With the current Covid-19 situation I haven't been getting many miles in on the bike, a situation which could persist for quite a while. For this post I'm falling back on some pics I took on the morning I was out getting shots of the former Wheel Inn, which is a just couple of miles away along the same road.
From time to time a bit of jingling stirs in my memory. It could be Don Williams' 'silver coins that jingle, jangle' coming from the jukebox of the Highlands or maybe Dylan's 'jingle jangle morning' from a similar, albeit pricier, device in the Links Hotel. (Whether it was the man himself or the Byrds' version I can no longer recall.) but I'd never come across it in a pub's name. That was until I moved to Derbyshire.
The Jinglers was the name of a pub on the A517 near Bradley, about 4 miles east of Ashbourne. In truth it was a name of the pub, for the sign which hung outside bore two names. Approach from the Belper direction and the sign informed you that you'd arrived at the door of The Jinglers. Approach from Ashbourne and you'd reached the Fox and Hounds.
A former coaching inn, it no doubt dates from earlier than the first hint of it that I've found, which is in the 1841 census. This lists a Charles Haseldine as a victualer in Bradley and he's there for more than another thirty years, only relinquishing his hold on the place when he dies in 1877.
Why did the place have two names? And why the Jinglers? Well, Derbyshire Life magazine carried an article a few years back in which it claimed that a local historian, Wendy Whitbread, had unearthed an explanation for both. Firstly, the inn stood at the end of a track which lead from a lead mine. The extracted ore was transported using pack ponies with the leading individual being equipped with a bell whose jingling sound would inform workers in the bar that it was time to put down, or probably just down, their pints and set off to deal with the approaching beasts of burden.
So, that's the Jinglers dealt with, but why two names? Whitbread suggests that when the house became tied to Offiler's Brewery the new owners wished to change the name to the Fox & Hounds but the locals were resistant to the idea. The two name situation arose either as a compromise with Offiler's or as a false front to keep the new owners happy without upsetting the locals.
Whitbread's suggestion for the source of the Jinglers name may or may not be correct, but I have to question her suggested reason for two names. It's a nice story but Offiler's Brewery was founded in Derby in 1876 and Charles Haseldine is shown to be at the Fox & Hounds in Bradley in the 1849 Post Office Directory. The earliest reference that I've found for the use of Jinglers is in the 1861 census return. So why the two names? I'll have to pass on that one.
It certainly wasn't an Offiler's house when I last visited with a friend, one evening in the autumn of 1999. The mergers and takeovers of the '60s and '70s had seen it become part of the Bass estate. Quite how good the pints of Bass were I can't remember. They couldn't have been bad or we wouldn't have stayed for more than the first, but one thing I'm certain of is that for the hour and a half that we were in there we were alone on our side of the bar. This fact may well have been one of the contributing factors in its closure the following year. Now the Fox & Hounds, or the Jinglers, has joined those jingles and jangles of Williams and Dylan. In the memory.
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