The Iron Duke breathed his last in an armchair at Walmer Castle in 1852. The chair is still there. He would have hated this pub.
Walmer Castle is a real place. It is an artillery fort on the Kent coast, built by Henry VIII, and it became the official residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.
Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, held that post. He loved the castle. He spent as much time there as he could.
And on 14 September 1852 he died in it, in a wing armchair, in a small plain room he had furnished like a soldier’s.
The chair is still in the room. So is the camp bed he slept on, which was too narrow to turn over in, and about which he is supposed to have said that when a man wants to turn over in bed it is time for him to get up.
The pub, and the Duke’s opinion of it
We wrote about the Wellington on the Strand in the Covent Garden survey, and we made the point there and we will make it again because it is the funniest fact about the man.
He hated being celebrated. He was contemptuous of his own fame. He was called the Iron Duke not for his conduct at Waterloo but because he had iron shutters fitted to his windows in Piccadilly after a mob threw rocks through them, and refused to take them down for the rest of his life.
There are now something like four hundred pubs named after him, plus a boot, a bridge, a station, and a capital city on the other side of the world.
And a gastropub in Notting Hill named after the building he died in.
The naming of things after places where people died
The Prat’s memorial desk has been through both surveys and can find no comparable case.
We have pubs named after men who never existed, men who would have hated it, a fictional detective, a failed regicide gibbeted on the green outside, a nail factory, a car covered in paint, and a prawn.
This is the only venue in two hundred and fifty-two articles named after the specific building in which its namesake expired, and nobody involved appears to have noticed, and there are seven hundred and fifty-nine reviews and not one mentions it.
What the real castle is like
Small, low, round, and rather beautiful – a Tudor gun platform that became, improbably, a comfortable house with gardens.
You can go. It is open. You can stand in the room and look at the chair, and it is a strange thing to do, because it is such an ordinary chair, and the man in it had beaten Napoleon and been Prime Minister twice and was eighty-three and very deaf and had outlived nearly everybody he had ever fought with.
The pub
Twenty to sixty pounds. A proper Notting Hill gastropub with a good room, a decent terrace, serious food and a 4.3 across a real sample.
It is a lovely place to have lunch and it is entirely blameless.
Verdict
Good food, good room, and a name that quietly commemorates a deathbed.
Go, eat well, and raise a glass to the Duke, who would have found the whole arrangement contemptible and would have said so, at length, in a letter.
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]
Reads like someone keeping detailed notes on things they shouldn’t think about.