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The Three Soldiers was situated on Church Street. This pub opened in 1662 and closed in 1778.

Source: Tom Baines

you may be interested in an early report about a visit to the Three Soldiers pub at Gravesend. I have found an entry in a traveller’s diary stating that its author, the young minister Jacob Bernoulli (1654-1705) from Basel, Switzerland, who was later to become well known as a mathematician, stopped by there in 1682: (On Wednesday, August 16th [Old Calendar Style], we sailed [from Gravesend for Hamburg] at midnight ... but then we got into a storm and were stranded by the boatman’s carelessness ... so we went back to Gravesend, where we arrived on Saturday, August 19th and lodged at the Three Soldiers.) By the way, the journey was rendered particularly memorable by the fact that on August 16th (and again on August 20-22), the travellers sighted a comet – actually the one that became later known as Halley’s Comet. As a team of historians of science at Basel University, we are presently working at an online edition of Bernoulli’s Travel Diary from 1677-1684 that will be published sometime this year. I thought you might like to be made aware that the Three Soldiers’ early history is thus connected (in a peripheral way) both to a famous scientist and to a famous celestial phenomenon.

Martin Mattmüller (January 2023)

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