To dig further into these times I ask Penkhull historian Richard Talbot to lend a hand.

“I have a personal interest in the building because a direct ancestor of mine actually kept the pub,” he says. “The date of the conversion was probably when the cottages were purchased by a landlord named John Royal. The 1861 census first mentions its name – the Royal Oak and describes the owner as a chap named George Henry Underwood, a beer-seller. George was married to Eliza of Stoke and had four children the youngest of whom was James, my great-grandfather. James’s daughter, my grandmother Eliza-Ann, married Thomas Talbot. His profession is later listed also as a beer-seller.”

The profession beer-seller became recognised in the reign of William IV and was used in reference to the Beerhouse Act 1830 designed to wean the public off ‘mother’s ruin’ a nickname for gin. Its habit-forming consumption had, by the late Georgian period, reached epidemic proportions as a cheap but poisonous concoction. Pubs often displayed the sign ‘Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, clean straw for nothing.’ Gin was a narcotic for abject poverty. One contemporary social reformer declared there were only two means of enjoyment for the poor – sex and alcohol. And drunkenness was by far the more attractive of the two as it was cheaper and its effects more fulfilling.

“The beer act allowed anyone to brew and sell beer even from their own homes simply by paying an annual licence fee of £2,” explains Richard. “Its convenience had some effect on gin consumption but its main purpose was to increase excise revenue. Thousands of beer-houses opened throughout the country. In Stoke-on-Trent alone hundreds of new pubs were literally created overnight. There are still a handful remaining but their times had really come to an end by the 1970’s.”