78. Wolsey’s Bar

Like the grand ground floor of a Victorian hotel, or the large saloon of an American east coast city, Wolsey’s impresses at once by its proud scale and careless grandeur.

The bar counter and beautiful showcase have been rescued from a church, the counter being the pulpit itself. The clerical input is continued in the snugs, which are the actual pews, with stained glass tops made especially for the pew backs, while one glance is enough to show you that the finely carved oak partition between the floor and slightly raised table area is also ecclesiastical in origin.

The 1885 Boscombe Hotel has supplied various other items of furniture, including a superb mirror above the generous marble fireplace on your left as you come in. Above the fireplace hangs a 1st World War rifle and bayonet, and opposite are a lacrosse racquet and an ice pick.

Down the bar a little, hang a pair of crutches, and elsewhere you can find an early hand-operated sewing machine and a knife sharpener grinder. It’s that kind of place, a grand emporium-style bar, that somehow or other smacks of larger-than-life characters and adventures, and wide open spaces.

There’s nothing small or petty about Wolsey’s, and that includes the huge enamel signs for Capstan Navy Cut cigarettes and Wills’ Star cigarettes. It’s a sort of man’s domain, open-handed and great-hearted. The upstairs saloon is something else, an extravaganza of cigar store Indians, baseball bats, and Americana.
The wooden plank floor leads right down to a door which announces “They’re Here”, in in answer to the ubiquitous toilet-seeker.

On the walls, smoking Chesterfields, are Barbara Stanwyck, Glenn Ford, Bob Hope and Ronald Reagan, while Sergeant Bilko prefers his Camel brand. A movie poster displays John Wayne as one of the FLYING LEATHERNECKS, and the entire gangster/ prohibition era is represented in photos, wanted notices, and newspaper cuttings of such dignitaries as Machine Gun Kelly, Al Capone, Dillinger and Bugs Moran.
This is one of those bars where you’d not want to change a thing, where a mood has been caught exactly, and where you feel you should have gone to the bank first to get your sterling changed into dollars, nickels, and dimes.