The Black Horse - Dry Drayton

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Where it all began

When the Black Horse was opened c.1780, it formed part of the manor which was passed from the Duke of Bedford to Dr. Samuel Smith in 1785. the rector of Dry Drayton. It is doubtful whether he ever popped in for a pint as he regarded himself rather apart from the village. When he retired as Headmaster of Westminster School, he expected a rather better reward for his twenty years in education – a bishopric perhaps. As he wrote in an unfinished poem to his wife:

The bell-ringers who welcomed the new rector to his stall were rewarded with liberal amounts of ale at the rector’s expense, but this was probably at the Black Horse’s chief rival – the Three Horse Shoes – which was conveniently placed at the rectory gate.

When the manor was sold by Dr. Smith’s son in the 1840s the Black Horse passed into the ownership of Richard Foster, one of a very wealthy and influential family in Cambridge , who owned Anstey Hall, Pinehurst and Brooklands House as well as various mills and a bank. When Richard Foster died in 1859 no fewer than fifty licensed inns and public houses in Cambridgeshire were up for auction, including our Black Horse. The grand auction was held in the Town Hall, Cambridge on the 22nd day of June 1859, when ‘the Black Horse tenement. blacksmith’s shop and close of 1 acre and 3 roods’ passed into other hands. At the time the landlady was a Mrs. Dilley.

Auctions of Dry Drayton land and houses were frequently held in one of the public houses, including the Black Horse. In 1842, for example, baking premises were sold there and catalogues were available at other public houses in the village. The Horse Shoes was apparently the most popular; when it was sold by the Revd Hamilton Gell in 1886 it was described as ‘ a valuable freehold and old established public house in the centre of the village’. There are more stories in the local papers of the time concerning incidents there than at the Five Bells, the Queen Adelaide and the Black House, not always to the landlord’s credit. The Horse Shoes remained the chosen inn for Dry Drayton men until the 1960s when it was bought by the van Oosteroms and turned into a private house. ‘I suppose you aren’t thinking of opening the old place up again?’ some-one wistfully asked Judy van Oosterom.

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