Fascinating programme on R4 today on this, not least because it vividly demonstrated how a local historian’s speculation could turn into the sort of etymological ‘fact’ blithely spouted by someone whose superior smile tells you that they’ll never believe anything to the contrary, no matter how much evidence there is.

It’s available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/pip/113r8/ a for the next week.

Could you give us a brief summary of the true and false origins?  Some of us may not have time or inclination to listen to a whole program, and since the link will only work for a week the conclusions should be on record for future thread readers.

Yes, I don’t have time to listen at the moment but this is the blurb from the Radio 4 site:

Lemn Sissay explores the demise of the Black Boy as a name for a pub. The origins of the term are shrouded in mystery and many stories are in circulation. Some believe that it is connected with the slave trade while others claim its association with coal mining or chimney sweeps. The most likely reason for the Black Boy name turns out to be none other than Charles II, his dark-hued skin and his exile during Cromwell’s reign.

A quick google shows that the term demise is inaccurate. “‘black boy’ pub” brings up many current public houses with the name. As for the Charles II origin, this site would seem to suggest otherwise:

The original, seventeenth-century Black Boy stood nearer the corner of Barton Lane and Old High Street than the present one (see above postcard dating from the 1930s). It had a large backyard (now occupied by the present pub) and also a large garden (now owned by the Priory) where fêtes were held. The board above the door showed a black boy-servant, a sign commonly hung outside coffee houses in the seventeenth century.

Hmm, interesting, we have a road called Blackboy Road here in Exeter - the pubs on it are currently called the Horse and Dray and the Bowling Green, maybe I’ll hop along the Westcountry Studies Library and do some research. (As for the origins suggested by Radio Four: Exeter was Royalist during the English Civil War; and; a link with coal mining is unlikely in this part of the country - practically everything but coal was mined in the South West of England).

"The Wordsworth Dictionary of Pub Names”, Wordsworth Editions Limited 2006, on “Black Boy”:

Caernarfon and elsewhere.  Modern signs are likely to portay the black boy as a young chimney-sweep of the Dickensian kind.  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the sign was extremely common for coffee-houses as well as taverns, the reference was to the personal servant of a rich person.  Negro pageboys were highly fashionable and must have been distinctive figures in the streets of London, dressed in brightly-coloured liveries as they inevitably were, as depicted on the sign at Killay, near Swansea.  For this reason they were popularly known as ‘tigers’, their uniforms often having a striped design.

and on “Black Boys”:

Norwich and elsewhere.  Usually related to Black Boy, but the pub in the village of Blackboys near Uckfield, E Ssx is derived from the name of a nearby estate, owned in the fourteenth century by Richard Blackboy.  This fact has not prevented tales of black-faced men from an iron-foundry being responsible for the name.

“The Wordsworth Dictionary of Pub Names”

I am delighted to know that such a book exists.

According to a neighbour of mine there was a pub called The Naked Child in the Manchester area which (understandably) changed its name about 40 years ago he says.

Happy to report that all pubs in the UK are now clothed with suitable decorum and are not Naked any more.

(Wordsworth again.  Diegogarcity - we visited Dove Cottage only the other day).

Is The Naked Boy in your dictionary. Eliza? No one here considered it a salacious name and my neighbour (89 or so) said it had been there forever and people only noticed the name when plans emerged to change it and everyone was up-in-arms about the loss to local history. I’ll ask him if he remembers what was depicted on the sign next time I see him. I can’t recall any dirty names for pubs. It could have been a reference to the baby Jesus. Other notable pub names around here are The Malt Shovels, The Cheshire Cheese, and The Bleeding Wolf.
I believe Charles Lamb wrote an essay about chimney sweeps in which he romanticised them as lovable little urchins not realising they were in a dangerous, often fatal, child-slave occupation. His misconception may have been widespread though I am only guessing here.

I suspect the tendency to romanticize such occupations was fairly common; consider the expression happy as a sand-boy.

venomousbede - 26 March 2008 10:09 AM

I believe Charles Lamb wrote an essay about chimney sweeps in which he romanticised them as lovable little urchins not realising they were in a dangerous, often fatal, child-slave occupation. His misconception may have been widespread though I am only guessing here.

Kellow Chesney’s book ‘The Victorian Underworld in London’ also suggests that those who survived a childhood as a climbing boy tended to make extremely efficient cat-burglars as adults - he cites the story of one boy who escaped from his master by climbing down the outside of a 60ft brick stack.

venomousbede - 26 March 2008 10:09 AM

I believe Charles Lamb wrote an essay about chimney sweeps in which he romanticised them as lovable little urchins not realising they were in a dangerous, often fatal, child-slave occupation. His misconception may have been widespread though I am only guessing here.

In Praise of Chimney Sweeps

Lamb certainly romanticizes the young sweeps but I’d forgive the Inimitable Elia anything for his glorious prose style.

I reverence these young Africans of our own growth—these almost clergy imps, who sport their cloth without assumption; and from their little pulpits (the tops of chimneys), in the nipping air of a December morning, preach a lesson of patience to mankind.

When a child, what a mysterious pleasure it was to witness their operation! to see a chit no bigger than one’s-self enter, one knew not by what process, into what seemed the fauces Averni—to pursue him in imagination, as he went sounding on through so many dark stifling caverns, horrid shades—to shudder with the idea that “now, surely, he must be lost for ever! “—to revive at hearing his feeble shout of discovered day-light—and then (O fulness of delight) running out of doors, to come just in time to see the sable phenomenon emerge in safety, the brandished weapon of his art victorious like some flag waved over a conquered citadel! I seem to remember having been told, that a bad sweep was once left in a stack with his brush, to indicate which way the wind blew. It was an awful spectacle certainly; not much unlike the old stage direction in Macbeth, where the “Apparition of a child crowned with a tree in his hand rises.”

Reader, if thou meetest one of these small gentry in thy early rambles, it is good to give him a penny. It is better to give him two-pence. If it be starving weather, and to the proper troubles of his hard occupation, a pair of kibed heels (no unusual accompaniment) be superadded, the demand on thy humanity will surely rise to a tester.

I think he was well aware of the dangers and hardships of the profession, it was just that the sensibilities of the age were different.  (Although the young Dickens would soon set about changing those sensibilities).

aldiboronti - 26 March 2008 12:05 PM

Reader, if thou meetest one of these small gentry in thy early rambles, it is good to give him a penny. It is better to give him two-pence. If it be starving weather, and to the proper troubles of his hard occupation, a pair of kibed heels (no unusual accompaniment) be superadded, the demand on thy humanity will surely rise to a tester.

The only definition of “tester” I can find that seems relevant is “coin of Henry VIII”, which seems an unlikely piece to still be around in the time of Charles Lamb.  A fourpenny piece?

Henry VIII’s coin was a ‘teston’ the debased usage ‘tester’ as slang for a sixpence was current in the Regency period.

Flynn is spot on.

Teston itself comes from “It. testone, augmentative of testa head” (OED). One of Lamb’s many conscious archaisms (two cites from him are the most recent in the OED).

Just as another example of how you can’t generalise about the origins of pub names, there is a pub in Royston, Hertfordshire that was called “The Red Cow” until the 1940s, when the then landlady asked for it to be changed because, apparently, she associated the name with prostitutes (cow is, I believe, a word used in Scotland to indicate a lady of the streets). The name was changed to “The Black Boy”, solely because there happened to be a spare signboard with that name on lying about the brewery yard, according to Royston Inns and Public Houses, published by the town’s local history society. (Later the pub changed its name again, to “The Jockey”.)

Nor is Charles II the only likely source for “Black Boy” pub names. The magnificently-monikered “Green Man and Blackamoor’s Head Commercial and Family Hotel” in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, was originally two inns, the “Green Man” and the “Blackamoor’s Head” or “Black moor’s head”, which later amalgamated. The second inn’s name quite likely comes from some local family’s armorial bearings, perhaps the Binns of Yorkshire, next door.

Incidentally, I wouldn’t trust the Wordsworth Dicitionary of Pub Names over-much, it has some good points but its version of the origin of the name “Red Lion” is the one I demolish here,