knot two years later and were still in service when their first child, a daughter named Harriet, was born at Swainston in 1810. By the time their third daughter, Amelia, was christened in 1817, John’s trade is listed as ‘publican’ in the parish register. From this, we can infer that he took over the tenancy of the Sun from John Jacobs at some point between 1813 and 1817, probably at the instigation of his employer, the inn’s freeholder.
Attached to the property was a dairy smallholding with stabling for horses. In addition to a garden, where John and his descendants grew vegetables, there was also a meadow at the back of the inn, where the recreation ground is now, which was used for village sports in summer.
When George Brannon’s pictorial Pleasure Visitor’s Companion to the Island was first printed in 1833, naming ‘Buckler’ as the Sun’s innkeeper, John had been in the post for over sixteen years. But it is not until 4 March 1839 that we get a glimpse of his tenure as mine host in the Hampshire Telegraph, which reported on the Island’s annual hare-coursing fête, ‘The Pork and Cabbage Hunt’, held that year on Calbourne Down.
Our John, presumably with help from Christian and young Harriet, did the catering, serving up dinner ‘in good style’ to the ‘large field of tradesmen’ in attendance. The Telegraph noted that ‘Ten hares were killed, and after the day’s sport, a large party of them dined together at the Sun Inn’. (They must have been famished after being torn limb from limb by hounds.)
Benjamin Woodford (1809–1891), three-times great-grandfather
Harriet Buckler was the only one of John and Christian’s three children to reach adulthood. She married Benjamin Woodford in 1836. Benjamin, who must have been a canny chap, came from a family of village butchers, his father, James Woodford, having moved to Calbourne from Freshwater as a young man, setting up shop in Barrington Row, better known today as Winkle Street.
Benjamin and Harriet were living at the Sun in 1841, the year of Christian’s death, and by the time of the 1851 census, Benjamin was the licensee, his father-in-law having retired in the intervening years. It seems he brought some new ideas to the business, for his name appears a year later, in the Hampshire Telegraph, on the list of stockists appending an advertisement for ‘delicious’ Stogumber Medicinal Pale Ale. Imported from Somerset, it would have supplemented regular beers, either brewed in-house or at the nearby Crown Brewery at Newbridge, and later supplied by Mew & Co of Newport.
Made with medicinal water ‘expressly for the clergy, members of parliament, public singers, and persons with weak lungs’, this restorative wonder beverage was purportedly endorsed by ‘numerous physicians and surgeons of the first eminence’. Even aristocrats were knocking it back, apparently. The advert went on to claim it had cured an octogenarian with a dicky heart from Wells and a gout-sufferer from London, and had ‘greatly improved’ the personal appearance of scores of discerning ladies and gentlemen.
Perhaps Benjamin aspired to an upmarket clientele. His inn was a staging post for the weekly ‘coach-and-four’ from Ryde to Alum Bay and a popular refreshment stop for tourists, meriting mentions in all the guidebooks of the day. Who knows, maybe Tennyson dropped in for a snifter on one of his ‘daily airings’ from Farringford. The Poet Laureate was certainly a frequent visitor to Swainston Manor, which had been inherited by his chum Sir John Simeon. He was good friends with Calbourne’s rector, Thomas Woodroffe, too. Queen Victoria also passed by on her carriage drives around the Island, though I somehow doubt she stopped to wet her whistle with a revitalising mug of Stogumber MPA.
Jenkinson’s Smaller Practical Guide to the Isle of Wight tells us the Sun offered ‘comfortable but modest accommodation’, which seems unlikely to have satisfied more refined visitors to the Island. Indeed, going by reports in local newspapers, it seems Benjamin’s regular patrons were, by and large, more ‘rustic’ than rarefied. They included his heavy-drinking older brother, James Woodford junior. Estranged from his wife, James had returned to the family butchering business after a brief career as an excise officer, and by all accounts, he was not someone to be trusted with a meat cleaver. Not for the first time, he was found ‘helplessly drunk’ outside his younger brother’s pub in August 1870 and was charged with being drunk and incapable by the village bobby.
Benjamin and Harriett had to deal with a number of inebriated troublemakers over the years. There was quarrelsome Theresa Austin, from Newport, who helped herself to potatoes from the garden in 1858. Thirteen years later, James Russell arrived at the Sun in an intoxicated state and clouted poor Benjamin when he was refused more beer. Top of the barred list, however, goes to William Cassell of Mottistone, who, late on Christmas Eve in 1870, decided to hack at a table with an old sword. When asked to desist, he threatened to decapitate Benjamin and proceeded to knock several empty beer cups onto the floor. He then struck Benjamin with the sword several times as he was manhandled out of the door, presumably after getting his Peggy Mitchell-style marching orders.
The uglier aspects of innkeeping must have taken their toll on Benjamin, because he hung up his beer-soaked cloth for the last time in November 1871, when the Sun’s licence was transferred to his second son, Frank. The pummelling he received earlier that month, from potty-mouthed George Young of Newbridge, was probably the final straw.
Taking on the tenancy of Warlands Farm, in neighbouring Shalfleet, Benjamin continued to serve as an assistant overseer for Calbourne, collecting parish rates and administering poor relief, which could explain why he had sometimes been on the receiving end of abuse. He was an assistant overseer for over forty years, and the role would have brought him into contact with Tuttiett’s father. Benjamin’s sons were also parochial officials, his third son, Cass, serving as the relieving officer for the Calbourne district, while his eldest son, Henry, held the same office in Newport. Henry seems to have been the black sheep of the family; he was convicted of embezzling £50 from district funds in 1878 and later became the caretaker of the Newport Literary Society’s reading rooms and museum at 30 Quay Street.
It is through Benjamin’s youngest daughter, Martha Mary, my two-times great-grandmother, that I am related to the Woodfords. At the age of eighteen, in 1871, great-great-granny Martha was living at the Sun Inn, no doubt earning her keep as a barmaid. Two years later, she married Wootton-born carpenter and joiner Harry Ridgley, a journeyman miller’s son who had been lodging in a cottage on Lynch Lane. After their wedding, in 1873, Martha and Harry moved to Granville Road in Cowes.
Frank James Woodford (1844–1917), three-times great-uncle
Together with his wife, Caroline, Uncle Frank would run the Sun for the next twenty years. Like his father before him, he had his fair share of rowdy customers crossing the threshold, especially at harvest time, when farm labourers turned up already sozzled from the ‘generous flow of harvest ale’. Three such roisterers, John Baker, Thomas Whittington and Frank Hawkins, described as ‘rustics’, were fined by magistrates for disorderly conduct in 1872. Acting like ‘drunken savages’, tutted The Hampshire Advertiser, they had ‘sung to the tables, chairs, and candles’, and refused to leave the premises when asked by Caroline. Once forcibly ejected, they then attempted to batter down the door, throwing stones at the shutters and rousing half the village with their ‘clamorous roar’.
Life at the Sun Inn wasn’t usually so lively. Indeed, it seems most patrons were well behaved. Members of Wootton’s church choir expressed their hearty thanks in the Isle of Wight Observer for a ‘splendid dinner’ at the Sun, which formed part of their annual treat in September 1888. Their hosts had earlier laid on a ‘plentiful meat tea’ for twenty-three members of Westover Park Cricket Club after the opening match of the 1878 season.
Uncle Frank was only too happy to offer up his meadow to the community, whether it was for 150 schoolchildren, led by a drum and fife band, enjoying a harvest-holiday treat in 1881, or for the village quoits derby. Frank also took great pride in his vegetable plot. An ‘ardent horticulturist’, according to the County Press, he exhibited a plate of ‘peculiar peas’ with dark purple shucks, ‘splendid curley green Surrey cabbage’, and ‘village blacksmith potatoes’ at the produce show held in the grounds of Westover House in 1888.
After Benjamin passed away on Good Friday 1891 – having soldiered through a snowstorm to get to church – Frank took on Warlands Farm and relinquished the tenancy of the Sun in February 1892. The licence was transferred to Frederick George Piper, from Kent, Frank’s nephew by marriage. Young Fred’s tenure as innkeeper was to be short-lived, however.
Disaster struck on 26 April 1894 when a lamp was overturned, setting light to an upstairs room. Believing the fire to be extinguished, Fred retired to a neighbour’s house for the night but was woken early the next morning to discover the blaze had in fact spread to the thatched roof, and the building burned to the ground.
The destruction of the old pub conveniently allowed for the realignment of the crossroads, and with the road to Freshwater straightened, the Sun Inn was rebuilt on a grander scale in brick, slightly to the north of its original location and rotated ninety degrees to face the village. This is the pub which stands at the crossroads today, behind which you can still trace the line of the old road.
The old Sun Inn eventually faded from living memory. Only by delving into old newspapers have I been able to bring some of its stories to light. But they can’t compare with Mary Gleed Tuttiett’s vivid depiction of the inn, albeit fictionalised, in its Victorian heyday. There can’t be many lost pubs immortalised in fiction.
An abridged family tree
Further reading
Keir Foss, The Book of Calbourne: A Village at the Crossroads, Halsgrove, 2009
Ray Girvan, A Wren-like Note: The Life and Works of Maxwell Gray, 2013
Ray Girvan, Journal of a Southern Bookreader
The Illustrated Life and Times 