Mitre Inn, 55 Haworth Street

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The Mitre Inn in the 1930s

The Mitre Inn was situated on Haworth Street, off Higher Bridge Street. The pub was located at number 55 Haworth Street, at the junction with Beta Street North.

That area of Bolton was developed in the middle of the eighteenth century and the Mitre opened in the 1860s. It was possibly founded by John Johnson who was at the pub from at least 1869 until his death  in 1883. 

The problem of who to take over after John's death was settled within his family. His daughter, Mary, had married Joseph Bryce Latham in 1877. Joseph was a draper who lived in Albert Street, three streets away from the Mitre, and he may well have been one of the pub’s customers. He married the landlord’s daughter and they  moved into the pub on John’s death.

Joseph Latham spent over 20 years at the Mitre. Sadly, Mary died in 1900, aged just 49, but the following year Joseph married again, this time to Martha Balshaw, at 31 some 13 years younger than he and a widow from Tonge Moor. The marriage certificate shows that Joseph was now a brewer’s traveller – a brewery rep, in other words. At the baptism of his son, Joseph Ernest Latham in 1892 he is described as a commercial traveller. He eventually gave up the pub to move to Davenport Street where he and his family were living in 1911. He was still a brewery rep at that time. Another son, George Latham, married into the pub trade in 1914 when he wed the daughter of the landlord of the Dog and Partridge on Manor Street.

There is no mention of the brewery Joseph Latham was working for, but there is a good chance it was the Empress Brewery of Manchester who by now owned the Mitre Inn. Empress were taken over by Walker Cain of Warrington and Liverpool in 1930 and after Walkers merged with Tetley’s in 1960 to form Tetley Walker it was a Tetley pub that the Mitre ended its days in 1970.

All the streets around Haworth Street were cleared in the seventies and new housing built in its place. There is now nothing left of either the pub or of Haworth Street.