VOL 14; No 10 Tales of the Jolly Coopers

[Les1949]

HAMPTON, AROUND AND ABOUT

Things you may not know, or didn’t know you knew!

No 10 TALES OF THE JOLLY COOPERS
A Hampton institution since the early 18th Century

On a board in The Jolly Coopers is a list of the Landlords since 1726. In the 1880s Daniel Soames was ‘mine host’. Soames lived on the premises with his wife, children, a ‘Potman’ and other servants. On several occasions, Soames appeared in the Surrey Comet due to problems with customers and the Courts. Within a period of one month during the summer of 1881 he was in court twice.


In June, Soames was summoned for an assault on Mary Trimmer, wife of a Carman (Carrier of Goods), whilst he issued a cross summons for her refusing to quit licensed premises.

Trimmer claimed that she went to the pub in search of her husband. She found him asleep in the parlour behind the bar and asked him to come home or giver her some money. Her husband refused to do either, so Trimmer expressed her intention to remain in the house until she could get him out. She then claimed that the landlord bundled her off the premises, coupled with threats as what he would do if she returned.

Soames’s defence was that Trimmer had, indeed, come to the premises but had then she created a disturbance by fighting with her husband. Trimmer refused to leave and used ‘disgusting language’ in the bar. Soames claimed that he only used sufficient force to remove her from the premises. The case against the landlord was dismissed and Trimmer was bound over to keep the peace for six months.

In July, Soames was back in court.

This time, Soames was accused of ‘permitting drunkenness’. Inspector Shillingford entered the pub, in company with P C Charles to find some 14 men on the premises. One was playing a violin, many were dancing, two men were asleep on a seta and there was a woman sitting down with ‘her hair down’ who was so drunk that she ‘could not see out of her eyes’ and was surrounded by pots of ale. Shillingford pointed out that a number of the customers were drunk, especially the woman, and demanded an explanation from Soames. The landlord’s excuse was that he hadn’t been into the ‘tap room’, and had not seen the woman or he would have ejected her. The woman, who gave her name as Margaret Carey then left with the two men who had been asleep. Furthermore, he explained that the pub had been very busy as it was full of people from the Horse Racing meeting held on Molesey Hurst earlier in the day – in other words ‘I’d been run off my feet, your honour’. Soames also claimed that Shillingford, a month earlier, had encouraged Mary Trimmer to make a false allegation against him. There definitely appeared to be an underlying feeling of hostility between Soames and Shillingford.

The Magistrate, Sir John Gibbons, did not take kindly to Soames impugning the honesty of a serving policeman. Soames was now on a loser. The Bench recorded that Soames should have taken steps to remove Carey, and had made an unjustifiable allegation against the Inspector.

Soames was fined £1, plus costs.

The Old Historian