Spread Eagle’s pet piglet 
Harry was in the pink!

It vanished when the area was redeveloped, and the Beale Street junction was blocked.

Nowadays, the houses in Beale Street can only be reached via Cross Street North, off Chiltern Road.

The colour photo, taken in the high street last week, shows the area where the pub once stood, midway between Westfield Road and Chiltern Road.

In the background can be seen the new development of old people’s accommodation being built on the site of the old Priory pub, on the corner of Chiltern Road, which in turn had replaced the Bennett’s brewery buildings.

The main photo, enlarged from a snapshot owned by Renee Adams, of Croft Green, shows the Spread Eagle in the days when a gas lamp stood on the corner outside.

Renee’s mum and dad, Arthur and Edith Kibble, ran the pub from 1918 after Arthur was demobbed from the army.

They are pictured there in around 1919 or 1920, with their first daughter Lilian.

They met when Arthur was based at Houghton Hall during the First World War, before being sent to France.

One of the family anecdotes about the Spread Eagle concern Mr Pratt, whose farm was at the top of Beale Street.

He came into the bar one evening with a piglet, the runt of the litter, and asked Mrs Kibble if she would bottle-feed it.

This she did, and the pig, christened Harry, became the pub’s pet, scrubbed to a beautifully pink cleanliness every week and led around on a lead.

Arthur and Edith became landlord and landlady of the Royal Oak in Church Street in 1924 and stayed there until it closed in 1961.

> Yesteryear is compiled by John Buckledee, chairman of Dunstable and District Local History Society.