Walk up Welch Gate today and it is a quiet residential street climbing away from the town centre. For most of the nineteenth century it was the most disreputable address in Bewdley, and the local papers could hardly get enough of it.
The gate
The name is literal. A wooden gatehouse stood here from about the middle of the fifteenth century, one of several put up around the town to control who came in and, more to the point, to make sure that merchants paid their tolls. This was the gate on the road west, the Welsh road, and the trade that came through it was the reason it mattered. Packhorse trains arrived from the Welsh hills and went back loaded with goods brought up the Severn.
The gate has gone, but a toll-keeper was still at his post here in the 1850s, and the road out through Winbrook had a toll gate within living memory of people whose recollections are still being collected. A few stone steps are said to mark where the toll house stood.
Ten pubs in a hundred metres
Here is the statistic that explains everything else. For much of the first half of the nineteenth century there were at least ten public houses between the old town gate and the junction with Bark Hill, a stretch of less than a hundred metres containing about forty street-facing buildings. One building in four was a pub.
They were, in order up the street: the Old Pack Horse at No. 1, the Star and Crown at No. 5 which had been the Queen’s Head, the Anchor at No. 7, the Waggon and Horses at No. 8, the Malt Shovel at No. 13 which was probably once the Rising Sun, a Mug House at No. 17, and the Star and Garter at No. 18. Further up came the Wood Colliers’ Arms at No. 76, the Old Black Boy somewhere near it, the Rose and Crown at No. 89 which had been the Black Horse, and the Hole-in-the-Wall at No. 93. Two more, the Vine and the Union, stood along Winbrook but counted as Welch Gate for official purposes.
A note for anyone who knows the town: the Mug House at No. 17 is not the Mug House on Severnside. They were two different pubs sharing a name, which in a town that had seventy-one public houses by 1841 is hardly surprising. The Welch Gate one has been a private house for a very long time.
What the newspapers made of it
In the mid nineteenth century Berrow’s Worcester Journal regularly entertained its readers with accounts of disgraceful conduct in the county. The offences were usually petty and the writing enjoyed itself enormously, and it did not escape the editors that a good many of Bewdley’s ne’er-do-wells lived in Welch Gate. Plenty of perfectly respectable people lived there too, but the mere mention of the street could liven up a dull week.
In August 1859 the paper reported that “a family jar took place in that well-known locality, the Welch Gate, from which a scuffle arose, when one of the party, named John Baker, managed to get his arm broke”. The choice of verb is doing a lot of work.
In June 1862 John Wilcox was charged by Eliza Crump with using obscene language to her. Witnesses were called on both sides, and Crump, “proving to be the real offender, was discharged after paying expenses of 13s”. The paper could not resist adding that the parties lived “in the noted locality of Welch Gate, a place famous for its constant broils in which these worthies have earned an unenviable reputation”.
The Worcester Chronicle in May 1855 reported the case of Mrs Lucas, a greengrocer, summoned by Mrs Bright for using disgusting and threatening language, “by which the delicate feelings of the inhabitants of this polished neighbourhood were very much shocked”. The extracts recited to the magistrates were, the paper noted, “so recherché that they considered them worth a fine of 10s. and 16s. costs, which were paid”.
The disorderly carpet weavers
The best of them ran in September 1854, and it is worth telling in full.
George Millward, Joseph Millward and a man named Blount, all carpet weavers, had been drinking at the Hole-in-the-Wall at No. 93 on the Tuesday night. Becoming, in the paper’s word, “larkish”, Blount ran out into the street with a poker, his companions followed, and they set about pelting people’s doors with stones. As a finale they abused the toll-keeper at the Welch gate.
They started again the next day. When the constable intervened they abused him too, until he had no choice but to arrest them, which proved difficult: one of the Millwards was so drunk that a trolley had to be fetched to convey him to the black hole, the borough’s cells at the far end of the Shambles in Load Street. Blount made a run for it, pursued by PC Jefferies’s son, got as far as the rectory at Dowles, and jumped into the Severn to escape. He would have drowned if somebody had not pulled him out.
They were fined a pound each, with five shillings and sixpence costs.
The street now
The carpet weavers are a reminder of what this street actually was. Kidderminster’s looms were a few miles away, the forest and the coal were behind the town, and Welch Gate was where working people lived, close-packed, on a hill, with a pub every fourth door. Bewdley’s Georgian riverside got the merchants’ houses. This is where the rest of the town lived.
The last public house in the street, the Wood Colliers’ Arms at Nos. 76 to 78, was still open when a local history was published in 2015. It is now a house. A street that once had ten has none.