He set up his old sergeants as publicans, which is why there are so many pubs named after him, and he died in debt
The Marquis of Granby holds a 4.3 from one thousand and seventy people, charges ten to thirty pounds, and the man in the name is the reason there are so many pubs called this.
Because he bought them.
John Manners
Marquis of Granby. A cavalry commander in the Seven Years War, and genuinely popular with his men – which was, in the eighteenth-century British army, close to unheard of.
And he did something almost nobody in his position did.
He looked after them afterwards.
The pubs
When his soldiers were discharged – wounded, or old, or simply finished – they had nothing.
There was no pension worth the name. There was no provision. A discharged soldier with a ruined arm was a beggar, and that was the whole arrangement.
And Granby used his own money to set a substantial number of them up as publicans.
He bought the licences. He paid for the premises.
And the men, out of gratitude, named the pubs after him.
Which is why there are dozens
Across the whole country. It is one of the commonest pub names in England, and essentially nobody knows why.
They are not named after a battle, or a coat of arms, or a fashion.
They are named after him by the individual men he paid for – which makes them, collectively, the largest and most touching monument to a soldier in Britain, and it is scattered across a hundred high streets and nobody has ever looked at it as a whole.
And he died in debt
Which is the ending.
Enormously so. He spent his own fortune on his men, and on his political career, and on his obligations – and he was owed money by the state and never properly repaid.
He died in 1770, aged forty-eight, with debts that his family spent years discharging.
And he was bald
Which is the fact that gave English a phrase.
He lost his wig, famously, leading a charge at Warburg – and he was completely bald underneath, and he charged on regardless, and the image became celebrated.
And going at it bald-headed is popularly said to come from him.
The Prat has looked. It is repeated everywhere and it is not securely documented.
The tellable version wins. A thousand and sixty-four articles.
Verdict
Good pub, honest number.
Go, and raise one to a man who bought pubs for his wounded.
The Chelsea Pensioners
Which is the institutional version, and which was extraordinary for its time.
The Royal Hospital Chelsea was founded by Charles II in 1682 – as a home for old and injured soldiers, with a bed, food, medical care, and a uniform.
And it is still running. There are still Chelsea Pensioners. They still wear the scarlet coat.
Which makes it one of the oldest continuously operating pieces of state welfare in the world – and it was built for soldiers, three hundred years before anybody thought of building one for anybody else.
The Prat’s editorial desk would note, drily, that a country will always find money to look after the men it has finished using, and will find it rather more slowly for everybody else.
Staff Writer at The London Prat
