Published: Thursday, 9th October, 2008 12:00pm

Retro: Merry Maidens

by David Cliffe

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WHEN someone gave this postcard to the library recently, I tried to remember what had happened to the pub in Shinfield Road.

I believe it's now called The Maidens, and that it has lost the four busts on plinths shown in this photograph.

Along the bottom of the postcard, but now barely readable, are the words: "with the compliments of Bert Oxlade".

A search through the old Reading directories shows that Mr Oxlade was the pub landlord between 1934 and 1949, approximately.

In those days, the pub had three entrances from Shinfield Road. With the aid of a magnifying glass, I can just about make out the words

"public bar" over the door to the right. I expect the sign over the door to the left had the words "lounge bar" on it.

All three doors had steps up to them, and the low stepped wall with iron railings on top in front of the main door was presumably to stop you staggering out onto the road at the end of the evening.

The name of the pub is curious.

It seems to have been the only pub in the country to be called The Merry Maidens. Old writers have connected the name with the old ballad The Three Drunken Maidens, who "came from the Isle of Wight, and drank from Monday morning, and stayed till Saturday night".

But there were only three of them, whereas the pub had four statutes, and they were "drunken" rather than just "merry".

Another theory is that the pub was named after a prehistoric stone circle in Cornwall known as The Merry Maidens. The story goes that the maidens were turned into stone as a punishment for dancing in a ring on a Sunday.

The local legend is that the four statues represented the four maidens whose heads appeared on the old coat of arms of Reading. This, of course, also had a crowned female head in the centre.

The statues were said to have come from an old house, somewhere in this area. The fact that they had bunches of grapes in their hair suggests that they were made for a pub, even if it is not this one.

Please get in touch if you can enlighten us further on the subject of these Merry Maidens.