Pub Sign Study The Old Boars Head Middleton Manchester

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An old pub that really looks unspoilt by time, a 1624 Tudor coaching inn full of authentic crooked low ceiling timber beams and fragments of the original inglenook fireplaces, though these are not lit now. It was originally two independent cottages that were knocked together to form a house adjoining the nearby church properties, before becoming the Old Boar’s Head in 1737. Jacobites held fund raising and recruiting events in the pub in the 1740’s and it was doubling up as a postal sorting office by the 1840’s, when it was also the main stagecoach boarding point for catching a ride from Middleton to Rochdale. The Council was intent on demolishing the pub in 1911 but public anger saved it as a grade two architecturally protected property. Highwayman Dick Turpin is believed to have visited the pub in the 18th century. The next century Radical dialect poet Sam Bamford was a frequent visitor and wrote of his father winning a bare knuckle fight in the pub over two hours against a much bigger opponent who was carried off unconscious by his friends afterwards. Bamford was a witness to the Peterloo Massacre and arrested for sedition and treason over his own politics but eventually released. Large stuffed trout and perch displayed in the pub were caught by members of its angling society in the 1920’s. The society is still thriving to this day. The sign is set in wood on a chain and depicts a quite vicious looking wild boar with tusks and bared teeth from the days when hunting wild boar would have been common around Middleton, with this old semi0kegendary boar proving elusive and dangerous to its hunters. It may be the oldest inn sign design in Greater Manchester. Arthur Chappell