THE BRUCE ARMS

The Gammon of Bacon Inn stood on Easton Green, one mile out of Easton Royal, at the intersection of the road to Pewsey and a track of the ancient Wessex Way, wide enough at that time for travellers in carts approaching south from Salisbury Plain and continuing north towards Marlborough.

The first record of the Gammon can be found in the 1791 Savernake estate account books when its tenant, John Gammon, was paying an annual rent of £2 7s 6d. The tenant’s name, without details of his holding, appears for several years before this and tenants of the same family holding the same property are traceable for a long time before that. The inn subsequently became a famous venue for cockfighting and backsword contests - large crowds from all around Wiltshire would attend its annual June revels.

The village had two hostelries in those days. The Bleeding Horse was no more than a beer house situated on the village street in a cottage where in the malt yard behind, the tenants brewed their own beer. In 1756 the ale-house keeper delighted in the name of Osmund Plant. The yard was also used for slaughtering villagers’ pigs on a long low stool called a bleeding horse.

With the building of the nearby railway during the mid-19th century, migrant outworkers arrived in the area and were billeted in hutted camps on the Ram Alley road.  Fights between them and the locals, fuelled by pints of ale, became frequent and violent. Wise husbands watched over their wives and daughters. Mary Caroline, the Countess of Ailesbury at the time, decided it was not good for the morale of the place and had the ale-house closed.

After the Gammon burnt to the ground in around 1848, the Ailesburys built a public house on the opposite side of the road and called it the Bruce Arms in recognition of their family connection. For many years the pub has been still known by locals as the Gammon and the road on which it stood was called Gammon Lane.

There was apparently a time when the attractions of the pub became a serious competitor with the church in the matter of Sunday congregations. The alarmed vicar at Milton complained to the Countess and the decree went forth that the Bruce’s should be shut on Sundays. The ban was only lifted in 1949.

In 1855, the licensee James Price used the Bruce Arms as a stopping point for the Hope Coach, his carrier’s run between Lavington and Hungerford.  His son Zebedee soon took over the pub and was in charge for the next twelve years when another member of the Price dynasty called Enos, became landlord.

One indomitable resident was Rosie Raisey who lived in the Bruce’s from the age of thirteen when her father Charles Hawkins was landlord, and in 1945 became licensee with help from her husband. When he died, she continued on her own and won an award for the longest serving landlady in Wiltshire which she held until her death at the age of 87.

Rosie was generally a good-natured person but if she took a dislike to patrons, particularly those who wore leather motor cycle jackets, she would refuse to serve them and suggest they went elsewhere. 

During Rosie’s time as landlady, the Bruce Arms changed very little from when the valuer of 1867 described it as an agreeable roadhouse.

Bruce Arms circa early 1900

Bruce Arms