QUAINT ORIGIN

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 56, Issue 4016, 23 February 1938, Page 3

QUAINT ORIGIN

OLD ENGLISH TOBY JUGS > A Toby jug is a grotesque piece of old Staffordshire ware modelled in days when English life was hale ahd hearty. This quaint, humorous figure represented :• nd was named after a notorious- eighteenth century drinker, Henry Elwes, nicknamed Toby Fillpot, on account of his drinking two thousand gallons of beer out of a plain silver tankard. He drank bitters and milds to such an extent that at the end of his days he became excessively stout, “like a Dorchester butt.” The first Toby jug was supposed to be a representation of Elwes drinkifig bis two-thousandth gallon of beer. 'A -mezzotint of the period shews Toby drinking to his heart’s content,

with a cheery smile upon his countenance. The early Toby jugs or “Fillpots’’ were used for che purpose of filling glass dr inking-vessels with strong ale or dark beer. Their usual height was about ten inches and they were made in the form of a convivial gentleman, usually short and corpulant, with leering, disagreeable face, wearing a tricornered hat each corner of which forms a convenient spout, and gazing down upon the world with a self-sat-isfied air. He is dressed in a full long coat with capacious pockets, spacious waistcoat, with a cravat not unlike a barrister’s bands, knee-breeches, and stockings, and shoes fastened with a buckle. The real Toby Fillpot sits or stands comfortably against the handle of the jug, and invariably with one hand balances a brimming beer jug upon his left knee. In the other hand there is sometimes a foaming glass or a churchwarden pipe—G. Bernard Hughes in Chambers’s Journal.