Pubs and Breweries in Gloucestershire Past and Present
Rose & Crown Inn, Rose & Crown Passage, High Street, Cheltenham
Rose and Crown passage is between 219 and 221 High Street.
Courtesy Vic Cole.
The Archer family, hosts in 1878, had horse racing connections (see the Kings Arms, Prestbury).
Jacob Silk was the owner of the Rose & Crown Inn in 1891, he also owned the grocer’s shop a few doors away in the premises that is now the Stagecoach office. The lease of the ale house was taken by the Cheltenham Original Brewery. The annual rateable value was set at £37.5s.0d., and it remained at the same level throughout the next twelve years to the 1903 licensing returns. Jacob Silk had died in the preceding years and the ownership of the Rose & Crown was in the hands of his executors. The lease had apparently been relinquished by the local brewery (the Original Brewery was just yards away and the smells of brewing would have filled the air), as in 1903 Flowers & Sons of Stratford on Avon had got the lease of the Rose & Crown.
The Rose and Crown closed in 1980 and was demolished soon afterwards. In its final years it had acquired a dubious reputation and was known as a cider drinkers pub.
Hi Geoff,
The Rose and Crown is definitely an old pub, listed in the 1830 Pigot’s Directory, and I suspect it had been around some time by then. I had read that Colonel Fitzhardinge-Berkeley (from Berkeley Castle) kept a house full of ladies to entertain his friends at German Cottage. The friends apparently included the famous white-face clown, Grimaldi, and King George III’s third son, Prince William the Duke of Clarence (who went on to become King William IV and awarded Fitzhardinge-Berkeley two titles (Baron Seagrave [1831] and Earl Fitzhardinge [1841]) even though, having been born outside of wedlock, the House of Lords prevented him from inheriting his father’s title.
The Duke – later “the Sailor King” – was a bit of a lad I think, and although he married a younger bride, who became Adelaide, Queen Consort, – and they had no children (hence the crown passing to his niece, who became Queen Victoria), he had 10 by his mistress, actress “Mrs.” Dorothy Jordan. She wasn’t actually married, but appearances had to be maintained, even if you were dropping illegitimate sprogs with members of the Royal family! Anyway, I never knew where German Cottage was until I got to have a good look at the 1855-7 Old Town Survey map, and discovered it was at the St. Margaret’s Road end of Rose & Crown Passage on the east side.
Nearer the Rose & Crown end of Rose & Crown Passage in the early 20th-century, two engineers named Usher and Hall, who lived in adjoining terraced houses, used to do sub-contract work for H.H. Martyn. They knocked together two adjoining rooms as Usher owned a large gas-turbine engine, and Hall – a wood turner) owned a lathe, so they were able to turn decorative wooden tubes up to 15ft in length. These were used to cover the cast-iron roof supports in the public rooms of some of the world’s great cruise liners, and it is believed they might have produced such items for use on RMS Titanic. Cheltenham’s only casualty of the Titanic sinking though, was another engineer who lived in Gloucester Road, Francis ‘Frank’ Somerton.
The Rose & Crown Inn was located on the west side of Rose & Crown Passage across from roughly nos. 4-6 Bennington Street.
Regards,
Alan Jones
Landlords of the Rose & Crown include:
1830 Benjamin Chapman
1844 Joseph Chapman
1859 George Bowl
1878 William Archer
1881 Albert Archer
1883,1885 William Henry Ireland
1891 Samuel William Strange
1902,1903 Charles Craddock (Charles Clement Craddock in 1903)
1906 Fred Goulding
1919 Frank William Chadwick
1926,1927 John Houghton (John Rouse Houghton in 1926)
