IN his book The Local: A History Of The English Pub, Paul Jennings remembers The Flying Dutchman, which opened as a beerhouse on the corner of Lumb Lane and King Street in 1852, taking its name from the horse that had won the Derby three years earlier.

Writes Paul: “The Flying Dutchman was quite a common pub name. Bradford boasted two, the other being opened at more or less the same time on Leeds Road.

“My photograph (of the Lumb Lane pub) dates from the time when the landlord was Alfred Perkins, who had taken the pub in March 1916, during the First World War, when publicans were having a hard time of it with customers away at the front, as well as high prices, beer shortages and much reduced opening hours.

It had had something of a colourful history, according to the register of premises which the police kept: previous landlords had been fined for opening in prohibited hours, allowing betting on the premises and one for being drunk and disorderly in King Street itself.

This last, Henry Hanson, had also been reported for allowing prostitutes to be taken to his pub. The law banned ‘reputed prostitutes’ from licensed premises, whether or not they were there for the purpose of prostitution, except that they might obtain ‘reasonable refreshment’.

The area thus seems already to have acquired the reputation which it long retained. Brunswick Place (later Rawson Road), off Westgate, a little further towards the city centre, had been described as a ‘hotbed of prostitution’ in the local paper and in 1899 the police had carried out a number of raids on brothels in the area, detailed in a pamphlet by the city’s Chief Constable titled Bradford’s Great Curse: Impurity on the Streets and Off.

The pub had been leased in 1895 by J Hey and Company, whose brewery was further along Lumb Lane towards Carlisle Road, and who had bought it four years later for £2,250.

In the mid 1930s the company remodelled the premises in the rather idiosyncratic style used in a number of its pubs, like the Theatre Tavern on Manningham Lane or the Wheat Sheaf Hotel on Wakefield Road at Hall Lane. It was this pub, by then a Webster’s house, after its takeover of Heys in the late 1960s, which I remember among several pubs on Lumb Lane, including the notorious Perseverance at the bottom of Green Lane.

It was kept for a time by a West Indian couple and I recall once the landlady coming round the bar with a tray of fried chicken for hungry customers.

It was later renamed Haigy’s, after another landlady, and traded as a real ale pub, popular with supporters of Bradford City. It was recommended in the 1995 Bradford and District Beer Guide, which rather coyly noted its location in ‘a somewhat notorious area’.

This notoriety had of course been increased by the terrible crimes of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, and later again by the TV series Band of Gold, broadcast between 1995 and ‘97, about a group of prostitutes working and living in Bradford, and shot largely on location in the city.”