Half Moon Hotel, 22 High Street

Although known as the Half Moon Hotel, this was originally a coaching inn, dating from around about 1680-90. The inn was given the distinction of 'hotel' sometime after 1770, as this was the date of the country's first hotel, the Royal Clarence, in Cathedral Yard. The Half Moon had some splendid decorative plaster ceilings, which may have been installed by Thomas Lane, who had put in the ceilings in the New Inn, next door in 1689. When the hotel was demolished, one of the ceilings was removed and put on display in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum.

A sale advert in Trewman's Exeter Flying Post for December 1771 said that Mr John Land had newly occupied the Half Moon and installed "new built stables & coach houses" which comprised of 18 stalls, coach houses for 8/10 carriages and 2 hay lofts.

The next April, the sale was complete and an advert reported that John Hemmings from Bath had taken on the business, with improvements:

"He also proposes to open a genteel COFFEE-ROOM & hopes if care, attention, and an Endeavour to please can merit the Approbation of the Public, he shall be intitled (sic) to their favours."

Hemmings encountered problems at his inn when in 1774, a fire was reported. It was alleged that one of the ostlers had carelessly left a candle over some straw. The fire "was happily extinguished without doing any considerable damage". In the same issue a sale of "Mens, boys & girls stockings"  was reported to be held in the hotel.

A Coaching Inn

In 1844, the year of the coming of the railway from London and Bristol, the Half Moon was, along with the New London Inn and the Old London Inn, the departure point for the London stage coach, that left daily. It travelled via Honiton, Chard, Yeovil, Salisbury and Andover. The daily Nautilus coaching service to Torquay, via Dawlish and Teignmouth, leaving at 5pm, after the arrival of the London Telegraph. James Cossins remembered the arrival and departure of the coaches from the Half Moon during the first decades of the nineteenth-century:

"... the Half Moon Hotel... was kept by Mrs. Medland, afterwards by Mr. Stephens; when several coaches started for and arrived from various parts, the guards enlivening the inhabitants with tunes from their bugles. One was named "Jack Goodwin," who was considered a master of this instrument, which now is quite out of date."

Some local stage coaches survived for a few extra years after the coming of the railway, as they were often timed to coincide with the arrival and departures of trains. An advert from the Torquay and Tor Directory, April 1846.

"REIN-DEER (Fast Day Coach,) at ¼ before 8 o'clock A. M. through Teignmouth, Dawlish, Starcross, &c., to the Half-Moon Hotel, Exeter, arriving in time for the Quick Train, so as to allow passengers leaving this place in the morning, to arrive the same Day at Bath, Bristol, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Birmingham, and London."

When the parishioners beat the bounds of St Stephen's, once a year, thirty or forty would dine afterwards in the Half Moon. The hotel was also popular with local merchants who would meet in the early part of the 19th century to talk business, and enjoy a glass of grog and a clay pipe of tobacco. The hotel, like others in the city was used for auctions, especially of property and estates, and the installation of a billiard table in 1871 would have encouraged a broad patronage of the hotel facilities. Arthur Sullivan, of the operatic fame, first performed the music of The Mikado to W S Gilbert on the hotel's piano.

Entries in some 19th-century trade directories and the Flying Post, for the Half Moon:

1771 - Half Moon, John Land, he went on to open the New London Inn Flying Post
1772 - Half Moon, John Hemmings - Flying Post
1833 - Half Moon, Wm. Stephens - Flying Post
1844 - Half Moon, Ann Stephens - Piggot's
1853 - Half Moon, Wm. Rowley - Flying Post
1868 - Half Moon, Robert Pople - who went on to run the New London Inn
1871 - Gardner, T., half moon hotel, high-st - Pocket Journal
1878 - Half Moon, Thomas Gardner - White's
1897 - Half Moon family & commercial & posting house (John Headon Stanbury, propr.), High street, Exeter - Kelly's
1901 - Ethel Rose Finch 30, listed as head Edmund 7 plus 18 staff - census return

It is worth listing the staff in 1901 to see the variety of work available in the hotel trade – Porter maid 2, nurse 1, Staff maid 1, Chamber maid 3, House maid 2, Kitchen maid 1, Book keeper 1, Bar staff 2, Waiters 2, Night porter 1, and others 2.

The hotel was demolished in the summer of 1912 and replaced by the single story, Lloyd's Bank on which Deller's Cafe was built in 1916.

Source - Two Thousand Years in Exeter by W G Hoskins, British Genealogy website (newspapers section), Reminiscences of Exeter by James Cossins and trade directories.