Thirsty china workers ran many Derby pubs

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In the 19th century, Derby’s Nottingham Road was alive with pubs, patronised and often run by workers at the nearby China Factory. Maxwell Craven traces their fate and discovers which have survived.

Punch Bowl Cottage – the former China Punch Bowl pub, now a Grade II-listed building

People who worked in china factories – especially those in Derby, it seems – suffered from a raging thirst, if the number of employees who also ran pubs is any guide.

The most obvious is, of course, the most eminent, William Billingsley (1758-1828). In 1770, he succeeded to the proprietorship of the Sir John Falstaff, in Bridge Gate, on the death of his father, also William, and a gilder at Der-by China Factory, although his mother ran the pub until he came of age in 1779.

Billingsley’s father had bought it as the Three Cranes and renamed it after the jovial china figure of James Quinn in the role of Sir John Falstaff, a popular product of the factory at the time.

The pub later passed to Billingsley’s nephew, William Wheeldon, who changed the name to the Nottingham Arms. Likewise the Old Seven Stars, by St Mary’s Bridge on the Nottingham Road, was run for some 20 years, until 1835, by China Factory stalwart Thomas Tatlow, a china painter specialising in flowers.

Indeed, his brother, Joseph, had been a close friend of William Billingsley. Nor was that the end of the connection, for Tatlow was succeeded at the pub by his colleague, William Hill, another painter, although not known to have been related to the more celebrated “Jockey” Hill.

Nottingham Road, before the demise of the China Factory, in 1848, was alive with pubs, including the Boat (c1822-1852), Bowling Green (c1833), Hearty Good Fellow (Three) Jolly Topers (c1827-1862), (Three) Jolly Colliers (c1823-25), Liversage Arms (c1850-2005), Peacock (founded c1815) and Plough (1846-1916), all near the factory, of which only the Peacock survives.

It is not particularly surprising as the residential hinterland has shrunk and the thirsty workers mainly gone. Added to which, in 1968, Derby Council and the Ministry of Transport thoughtfully put an elevated motorway right in front of the first-floor windows of the surviving buildings.

The New Station – now renamed – further to the east is still there and, although the pub no longer exists, the building of the Liversage also survives. One other remains, too, long since “dis-pubbed”: the Punch Bowl, originally the China Punch Bowl, is now Punch Bowl Cottage, 53 Nottingham Road.

This pub stood virtually next door to the China Factory. It was founded in 1758, less than a decade after the factory itself, the rationale being to satisfy the thirsty workers, their throats parched by the dry atmosphere of the china works and the heat of the kilns.

The name cleverly couples a decorative piece of drinking equipment with what was then a product of the adjacent works: the porcelain punch bowl. The “China” prefix to its title lasted until about 1825, when it was dropped.

It was at that time the venue for a little-known local friendly society called the Punch Bowl Dividend Society, along with the Hope Lodge of the Oddfellows. These associations, modelled vaguely on the Freemasons, solicited modest weekly subscriptions from their largely working-class members. The accumulated fund went towards members’ medical expenses and burial costs.

In time, most found themselves with a surplus on their hands, which they usually invested in properties, using the rent to augment the fund and keep subs down. Today, the survivors have very impressive property portfolios.

The Punch Bowl survived the closure of the China Factory and soldiered on as a beerhouse until finally closed by those killjoys, the Derby Temperance Society and Mrs Henry Boden of The Friary.

It was later sold as a residence and is currently up for sale for around £225,000. It is now a Grade II-listed building and lies within a conservation area.

It has been a private residence, with its little yard at the side and sequestered walled garden at the rear for some time because I remember being shown round it in the 1980s. But with the adjacent A52, it may have a better future as an office or even as a staff residence for the adjacent Landau Forte College.

Either way, I hope it finds a sympathetic buyer.

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