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The Wheat Sheaf
Historical information concerning individual beerhouses is rather hazy. The householder was only required to pay a small annual fee to the excise. If the householder was not the copyholder, then the brewery could not obtain a mortgage on the property, so there are no records in the Manorial Court books mentioning a beerhouse at Brookfield (P27). We know from the census of 1861 that beer was retailed from Brookfield under the sign of the Wheatsheaf. White's Directory of 1859 lists the occupant, Henry Blake, under the heading beerhouses. Blake had gone by 1871 leaving only the eponymous pond.
The new occupant was none other than our old friend Thomas Bartlett from the Anchor (P22). There is no record in Courage's archive as to when Thomas left the Anchor but is was after 1864. By 1871 Thomas Bartlett and Ann his wife had moved into Kelsey's Cottage on the Green. In the census Thomas still described himself as a carpenter. Even in 1881, after Thomas' fatal accident (P29), when Ann is surely in need of income, but still living at Brookfield, she provides no occupation to the census enumerator.
The oral tradition is sufficiently strong for us to conclude with a reasonable degree of certainty that Thomas and Ann moved into Brookfield in order to take over the beer retailing business established as the Wheatsheaf. Possibly he chose Brookfield since it had become established as an Ante-1869 beerhouse (P13). The 1869 Act prevented new beerhouses being opened merely by paying the annual fee. All new beerhouses then had to be licensed by the magistrates, whose objective was to cut down the number of existing premises.
Ann died in 1882 aged 62. In 1882 Richard Kelsey, whose father had purchased Brookfield in 1838, tidied up the paperwork in the Court books, and had himself admitted as copyholder. His father, Richard Kelsey of West End Farm, had also died in 1878, just after Thomas Bartlett. By 1891 Herbert Percy St Gerrans, later a Barrister at Law, was living in Brookfield with his wife Annie (née Kelsey). So was the Wheatsheaf finally killed off in 1882?
Back to 1997 Exhibition: Inns, Alehouses & Maltsters of Yateley
Original page written by Norma Dowling for the Yateley Society's 1997 Exhibition: Inns, Alehouses & Maltsters
Additional research by Richard Johnston, Elizabeth & Peter Tipton
Original page may now have been revised to include the Society's latest Research
(c) The Yateley Society, 1997 & 2008
Page Exhib.1997.28
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