Morice Town Wine and Spirit Vaults

It stood on the corner of William Street directly opposite the bottom of New Passage Hill, with the road to the Torpoint Ferry running down past the photographer. A little way behind this vantage point was the old north-eastern entrance to the Gun Wharf or Morice Yard, named in honour of the man who leased the land to the Crown in the 1720s – Sir Nicholas Morice. Morice Town, on the other hand, after which the pub was named owes its name to Nicholas’s father, William Morice, 1st Baronet, who in 1660, had become Governor of, and Member of Parliament for, Plymouth, and who had played an important part in the Restoration of Charles II. William bought the Stoke Damerel estate from Sir Edward Wise in 1667 for the princely sum of £11,600 little knowing just how valuable that land would become following the decision to start building the Dockyard on it in 1690.

In the event the land was leased to the Crown until the mid-nineteenth century. The pub curiously dates from around that time and it closed just over 100 years later as part of the post war phase of redevelopment of the Keyham Yard.

Licensees

1852 - John Spiller
1867 - Elizabeth Andrew
1875 - Henry Jones
1885 - C Williams
1888 - G Willcocks
1890 - C Dowse
1893 - J Dew
1899 - Alfred Trenery
1910 - Jerry Hanley
1920 - Sarah Hanley
1921 - Mary Collins
1922 - Sarah Hanley (became Sarah Jennings 1929)
1945 - William McIntyre
1945 - Violet Hanley
1948 - John Hewitt
1954 - Frederick Baldwin