The Rising Sun Public House Slip End
Rising Sun Public House in the 1960s
Rising Sun: 1-3 Front Street, Slip End
This public house on the corner of Front Street and Church Road is first mentioned in any record held by Bedfordshire & Luton Archives & Records Service in 1837 when it was conveyed by William Thorogood to luton brewer Frederick Burr. At this time it was a beerhouse, and in 1860 William Burr’s trustees conveyed it, along with the rest of his business and licensed houses to Thomas Sworder. Sworder sold his business to rival Luton brewer J.W.Green in 1897 and Green merged with Flowers Breweries in 1954, taking the Flowers name. In 1962 Flowers were taken over by Whitbread who, in 2001, divested themselves of their brewery and public house business.
1917 the beerhouse was visited by a valuer, Arthur Walker Merry of Stafford, Rogers & A.W.Merry of Leighton Buzzard and Bedford, in regards to the renewal of its licence. He found the place had an “excellent bar” and a tap room with a fourteen feet counter with a public urinal “opening thereout”, there was also a club room and cellars. Private accommodation consisted of a private sitting room and kitchen. The valuer clearly felt, from comments made in his report on the Royal Exchange, for which see, that the village only needed one public house and that the Rising Sun should be it. The Royal Exchange remained open, however, on a technicality concerning the issuing of the notice of objection to renewal of the licence.
In 1927 the beerhouse was valued under the terms of the 1925 Rating Valuation Act; the valuer found a brick, cement faced semi detached building in a corner position with bar, smoke room, living room and scullery downstairs along, unusually, with the cellar “on the ground floor” and three bedrooms and a box room above; outside were a shed for storing lumber, coal and “general things”, a stable used as a washhouse and “general rubbish store room”, a public urinal and earth closet. Trade was 2½ barrels a week with eighteen dozen bottles of beer and three dozen bottles of minerals. The notes make interesting reading: “Tenant is a new arrival does not know gross taking”; “Tenant a favourite”.
Rising Sun Slip End in March 2007
List of Licensees: note that this is not a complete list. Italics indicate licensees whose beginning and/or end dates are not known:
1853: James Coleman
1872: Joshua Dickenson
1883: Mrs Eliza Dickenson;
1899: Joshua Dickenson; [convicted on 10 Dec 1900 of adulterating gin 2.5 degrees below 35 degrees under proof – fined 18/6 costs]
1910: Henry Charles Dickenson;
1916: George Daniels Matthews
1926: William Swain;
1931: Ernest Cheney;
1955: Walter Birch;
1969: Reginald Raymond Swallow;
1990: Seamus Murphy and Mary Gabriel McNamara;
1990: Seamus Murphy and Jacqueline Wheaton;
1991: Graham Henry Edwin Tucker;
1992: Edward Nicholson;
1992: Brian Joseph Minnighan.
