The Dog and Pot

Situated just outside the Dockyard Gates at the western end of Fore Street, Devonport, was a pub with the unusual name of the Dog and Pot. Although references to it are thin on the ground, Whitfeld, in his 1899 history of Plymouth, Stonehouse and Devonport In Times of War and Peace, records that the pub’s emblem was ‘repeatedly stolen by frolicsome seamen’.

Seemingly a reference to an old joke about a lazy wife who let her dog lick her pots clean and then used its tail to dry them (there is a similarly named alehouse in Stoke Poges), the visual depiction of a dog and pot is also used by iron mongers, indicating that they sold iron dogs for coal scuttles. Dickens refers to such a sign – in Southwark – in his autobiography; “My usual way home was over Blackfriars-bridge, and down that turning in the Blackfriars-road which has Rowland Hill’s chapel on one side, and the likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop door on the other.”