Friday 6 January 2012: THE PRINCE OF WALES, HERTINGFORDBURY (Chris Haden, Mike Horsman, Gerry Murphy, Elvis Pile, David Room, Roger Toms, John Westwood)
COMMENT: I'm writing this one so long after the event that I'm having trouble remembering much about it except the sight of John Westwood, complete with cap and rucksack, jauntily striding up the hill to the Prince of Wales faster than I could cycle up it on my bike. The Prince of Wales, first pub of 2012, has a different name but obviously relates to the same personage as the last pub of 2011 (the Plume of Feathers, Pub Odyssey 51, is an emblem of the Prince of Wales). The Hertingfordbury Prince of Wales isn't a particularly old pub, coming into existence sometime between 1852 and 1890. In this it contrasts both with the Plume (probably from 1596) and the other Hertingfordbury inn, the White Horse which under various names and on various sites goes back to 1643.
I mentioned in the entry on the White Horse (Pub Odyssey 49) a distinguished inhabitant of the Hertingfordbury graveyard, the last woman sentenced to death for witchcraft in England. Another graveyard inhabitant might be more fun, the great eighteenth-century brewer Ben Truman (1700-1780) whose image was used on beer labels and advertising till the 1970s, presenting him as a jolly fat man with a peg leg. There's no such thing as bad publicity. The 33rd President of the United States, Harry Truman (1884-1972) between 1945 and 1953 maybe the most powerful man in the world, was proud to claim he was a descendant of the great English beer baron (though maybe he wasn't really)..
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