25/05/2026
My today's (Monday Bank Holiday 25th May 2026) photographs of The White Bear Pub in the corner of Harefield Road and Church Street, Rickmansworth and the old photograph of the old building (before rebuilt) The White Bear Pub that I think Edith took it.
Edith Price Mayo - photographer and publican.
Edith Price was born near Tottenham in 1879, the older of two daughters of Thomas and Elizabeth Price, who moved in the 1890s as a newsagent and tobacconist in Station Road, Rickmansworth. By 1901 she and her sister Florence seem to have lived ‘above the shop’, with their parents’ home higher up the road.
Like many young women of the day, she will have seemed ‘ordinary’, but she has left us with a photographic record of Rickmansworth between about 1900 and 1914 - and she also ran one of the best-known pubs of the town. In the spring of 1909 she married Thomas Mayo (1854-1927), the landlord of the White Bear at Batchworth who had been widowed probably in 1894. A member of the ‘Olde Fogies’, a group of businessmen who combined social life with supporting local good causes, he seems to have courted her for some years. They went on to have a daughter, Kathleen, in 1911, and a son, Thomas, in 1915: when her husband died Edith continued at the White Bear up to her own death in 1944.
Enjoy your Bank Holiday Monday!
