High Buston

[janwhin]

A nice photograph of the Plough Inn, High Buston, about 1900. I believe it is now a house, called No 1, High Buston.

[Coquet]

Which building is it today on the map Janwhin?

https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=hig...gl=uk&t=h&z=17

google "street view" is a mess for this area so not much help.

[Coquet]

think I've found it:

https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=hig...138.82,,0,8.33

[janwhin]

They are a mess, aren't they. Yes that's the one. You can see where the porch has come off. The Keys to the Past website has an older photograph with an arch still over the gate (laburnum?)

[Alan J.]

Never knew they had a pub there once, can't see it ever being " stowed off" though due to it's limited pool of potential regulars.

[janwhin]

You never know, there might have been a queue of horses and carts desperate to get there before closing time!
My only written reference to it, so far, in 1855 Whellan trade directory, is William Common, victualler and millwright. The photograph is from a member of the Common family.
The Commons were a long standing High Buston family given to inventing all sorts of agricultural machinery.
My maternal grandmother was a Warkworth Common but so far no link to this lot, maybe a long way back.

[janwhin]

William Common who was the victualler and millwright was also the great grandfather of Jack Common, a Newcastle born journalist and author of Kiddars Luck (1951) and The Ampersand (1954). He was a friend of George Orwell and strangely his brow was used as the model for the bust of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery. There is a blue plaque on the wall of the house where he was born in Heaton.

[hollydog]

"and strangely his brow was used as the model for the bust of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery"

That is the kind of information that makes life interesting!

[janwhin]

Originally Posted by hollydog

"and strangely his brow was used as the model for the bust of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery"

That is the kind of information that makes life interesting!

You never know when you might be able to drop it into the conversation

[janwhin]

Originally Posted by janwhin

A nice photograph of the Plough Inn, High Buston, about 1900.

Another reference to the Plough is in Dand and Hodgson's Warkworth Memorial Inscriptions: "The first to settle at High Buston was Robert Common, who besides his trade of millwright, kept the village alehouse called the Plough".
Robert Common was born in Shilbottle and was having children at High Buston from 1775, so it seems the family kept the Plough going for at least 80 years.