An old Norwich pub, and a treatise on the name.


"Even after 1945 had a sand covered floor and S&P beers served straight from the barrel. The bar offered rails for both hands and feet."
Norfolk Pubs


Walk through Norwich's Tombland area any time up until 1984 and this pub was open in a cosy corner of the old city's market area. It had a good view of both the Maid's Head Hotel, the Cathedral's Erpingham Gate and of course the Public Convenience (renowned for its night-time cottaging). The building is 18th-century, but with foundations going back hundred of years before that. The earliest back my research takes me is 1760, one Amy Roper being in charge of a public house referred to as the Compasses.

The Name

The naming of pubs is a difficult matter, and this one had many names over the years, most being compass-related, as in the Three Compasses. The name is not limited to Norwich; other pubs from Hull to Saint Pancras, London have been similarly blessed. The origin, as with so many things, is now lost to us. But speculation is free, and there does seem to be a lot of it. Popular mythology includes that it's a corruption of the phrase "God Encompasseth Us", which many view as fanciful, but supporters rightly point out that the Cathedral grounds and walls were a stone's throw away.

Compasses have long been associated with artisans (both carpenters and masons used them, and the image most associated with the Freemasons includes a square and compasses). Such craftsmen must have been working on cathedral building and repair throughout the period, so it seems almost likely. Michael Quinion also suggests a connection with Freemasonry, but also points out that the "arms of the Carpenters' Guild…include three goats and a chevron, with the chevron later being corrupted to compasses" That doesn't adequately explain everything, unless there were a time when the name was The Goats and Compass. Possible, but there's more.

We have "explained" the compasses, what of the goat? Well, goats have been associated with lasciviousness in mythology, and have featured in other pub names (I have drunk in many Goat Inn variants) and it's possible that goats featured in the market scene outside the doors in earlier days. Local legend (always reliable) says that at one time sheep and goats were pastured in the fields to the north-east, which is a stretch.

The Pub

I have to be honest. The pub was nothing special at the time I lived there in the 1970s. It wasn't a free house, so no choice of ales, in fact as far as I remember it was a Watney's pub, serving only that brand of fizzy arse. I preferred the plethora of other places with a wider variation of brews. After all, I was a fully paid-up member of CAMRA and a qualified real ale bore. (Coarse definition of an Irishman: a mechanism for turning Guinness into Watney's.)

The architecture was nowt special either, a practical square-built structure with no defining features other than the pub sign. The only reason I ever went in was purely pragmatic – it was close to the Samson and Hercules club, so good for one last cheap pint before the overpriced drinking began. That it was within spitting distance of the local cottage meant that most weekend evenings there were often a lot of horny, lonely men there with long faces and hidden erections.

That said, it was clean and the staff were decent. It wasn't quite the spit and sawdust place the above quotation suggests, at least not in my days there. Nowadays the building is occupied by an estate agent business with a very dull name indeed. Sad to say, the toilets were nothing special, either. My fanciful excursion in trough urinal is just that. Shame, I'd have gone there more just to piss on the urinal flies.




https://www.bygoneboozers.co.uk/post/full-circle
https://patrickchaplin.com/2019/05/22/the-goat-and-compasses-2/
https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-goa1.htm

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.