The Cock and Magpie was undoubtedly the smallest and most modest of the four Helmdon public houses. Its premises were what are today called Magpie Cottage, which is situated on the south side of Wappenham Road, nearly opposite the Baptist Chapel. Its name probably refers to the fact that cock fighting (an entertainment barbarous to modern eyes but commonplace in bygone days) took place here. The picture shows the Magpie taken around 1900.

The earliest reference I can find to a licence for The Cock and Magpie is in 1861 when Thomas Humphrey was the beerhouse keeper. The house is undoubtedly much older, and this is perhaps an instance of where beer was first brewed for the occupants, then the neighbours, and eventually the victualler was licensed to sell it to all comers.

William Gibbs, the alehouse keeper, owned the Magpie until 1871 and then from that date until at least l899 when the owner was William Blencoe of Brackley. In 1888 James Bull, a coal merchant, became the licensee. This was the time when navvies were camped in Helmdon, hard at work on the section of the Great Central Railway which included the viaduct. Joy Webb, a previous owner of Magpie Cottage, told me that James was a navvy who had married into an old Helmdon family (the Needles). The Bulls were also an old village family (there was a Timothy Bull at The Chequers at the end of the eighteenth century) so James could have temporarily found his fortune with the navvies, or he may have had no previous connection with the village. In any case, camaraderie with such free drinking men would have been quite lucrative, since he could have encouraged his erstwhile colleagues to buy ale from him, and not at one of the other establishments! Not that the other landlords would probably have minded. Navvies having the disreputable reputation that they had as an uncouth, brawling band of men with scant regard for the law, this could well have been a period when the The Magpie was given a wide berth by the more respectable of Helmdon villagers. Indeed, according to Joy, at the back of the cottage there was a timbered and shuttered room, with a corrugated iron roof, which used to be known at the "swear room", built to separate the navvies from the other occupants of the pub. Navvies used to sleep up in the loft. In l888 James Bull had his licence endorsed on the evidence of William Bazeley, G Finch, and E Franklin and was fined 40s and 23s costs for permitting drunkenness on his premises. He died in 1904, aged 79 years, and is buried in the churchyard, as is his wife Sophia. Joyce Payne says that her Grannie Kelcher remembered men drinking pints in the porch. After a period in the life of the establishment when tenants came and went, in 1909 records state that The Cock and Magpie closed. However, Harold Gulliver remembered it as a drinking place later than that, with men visible in the front of the cottage.