The Three Horseshoes was located at No.9 High Street, the last cottage on the left before you reach Hunting Lodge Mews. The pub operated from at least 1841 until the early 1900s.
If you look carefully at the 1910 picture of the Spread Eagle above, you can see the Three Horseshoes pub sign in the middle distance. The little girl in the dark dress on this picture is Florence Davenport. Jenny Webster (nee Coles) tells us that the building and the yard with the double gates in the 1920 picture belonged to the pub and later the village shop owned by the Coles family, and that the building within the yard was a garage/workshop.
Landlords
1841: John Claypole , with 12 year-old Comfort Tansley working as a live-in servant (source: 1841 Census)
1854: Thomas Spriggs (Source: Post Office Directory)
1870–1890: Thomas (and Susan) Craxford (Source: trade directories and census)
1900s: John Coles (Source: 1906 Kelly’s Directory)
Helen Norman is granddaughter of the pub’s last landlord, John Coles. She tells us: “My great grandfather John Thomas Coles and his wife Clara Tansley/Binley ran the Three Horseshoes Pub during the early 1900s, having moved his family back to Cottingham from Leicester. They had one daughter and six sons, including my grandfather Ezra Coles (born 1892). Ezra’s son Raymond was born at the pub and has early memories of the pub and schooldays in Cottingham. Family say that as there were too many pubs in the village in the early 1900s; one had to close and so it was my great grandfather’s Three Horseshoes pub that was forced to close.
The pub is not listed in the 1914 Kelly’s Directory, so we can assume that it had closed by then. The left hand part of this building later became the sweet shop run by Vere Coles, who was son of the last landlord, John Coles and brother to Ezra. Says Helen: “I can remember as a child visiting (great) Uncle Vere and Aunt Doss, both at the shop and later at the bungalow Vere built next door.”
Geoff Gough also has memories of No.9 High Street: “My mother’s side of the family were the Coles. On 3 September 1939, the day after my 11th birthday, I listened to Neville Chamberlain declare war in the front room of what was the Three Horseshoes pub. which one of several homes in the village occupied by Coles.”
George Robertson, who purchased the property from the Coles in 1978, says his wife chatted with Vere Coles, who told them that, when the house was a pub, what is now the kitchen was the beer store, and that the door into the kitchen is still the original extra wide opening to enable barrels to be rolled in.
The building, now a private house, has a charming tribute to its history, with a Three Horseshoes design in stained glass above the front door.