Public House Riot

This a repeat from a very old blog of mine, an extract from what was then my most recently published novel, Radwinter, the first in the series.

Public House Riot

A disturbance took place in The Lark, a public house in High Street, Easthope, at about 9 o’clock last night, and the police were called. Constables Robinson and O’Shea, arrived very shortly and found the floor of the place covered with glass, and a general uproar taking place among the men present. One of the men, Matthew Davis, who was recently imprisoned for a cowardly and cruel assault on a woman, attempted to strike O’Shea, but that officer took care of himself and Davis was soon in safe custody at Easthope police station, along with others who had caused the affray.
The landlord, Thomas Radwinter, was commended for his action in defending several of his customers, taking them into his private salon for their own safety.
February 1892
BROKE PUBLIC-HOUSE DOOR.
Matthew Mudd and Matthew Matthews were found guilty of breaking a window of the Lark public-house and attempting to force an entrance. They were each fined 10/ and 11/6 costs.
November 1893
Local History – Easthope – page 22
“Several other ale-houses were kept by Easthope brewers in the 18th century, including the Castle, near the site of Stope Castle, demolished in the Civil war. The Red Lion, established before 1750, was one of several half-timbered buildings on Hope Street; the Lark Inn built on the site of the London in sometime in the 1820’s remains open to the present; the India Arms serving the wharfmen on the Hope, was closed in 1980 and is now a private residence. The Bull was converted in the 1920s into a Co-operative store, still open on the High Street.
Easthope’s friendly societies included branches of the Ancient Shipwrights, probably formed c. 1842, which had 37 members in 1892, and the Ancient and Honourable Order of the Old Foresters, with some 32 members in 1892, regularly meeting at the Lark Inn, Easthope. Both were still active in the 1920s.
In 1873 the Reverend James Purlieu started a working men’s club with 50 members, providing a reading room and coffee house adjacent to the St James Church Hall, in association with the Church Temperance Society. In 1919, Mr Thomas Radwinter, formerly of the Lark Inn, in memory of those sons of Easthope killed in the Great War, and in thanks for the life of his own sons, Charles, Walter and Horace, endowed the former reading room and coffee house for use by the Easthope Men’s Club, which had over 100 members within a year and was still active in the 1980s.”