Long before it served a single plate of Italian food, the building now known as the Tipperary Inn was called The Plough — a Balsall Common pub with a quieter, more local reputation, and a family living upstairs whose story would eventually connect the building to one of the most recognisable marching songs of the twentieth century.
The Sketchley family arrives
In 1900, Henry Sketchley moved from Oldbury to become the licensee of The Plough, bringing his family with him. Among them was his son Harry Williams, described by those who knew him as a shy, sensitive introvert — a description shaped in part by a childhood accident in which he fell down the cellar steps at his father’s pub, breaking both legs and leaving him confined to a wheelchair for much of his life. It would have been easy for that accident to define Harry Williams’ life in purely limiting terms. Instead, by every account passed down through his family, it channelled him toward music.
Harry was, by the recollection of his descendants, a genuinely accomplished musician — a poet as well as a composer, someone who played a range of instruments despite the physical limitations his injury had left him with. That combination of confinement and creative output set the stage for what would become his most famous work.
A partnership formed in Oldbury
Harry’s songwriting partner, Jack Judge, entered his life through Oldbury, where Jack was, at the time, running a fish stall — a detail that makes the eventual scale of what the pair achieved together feel almost improbable in hindsight. The two formed a songwriting partnership that would last fifteen years and produce thirty-two songs, the vast majority of which have faded from public memory in the way most popular songs of any era eventually do.
One did not fade. It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, written by the pair, went on to become one of the defining marching songs of the First World War — sung by soldiers, adopted informally as an anthem of the era, and remembered more than a century later in a way neither Harry Williams nor Jack Judge could likely have anticipated when they were working together, by most surviving accounts, at The Plough itself in 1909.
From The Plough to the Tipperary Inn
The building’s eventual renaming to the Tipperary Inn is a direct acknowledgement of that history — a pub choosing to carry its most famous former resident’s legacy in its name, rather than let the connection quietly disappear from local memory. It’s a rare thing for a countryside inn to be able to point to a specific, well-documented piece of cultural history tied directly to its walls, and rarer still for that history to be preserved through direct family testimony and an original manuscript rather than secondhand legend.
Today, the building has folded that history into its identity as an Italian-inspired countryside restaurant — a beer garden built for the surrounding Warwickshire walks, a menu of Italian dishes served in a genuinely historic pub setting, and a family history preserved in the gallery of photographs and documents on display for anyone curious enough to ask about the name over their meal.
Why the history still matters to the meal
A restaurant’s history doesn’t change how a dish tastes, but it does change what a meal there represents. Eating at the Tipperary Inn means sitting inside a building with a genuinely traceable connection to one of the most sung wartime songs in British history — not a marketing story built after the fact, but a documented family history that predates the restaurant’s current identity by well over a century. For a countryside inn built around slowing down and taking in its surroundings, that layered history is very much part of what’s on offer, alongside the food itself.
