Alternative names: Ram, White Horse Cellar, White Horse, Carpenters’ Arms, Royal Mail.
The earliest record of this public house is from a list of licences set out in the minutes of Quarter Sessions of the Borough of Newbury in April 1761. At that date it was known as the Ram, landlord William Sadler. In the 1770s and 1780s it was often used by local agents for auction sales of live timber (trees) and underwood (bushes).
Around 1823/24 the name was changed to the White Horse Cellars, the name of a famous London coaching inn in Piccadilly and the London terminus of many of the Great Bath Road coaches. This was later rebuilt as the even more famous Ritz hotel.
Northbrook St. ca1930. The tall narrow building with Edmonds’
painted wall sign replaced the White Horse Cellars in 1895
It was under the name of The White Horse that the pub changed hands in 1838 – sold, along with six other local pubs, to Thomas Smith by the partners in the Castle Brewery (later the Newbury Brewery Company), Richard Compton and John Satchell. Smith was Satchell’s father-in-law and Compton’s great-uncle and the deal was involved in some way with the replacement of Compton by another of Smith’s sons-in-law, Robert Rowell. Smith was a wealthy man, able to advance the new partners £11,600 to buy out Compton.
In his will, Smith left the White Horse Cellars and the six other pubs in trust for his grandson, Thomas Robert Rowell. More pubs and many Newbury houses (including all of Smith’s Crescent in Shaw Road), were left to his Rowell grandchildren, the children of Robert Rowell and his two wives, Sarah and Elizabeth, who were both daughters of Smith and both deceased by the date the will was written.
For a while the White Horse Cellars was a popular house with people coming in from the country for the market. They would put their horses in the extensive stabling to the rear, parking their carts down the centre of the wide street outside while they spent time at the market.By the 1850s, the business was struggling. There is one entry in an 1852 county directory as The Carpenters Arms, although the pub had already lost its licence by the time the directory was published. At the adjourned Annual Licensing Session for the Borough of Newbury on 13 September 1851, it was noted that three pubs would be given up or closed, including the Carpenters Arms, late White Horse Cellars.
However, the premises continued in use as a beer house selling beer and possibly cider, but no spirits. This could be done at that date simply by applying to the local Excise Office for a licence. The name cannot have lasted long, for in an 1853 directory it is once more the White Horse Cellars.
Three years later in May 1856 Francis Thomas announces that he has moved his auction and appraisal business from Bartholomew Street to the Royal Mail at 40 Northbrook Street. Thomas is the last known landlord of this pub; clearly, he was running it as a pub or off-license because he advertises, alongside his move of business, that he has draught Wiltshire Ales for sale.
An unusual exhibition in 1838.
In 1868 Rowell leases the premises, along with several others, to Blatch’s Brewery of Theale for 21 years. Following Rowell’s death in 1877 the lease is renewed by his children, the new lease names the property as ‘The Royal Mail, previously The Ram and The White Horse Cellars.’ However, despite these leases to a local brewery, it is no longer a pub. In both leases the occupier is named as James James, a fishmonger, who occupied the premises until its demolition in 1895. James was not the first to use the former pub for other purposes; he succeeded William Lane, a hairdresser, as tenant. The exact date the pub closed is not known, but Lane is in occupation by 1864. At the time of the 1861 census the premises are vacant, perhaps indicating when its days as a pub ended.
In 1889 the eight children of Thomas Robert Rowell, who inherited the pubs and ex-pubs, left to him by Thomas Smith, sold the properties at an auction held at the Queen’s Hotel in Newbury Market Place on 13 August. 40 Northbrook Street, the former White Horse Cellars, was included in the sale along with the Hatchet, Catherine Wheel, the Cricketers Arms in Bartholomew Street (another lost pub), a pub in Compton and three in East Ilsley.
When the building was demolished in March 1895, a newspaper article reminiscing about the old pub recalled that its reputation fell in its later years following the change of name to the Royal Mail. The article noted that a beam was found that bore an inscription “Anno Domini, 1624, August 20.” This gives a good indication of the age of the building, perhaps it was a public house from the start? We shall probably never know. Records prior to the 1761 list mentioned above tend to record the names of licensees, but rarely those of their premises.