Good Intent and The Devonport: Why landlocked pubs have nautical names

Beside the railway and the bridge was a pub, called the Good Intent, where Sandy Delf has discovered that the great-grandparents of her husband Chris were the landlords in the early 1880s. They were Jane and Richard Lawson, and their eldest son, Richard, was born in the Good Intent in 1881.

Soon they moved up the hill to take on the Holly Hill Inn, where they had nine more children. Richard, the eldest, became a well known local character, farming at Gillingwood Hall near Gilling West.

The Holly Hill is very much still going, but the Good Intent closed before the start of the First World War when the mine shut. Its building and its name survive as a private house.

The Holly Hill Inn, Richmond, with Jane Lawson at the door in about 1901

There are, or have been, Good Intent pubs all over the country. Many are in the south and many have pictures of sailing ships in full rigging on their sign.

In the days when our seas were full of ships, the Good Intent was an extremely popular name for vessels. Most were merchant or fishing ships – the Canadians once had lots of whalers called the Good Intent, perhaps ironically – but some were warships.

The Good Intent, at the foot of Sleegill, was once a pub. On the right, is the ramp down from Green Bridge to the copper railway

In 1800 alone, five British ships called the Good Intent were sunk, usually by privateers – pirates who were commissioned by hostile countries like Napoleon’s France to attack British shipping. For instance, on January 26 that year, the Good Intent was captured by Dutch privateers off the coast of Sunderland and scuttled.

So most Good Intent pubs were named after a ship.

Richard Lawson, who was born at the Good Intent, is the tall chap at the back in the centre of the picture wearing a hat. It is market day outside the Bishop Blaize Inn in Richmond Market Place

The obvious flaw to this theory is that Richmond is practically in the middle of the country. A more non-coastal community is hard to imagine.

But then so is Middleton One Row, where there is a pub named after a naval dockyard on the south coast.

The Hurworth Hunt meeting outside the Devonport in Middleton One Row

The pub, the Devonport, was rebuilt in the early 1820s to cater for an explosion of tourists coming to take the waters of nearby Dinsdale Spa.

The village, on the banks of the Tees to the south of Darlington, had for centuries had the Killinghall family as it lords of the manor. When the last of the Killinghalls died childless in 1762, the estate was inherited by his cousin once removed: William Pemberton, of Aislaby.

When his son died in 1801, he left the estate to his mother’s sisters, Elizabeth and Sally Cocks of Plymouth Dock on the south coast. They moved up, and when they died in the village in 1809 and 1811 respectively, their brother, Elisha, took over. Elisha’s son, Henry, was known as “Squire Cocks” and he was a major figure in Middleton for much of the 19th Century – the Fighting Cocks area gets its name from his emblem, which showed a couple of battling cockerels.

Plymouth Dock, where the Cocks family originated, was built around 1700 by the Government as a naval base, but it never was given an official name – it was referred to as the “dock near Plymouth”, and the residents called it “Devon’s nameless baby”. By 1800, Plymouth Dock – perhaps the best dockyard in the country – had grown so that it was bigger than Plymouth, and its proud residents resented being mistaken for, and lumped in with, the old town down the road.

In 1823, they petitioned King George IV to give them a proper name and as they were the port of Devon, Devonport became their name, with the king issuing a proclamation to that effect on January 1, 1824.

The people of Devonport rejoiced hugely at being freed from Plymouth with street parties and processions. Indeed, even the Cocks family of proud Devonportians, settling in to their role of lord of the manor on the River Tees, were delighted and so the newly rebuilt hotel in their village was given the name of the naval base.

So if landlocked Middleton One Row can have a nautical connection, why can’t the landlubbers of Richmond have drunk in a pub with a nautical name?