Inn and venue · Kent and the Narrow Sea
The Grapnel
The Grapnel is a drinking house at the top of the shingle by the Dover quays, kept by Sarah Laker, who never asks a customer's name and looks for the same discretion in return. Runners and beach men drink there, and foreign coin is accepted. Davy Tregenna, the town's fixer, is a regular, and to be liked at the Grapnel is as good in Dover as being vouched for. The stakes laid there on the Christmas match with the garrison already exceed sixty pounds, almost all of it money from the runs.
- Within
- Dover
- Named in
- Living Britannia, Travelling Britannia
History and lore
Dover has been held since at least the 3920s, when a milestone of the West March near the town was cut, and its drinking trade has been shaped by the corporation's view, fixed when licences were granted in 4466, that a harbour town runs on drink and stops without it. The Grapnel belongs to the oldest and roughest layer of that trade: a house at the very top of the shingle, above the hauled-up boats, serving the men who live by the beach rather than by the quays. Beach talk holds that it began as a loft for keeping nets dry, and that the tap came later.
It is kept by Sarah Laker, who has a settled rule that she does not ask who anyone is and does not care to be asked who she is either. Her custom is the runners, the men who came ashore off a hull and never signed on again, and the beach men, the paid hands who dig and carry at the head of the shingle and do the work the town will not ask of anyone it counts. Like the other quay-side publicans she minds savings for those with no safe place of their own, and she takes foreign coin across the bar without remark.
Davy Tregenna, a western man of twenty-five who first came to Dover as a hand on a packet, is the town's fixer and drinks here. He arranges passages and berths, and can name the boatmen who know on which evenings the riding officers sit down to dinner together, and a man the Grapnel likes is treated along the coast as if someone had stood surety for him. The house is also where the serious money on the Quay Fifteen goes. Laker keeps the stakes, in foreign coin, on behalf of the free trade, and the free trade backs the harbour side openly. The pot on the pre-Christmas match against the Highward garrison had passed sixty pounds by this winter, nearly all of it run money, and the quays wonder whether Lieutenant Hal Ifield's debts might yet arrange a result the Grapnel would welcome. On fight nights Dick Kenward's backers want the house's stake box under guard.
A visitor should give no name unless asked and ask none in return, pay in whatever coin he has, and keep any preference for the garrison to himself, ideally from somewhere near the door. Tregenna is the quickest way to an unwritten crossing, at a fixer's price. As in every Dover house, nothing is served once the closure bell has rung, and a company that tries its luck on such a night will find the Grapnel shut against it.
Where the volumes speak of it
- LiB1 › 23.7 Fixers
- LiB2 › 5.4 Public Houses, Taverns, and Beerhouses
- LiB2 › 5.9 After Dark
- LiB2 › 5.12 Talk of the Town
- LiB2 › 5.4 Public Houses, Taverns, and Beerhouses; 5.9 After Dark
