Simon Fowler explains the records available to research any publicans in your family tree, as well as the establishments that they managed
Pubs remain a familiar feature on our high streets. Although the oldest date back centuries, most of them are no more than 150 years old.
A pub is a pub is a pub, right? This may be the case today. But historically there were various types of licensed premises depending on the types of alcohol they were permitted to sell.
Most pubs were only allowed to sell beer or cider. They became known as ale or beer houses, or cider houses in cider-drinking areas. They had very basic facilities. The authorities often regarded these places with suspicion as being dens of trouble. But like the men depicted in novelist Flora Thompson’s 19th-century Candleford, most customers came to forget the day’s woes and to gossip over a glass of beer.
Rather posher were inns and taverns. Any difference between the two has long been forgotten. Here you could obtain wines and spirits, and perhaps a meal.
Most superior of all were the coaching inns. At the largest – like the George in Southwark – you could eat and sleep, catch a stagecoach to London or the provinces, attend a dance, or even use the premises to conduct your own business. Charles Dickens of course wrote lovingly about them in The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837). A surprising number can still be found on the high streets of historic towns.
Ties To Breweries
During the 19th century pubs were beginning to be bought by breweries with the object of selling their products to customers. By 1950 almost all pubs were ‘tied’ – ie belonged – to a particular brewery. There were also a small number of free houses, where the landlord could sell whatever he wanted.
The arrival of gas lighting in the 1820s and 1830s led to the construction of glamorous new taverns. According to Dickens’ Sketches by “Boz” (1833-1836) the fashion for these new ‘gin palaces’ “rushed to every part of town, knocking down all the old public-houses, and depositing splendid mansions, stone balustrades, rosewood fittings, immense lamps, and illuminated clocks, at the corner of every street”.
At the same time there was an explosion in the number of pubs, because the 1830 Beerhouse Act allowed any rate-payer to brew or sell beer if they could pay two guineas for an annual licence. In 1831 alone, 30,000 new beer houses opened. Most of the pubs trading
