First visited : 30 August 2017
Our next trip , the following week was to the Piece Hall in Halifax and the next few pubs in the notebook are from that route but we then went there a few times over the next six months so they could be from a later date. In any case there are so many missed out that it looks likely I wrote in the ones I could remember after the trip had finished.
The reason I would recall the William Dighton is that I actually knew who he was. He was an eighteenth century tax inspector from London who came up to Halifax to investigate the practice of "clipping", that is making fake coins from trimming the edges off genuine ones. His enquiries led to the arrest of a farmer named David Hartley from Cragg Vale. Some of Hartley's accomplices responded by shooting Dighton which of course did Hartley's chances of escaping the gallows a world of good. I knew both the real story and the fictionalised account in Phyllis Bentley's children's novel Gold Pieces and can't now remember which I read first.
It was nice to think that the poor bloke was commemorated by a pub name but apparently this didn't happen until the 1970s and the pub was originally called The Wheatsheaf as demonstrated by the carving between the top windows. Some time later it became the Portman and Pickles and then closed for a while before reopening as The Jubilee in 2012.
It's a charmless town centre pub which has been gutted inside to provide space for Sky-watching crowds at weekends.
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