The Georgian Hat & Beaver (a beaver refers to a hat maker’s stand).
In 1831, the debtors confined to County Goal opposite forwarded a communication in which they thanked landlord William Facer of the Hat & Beaver for the excellent Christmas dinner he had sent across to the prisoners.
January 1834, saw the suicide of William and Hannah Facer, who together had been at the pub for thirteen years, William was much addicted to drink and, becoming melancholy and incoherent, he finally slashed his own throat with a razor blade. Hannah became deranged and went to live in lodgings. After being presented with William’s will she found that their house had, due to a legal oversight in the will, passed to another. She took a pair of wool shears and cut her own throat.
The Hat and Beaver was also used for inquests. In 1864, for example, Mary Nobbs, a 19 year old domestic servant girl in the employ of Mrs Johnson in Oxford Street, was questioned by her employer as to her condition as she believed Mary was pregnant. Mary denied this, fearing for her future and with nowhere to turn, became very distressed but was still told to leave the next day.
After requesting a knife and dustpan Mary went into the kitchen, where she was shortly to cry out ‘Oh dear.’ When approached by her friend and fellow domestic, Eliza Shawley, Mary said ‘Don’t say anything it has all come, pray don’t tell I’m all right now.’ Mary was sat on a chair in the kitchen surrounded by pools of blood. Shawley fetched Mrs Johnson and a surgeon, Mr Sidley was called for.
As the surgeon was going through the washhouse to the kitchen he heard a baby crying, the sound coming from the privy. On entering the privy he looked down and could see a baby in the excrement. Sidley called for the night soil men, who recovered the baby, wrapped it in a blanket and put it near the fire to warm. The baby a boy was in a feeble state and died within the hour.
The surgeon told the inquest at the Hat & Beaver that after the birth was found he came across the afterbirth in a dustpan, the cord being torn as from a blunt knife. He believed the cause of death was from exposure and the vitiated atmosphere it had inhaled from being partly submerged in the privy. Mary was charged with concealing the birth and throwing the child in the privy, being committed to the assizes on a charge of ‘Wilful Murder’.
On the 5th of May 1864, a crowd assembled outside the courthouse. The newspaper report suggested ‘some manifestation of rudeness’ came from the crowd as Mary was ushered from gaol to the courthouse where inside the charge of murder was reduced to manslaughter.
With a clearly distressed Mary present in court, this pitiful case was heard by a sympathetic jury whose verdict was one of acquittal. There is no further mention of Mary Nobbs in Leicester.
Little changed in the Hat and Beaver from the 1960s through to its demise in 2007, when Hardy and Hansons foolishly closed the pub just prior to the new Highcross Shopping complex due to open opposite. ‘The Hat’ was one of my all time favourite pubs: unspoilt, and an oasis of calm in an otherwise manic world.
Barry Lount
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