No . 138 The Trusty Servant
Although aware of the book , I hesitated at first to consult Peter Roberts ’ s Minstead - Life in a 17 th Century New Forest Community because I assumed from the title that it would not overlap information I sought , but when I eventually dived in , it did add a little . Roberts confirmed the 1837 mention of the current name , citing from the Hampshire Record Office a property deal in that year referring to a thousand year lease on the property from 1602 , and that an adjacent property was called Innbridge or Dunnbridge from the 1690s , implying the presence of an inn nearby . A punt on the search function at the Hampshire Archives , however , came up with this illuminationg snippet :
‘ Minstead Friendly Society : rules and orders to be observed by a friendly society to be held at Mr G Scorey ’ s , at the Trusty Servant in the parish of Minstead in the county of Southampton , 1 Jan 1804 , approved by Quarter Sessions 23 Apr 1811 ’ - making my earlier speculation on the date redundant : it was already The Trusty Servant in 1804 . Suzanne Foster checked for me - Mr Scorey was not a Wykehamist .
So we have some idea of dates , but still absolutely none as to how and why the pub became The Trusty Servant . As Barbara Vesey wrote in 2001 of Minstead :
“ Admirers of the creator of Sherlock Holmes , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , will want to pay their respects at his grave in the churchyard here . A puzzle worthy of Sir Arthur ’ s great detective is the idiosyncratic sign outside the Trusty Servant pub in the village .” pub signs opined that signs for Trusty Servant pubs “ traditionally showed a strange composite figure with a deer ’ s legs ( swiftness ), a donkey ’ s ears ( attentiveness ), and a padlocked pig ’ s snout ( silence ), all qualities associated with a trusty servant .”
I leave it to a better historian than I to discover why and how the Minstead inn , and any others so named , acquired their unexpected designations .
Acknowledgements : I am indebted to Suzanne Foster , Winchester College Archivist and David Cole , editor of the Journal of the Inn Sign Society for their valuable input into my investigation .
And finally , why on earth was there another Trusty Servant pub in Chelmsley Wood , Birmingham , with a poor pastiche of the icon , in what looks like a 1960s building now demolished in favour of an Asda supermarket ? Were there more ? A recent book on
The Editors holding an editorial meeting on location in the New Forest
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