DR Paul Jennings continues his look backs at old Bradford pubs:

In my previous piece I looked at pubs on Harrogate and Otley Roads, particularly the Peel Park Hotel.

This time I look at the Cambridge Hotel further down Otley Road at the corner of Southampton Street, one of several here named for ports on the south coast.

According to the deeds to the pub, which I examined at the Bradford Archives, it was one of several properties built in the mid-1850s. A beerhouse was opened there towards the end of the 1860s.

A William Hargreaves sold this and other houses to Joseph Richard Holmes, brewer of Bradford, in 1874. Holmes worked for the Bradford Old Brewery, which occupied the site of the present Odeon building.

In 1890 he set up in business at Dowley Gap, Bingley. The business was in turn acquired by Hammond’s Bradford Brewery in 1919.

The licensee for many years, from 1879 to 1913, was David Milner. His was quite an interesting career. He started his working life as a worsted spinner but then became a coal miner, like his father before him.

This was his job when living in Eccleshill at the census of 1861, with his wife Grace, whom he had met whilst living in Harden and married at Bingley Parish Church in 1856, and their son John.

Ten years later he is an excavator at the Stone Yard on Undercliffe Old Road, but by 1881 he is now a contractor, builder and beerhouse keeper at the Cambridge at 151 Otley Road. In that year too he was granted a full licence to sell wines and spirits, when it was stated that he had previously been seven years the landlord of the Wellington Inn on Harrogate Road.

Then in 1891 he is described as a publican, helped as barmaid by his daughter and two other live-in barmaids.

At this point too he had got involved in local politics, elected as a councillor for the North Ward in 1890 and at successive elections thereafter, usually unopposed, later becoming an alderman and Chairman of the Waterworks Committee.

It was not unusual at this time for publicans to enter politics.

They were almost always Conservatives, as businessmen, and the party was usually identified both with the drink trade and patriotism, which many publicans espoused, just as now you see pubs draped in a Union Jack or the Cross of Saint George. Conversely, the then opposition Liberals were supported by temperance campaigners and those critical of Empire and its associated ‘jingoism’.

Milner probably now left the running of the pub to others, as in 1901 his home is on Pollard Lane, with his second wife Hannah (Grace having died in 1896), whilst at the 1911 census we find the pair at Scarisbrick New Road, Southport. He died, aged 75, in 1913. Only then did the pub pass to a new licensee, Charles Blakey, as seen here in the photograph, courtesy of the former Bass North.

I know nothing of the pub thereafter until in 1974, rather suddenly so I was told, it was declared structurally unsound and demolished. A health centre now occupies the site. Indeed, below here almost nothing remains of the district as it once was.

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