The Lion was very much a male preserve and although
it had only an off-licence, newspaper stories of the time
have reports of ‘drunken garden frolics’ at the rear of the
relatively respectable shop so obviously beer was being
enjoyed on the premises. Of course many men who went out
for the evening merely nursed a pint for duration; chronic
overindulgence was beyond the means of most but for those
who did, with mournful irony, get as drunk as Lords and
lose themselves in a daze of drink it could lead to the poor-
house. In a comic but poignant letter dated 1881, a
Foxearth resident, Mrs Eady, wrote to the Sudbury Board
of Guardians8 asking for their advice as she feared ending
up in the workhouse if her husband could not curb his
sporadic drinking spells.

By the time of his early death at the age of 64 in 1878,
few in the area could rival George Ward’s skilful brewing.
His business had afforded him to school all his children
privately and convinced George’s widow that she and her
19-year-old son David should continue to live at The Lion
and trade as Mrs Charlotte Ward & Son. As well as taking
over the brewing and the running of the beerhouse,
Charlotte continued to act as an agent for Greene & Son’s
‘celebrated ales and stout’- the company founded by the
Bury St Edmund‘s brewer and which would later become
Greene King. 7

‘Everybody  in  the village knows my husband is  a hard work-
ing man and everyone knows when he has had a drinking bout

helped by Ward’s beer for he proclaims the fact wherever he
goes, and tells whole  gatherings  again and again about  how

Life for Charlotte was undoubtedly hard. She had not
been brought up in a protective cocoon like her middle and
upper class counterparts and keeping a beer house was no
easy  task  for  a  woman,  especially  as  many  men
disapproved of women earning at all as they believed work
and wages de-feminized the gentle sex. Such a view totally
discounted the immense courage and strength of character,
which women brought to their dual tasks as wage earners

much he can drink. He thinks he has a perfect right to do as he
pleases without anyone telling him otherways. Please help me
to give him what for.’

 For women there was little to alleviate the ensuing
gloom and no respite from family cares except for the
exchange of tittle-tattle, which Richard Jeffries, a social
commentator in the mid-1870s unkindly characterised as
their ‘chief intellectual amusement’ Not surprisingly The
Lion provided an important social function and here the
small minutiae of village life would be alluded to with the
same thoroughness as the leasing of a harvest field, until
not a grain of interest or novelty was left.

and housewives. It must have been a miserably sad and
lonely time for her.

Although Amelia had moved out of her parent’s house she was
still living in Foxearth and near to her family. In the previous
three years she had trained as a teacher and was now working at

the village school. Her father‘s memory lived on, through his
business and through the Redwood tree he had planted in the

poor now became the responsibility of the Board of Guardians.
Rev John Foster was for many years Chairman of the Sudbury

Rectory grounds in the 1860s. The Redwood was destroyed by
lightning in 1987. A replacement was planted by George’s

Board of Guardians (1856-1883) which was situated where
Walnut Tree Hospital now stands in Sudbury. David Ward later
served on the Guardians Board as an ‘ordinary committee-man’.