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The house
is called the Old General and obviously the statue is the man
himself but who was he?
Surprisingly he wasn't a military man but a resident of St Peter’s
Poor House called Benjamin Mayo.
He was born in 1779 and had the interesting occupation as a
seller of ballads, broadsheets and chapbooks (books for children).
However, when viewing his house, it's clear this didn't make
him one of Nottingham’s millionaires.
His patch
was the Great Market Place and like most frequenters of (what
is now known as) the Old Market Square he was quite a character.
He had a self-made task to group together Nottingham’s
band of truant schoolboys. This body checked the Borough’s
(Nottingham was not yet a city) streets for obstructions and
when such obstructions were found, he would order his lads to
remove them.
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| Old
General |
This was
a great day for the schoolboys and they demanded, and usually
got, a day’s holiday for this event.
Those who were kept in and were not brave enough to play truant
were liberated by the arrival of Benjamin and the rest of his
army.
Benjamin would talk with the schoolmasters and when the masters
saw the extremely large numbers of lads armed with mud, stones
and knotted rope, they could quite easily see the need for a
day’s rest.
With the
happy cries of "Out, out, out", the liberated would
join their fellows and march off behind Benjamin to terrorise
Nottingham’s obstructers.
With such
a large army of rag-bags, Benjamin was a well known sight in
Nottingham and received the nickname of the Old General.
The Radford Road house remembers him and thus shows the importance
of local history in pub names and, conversely, the significance
of pub names to remind us of local history.
Benjamin’s
statue is painted white but when the house offered young ladies
removing their clothing as one of its delights, Benjamin was
seen with red cheeks and so, when Yuletide is upon us, the statue
is dressed in a Father Christmas cloak.
Mark Andrew
Pardoe
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