Chris French, May 2020
This book has a set of chapters for each major section of time, including "The Railway Era" (from 1830 to 1900) and "Time Gentlemen Please" (1900 onwards), each describing any specific events that had an effect on beer production or consumption, a list of the pubs in use over that period, together with a map (at least of the town centre pubs).
This did not mean that a pub necessarily existed in 1901, but there is also a table at the end of the book of all the pubs with their 'last mentioned' date, which helps to sort out that problem. This table also gives the address, although not necessarily the street number, which has led to ambiguities.
Finally there is a chapter on a selection of pubs: those deemed of interest due to their history or some story surrounding them.
This is a fine collection of detailed web pages with data on all the pubs in Wokingham (and elsewhere), using data from various issues of the census and Kelly's Directory.
By checking the data for each pub I could see who was the landlord, or a possible candidate.
Since Kelly's Directory comes out every 4 years, including 1899 and 1903, I could see if there were names either side of 1901. Sometimes we have names from the census (which we can confirm): at other times we have to do some searching of possible names. All in all, this was a very useful confirmation of the other sources.
Last, but of course not least, we have the data so usefully transcribed from the 1901 census.
Since it's my line of business, and because I relished the challenge, I imported the data from the spreadsheet into a database. I'm used to devising search capabilities for this sort of data and personally found it easier to get the results in a form I was used to. I also linked each individual's result page to the appropriate scanned page from the original census returns.
As I used it more, I have added additional fields to help searching, for example the first record in a household (not necessarily recorded as the 'Head') and 'Involved in the beer trade'.
A very useful side effect was that discrepancies stand out much more.
Some examples are:
Checking the data against the scanned original usually helped resolve any conflict.
The census gives full details of each person. It does not necessarily use the specific house number, so there is still room for ambiguity.