Home > Lincolnshire > Grantham > Blue Lion Blue Lion
Date of photo: 2024	Picture source: Anthony Beaumont
The Blue Lion was situated at 5 Market Place. This grade-II listed pub was present by 1822 and closed in 1965,
My grandfather, Arthur Newton, was born in Leicester. When he was three years old (1888), his father, Charles Newton, died - almost certainly as a result of alcoholism. My grandfather used to say, wryly, that the family had gone, as the saying was, 'from clogs to clogs in three generations.' Some time after Charles death, his widow, Mary Ann (née Benson, Grantham born and bred), took her two youngest sons and moved back to her home town. They were more or less penniless. Arthur was lodged with his uncle who kept the Blue Lion in the Market Place. He was given an attic bedroom. He said there was no lighting there but he could take a candle in a jamjar to see his way to bed. He told me, many times, that rats ran over his bed at night in the attic room. That memory, not surprisingly, stayed with him all his life - quite a trauma for a little boy. He may have dreaded going to bed at night. He also had to run errands and 'earn his keep'. One way he did this when he was a bit older was to go out mushrooming early in the morning, before going to school I suppose. He came to love this, and anything that took him into the countryside. I don't know how many years he lived at the Blue Lion. His mother had got work at another pub/ hotel in the town. (I don't know the details but I believe both Charles Newton and some of the Bensons had a background in hotel keeping in Grantham). When Arthur left school, at about fourteen, he got work at Hornsby's, became an engine fitter and worked there until 1916 when he married and joined his wife in Market Deeping where, eventually they had their own café cum small hotel ('The Imperial Café'). My grandfather was always the chief cook at 'The Imperial' I believe, and he must have acquired his culinary skills in those childhood years at the Blue Lion in Grantham. (He was also a first-class baker and in WWII the story is told that WAAFs from the radar station in Deeping/Langtoft, would come to The Imperial Café, ask if they could have Mr Newton's Victoria sponge cake with their tea, and then would sit and wait while he went and baked them one! 'The Imperial' had an interesting career during WWII.)
Maggie McKay (January 2021)
Listed building details:
Formerly Blue Lion Inn. Late C18; Colour-washed brick; slate roof; 3-storey with parapet; projecting bands between storeys; central doorway with fluted Doric pilasters, entablature and pediment. There are many "blue" inns in the town because of the political preferences of Lord Dysart's family.
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Other Photos
Date of photo: 2006	© Copyright Richard Croft and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence