Building record 1464200000 - The Dog and Pot Public Hosue - Rogers Lane

The building is in Arts and Crafts style. The front section has two prominent black and white half- timbered gables. The rear part is gable-ended parallel to the road. Roof covered in machine plain clay tiles. Original projecting right- hand side wing has a fully-hipped roof. Corbelled ridge stack on left-hand gable and lateral corbelled stack to right-hand side of rear section. Pebbledashed walls, painted white but which would originally have been left unpainted in late Victorian/Edwardian fashion. Original timber sash windows with 3 x 3 panes in upper sash and off- centre front door (typical of Arts and Crafts style). Glass verandah on timber posts across front and into return on right-hand side. From comparison with a 1900 photo (see page 33) the building appears little altered apart from some side extensions (in character). The inn sign hangs from a fine wrought iron bracket on a post sited on a segmental green on the road side. The white-picket fence contributes to the village character. The stock brick stable/coach house also
looks quite unaltered and makes a positive contribution in its own right.

The original plans for this building approved in January 1899 are at the Centre for Bucks Studies (ref. Eton RDC plans, Box 3 no.692). They were prepared by John Geo. Carey for Messrs Neville Reid & Co, brewers and bankers in Windsor. The original “Dog and Pot” was farther west and was demolished to make way for the road diversion by Henry Allhusen, then owner of Stoke Court. Extract from the Slough Windsor and Eton Express, 23rd February 1945, quoted in Rigby, L., Stoke Poges pp.69-70 (see Sources section) Headed “Dog & Pot Song An Amazing War Story” it read: The Dog and Pot inn at Stoke Poges has become famous overnight in America as the birthplace of a new song. From New York, its licensee, Mr Walter Brigden, has just received a presentation copy of “Lilli Marlene”, the marching song of the Eighth Army, which is sweeping America, together with a copy of Variety, the America Magazine, whose front page of 14 October is devoted to the story of how the 51st Highland Division came home from Africa to its rest quarters near Stoke Poges, and lifted the rafters of the Dog and Pot with the German version of the song they had captured on a gramophone record at Tobruk. To the inn came Mr Billy Cotton, the famous dance band leader, and Mr James Phillips, managing director of a music publishing company who was introduced to a major of the 51st who ‘implored him to produce an English version of the song to stop the boys from singing the German lyric which they had taken over from Rommel’s Afrika Corps and made into their theme song’. The song was duly translated into the English version, which is now selling in America at the rate of 600,000 copies in a month.” Photographs on pages 29, 33 and 36. This is a local building of note within the Conservation area of Stoke Poges West End. (B1)