The Windsor Castle was opened during the 1840s. Jeremiah Herbert purchased some land in and around Grange Lane during 1841, and the beerhouse was up and running by November 1844 as Herbert was fined for being open after hours. Herbert also hosted a meeting of the Beerhouse Keepers Protection Society at the Windsor Castle in 1846. Delegates from Birmingham, Sheffield and Manchester met to arrange to lobby the government to improve the present law which, they claimed, ‘presses hard on beerhouse keepers.’
Jeremiah Herbert died aged eighty in 1869 and his estate was auctioned in August of that year. As well as the Windsor Castle, together four adjoining houses, it comprised a parcel of land and more than a dozen houses in Grange Lane, Asylum Street and Gosling Street.
George Spriggs, who had moved from the nearby Earl of Lancaster to run the Windsor, died shortly after and the licence was transferred to a widow, Sarah Morris, in 1871. She had been there less than a month when one of her lodgers, Joseph Dunkley, died at the table whilst having breakfast with her.
Sarah Morris was not to have a lot of luck at the beerhouse. After only eighteen months, she moved on after being charged with allowing drinking during illegal hours on a Sunday. The court was told that the police kept watch and counted seventy eight men and six women enter the beerhouse. Sarah was fined and gave up her licence within four weeks.
Daniel York followed Sarah, but he too died at the pub aged only thirty six in 1882. The licence passed on to his wife, Mary Jane.
By 1897, Holes Newark Brewery had purchased the beerhouse and rebuilding plans were drawn up.
Windsor Castle in a traffic free Mill Lane, 1950s (photo above). The pub closed in January 1959, with the licence together with that from the Plumbers Arms going to the newly built Holes pub, the Tudor Rose.
