4 Golden Eagle public House, Terrace Road, Aberystwyth

Description

This is first referred to in 1871. In 1872, the landlord of this beer house, Morgan Davies, was fined £1 with 7 shillings costs for selling drinks after hours and was warned that the fine could have been £10. Later that year, John Lewis was charged with being drunk at the Golden Eagle, but he absconded before the court case on the S. S. Annsboro, on which he was foreman. Two years later he returned to Aberystwyth and was arrested for the offence and was fined 2s 6d (12.5p).
By 1874, Richard Morris was the landlord when a police officer knocked at the door after midnight. Mrs Morris opened the door, and on realising the caller was a policeman, rushed back in. After ‘a good deal of shuffling about, everything was as silent as the grave, and all the lights were put out.’ It turned out that one of the illicit drinkers was a recently appointed policeman ‘who probably did not know better’ and was allowed to resign. The landlord was fined £1 but had his annual licence renewed a few days later.
In 1880, Richard Morris was again charged with selling drinks after hours on a Sunday afternoon, but his defence, that the drinkers had come to tea, as guests and were not customers, was accepted by the court.
In 1884, a police officer was fined 10s (50p) for using his staff [truncheon] on a man he had accused of assaulting him probably at the Golden Eagle.
There were several other charges of drunkenness and selling drinks after hours at the Golden Eagle during 1886, so when Richard Morris applied for his new licence, it was refused on the grounds that ‘the house was of a disorderly character, the habitual resort of prostitutes, … and was not used as an inn, but merely as a tippling house and that the applicant was not a fit and proper person to hold a license. Friends and neighbours signed a petition against the closure, to no avail.