COMPARE AND CONTRAST ...
The Owners
WILLIAM CAVE and the PLOUGH
William Cave's family were part of the local brewing, malting, public house owning "mafia". Seven generations back, his namesake William Cave had bought Monteagle House in 1617. The first William was the equivalent to what we should now call the Permanent Secretary for Wales. He was closely related to the Caves at Elizabeth's Court. His son William went to Oxford University. The family then possibly overstretched themselves financially since the third William Cave moved to Elvetham on his marriage to an Elvetham girl. The fourth William died as a baby. Another child was called William, but he died too.
The surviving son John, who apparently could not write, came back to live in Yateley. His will states that he was an Innholder. The fifth generation of the family, John Thumwood Cave, became Yateley's Maltster and his sisters all married well, especially Mary, who married three times, her second husband being brother of William Simonds the founder of Simonds brewery of Reading.
The sixth generation, once more a William Cave, took over the Malthouse in Yateley, but he died at the young age of 37 on 18 Nov 1807. His son, William Cave who eventually owned the Plough, was born on 20 July 1808, eight months after his father's death. His father did not own the Malthouse, relations of his grandmother did. Unfortunately this grandmother, the widow of John Thumwood Cave, died only 11 days before William was born. His mother Ann was left, just about to give birth, a 25 years old widow, not owning her own business premises or even her own house.
Ann Cave's father was Thomas Giblett of Elvetham. On 10 Oct 1808 he bought the Malthouse. A few years later Ann's brother William became Yateley's Maltster. Ann Cave subsequently remarried well in 1823 when she married John Bailey, who had a successful poultry business in London -- a Bernard Matthews of his day.
William Cave therefore received a sound upbringing and became a maltster like his grandfather, father and uncle. But he had bigger plans and, on 27 Feb 1836 at the age of 27, he bought for £1,600, Jonathan McKenzie's brewery in Hartley Wintney together with 34 public houses . He knew that at that time the way to prosper as a brewer was to increase the number of public houses tied to his brewery by leases, mortgages or simply because he owned them. By the time of his death at the age of 67 his business was worth £50,000 and he had 60 freehold, copyhold and leasehold pubs --- including the White Lion and the Plough at Yateley.
Back to 1997 Exhibition: Inns, Alehouses & Maltsters of Yateley
Original page written by P J Tipton for the Yateley Society's 1997 Exhibition: Inns, Alehouses & Maltsters
Additional research by Richard Johnston & Elizabeth Tipton
Original page may now have been revised to include the Society's latest Research
(c) The Yateley Society, 1997 & 2008
Page Exhib.1997.21
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.