Ten thousand men, up a hill and down again, immortalised in a nursery rhyme that mocks a real royal military failure
The Duke of York holds a 4.3 from five hundred and fifty-six people, and carries a name that is one of the most common royal pub names in England – and which is inseparable, for anybody who was ever a child, from a nursery rhyme mocking a military disaster.
The grand old duke
“The Grand Old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men; he marched them up to the top of the hill, and he marched them down again.” Every English child knows it. It is a rhyme about pointless activity, futile effort, a leader moving his troops around to no purpose whatsoever.
And it is, most likely, about a real person: Prince Frederick, Duke of York, the second son of that same mad King George III whose queen hid food in the Queens Larder up the road. Frederick commanded British forces in the Flanders campaign of the 1790s, which went badly, and the rhyme is generally understood to be a piece of popular mockery of his ineffective generalship – the troops marched about, achieving nothing, at great expense.
The unusual honour of being mocked forever
Consider the strangeness of this. Most people named on pub signs are being honoured – generals, dukes, monarchs, celebrated for their triumphs. The Duke of York is honoured on hundreds of pub signs while simultaneously being ridiculed in a nursery rhyme sung by every toddler in the country.
He is, in effect, the only man in Britain whose name means both “distinguished royal duke” and “byword for futile pointless effort,” depending on whether you encounter it on a pub or in a nursery. The Prat’s history desk notes that this is a peculiarly English fate: to be grand enough for a hundred pub signs and foolish enough for a rhyme that will outlast every one of them.
In fairness to Frederick
He was, by most serious accounts, not actually a bad soldier – he was a genuinely effective military administrator who reformed the British Army and improved the conditions of ordinary soldiers, work that helped make later victories possible. Sandhurst, the officer academy, owes something to him.
But history does not remember the administrative reforms. It remembers the hill. He did the boring, useful, unglamorous work of fixing an army, and he is immortalised as a buffoon marching men up and down a slope, which is roughly what happens to anybody who does the unglamorous work.
The pub
A solid traditional Fitzrovia pub at ten to twenty pounds, a 4.3 across a real sample, doing an honest trade with no particular interest in whether its namesake was a reformer or a punchline.
Verdict
A good, plain pub named after a royal duke who reformed the British Army and is remembered, entirely unfairly, as the man who marched ten thousand men up a hill for no reason.
Go, have a pint, and spare a thought for Frederick, who did the useful work and got the nursery rhyme.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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