The Three Pigeons was once a bustling tavern that used to grace the south-west corner of the Brentford Market Place. In its heyday in the 17th and 18th century, when Brentford was a busy market and resort town, it was a coaching inn, which could stable up to one hundred horses. It sadly closed in 1916.
There is an etching of The Three Pigeons done in 1848 which gives some idea of the Inn.
Fortunately for us, its reputation for entertainment has been captured and preserved in many references to it in literature. I have been uncovering a few, which build a picture of a lively and attractive place and a source of material for writers.
But first let me introduce a great Shakespearean actor who was the landlord of The Three Pigeons, John Lowin, and appropriately enough his great role was Falstaff.
The Actor and Landlord of The Three Pigeons
John Lowin was an actor who became the innkeeper of The Three Pigeons Inn, and died there in 1659. With Shakespeare, he was a member of the King’s Men theatre company, well remembered for his Falstaff role. An article on “Falstaffs, Past and Present” in the New York Times (1894):
“The original Falstaff is said to have been John Heminges, but Davies in his “Dramatic Miscellanies” disputes this, and gives the honour to William Lowin. Lowin played the part for forty years, until the Long Parliament made the giving of “stage plays and interludes” a crime. Then Lowin opened a public house at Brentford, called The Three Pigeons, and here he had as a companion Joseph Taylor, said to have beeen the original Hamlet. Lowin and Taylor led a precarious life, only brightened now and then by a few members of royalty and several commoners, who apprecaites the drama, and patronised The Three Pigeons to hear Lowin and Taylor recite Falstaff and Hamlet.”
In “Shakespeare and the Modern Stage with Other Essays” (1907) Sidney Lee refers to Lowin and Taylor’s time at Brentford:
Of the twenty-five actors who are enumerated in a preliminary page of the great First Folio, as filling in Shakespeare's lifetime chief roles in his plays, few survived him long. All of them came in personal contact with him; several of them constantly appeared with him on the stage from early days.
The two who were longest lived, John Lowin and Joseph Taylor, came at length to bear a great weight of years. They were both Shakespeare's juniors, Lowin by twelve years, and Taylor by twenty; but both established their reputation before middle age. Lowin at twenty-seven took part with Shakespeare in the first representation of Ben Jonson's “Sejanus” in 1603. He was an early, if not the first, interpreter of the character of Falstaff. Taylor as understudy to the great actor Burbage, a very close ally of Shakespeare, seems to have achieved some success in the part of Hamlet, and to have been applauded in the role of Iago, while the dramatist yet lived. When the dramatist died in 1616, Lowin was forty, and Taylor over thirty.
Subsequently, as their senior colleagues one by one passed from the world, these two actors assumed first rank in their company, and before the ruin in which the Civil War involved all theatrical enterprise, they were acknowledged to stand at the head of their profession. Taylor lived through the Commonwealth, and Lowin far into the reign of Charles the Second, ultimately reaching his eighty-third year. Their last days were passed in indigence, and Lowin when an octogenarian was reduced to keeping the inn of the Three Pigeons, at Brentford.”
I have not found any evidence for Shakespeare having visited the Three Pigeons, but it would be magical if Shakespeare had thought up the character of the Old Woman of Brentford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, from a visit to the Three Pigeons!
Lowin’s role as Falstaff in this would have been a treat to see in Act IV, scene ii.
‘The Roaring Girl or Moll Cutpurse’ (1611)
The play can be read on the tech.org website or on Manybooks
“The title of the play derives from the riotous gallants of London, known as "roaring boys," whose penchant for machismo quarreling was parodied by Jonson in The Alchemist. The title character is based upon Mary Frith, the real Moll Cutpurse, whose notorious exploits tested the patience of proper society and often brought her before the court.”
There are many mentions here of The Three Pigeons:
Act III scene i
MOLL
So young and purblind? You're an old wanton in your eyes, I see that.
LAXTON
Th' art admirably suited for the Three Pigeons at Brainford; I'll swear I knew thee not.
MOLL
I'll swear you did not, but you shall know me now.
LAXTON
No, not here, we shall be spied, i'faith; the coach is better, come.
.
.
LAXTON
Spoke like a noble girl, i'faith! [Aside] Heart, I think I fight with a familiar or the ghost of a fencer! Sh' has wounded me gallantly. Call you this a lecherous [voyage]? Here's blood would have serv'd me this seven year in broken heads and cut fingers, and it now runs all out together. Pox a' the Three Pigeons! I would the coach were here now to carry me to the chirurgeon's.
Act IV scene ii
MISTRESS OPENWORK
Swore to me that my husband this very morning went in a boat with a tilt over it to the Three Pigeons at Brainford, and his punk with him under his tilt
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MISTRESS OPENWORK
Sure of it! My poor innocent Openwork came in as I was poking my ruff; presently hit I him i' the teeth with the Three Pigeons: he forswore all, I up and opened all, and now stands he in a shop hard by like a musket on a rest, to hit Goshawk i' the eye when he comes to fetch me to the boat.
‘She Stoops to Conquer’, 1773
The play can be read on gutenberg.org
The scene in the Inn is set at the Three Pigeons.
Act I, Scene ii
At the Three Pigeons Tavern, Hardcastle's stepson, Tony Lumpkin, sings with his drinking buddies. The landlord interrupts, saying that two London gentlemen have lost their way. As a joke, Tony tells the men, Marlow and Hastings, that they remain far from their destination, Hardcastle's house. Then, Tony directs them lo his stepfather's house, describing it as an inn, run by an eccentric innkeeper who fancies himself a gentleman.
Hastings and Marlow turn up at the Three Pigeons Alehouse. Tony Lumpkin, inheritor to an estate, is there with his goodfellows, drinking away his estate.
‘The Alchemist’ (1610)
Set in an abandoned town-house in Elizabethan London, The Alchemist centres on the escapades of three confidence tricksters: Face the butler, Subtle the alchemist and Dol Common the whore.
The play can be read on gutenberg.org or on Manybooks
Act V Scene Ii
“Subtle: Soon at night, my Dolly,
When we are shipp'd, and all our goods aboard,
Eastward for Ratcliff; we will turn our course
To Brainford, westward, if thou sayst the word,
And take our leaves of this o'er-weening rascal,
This peremptory Face.”
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“Subtle: My fine flitter-mouse,
My bird o’ the night! We’ll tickle it at the Pigeons,
When we have all, and may unlock the trunks,..”
‘Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele – The Jests of George Peele with Four of His Companions at Brainford’ (1607)
The ‘jest-book’ can be read on luminarium.org
“…my honest George, who is now merry at the Three Pigeons in Brainford, with Sack and Sugar, not any wine wanting, the Musicians playing, my host drinking, my hostis dancing with the worshipfull Justice, for so then he was termed, and his mansion house in Kent, who came thither of purpose to be merry with his men, because he could not so conueniently neare home, by reason of a shrewish wife he had.”
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“..goe but to the three Pigeons at Brainford, you shall know.”
If the everlasting promise of a new High Street for Brentford ever materialises in my life-time, then I would dream of the resurrection of The Three Pigeons Inn with a theatre to build on its glorious past. Then we could join in with Tony Lumpkin’s song in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer , in toasting “Here’s a health to the Three Jolly Pigeons”:
Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain
With grammar, and nonsense, and learning,
Good liquor, I stoutly maintain,
Gives GENUS a better discerning.
Let them brag of their heathenish gods,
Their Lethes, their Styxes, and Stygians,
Their Quis, and their Quaes, and their Quods,
They're all but a parcel of Pigeons.
Toroddle, toroddle, toroll.
When methodist preachers come down,
A-preaching that drinking is sinful,
I'll wager the rascals a crown,
They always preach best with a skinful.
But when you come down with your pence,
For a slice of their scurvy religion,
I'll leave it to all men of sense,
But you, my good friend, are the Pigeon.
Toroddle, toroddle, toroll.
Then come, put the jorum about,
And let us be merry and clever,
Our hearts and our liquors are stout,
Here's the Three Jolly Pigeons for ever.
Let some cry up woodcock or hare,
Your bustards, your ducks, and your widgeons;
But of all the GAY birds in the air,
Here's a health to the Three Jolly Pigeons.
Toroddle, toroddle, toroll.
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