Up: Hayward
YOR: 21 of 113
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for the acquisition of this relic just as there was more than a century
later among antiquaries and curators.
Whether Thomas Noble purchased the sign of The
Dog's Head in the Pot and set it up over the corner shop in St. George's
Terrace, later to be occupied by Haywards, or whether it was Noble's
successor, is not recorded. Charles Dickens, as a small boy, noticed the
sign in 1823 as he walked backwards and forwards from his home in Lant
Street, Southwark, to the blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs, which
figures in his autobiographical novel, David Copperfield. "My
usual way home," he wrote to his friend and biographer John Forster, "was
over Blackfriars Bridge and down that turning in the Blackfriars Road
which has Rowland Hill's Chapel on one side and the likeness of a golden
dog licking a golden pot over a shop door on the other." From the vestiges
of the period which have remained it is still possible to visualise the
scene as Dickens saw it a hundred and thirty years ago.
Earlier still, Rowland Hill had been a familiar
figure as he followed the same route to and from his chapel. Little did
he know that this was to achieve even greater fame as "The Ring," a
boxing arena. "I remember Rowland Hill from my infancy," recorded Charles
Mathews, the great mimic and actor, "He was an odd, flighty, absent person.
So inattentive was he to nicety in dress that I have seen him enter my
father's house (in the Strand) with one red slipper and one shoe, the knees
of his breeches untied, and the strings dangling down his legs. In this
state he walked from Blackfriars Road unconscious of his eccentric
appearance."
There is one more character to be introduced as
taking part in the prologue to the story of Haywards of the Borough-- yet
another ironmonger, George Glover, who specialised as a maker of iron
fences. Little more than a stone's throw from Noble's shop on the corner,
Glover carried on his business in premises at 117, Union Street. Here
today stand the headquarters of Haywards Limited.
An extract from The General Shopbook for
1783 gives an interesting description of ironmongers of that day. "They
generally
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