Chapter Fourteen

     The first night, the two bars were filled with locals, farmers, their workers and nearby tradesmen, all wanting to see what the new landlord was like. They took to Peter immediately. He talked their language and had a great repertoire of jokes and of course, he enjoyed his glass of beer. We inherited a part-time barman, Bill, and a cleaner Flossie but everything else we had to do ourselves as well as looking after several acres of land, very soon under cultivation by Peter. There he grew fresh vegetables for our restaurant and reared turkeys for Christmas and even a pig for the table. Clive was nearly 3 years old and took to the country life at once and just loved all the animals there.

     This old inn, the last in Devon, just over the border from Cornwall, had ten bedrooms, two bars, a restaurant and a long narrow tea room. It was described in a travel guide as ‘A lonely house in a lonely parish’. We realised we had a tough job ahead to attract people to stay when transport was so difficult.

      Now I had to learn to cook but that was no hardship as I had always been interested in food preparation and watched my mother who was a master of the art. The kitchen was large and I cooked on a large coal fired range. At first, there were only occasional meals required and a few bar snacks. Food rationing was still in force and anyone staying had to give up their ration coupons to us if they stayed more than two days. Fortunately, in the country, with farmers nearby, things were not quite as difficult as in the towns. Eggs, milk and cream were easily accessible and the rabbit catcher would call once a week. Peter’s hobbies of shooting and fishing added to the menu with snipe and plover, salmon and trout and even the occasional woodcock.

     Initially resident guests were few and far between, mostly passing sales reps and a few landowners who visited weekly to oversee their farms. Occasionally we welcomed families for a Devon holiday, enjoying that beautiful unspoiled corner of Britain but travel was difficult because of the fuel shortage. Petrol was still severely rationed. Then one day the headline appeared in The Daily Express:  

              THE YOUNGHUSBANDS BEAT THE PETROL BAN!

     We hit on the idea of flying guests from Elstree aerodrome in a small plane to a nearby field, for the cost of a first class rail fare. Renting a farmer’s field nearby, we used a drogue, dropped to us by a passing RAF pilot from a nearby air base, to indicate the wind direction. We would pick the guests up in our station wagon with our legal red petrol. Our guest list multiplied and we soon built up a reputation for good food despite rationing, with home-grown fruit and vegetables, our own chickens and cream from a friendly farmer, the game Peter shot and even our own pig, fed on the remains from the kitchen!

     Fortunately, one day the Officers from the nearby Territorial Army camp at Cleeve, near Bude, found us and from then on, April to October each year, we regularly provided Regimental Dinners for visiting TA Artillery Regiments. Many well-known people signed our visitors’ book, all serving as TA officers, including Colonel Edward Heath of the Honourable Artillery Company, Sir Colin Cole who became Garter King of Arms and Robert Henriques, the writer and broadcaster.

      Things were going well. Clive, 5 years old in 1951, started at Hartland School, five miles away. He went with several farm children in a small bus and thoroughly enjoyed it. His London accent acquired some Devonian overtones. During that summer, we engaged three newly graduated students from Oxford University to help us; John Russell, a budding poet, Peter Gammell and Bob Furnival. Two had served as soldiers and one as a Bevin Boy working in the mines during the war. As you can imagine, they were a great asset and good company.

      This was the summer of the polio epidemic in the Isle of Wight. Several families switched their holiday from the island to us to escape the epidemic. Then fate struck. Bobbie Furnival came down with what the Doctor thought was ‘flu. He was so ill that we moved him from the damp cottage they had rented at the coast, into the hotel. Two days later the diagnosis was changed to polio. We were all quarantined, including the holiday families who had come to us to escape just such a chance. Fortunately, Bobbie recovered and no-one else caught it but it was a very bad moment.

     The next help we took on, a couple whose references we checked assiduously produced a very different problem.  The man, under the assumed name of Jimmie Barraclough, picked up a prostitute at the White City Greyhound Track, answered our advertisement in the Morning Advertiser and produced excellent references which he had stolen from a fellow employee in a Yorkshire hotel. We even phoned the Mayor of Keighley to verify these and he gave the so-called Jimmie Barraclough a glowing report, but unfortunately it was for the wrong man. We didn’t think to describe him – ginger hair, balding slightly, with a stoop and who always walked with his hands clasped behind his back!  It transpires these papers were stolen from an innocent night porter from a local hotel in that town. Of course we were completely unaware of this.

     Jimmie appeared a hard worker. He got on with the customers, made friends with Clive and offered to walk our water spaniel, Fuss. Two weeks after their arrival, we had to go to Torquay for a meeting with the owners’ lawyer. Immediately we drove off, he ordered a taxi and left the hotel. His wife asked him where he was going but he fobbed her off with some excuse of getting some necessary supplies. When we returned in time to open the bars at 6 o’clock, we found the woman in tears. “Jimmie’s gone and I think he has taken all your money too.” She sobbed.

      How right she was! He had made off with all the hotel cash and all our jewellery but leaving the so-called wife behind. He even took the small amount of cash I was looking after for the Women's Institute, which of course I had to refund.

      There was no safe in the hotel and normally the cash was left in the locked wine cupboard as we could only bank once a week in Bideford due to the petrol shortage. I had carefully removed it before we left and hidden it in our locked bedroom. Apparently Jimmie was after our jewellery and in finding that, also found the cash.

     We had thought it strange whilst driving through Dartmoor on that day, when a gang of prisoners working out on the moor gave us a friendly wave. We wondered why. Peter turned to me and said “Who are your friends”? Not so funny now. It seems the prisoners recognised our car, a station wagon with a rather unusual wooden body. We later found out that on their day off the previous week, the couple having been loaned our car to visit Barnstaple to buy replacement clothes Jimmie said had been stolen at Paddington; they had come to Dartmoor instead. He had helped himself to some of our cigarette stock and had given it to his once fellow prisoners.

      We later found he had very recently been released from a long term imprisonment there, just a few weeks before he did his con trick on us. Apparently it is customary for prisoners during their exercise period to walk with their hands clasped behind them. I now check everyone with that habit!

      He had picked up his so-called wife, a London prostitute, at the White City dog  racing track, after answering our advertisement for a couple. He had planned it well. Before taking the train from Paddington to Devon, he had secreted their luggage in a left luggage slot, telling the poor unfortunate woman it had been stolen. All this was in preparation for stealing from us and making a getaway. Oh the joys of finding staff for hotels!

     He was arrested six months later, having committed four more similar crimes. Any money or belongings found on criminals is returned to the owners but I am afraid there was nothing left of his haul from us. What happened to the jettisoned non-wife, I do not know but she was almost as shocked as we were, to find he had left her to face the police.

    The next year, 1952, saw another change in our lives. Mrs. Lowe, Peter’s second cousin and owner of the West Country Inn, decided to buy a hotel in South Africa and sell one of her two properties in Britain. We were offered a move to manage the Wincanton hotel but decided against it. It was a much larger hotel and I was then not sure we had enough experience for such a large hotel. I still cannot believe I turned the offer down! This meant we had to sell the West Country Inn on her behalf and put ourselves out of a job. We managed a successful sale of the property for a sum five times the amount the Lowes had paid for it, seven years previously but that didn’t help us much. Our future was in the balance.

Peter becomes Mine Host

Bridging the Centuries 

By Eileen Younghusband