The Gate Hangs Well pub, Coventry

This Town’s Irish venue – fiction and fact

The BBC’s new Midlands based drama, This Town, another creation of Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight, has been well received by the critics – give or take a few moans about the accents from locals? Having always lived in Coventry I looked forward to seeing how they would recreate the city for a tv drama. Along with Knight’s Birmingham locations and Chelmsley Wood, parts of Riley Square in Bell Green, and the flats in Spon End were filmed. For 1960s urban landscape – elevated motorways, tower blocks and what were then called ‘council estates’- I’d say they have done a good job.

Set also around the music scene of the late 70s/ early 8os these were the very streets that formed Two Tone, a unique post-punk/ ska black and white music collaboration. Alongside the black community (which includes the main character Levi Brown and his brother Jordan Bolger) the Coventry Irish also feature, with the family of the hardline IRA man Eamonn Quinn, played by Peter McDonald. Not typical of the Irish in Coventry by any means but hey – this is the man who created the Shelby family so allow for dramatic licence! There is a nugget of the truth however in that Coventry did have an IRA cell in the early 1970s, but following the conviction of Father Patrick Fell, and the aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings in 1974 it all went quiet.

Which brings me to the Gate Hangs Well. In the films the Irish meet in a pub of this name near to ‘Hillside’. The setting shows what looks more like a social club, underneath an elevated ring road backdrop, than a pub. Knight, of course, did similar with The Garrison in Blinders, recreating a location of that name removed from the actual Garrison Lane premises. Again the grain of truth. Next to the ring road at Spon End there used to be an Irish club, St.Brendan’s, which closed I would guess back in the 1980s? Likewise. Coventry did have a pub called the Gate Hangs Well which stood about a mile from there at 10 Howard Street in Hillfields. I cannot claim to have been in it before it was demolished in 1979 but liked the name . Originally called The Gate, this small street corner pub on the corner of Howard and Jenner Streets stood close to the Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital site. It was an M&B pub, first appearing in records in 1851 as a beerhouse. Over time it seems to have acquired the Gate Hangs Well name from the following quote…..

‘This Gate Hangs Well and hinders none. Refresh and pay and travel on.‘

Over the years it enjoyed mixed fortunes which can be gauged from the pages of the British Newspaper Archive searches of the Coventry Evening Telegraph. Probably the best description comes from an advert in which they described themselves in September 1977 -‘ If you enjoy good beer, a game of pool,darts or dominoes, then come along to the Gate Hangs Well, an old-fashioned pub with draught Brew XI’ . This was very much a last chance as only the previous month the City Council had unveiled a Compulsory Purchase Order, prior to demolishing most of Howard Street. The pub hung on until it closed on 29th October 1978. The press reports tell us a little bit about the pub.

On the 17.3.1947 it was announced the then landlord, William Morgan, 45, had ‘passed away peacefully‘on the premises.

In September 1949 the licensee was a Harry Richardson. He was a witness to an assault on a Police Constable, called after ‘fighting in the Smoke Room‘.

In January 1952 a full license was granted ‘for the Gate Hangs Well at present licensed for beer only’.

On the 21.1. 1956 there were reports of a fire. A faulty hearth had caused an outbreak in two rooms. A few months later they were advertising for a ‘Barmaid –learner considered’.

The 1960s saw more crime reports. In February 1962 a woman from Jenner Street pleading guilty to maliciously wounding the landlord’s wife, Jesse Anderson. A couple of years later a man described as a ‘regular customer‘ failed to deliver to the bank £115 of the pub’s money and ended up in court. In a story headed ‘Man sent to Trial for Woundings‘ ( 22.6.1966) a Mr Singh went to look for a woman missing from home, he ‘went to the Gate Hangs Well public house and found her with four Jamaicans‘. On the 4.5.1970 it was reported that a man named Jackson, aged 20, of no fixed address ‘ admitted causing £3o damage to two windows’ at the Howard Street pub. Surely enough here for a Steven Knight series?

Shortly before the pub’s demise in the late 1970s I was a hospital in-patient at the Coventry & Warwickshire Hospital on the Orthopaedic Ward ( broken leg/football) which overlooked these streets. Confined to the ward for what seemed ages, I remember looking out the window with an Irish man, named O’Toole, enviously watching a small group of labourers, waiting outside one morning for the Gate Hangs Well to open! I recall it stood alone amid the demolition, small, two storeys, with probably just a bar and a smoke room? So I can’t say I ever went in but I do remember Coventry’s Gate Hangs Well

Images

Above is the site on Howard Street where the pub once stood looking towards the Health Centre. This now occupies what was the south side of Jenner Street/ author April 2024

I could only find one image ( below) of the Gate Hangs Well online. It is from a Hillfields History Group 1973 photo and shows only the front of the pub on Howard Street with the corporate Bass Charrington sign over the door. Should they require me to remove it from this post I will, of course, do so.