The “Post Office Hotel” brings the post-boy of old to my mind, and I turn to the oldest book I possess, given to me by my father, in which he wrote my name in 1861. “The Sporting Scrap Book,” by Henry Alken, containing fifty plates, designed and engraved by himself, published by Thomas McLean, 26, Haymarket, 1824. I have always treasured this book, and the coloured prints are as good to-day as ever. I was wondering how often the pewter pot appeared in Alken’s drawings, and I find twice. The first is entitled “The Post-Boy,” who with a pair of harnessed horses has just called for drinks for himself and his horses, and no sooner has he got his than he has the pot to his lips. The shape is similar to the “Post Office Hotel” pint, but probably the “Post-Boy” needed a quart, for the pewter pot is as tall as his pot hat. In the second picture Alken shows a pewter pot with almost as much “frill” on the top as there is round the cap of the woman who holds it, and this one is also the same shape, which confirms my impression that the “Post Office Hotel” pint pot is about 100 years old.
I now turn my attention from the handy pints to the capacious quart pots, just the things to wash down a breakfast with; pause and conjecture what “lovely” thirsts they must have had! It was quite the custom to put the landlord’s monogram on the front, and the name of the tavern on the bottom of the mugs; there again is a theme for reflection. As a reason, I think we may assume there were kleptomaniacs, souvenir hunters, and sneak thieves in the far gone times, just as there are to-day, and by marking in this way it would limit the loss to the latter class, who would sell the things for old metal. These big mugs would well set off a table on which were pewter plates anything from nine to twenty inches in diameter. Although I have studied all the books written on old pewter, I have failed to find that it was always a case of “One man, one quart,” and am forced to the conclusion that there may have been odd occasions when more than one shared.
To get back to the pots illustrated, does any living man know where the “Baptist Head,” High Holborn, stood? It is perhaps typical of the country that the largest and heaviest quart comes from Ireland, and from the battered condition it was in when I got it, I surmised it had often been used to add weight to an argument.