"Tin Pot" landlord who served the King
by Richard Taylor

When regulars at the popular Golden Cup in Masbrough Street, Rotherham, ordered their pints in the 1920s from landlord Edmund Cliff they were talking to a man who had fought natives in Africa and had rubbed shoulders with royalty.

And in nearly 27 years with the Royal Navy he had seen plenty of the world, too, usually from the decks of ships which were far less comfortable than the royal yacht in which he served for more than two years from February 1902.

Edmund was born on 8 February 1867 at Bramley, the son of 29-year-old tailor William Cliff and his wife Emma. About three years later the family moved to Masbrough but Edmund was still at Bramley when he joined the local village school. His name can still be found in the admissions register now held in Rotherham’s local studies library.

After he left school he trained as a blacksmith, a trade presumably not to his liking because by the time he was 18 he had joined the navy to whom he had been less that honest about his age. He pretended his was two years younger so that he could enlist as a boy entrant. Then only 5ft 32 ins tall, with blue eyes and light hair, he survived the hard life of the navy’s training ships until he became an Ordinary Seaman in 1887.

HMS Active, commodore’s ship in the squadron that was still used for sail training. He was soon promoted to Able Seaman and in April 1888 was sent to another corvette, HMS Boadicea, then the flagship on the navy’s East India station.

Edmund’s training continued. In May 1890 he qualified as a seaman gunner and he went on to hold gunnery ratings for almost all his time afloat. These were skills which were soon to be put to the test in one of those minor clashes against natives which were so often a feature of shore actions during the days of Queen Victoria’s navy.

In September 1890 nine German traders were murdered in Witu, a small state 230 miles north of Zanzibar in what is now Kenya, apparently on the orders of the sultan, Fumo Bakari. A few months earlier Germany had transferred the protectorate to Britain and now, after talks between the two countries, Vice-Adm Sir Edmund Fremantle, C-in-C of the East India station, mounted a punitive expedition to avenge the crime.

On October 20, 1890, the Boadicea and the rest of her squadron arrived at the port of Lamu on the East Africa coast. The force which went ashore consisted of nearly 800 sailors and marines, with 150 Indian police from the Imperial British East Africa Company, 200 Zanzibari troops and more than 250 ‘seedies’ n native shipboard workers. Each armed man carried 80 rounds of ammunition.

Five days later the Boadicea and nine other warships assembled at the mouth of the River Ozz, only 14 miles from the sultan. Here a force consisting mainly of seamen and marines prepared for a direct advance inland. Progress was slow because of the heat and thick bush and they had to drive off furious attacks by natives. At daybreak the next day the final advance began and the town of Witu and the sultan’s residence were soon taken. In all, only a dozen British were wounded but many more suffered from sun stroke.

For his part in the action, Edmund was awarded to East and West Africa Medal. Some of the Boadicea’s muzzle-loading guns which were taken ashore still stand outside the museum at Lamu. Admiralty records, as is so often the case, hold no clue to Edmund’s work ashore, but as he was a gunner it is very likely he was manning one of these weapons, artillery which was not available to the native troops which faced them.

In 1891 Edmund returned to England for further gunnery and torpedo training at Portsmouth and by 1893 he had been promoted to Petty Officer 2nd Class. Throughout this time his family were in Sarah Street where his father continued his trade as a tailor. Altogether, 11 of them were living at No 23.

After postings to various shore establishments at Portsmouth, in October 1895 Edmund was sent out to the Pacific to join another steam corvette, HMS Comus. Here was placed in charge of one of the guns, possibly one of the four 6in guns which formed her main armament.

South America had long been a hotbed of revolution and in spring the following year there was considerable unrest in Nicaragua. The Comus, together with an American cruiser, put ashore a detachment of  bluejackets at Corinto to protect the lives of European and US nationals; at the end of the third day it was clear they were not longer needed so the men were withdrawn to their ships.

Early in May 1897 Edmund, by now back at Portsmouth, was promoted to Petty Officer 1st Class and in October was sent to the battleship HMS Colossus, then serving as coastguard ship at Holyhead. In less than a year he returned to Portsmouth where he signed up for another 12 years. He was selected for further training and in 1900 became a gunnery instructor.

The navy clearly continued to hold him in high regard. Only the most reliable men were chosen for service in the royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert, which was where Edmund was posted in February 1902 n just a few months before the scheduled date of King Edward VII’s coronation on 26 June 1902. Only two days before the event it was announced that the king had been taken ill with appendicitis and had had to have an operation. The king convalesced on board the 4,700-ton yacht in the Solent and in July it was announced that the coronation would take place on August 9.

It was an exceptionally busy time for the Victoria and Albert’s crew. On August 16 she was used by the king to review the fleet at Spithead and a week later she left for a cruise along the west coast of Scotland, making a number of calls before putting in at Invergordon on September 8. The king wrote that it was ‘a most successful cruise... in perfect weather’.

It was at about this time that Edmund received his bronze Coronation Medal, with its red, white and navy blue ribbon. He had it engraved on the reverse n entirely unofficially n ‘Presented to E Cliff PO1 by HM King Edward VII’, indicating that he received it personally from the king, probably on board the Victoria and Albert.

The yacht was very popular with King Edward. He was on board her in the summer of 1903 for a yachting tour round the west coast of Ireland and had earlier used her for his first foreign tour as king. Accompanied by the cruisers Venus and Minerva, the Victoria and Albert visited Lisbon before sailing on to Gibraltar and Malta. The yacht then arrived at Naples escorted by eight battleships, four cruisers and eight destroyers. Despite this, the king tried to go ashore incognito at a tourist!

In January 1904, Edward was awarded his Long Service and Good Conduct Medal, providing another memento of his royal service. It is inscribed on the rim with his own name and that of the ship in which he was serving n HMY Victoria and Albert.

The last trip Edmund took in the yacht was in June 1904 when she carried the king to Kiel, accompanied by four cruisers and a flotilla of destroyers. Here King Edward was entertained on the German royal yacht by the Kaiser.

Edmund eventually left the Victoria and Albert in July 1904 and had a series of postings until he was pensioned out of the navy in March 1907.  Three years later he had taken over the licence of the Red Bull in Holmes Lane, Masbrough, but within a year or so had retired to live in Barlow, south of Sheffield in Derbyshire. The Red Bull was renamed Laynie’s in 1984 when it was run by former Rotherham United footballer David Layne. It became the Tivoli Inn in 1988, named after the nearby football ground’s Tivoli End or possibly the former Tivoli Picture Palace.

Edmund obviously could not settle into a life in retirement. Just before the First World War, he took over the Norfolk Arms in Attercliffe Road, Sheffield, and during the war, when he was recalled for service in the navy, his wife Beatrice was listed as licensee. Edmund’s first wife, Caroline, had died at the age of 39 in 1912.

In 1914 Edmund served in the Aquitania, a new Cunard liner which had been taken over for conversion to an armed merchant cruiser. In the end it was decided that at more than 45,000 tons she was simply too big for that role so she eventually became a hospital ship and troop carrier. Towards the end of August, this vast floating hotel was in collision with another steamer and she had to return to Liverpool for repairs.

Edmund never went back to her. Instead he was posted to the cruiser HMS Hermoine, then serving as a depot ship for patrol vessels at Southampton. Subsequently he was with the old torpedo boat TB065, a small boom defence vessel serving in the Solent, which was where Edmund remained for most of the war.

He was demobbed in February 1919 and in 1922 became landlord of the Golden Cup, known affectionately as the ‘Tin Pot’. Here Edmund remained until his death at the age of 63 in 1930. It was the end of a life of tremendous variety, but not the end of the family’s association with Rotherham’s pubs. Edmund’s widow, Beatrice, continued as licensee of the Golden Cup until 1939. Now, sadly, even the pub no longer exists, long since demolished to make way for road improvements.

This article first appeared in Medal News in February 2002

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