Derby City Register Office: From merrymaking to marriagemaking

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Last month, the half-timbered house on the corner of the Market Place and Tenant Street, in Derby, was unveiled as the winner of the Civic Society’s award for the best restored historic building in Derby in 2005. And deservedly so, says local historian Maxwell Craven, who takes a look at the building’s history.

The Market Place, Derby, c1890-92, with the Royal Oak building to the left

ONCE a pub, and more recently a solicitors’ offices, this grand building has been transformed into the resplendent new home of Derby City Register Office.

The previous register office, run until 1996 by Derbyshire County Council, was in a 1980s shed-like building crammed in between the southern edge of the Main Centre and Traffic Street – about as cheerlessly inappropriate as you can get.

The decision to remove it to the former Royal Oak was an inspired one, and was part funded by the Main Centre developer, Westfield, which had plans for the old site – and more appropriate ones at that!

So, what is the story behind this distinctive building, the presence of which always seems to me to add a jaunty air to the Market Place to offset the brooding Kremlinesque presence of the over-scale Assembly Rooms?

The first documentary mention of an inn called the Royal Oak in Derby’s Market Place appears in a local paper in October 1732, although the inn may be somewhat older.

The building which survived until 1889 was a three-storey affair in brick with a straight parapet and thick glazing bars to the sash windows, suggesting a building date after the 1708 London Building Act outlawed wooden eaves on timber conservation grounds.

The name, of course, came about following the restoration of Charles II in 1660 and commemorates his experiences hiding in the oak tree at Boscobel House following his defeat at the Battle of Worcester in September 1651.

Thus the pub could have been re-named or even newly founded in a previous building on the site at almost any time between 1660 and Queen Anne’s reign. It is, however, recorded that boughs of oak were, as tradition then dictated, hung from the upper windows on Oak Apple Day (May 29) – which was the official commemoration of the restoration until it lost its status by Act of Parliament in 1849.

The window heights of the 18th century building tell us that the formal public rooms of what was in effect a busy market inn (but never a coaching one) were on the first floor, above the entrance and drinking parlours, with bedrooms on the top floor.

This somewhat outmoded convention might suggest a date even earlier than 1660 for the original building. By the time of the first known pictorial representation of the inn in 1828, the ground floor appears to have been considerably altered, losing the symmetry it without doubt had when new.

That it was a busy inn during its 18th century heyday is confirmed by the fact that it has the fifth largest number of mentions in the Derby Mercury after the King’s Head (Corn Market) , the George (Iron Gate), the New Inn (King Street) and the Talbot (also Iron Gate), all coaching inns.

All inns were popular for auctions and sales, visiting salesmen, peripatetic charlatans and a variety of public functions which, from the more prudish Victorian era, were decanted into purpose-built public buildings.

Thus, the Royal Oak saw house sales along with 13 other such events up to the early 1770s alone, including the sale of a wood at Meynell Langley.

Indeed, the first written mention of the inn concerns the sale by maltster John Clay of a “newly built” brick house by Tenant Bridge in The Morledge.

The travelling salesmen included the peripatetic London dentist Whitlock, in 1769, Patrick Goodall, of Nottingham, a specialist farrier (effectively a vet) in 1771 and William Arnold of Newborough, Staffordshire, a bleaching expert: “Wm. Arnold…begs leave to inform the public that having great conveniences for whitening or bleaching linen yarn or cloth large or small quantities – he hopes to be favoured with their commands.

“All orders will be punctually observed either by letter or otherwise and due attendance given at his inn on market days which is the Royal Oak in the Market Place, Friday, April 26 and once a fortnight after that day.”

It wasn’t until about 1806 that Derby acquired its own Bleach Yard, off Bridge Street.

The inn also served as a clearing house for lost items, like the “black & white spotted hound bitch” of Mr Horsley of Denby in 1762, or the Littleover greyhound called Fly in 1773.

Creditors’ meetings seem to have been a speciality of the house.

Sometimes it was a bankruptcy, as in 1737, when fellmonger Thomas Rivett – father of the like-named potworks founder and Derby MP – went bust.

Or it could have hosted a gathering of the creditors of a deceased person’s estate as with Robert Dale of Ashbourne in 1763.

The chief speciality under landlord John Marriott (c1750-1770) was flower shows as well as florists’ and gardeners’ gatherings, which must have included luminaries such as Iron Gate market gardener and florist Francis Boott.

The bi-annual dinners of this segment of Derby’s society in April and July were invariably accompanied by a show of auriculas and carnations respectively.

The inn also acted as a theatre ticket agency in the 1760s and 1770s and for the booking of booths at the races on Sinfin Moor, these booths being effectively temporary private viewing boxes.

In 1777 the inn itself was subject to a robbery: “Early Sunday morning last some villains broke into the back part of the Royal Oak from whence they stole several pieces of beef, a leg of pork, a large bag of feathers and various other articles.

“Though a diligent search has been made after the offenders they have not yet been heard of.”

Worse, in 1818, the landlord, William Ingham seems to have been the subject of mud-slinging for he advertised in theDerby Mercury: “W H Ingham, grateful for the past favours of his friends and the public in Derby and its vicinity most respectfully returns thanks for the same and begs leave to state, in contradiction to a report, industriously circulated (with an apparent mischievous intention), that he intends to continue at the above inn and most respectfully solicits a continuance of their future favours and support, which he will use every endeavour in his power to merit.”

Presumably a rival was trying to put him out of business! Note the scrupulous politeness of tone, common to almost all advertising until the mid-19th century.

In 1838, a Coronation banquet was held at the Royal Oak, again confirming that it must have had a spacious public room, although public occasions tended to tail off from this date, with the Mechanics’ Institute lecture hall in the Wardwick coming on stream from that year to complement the Assembly Rooms (1764), Theatre Royal, Bold Lane (1773) and the enlarged Shire Hall (1773-1828).

The first full licence after the passage of the Licensing Act was granted to the inn’s landlord in 1842.

By the 1880s, the Royal Oak had been bought by the Burton-on-Trent brewing firm of James Eadie & Co.

That the firm had its own fire brigade at Burton is something of an irony for, in 1886, the Royal Oak, 24 Market Place, Derby, (re-numbered 30 the year following) was extensively damaged by fire and, although it was repaired sufficiently to be operational in 1888, the company resolved to demolish the 18th century building and replace it.

In 1886 plans by experienced pub architect James Wright of Derby were submitted to the council for approval.

Wright had been articled to Benjamin Wilson, a Sheffield man who had settled in Derby in 1859 and had strong connections with Alfreton and Melbourne.

By 1880 he was a junior partner with Evans & Jolley, a Nottingham firm with an office in Derby. From 1888 he was in partnership with John Tomlinson, of the contracting family as Wright & Tomlinson but from 1898 to 1908 he worked with T H Thorpe as junior partner, the latter continuing the practice, which still flourishes.

Wright’s work for brewers included Pountain’s in the Market Place and, for the same firm, the Lord Nelson, The Wardwick (now Horatio’s), the former Cambridge, Dairy House Road, the Cavendish, New Normanton and the Navigation at Wilmorton.

His first plan shows that the main part of the inn would face the Market Place with a centrally placed carriage entrance. On Tenant Street there was a shorter front abutting the next three shops, with the pub’s yard behind them. Much original fabric was to remain.

These designs appear to have been rejected or withdrawn and the next (and final) scheme appeared in 1889, Eadie having in the meantime been able to acquire the shops in Tenant Street, although only one with vacant possession.

This 1889 scheme, the present locally listed half-timbered design with its ashlared Warrington sandstone ground floor, was produced by Wright with a pretty little detached gatehouse provided some way down Tenant Street as the revised coach entrance and access to the stabling, where much of the original fabric was, again, to be re-used.

There were six bedrooms, room for 35 horses in the stables and 35 carts, adjacent in the rear yard.

Gone was the central entrance on to the Market Place, allowing Wright to spread himself and produce a wonderfully exuberant and over-the-top design which makes the structure the landmark building it is today.

The decision to retain much of the rear of the old pub seems to have been the source of problems with the Derby Urban Sanitary Authority.

The drains are shown on the plans, and on one sheet alternatives can be seen crudely pencilled in, probably a counter-scheme proposed by borough surveyor, Thomas Harrison.

Clearly the bone of contention was the adequacy of the original drains to cope with the increased capacity of both inn and stableyard.

Nevertheless, the inn was finished in 1890, but the contentions with the sanitary authority remained, with the latter deciding to compulsorily purchase the new pub. For two years, though, no mutually satisfactory price could be arrived at, so the matter went to arbitration.

The sum eventually agreed was £14,100 and, on June 22, 1894, the borough’s sanitary authority took possession of the inn.

During the dispute, the range of shops separating the pub from its gatehouse was demolished under compulsory powers and, suddenly, the borough found itself the proprietor of a spanking new pub.

A survey taken in 1903 tells us that it was quickly leased for 25 years to Alton’s Manchester Brewery of Ashbourne Road, who paid a poor rate of £343 per annum to the Board of Guardians and £325 to the borough in ordinary rates.

In 1916, it is said that the landlord, Arthur Mapham, was doing so poorly, thanks to the absence of many of Derby’s natural drinkers at the Western Front, that he was obliged to take a day job at newly-founded British Celanese and that the failure of trade to pick up after the Armistice persuaded the council to take the place over once Alton’s 25-year lease had run out and close it as a pub.

It has to be remembered that the Royal Oak was considered a new building in 1920 and, as such, was an asset. It was duly adapted as the Mayor’s Parlour (first floor) with the Town Clerk’s department beneath and other council officials housed in a new building of horrifying banality erected in 1921 on the site of the inn’s ill-starred but, by this time, redundant stable block.

In its new, municipal, role, dictated because of its proximity to the Guildhall (then the hub of borough administration), it was remembered by Freda, the daughter of Labour Alderman Arthur Sturgess, mayor in 1927-28, who could recall as a 10-year-old “...watching the life on the Market Place from those lovely latticed windows...” of the old Royal Oak with her brother, Norris.

With the completion of the Council House, most borough departments were moved into it in 1947-48 and the council then let the former Royal Oak as offices.

It became the Derby office of the legal practice of Flint, Bishop & Barnett, a firm founded by another Labour Alderman, Abraham Flint.

With the recent move of this practice to larger premises, the building became available for re-use hence its impressive transformation.

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