Volunteer (Adelaide Street)

When the Volunteer in Adelaide Street opened the fortification on the top of Battery Hill, Stonehouse, was still standing, the Royal Marine Barracks were close by and so too was the Drill Hall at Millbay. By the end of the nineteenth century the Battery was gone – the hill had been quarried flat and not long afterwards, before the beginning of the Great War, the pub too had been compulsorily closed.

Time was when each of the Three Towns had a ‘volunteer’ inn, the name a reflection of times of war when volunteer regiments were formed – there were many instituted in the Napoleonic Wars, there was a Volunteer Training Corps in that 1914-18 war and, of course, the Home Guard and Local Defence Volunteers in the Second World War. All the local ‘Volunteers’ are now gone, although there are many others dotted around the country, including famously, in Stalybridge, one with the longest name in the country – The Old Thirteenth Cheshire Astley Volunteer Rifleman Corps Inn.

Licensees

1865 - Robert Rider
1873 - Ann Rider
1885 - Thomas Parker
1898 - Albert Lake
1905 - H Gorham
1911 - Henry Jones