Pub history

The Four Candles

The eye-catching building next door but one to these premises is Oxford University’s history faculty. It was originally the city’s High School for Boys, which opened in 1881. The comic actor Ronnie Barker was a former pupil and later one of the Two Ronnies. Probably their best-known sketch was ‘Four Candles’. Barker walks into a hardware store and asks for and gets ‘four candles’. However, he really wanted fork handles – ‘andles for forks’.