Pub London's pubs had closed. The closures have been ascribed to factors such as changing tastes, rise in the cost of beer due to applied taxes and the increase in the Muslim population. Inns and taverns feature throughout English literature and poetry, from The Tabard Inn in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" onwards. The highwayman Dick Turpin used the Swan Inn at Woughton-on-the-Green in Buckinghamshire as his base. Jamaica Inn near Bolventor in Cornwall gave its name to a 1936 novel by Daphne du Maurier and a 1939 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. In the 1920s John Fothergill (1876–1957) was the innkeeper of
Jamaica Inn (film) pub on the edge of Bodmin Moor. The score was written by Eric Fenby. In 1819, Jamaica Inn is the headquarters of a gang of wreckers led by the innkeeper Joss Merlyn (Leslie Banks). The wreckers are responsible for a series of engineered shipwrecks in which they extinguish coastal warning beacons to cause ships to run aground on the rocky Cornish coast. They then kill the surviving sailors and steal the cargo from the wrecks. The beautiful young Irishwoman Mary Yellan (Maureen O'Hara) is travelling to Jamaica Inn in a carriage, but the driver is afraid to stop there and