IN the latest of his look backs at old Bradford Pubs, DR PAUL JENNINGS turns to The Flying Dutchman on Leeds Road:

Following my pieces on the Star and the Rawson, another new pub building from those turn-of-the-century years was the Flying Dutchman on Leeds Road. It had been built and opened as a beerhouse by Thomas Gledhill, previously a livery stable keeper, in 1851. He also built houses and two shops. His widow, Elizabeth, sold it 30 years later to Edwin Whitaker. The legal documents, with the deeds to the property at Bradford Archives, show that neither Thomas nor Elizabeth could write their name. Whitaker later sold the pub, with its brewhouse, to Hammonds Brewery in 1897 for nearly £7,000.

The Flying Dutchman was a famous racehorse, bred in Yorkshire, who in four seasons from 1848 to 1851 won all but one of its 15 races, including the Derby and the St Leger, and often had pubs named for him.

Hammonds then rebuilt it. The plans submitted to the Council show a substantial building with a tap room and smoke room facing Leeds Road and a jug and bottle department to the left, whose blocked-up entrance may be seen in my photo, taken for me in the mid-1980s. Behind that was a bar parlour and above the whole a club room. The pub also had a cart shed and stabling to the rear and it was because of those facilities that it was granted a full licence at the licensing sessions of 1899.

The new building, designed by local architect Abraham Sharp, then opened in 1900, as is displayed above its name. As my photo shows this was a commanding building on a corner site in a then very populous neighbourhood. It was also one of Bradford’s poorest and could be rough. Indeed, a landlord of the Flying Dutchman was fined in June 1914 for being drunk and disorderly in Leeds Road. I remember talking to a woman whose family moved from the area after the First World War and how her mother had wept with joy on seeing their house on the new Ravenscliffe estate. Much of the housing hereabouts and towards the city centre was demolished before the Second World War.

But several pubs remained. I knew the area quite well from the early 1980s and there was quite a weekend ‘circuit’ that pub-goers had from the Red House at the top of Garnett Street, The Garnett and the New Inn and the Adelphi and Waterloo on the other side of Leeds Road. The Flying Dutchman itself had undergone some name and character changes before becoming Funny’s, as seen in the photograph.

I have to say it was a pub I never did visit but under landlord Garth Cawood it hosted people like Alvin Stardust or Johnny Briggs (aka Mike Baldwin) and the women dancing on the bar at the end of a night were also apparently an attraction.

That is getting on for 40 years ago now and those pubs have closed and many of the buildings, including the Flying Dutchman, demolished. What was left of lower Leeds Road disappeared for the inner ring road.

* Dr Paul Jennings is author of The Local: A History of the English Pub (new revised third edition), Bradford Pubs and Working-Class Lives in Edwardian Harrogate. Available at Waterstones, WH Smith and online.