Patrick Carroll | Crewkerne
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The Inn at the Crossroad – Eight – In Living Memory

In looking back and revising the eighth chapter of this study I've been given pause as to retaining the title "In Living Memory".  My reason for this - not surprisingly after a hiatus of nearly 20 years - is that at least three of my previous informants have since gone under the wire.  However, I have reflected that those individuals...

The Inn at the Crossroad – Seven – The New Century

 In 1900 George Hilborne Jolliffe and Henry J. Coston concluded an agreement granting Mr. Coston a twenty-one year tenancy of the George Hotel.   As far as I am able to ascertain Henry John Coston was born in 1863 at King’s Lynn, Norfolk.  All the evidence suggests that he was an energetic and thrustingly entrepreneurial proprietor.  Mr. Coston consistently applied this...

The Inn at the Crossroad – Six – Interregnum

 During his period in the 1990s as proprietor of the George, Mr. Gary Gilmore acquired a two-gallon glazed pottery spirit jug.  It is a fairly common object but its curiosity value to Mr. Gilmore lay in its being imprinted “George Hotel, Crewkerne, C.F. Flowerdew, Prop.”  Little else, beyond the occurrence of his name in various deeds and directories, remains of...

The Inn at the Crossroad – Five – Mrs. Marsh’s Punch

             “…Notwithstanding that the supper last night was unexceptionable –            that the punch was like the nectar of the gods – that the cigars were            veritable wafters away of care – that our cosy evening’s gossip was            not perhaps uninteresting – and that the bed was an irresistible           inviter of repose, ‘ the sheets smelling of lavender’…”        ...

The Inn at the Crossroad – Four – The Consolidator

  Anyone enquiring deeply into the history of the George – and of Crewkerne generally – will be presented with a plethora of John Slades.  It is possible to number at least six (three of whom were at some point contemporaneous with one another) who may with some justice be considered to have a connection – however tenuous – with the...

The Inn at the Crossroad – Three – The Manor of Easthams

 The least documented period in the history of the George Inn lies between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries.  At some time in the late 1600s title to the freehold of the George passed from the Hutchins family and became part of the property appertaining to the Manor of Easthams.  Ownership of the Manor was acquired in 1694 from the Freke...

The Inn at the Crossroad – Two – The Postmaster of Crookhorn

                           "It would hardly be possible to exaggerate the historical importance of this experiment of the posts of the Plymouth Road.  It ranks as the greatest social invention of a century which also produced the coffee house, the printed journal and the turnpike road."J. Crofts, Packhorse, Waggon & Post The experiment referred to...

The Inn at the Crossroad – One

  An Account of the George Hotel At Crewkerne Together with Historical Sketches of the Other Old Inns – both extant & defunct - Of that Ancient Somerset Town By Patrick Carroll Copyright: Patrick Carroll 2012 In Memory of my mother, Anne Carroll (1905-1998), whose final years were made more comfortable through the kindness of Crewkerne people. * * * * * * * * * * *  “Yet a gentleman may not...