Downley's pubs part two – Lords and Donkeys

This post was updated on 18 February 2025 to provide the history of the De Spencers before 1835.

At the top of Downley Common, where the paved Plomer Green Lane becomes an unmade road before becoming a footpath into the woods towards Naphill Common, is Le De Spencers Arms.

The alehouse is described in an auction notice in the South Bucks Herald of 8 August 1835 as ‘A well built brick and slated Public House, known as Lord Le De Spencer's Arms, with good out offices, and about 3 acres of meadow land, situate at Naphill Common, in the parish of West Wycombe, now let to Mr. Jesse Bristow, at the rent of £25 per year.’

This is an auction of Thomas Joynson’s property on his bankruptcy. Joynson had been a horse owner until 1830, supplying horses for the Tetsworth to West Wycombe stage of the daytime Oxonian coach. In May 1832 he was trading as a lacedealer and coach master at West Wycombe when he was made bankrupt. 

It’s likely that Joynson opened the pub as the Wellington Arms in 1822, changing the name to Lord Le De Spencer's Arms the following year with John Hawes as the tenant. There was another pub with this name in West Wycombe until it closed in 1815 – its story is here.

The De Spencers in 1950 with licensee Stan Brown (courtesy of the Downley Local History Group)

Wethered’s bought the pub – brewery records first mention their ownership of the De Spencers in 1836. The poor rate records from 1840 show the pub to also have a shop, bakehouse and garden.

The Bristows were licensees until late in the 19th century, though it never seemed to be a pub Wethered’s were keen to retain. They tried to sell it at auction in 1895 and again in 1900, both times withdrawing the lot when it failed to make the reserve. They sold off most of the meadow after that. In 1944, the brewery considered removing the licence to a new site at Downley Pitch – see Downley Donkey below.

The De Spencers enjoyed a quiet existence until Wethered’s brewery closed in 1988 and then its parent company, Whitbread, sold the pub to Fuller’s of Chiswick in 1990.

The De Spencers, now a Fuller’s pub, in 1993 (courtesy of SWOP, copyright managed by High Wycombe Library)

In the 1930s many breweries were keen to improve their tied estate, including rebuilding many of their older pubs. Wethered’s were particularly keen to improve their estate in High Wycombe and move the licences of older pubs within the town to new housing estates that began to emerge after World War One. This strategy involved agreeing with the licensing magistrates to surrender usually two old licences for every new successful application. It also involved buying land on which to build new, improved pubs.

Wethered’s bought a plot of land at Downley Pitch – at the junction of Plomer Green Lane and Littleworth Road – in 1937 where an estate of houses, known as the Spriggs Estate, were to be built. The magistrates refused an application for a licence at this site and continued to refuse a licence until the outbreak of World War Two put further applications on hold.

As already mentioned, Wethered’s began to consider taking the licence of the De Spencers to Downley Pitch in 1944. Then in 1945 they were offered the house adjoining their plot for £3,000. Though they initially refused the offer they changed their mind and made the purchase.

What is contained in newspaper reports of the licensing magistrates’ meetings and what the Wethered board minutes say about licence applications often disagree. On the one hand, in 1947 the magistrates are reported as rejecting the removal of the De Spencers because there were local objections to the scheme, and there is too much post-war uncertainty about pub licensing. On the other hand, the Wethered board report that the magistrates wanted the company to surrender two of either the Beech Tree at Knaves Beech, the Bricklayers’ Arms (later the Derehams Inn) at Loudwater and Crooked Billet at Sheepridge. Wethered countered they would surrender the Beech Tree if they could rebuild the Bricklayers’. Application refused.

After this, Wethered’s lost interest in the new pub at Downley Pitch, despite plans being drawn up and then amended by their architect, Brocklehurst.

The next mention of the scheme is not until 1952, when board minutes affirm the company’s intention not to surrender the licence of the Rose Bush in Tylers Green for one in Downley, though there’s no evidence of any applications being made to the magistrates at this time.

The scheme was revived 10 years later in 1962, but after a further rejection Wethered’s decided to sell their plot for housing in 1963, which application was also refused by the County Council and by the Minister of Housing. In 1964, the company swapped their original plot for one on the other side of the road. And in 1967, after agreeing to surrender the licence of the Beech Tree at Knaves Beech, they were successful in getting a licence for a pub at the Pitch.

The Downley Donkey opened in 1969. Named after local character Dickie Gray, who stabled his donkeys in Moor Lane in the early 20th century. After Wethered's closed, their parent company, Whitbread, sold their estate – the Laurel Pub Company – to Enterprise Inns in 2002. The pub was closed in 2014 to be converted to a convenience store.

The Downley Donkey (courtesy of the Downley Local History Group)

Despite Wethered spending over 50 years trying, or thinking about, offloading the Lord Le De Spencer's Arms, and 30 years trying to get a licence for a pub at Downley Pitch, it’s the De Spencers that survives and thrives today.

Sources

Bucks Free Press and other local papers accessed through the British Newspaper Archive

SWOP (Sharing Wycombe’s Old Photographs)

Downley Local History Group

Buckinghamshire Archives for poor rate assessments

Fuller, Smith & Turner PLC

Downley pubs – education, golf and compensation

This is an edited and updated version of an article that first appeared in the Bucks Free Press on 9 September 2022. It has been edited further on 25 September 2024 as new information has come to light about both the Golf Links and Mountjoy’s Retreat. There is only one pub in Downley’s High Street now, but there were originally two with a third close by. The Bricklayers' Arms in the High Street dates from 1935 and replaced a building on the corner of the High Street and Plomer Green Lane first licensed in 1794. The second licensed premises was on the part of the High Street then still known as Chapel Street. This was an unnamed beerhouse, owned by Henry Fox, which first appears in the parish poor rate records in 1854. The poor rate records for the years from 1849 to 1853 are missing, so Henry’s beerhouse may have opened a few years earlier. Henry secured a loan from Wycombe brewer Richard Lucas in 1855. Taking loans from brewers was a way of financing improvements to a beerhouse, but it meant being obliged to take the brewer’s beer and being tied to that brewer as part of the loan agreement.

The original Bricklayers' Arms around the time of closure (courtesy of Downley Local History Group)

Richard Lucas’ business had become the Frogmoor brewery of Leadbetter and Bird in 1890, by which time they owned Henry Fox’s pub that had added butchery and baking to beer retailing. On his death in 1896 Henry was described as a beerhouse keeper and coal merchant. 

Additional occupations were common for beerhouse keepers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They were often also educated people and Henry, back in 1865, became secretary and librarian of a Mechanic’s Institute which met in a room in his house. These institutes had their origin in Scotland in 1804. They were educational establishments designed for working class adults often including a lending library. It’s likely that Henry’s original house had been extended, probably by acquiring adjacent cottages.

Around the corner from the High Street, at the junction of Moor Lane and Plomer Green Lane, stands our third pub, Mountjoy’s Retreat, a Grade II listed building of some antiquity. Its first appearance in the poor rate records is in 1840 when it was an unnamed beerhouse owned by Alfred Lane and occupied by William Collins, consisting of a house, shop, garden and orchard. 

The property was sold at auction in 1848, being acquired by Wethered’s brewery of Marlow. Long-time licensee Mary Martin provided rooms in her house to teach local children until the Downley Board School opened after the 1870 Elementary Education Act was passed. 

The Watlington brewery acquired the beerhouse in 1895, by which time it carried the Mountjoy’s Retreat name. It was a curious acquisition; the Watlington and Wethered brewery families were related and the two breweries often swapped pubs. Downley was at the limit of the 15-mile delivery range of a Victorian brewer’s dray – a ‘dray’s day’ – and its nearest pub to Downley was in Stokenchurch.  

Mountjoy’s Retreat had a six-day beerhouse licence. Watlington brewery, and all of their tenants between 1896 and 1907, made repeated applications to the licensing magistrates for a full licence, to no avail. Not only could they not get a licence to sell any liquor other than beer, cider and perry, but they could not sell any alcohol on Sundays. They consistently argued that they were the best-appointed pub in the village and that visitors to the common on Sundays were disappointed that they could buy only tea. The licensing magistrates’ job in late Victorian and Edwardian England was to reduce the numbers of licensed houses and approve full and extended licences only in exceptional circumstances. The police routinely opposed all new and extended licence applications.

Mountjoy's Retreat in the last stage of its life (courtesy of Downley Local History Group)

The ailing Watlington brewery had been trying to attract a buyer since 1902 with little success. Mountjoy’s Retreat was sold at auction to Wheeler’s Wycombe Breweries in 1914. Wheeler’s then had a monopoly, as they also owned the Bricklayers' Arms and Henry Fox’s old house (now called the Golf Links) after the Frogmoor brewery merged with Wheeler’s in 1898. 

The West Wycombe Golf Club opened in 1893 on Downley Common, land which was owned by Sir Edward Dashwood. The club moved to Flackwell Heath in 1904, although the links were maintained by locals until World War Two when the common was used to test Churchill tanks made and repaired at Broome and Wade.

The Golf Links on left just before closure in 1933 with the original Bricklayers' Arms (white building) beyond the children (courtesy of Downley Local History Group)

In 1933 the Golf Links beerhouse was referred by the licensing magistrates for compensation under the 1910 Licensing Act. The act imposed on brewers a levy to pay compensation to brewers and their tenants for giving up redundant pubs. In the case of the Golf Links it meant Downley had one pub too many per head of population. The beerhouse was in a poor state with two tiny public rooms, poor sanitation and a flooded cellar – Wheeler’s and licensee Sarah Allnut put up no opposition. Wheeler’s received £638 and Sarah £100 compensation. The Golf Links closed on 31 December 1933.

In 1935, Wheeler’s (now a subsidiary of Simonds of Reading) and the licensees of the Bricklayers' Arms (the Dixons) proposed to the magistrates moving the licence to a new building on the site of the Golf Links beerhouse. The magistrates were impressed with the plans for the new pub. The old pub, with a full licence, was dilapidated and jutted dangerously out onto the road, such that any customer leaving after a drink too many could be hit by an actual rather than proverbial bus. Not only would the beerhouse come down but the cottages either side of it were demolished too, Wheeler’s having bought land around the beerhouse in 1916 and early in 1935. 

The Bricklayers' Arms as rebuilt in 1935 (courtesy of CAMRA)

In the new pub there was an additional 940 square feet of floor space, with a folding screen across the main room to allow the football club to change and then have tea. The plans were agreed and the new Brickies was built. The Dixons remained as licensees until World War Two. The Wheeler name disappeared to be replaced by Simonds and their hop leaf trademark, and then by the Courage cockrell from 1961, until Courage too disappeared. The pub is now privately owned.

And what of Mountjoy’s Retreat? Where did that name come from? Mrs Kathleen Stevens, daughter of landlord James Martin, was born at the pub in 1887. She later recalled that a Mrs Mountjoy and her three daughters were friends of the Martins and visited regularly from their London home. Mrs Mountjoy joked that it was her retreat and Mr Martin named it so. In the late 1920s, a butcher, Jim West, ran the pub. He had a shop next to the old Bricklayers’ Arms and a slaughter house at the back of the Retreat. He also had a pianola in the tap room, which, boringly, only appeared to play In A Monastery Garden. The pub was closed, delicensed and sold at auction in 1952.

While the modern Bricklayers’ Arms dominates the High Street there is now just a patch of grass where the old pub stood.

Sources

Downley Local History Group - thanks to Brian Knott for many of the pictures and stories

Bucks Free Press and other local news papers sourced through The British Newspaper Archive

Buckinghamshire Archives for licensing records, property deeds and poor rate assessments