The last menu presented yesterday was from an Empress of Australia voyage that left Liverpool on June 30 and arrived in Montreal on July 8. Today we have four more lunch menus from that same trip, presented in the order in which they were used on the empress.
Click image to view and download a 1.8-MB PDF of this menu from the Chung collection.
The first menu shows the White Horse pub, which is located in the rural community of Hedgerley, about 30 miles from inner London. The pub is still in business, though some pages of their web site still contain lorem ipsum text, suggesting they need to pay a little more attention to details.
Click image to view and download a 1.9-MB PDF of this menu from the Chung collection.
The Derby Arms was a pub in Halewood, about 10 miles outside of Liverpool. Apparently, it was more than a century old — not old by British standards but still pretty old — when it was replaced by an apartment block.
Click image to view and download a 1.8-MB PDF of this menu from the Chung collection.
In contrast, the Gun Inn still survives. Located in the town of Findon about 55 miles south of central London, the building the inn occupies has been dated to be close to 500 years old, and parts may even be older. Although it calls itself an inn, it appears today to be more of a high-quality restaurant than a pub or hostelry.
Click image to view and download a 1.8-MB PDF of this menu from the Chung collection.
Finally, the Greyhound Inn is another survivor, and it truly is an inn, as it has both rooms and a restaurant with a pretty decent, if high-class, pub menu. They claim to have been around “since the reign of King Charles,” by which I assume they mean Charles I, which would be about 400 years ago, not Charles III, which would be now.
I am glad to see that most of the inns on Canadian Pacific’s 1953 pub & inn menus have survived. Tastes in food have changed in the last 70 years, and I don’t mind admitting I’d rather eat at one of these pubs today than aboard CP’s empress ships in 1953. But the pub & inn menus were a good reminder for Canadian residents of what life was like in the mother country.
Interestingly, Google Maps puts the White Horse and the Greyhound just 2.91 miles apart as the crow flies, about five miles by road. Directly between them lies Gerrards Cross station, somewhat infamous for the TESCO Tunnel Collapse of 2005.