THE former White Horse Inn was at Hermit Hole.
The Keighley Borough Licensing Committee refused to renew its licence in 1969, at the same time as closing another of Bentley’s Yorkshire Breweries houses, the Ship Inn at the bottom of West Lane (whose frontage by then had to be shored up with timber!).
This inn’s earlier history had been linked to its namesake, a White Horse Brewery on the opposite side of Halifax Road, owned by a local character, Henry Hargreaves Thompson, better known as Harry Tap, who died in 1877 leaving Keighley a duller place, for he had run a Keighley Hen-Pecked Club.
Its members could apply for the loan of a large cradle in which to rock a nagging wife – though it was all in fun, and there is no record of it ever being used.
However, the “wife-taming cradle”, which can now be seen in Cliffe Castle, used to feature in the festive Victorian days of the Keighley Agricultural Show. In 1864 it was displayed “in an elevated position”, with “a man’s effigy” so contrived as to keep it rocking. In 1865 it floated on a mill dam and contained a “henpecked husband rocking a baby”.
This is another photograph from Kevin Seaton’s collection.
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