The Billiards Hall

The Haunted Hare isn’t in a particularly large or grand village, but when the railway reached that part of the world and a station opened in the nearby town, there was a great undertaking by the local authorities, including the mayor (the wonderfully named Sir Williby Marmalade Broadcastle-Major), to appeal to a more high-class type of person.

As such, he made funds available to any local business with a sufficiently attractive proposal to help ‘raise the general character, demeanour and standing of [their] establishment, and improve the quailty [sic] of its patronage’.

The Hare put forward a suggestion to convert a little-used dining room into a billiards hall. The mayor very much approved of this suggestion and gave the pub the not insignificant sum of £150 (equivalent to many thousands of pounds today) for the renovations.

A red-baize billiards table was acquired from ‘J.J. Dunker & Sons of Blackpool’ and two new chandeliers installed above it. These additions alone cost more than half the budget, but money was also found to hang a large oil painting of Sir Williby above the mantelpiece. He was pictured in full military regalia and, to this day, still looks ominously down over the red baize.

Despite the pub producing a great many scrawled receipts, most found it hard to believe that these additions alone could have swallowed up so much of the eye-watering sum. Many in the know estimated the costs to be some £70 below what had been spent. Still, the local residents had little cause for complaint and made good use of the new facilities.

Not long after the room was declared open by the mayor, with considerable fanfare and reporters invited from both The County Chronicle and a newspaper in the city, a sign appeared on the door:

‘Locals Only Please’

As an act of hostility, it proved less consequential than one might imagine. Far fewer passengers than expected ever alighted at the new railway station and, as winter drew in, the anticipated stream of well-to-do visitors had slowed to next to none.

This did little to dampen the pretentions of the landlady, Polly Grubb, who by then had taken to styling herself ‘Madame’ and to wearing an expensive fur tippet, a brooch at the neck and a large ring. The total value of these new luxuries was estimated to be £70.

After her death in 1861, Madame Grubb’s brooch was hung in the billiards room.

The pub’s cat still uses her tippet as a bed.