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The White Hart was situated on Aswell Street and was previously known as The Foresters Arms and The Red Lion.

My great grandfather, Benjamin Hempstock was the publican there, certainly by 1912, as that is the address shown for his daughter Ethel May Hempstock on an application for a birth certificate. He remained publican through the 1920’s and 1930s and died the publican on 5th April 1941. Ethel May was his youngest daughter, and married John Reginald Smalley, also from Louth. They regularly returned to Louth to visit and my Mother Joan May Dickinson, nee Smalley, remembered going to bed in the pub with a candle in a brass candlestick, and I have that or a similar candlestick from the White Hart to this day. Benjamin Hempstock had something of a fearsome reputation, but my mother remembered him taking her on his knee, and singing to her, and never found him anything but gentle, except when he caught her and her cousin playing shove ha’penny in the bar with sticky fingers. According to his obituary, he was a keen footballer, and that seems to be confirmed by The Louth Town Football Club Report and Statement of Accounts for the season 1919/20 I have. He was on the committee, it’s headquarters were stated to be at The White Hart Hotel, his pub. The Treasurer was J R Smalley, who married his youngest daughter, and the captain was P Mee, presumably Percy Mee, who married his second youngest daughter Lillian.

Bill Dickinson (November 2012)

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