Reading of the latest Cameroid ‘big society’ project, accompanied by Prime Ministerial scoffing of ale and jubilation from the outraged ‘moral majority’, I am minded of an incident several years ago now, when a friend of mine was threatened with the loss of his home over an £18,000 debt.

He committed suicide, alone, in the forest one morning, unable to face telling his wife and family they must live elsewhere. He was much loved in the village, a local lad who had done well. Over 1,000 people crowded into his funeral to show his widow how much they cared.

I’m a curmudgeonly old soul and couldn’t help reflecting that for a mere £18 a piece we could have averted the disaster rather than gathered to display our grief whilst we nibbled the crisps provided to reward our attendance and toasted his memory. A logical mind doesn’t always go down well.

Community action of itself is not necessarily a ‘good’ – it needs to be community action when it is truly required.

Some time later a pub in the neighbouring village shut its doors for the last time. Now home to a commuter residential base, bereft of the hard drinking agricultural yokels that it once served, they simply couldn’t afford to keep the doors open.

At once the ‘moral majority’ that was the backbone of these London metro types, rose up and denounced the landlord. He was depriving the village of its ‘community centre’ – where would they take their gin and tonic, (just the one), before Sunday lunch? He must be punished by opposition to his planning application to turn the pub into a home.

Day and night they laboured. Media types were press ganged into producing press releases. The more vocal and photogenic were scooped up by local radio and television where they waxed lyrical regarding the ancient history of this hostelry. A senior legal chappie gave of his £400 an hour time freely to work out the correct legal tripwire to ensnare the dastardly landlord and thwart his plans.

They succeeded. The planning application failed. They still didn’t get their Sunday Gin and Tonic though – the landlord still couldn’t afford to open the doors for just a few Hooray Henry’s Sunday delight. No dignified retirement from a no longer viable business for him. You can take a horse to water, but you can’t force it to let you drink.

If only they’d put all that effort into actually supporting the pub whilst it was still open. As the landlord sadly commented to his local paper – 80% of the ‘committee’ had never set foot in the pub.

And so to the Butcher’s Arms in Crosby Ravensworth.

It has taken me half an hour of dedicated Googling to discover that the landlord and his wife were once a Sue and Colin Wilson. One of them fell ill. I know not which partner. The other could not manage alone or perhaps was required as full time carer. The details are not available, for they seem to have been forgotten in the general jubilation of the re-opening of the Butcher’s Arms. Sue and Colin Wilson don’t even get a mention after the pub closed in 2009.

No committee of concerned villagers to support them. No one offering to put a fresh coat of paint over the walls. No famous chefs rushing to man the ovens and conjure delicacies. No fund to help them over their hard patch.

But lo! What is this on the horizon? A Cameroid ‘Big Society’ project looms in the distance.

A chef has been lured back from continental eateries with an ambitious ‘business plan’.  Residents contributed a stonking £1,800 a piece to finance the replacement of the worn out décor, the primitive kitchen, the virtually kaput electrics and plumbing, the shabby exterior, and the ‘air of defeat’.

Daphne Baird, 61, who runs the Cosy Cats cattery, painted the front door and windows, and ran up the covers for the bar stools. “I told my sister, Heather, about what we were doing, and she ended up making the curtains. It was all worth it. You wouldn’t want to live with my partner if there was no pub where he could go for a pint. When the outside was done, it still looked a bit bare, so I bought some flowers and filled up the baskets.”

Housewife Jan Garnett, 52, sanded down the old beams and carted sacks of rubble from the gutted interior. “We’d be in here five hours some days,” she says. John Mullen, 60, a retired electrician, paved the floors and laid carpets. “I don’t drink, and my wife can’t, so we’re not really pub people,” he said. “But we wanted to be involved. It was a fantastic experience.” His wife, Yvonne, a former schoolteacher, lugged bags of cement and cleaned up as the volunteer workforce installed a new bar, kitchen and dining area.

The financial wiz kids behind this community scheme were hoping for a grant of up to £100,000 from the Community-Owned Pubs Support Programme. It’s been scrapped, so the new ‘community owners’ must now behave like real landlords and figure out how to raise the money from ordinary drinkers…..

All that effort, its commendable – but if it had been applied when the owners were struggling landlords, if interest free loans had been raised, if villagers had given up their time to drink there, paint the walls, fill the vases with flowers, would the television cameras have rolled into Crosby Ravensworth to film the Cameroid contentedly raising his glass to toast ‘community spirit’?

OK, I’ll accept that I’m a curmudgeonly old soul.

Kitty Smith September 9, 2011 at 18:59

Well, what can I say, factually wrong !

Anna Raccoon, you should have contacted us for a debate, instead of
blogging it, without true facts !
We had a meeting with the owners, who
wanted us to keep the village pub as a community asset & agreed a price
with us that was not unreasonable. They did not want to run the pub even if
the community did manage to raise the cash.
They dearly wanted to retire
& needed an easier life away from the pub.In order for a pub to survive
you need to open more & offer good food. The committee & helpers are
all people who visited the pub, we are not high flyers deeming to swoon in
& take over.
It is a project that matches Big Society criteria, the
profile has been picked up and supported by our MP Rory Stewart, nothing more
than that.
Politics don’t come into this project, why should they?

This heart is back in the now community-owned pub & all who have helped
& given their time which amounts to thousands of hours in total, it has
given a feeling of inclusion to all.

Kitty Smith Secretary Lyvennet Community Pub & Native of this
parish

Charles Paxton September 9, 2011 at 01:44

A word of advice, we may like our beer bitter, but save your gall for
topics other than our community pub. Honi soit qui mal y pense, Anna. That’s
the motto on The Butchers Arms crest. The Wilson’s have been fairly treated to
my knowledge. We’re lucky we’ve got a locally renowned chef now, that’s
all-important for the pub’s survival.

Cameron Smith is a good man and highly esteemed around here, if he’s been
exalted in the media as a big society exemplar for his work on restoring our
pub, every bit of praise is deserved. Who are you to smear his name? If you
are referring to our Prime Minister, I think you should also mind your
manners. He’s welcome in our pub any time it’s open, just as you are, despite
your hag-riding of us.

Stop skulking and sniping in the south of France if you care so much about
the plight of the country pub, and come over to The Butchers Arms, Crosby
Ravensworth for some Lamb Henry and real ale. Then see if you’ve got any
grounds to bitch about our pub and the people who have worked so hard to
reopen it.

You’ll find a map on the pub’s new website.

http://www.thebutchersarmscrosbyravensworth.com/

Be sure to use your pen name in our guest book.

ManNotNumber
September 6, 2011 at 22:25

The best headline ever from The Daily Mash:

“Why are thousands of pubs shutting?, say millions of people who never go
to the pub”

Cascadian September 6, 2011 at 20:29

Ahh the English pub, is there a subject of more mythology, I think not.
Most were (are) poorly decorated and maintained, the washrooms medieval and
smelly, the landlords/ladies more often than not surly, and the beer of
variable quality. In some, clean glasses were even a challenge. The
twenty-first century has not been kind, multiple TV’s now make any attempt at
conversation impossible. And yet, if you found a good one all the sins of the
bad examples were vaporized.

The good citizens of Crosby Ravensworth (less than 600 if wikipedia is
correct) have found some civic pride and are attempting to revive their dreams
of a good “local”, good luck to them. A quick Google reveals an interesting
Rootsweb email wherein the landords/ladies of the Butchers Arms since 1950 are
listed, apart from one businesswoman who survived twenty years, all others
failed (or moved on) within five years, so the viability of this business even
in times when they were not beset by myriad bureaucracies pushing overhead
costs ever higher was at best marginal.

So what we would seem to have here is a vanity pub, based on just about
everybody’s desire to “own” a small pub in the country in our declining years,
amiably chatting to the local characters as they sup their lunchtime pint
while the sun streams past the well-maintained flower baskets into the
windows. Abetted by politicians who have not the faintest inkling of the
reality of small business and razor thin margins, I fear the enterprise is
doomed to failure unless constant injections of “emergency” funds are
approved.

If this is the big society (BS?) in action then you can expect to be
forever dipping your hand in your pocket to subsidize the latest worthwhile
project in your locality. In reality I would be happy to do so, provided only
that the government recognizes that taxes provided for local services must be
removed so that I have those few quid to distribute AS I SEE FIT.

Simon makes a good point, perhaps most inhabitants are unconsciously going
“Galt” and removing their work and spending from the reaches of government and
grasping looters, such as the weekenders with their enhanced sense of “rights”
that must be provided to them at others expense.

Meanwhile, I can enjoy the virtual “Raccoon Arms” with the beer of my
choice at supermarket prices, chilled exactly as I like it in a clean glass,
no need to venture outside on a brisk winters night, nor run the risk of
encountering camoron. The Butchers Arms (and many others) face stern
competition.

Engineer September 6, 2011 at 14:45

Some pubs are victims of their own success, and the changing times.

Go back a couple of hundred years. Many pubs were just somebody’s house at
which the local yokels gathered for a pint or several of homebrew. Not much
capital investment, there being no bar, not much furniture and most people
bringing their own pint pot. No toilets, either – just round the back of a
hedge.

Some pubs were better than others. Maybe the beer was more consistent, or
the landlord/landlady was more welcoming. Some took out modest loans and
expanded a bit. Maybe served basic meals, after a fashion. Time went on, and
they prospered – put in one o’ they new-fangled bars, with pumps on, ‘stead o’
walking up an down the cellar steps with gallon jugs. Took on a barmaid or
two.

Then agriculture changed. Fewer people on the land, cottages sold to
weekenders and commuters. Cheap booze appears in the supermarkets, and
drink-drive laws stopping people having more than a pint or two.

Well, the barmaids still have to be paid. Poshed up pubs don’t maintain
themselves. Maybe the old hole-in-the-wall business model might still turn a
modest profit, but that’s been gone a century and more. Now, there’s loans to
service, distributors wanting a cut, rent at exorbitant levels. If the ‘new’
locals are only there weekends, and nobody who works locally can afford to
live locally any more, it’s a business with no customers. Very sad, but that’s
the way it is. Businesses are born, grow, mature, then shrink and expire.

Maybe people don’t appreciate what they’ve got ’till they lose it. Maybe if
some of the community schemes take hold (in the nature of things, some won’t),
it might foster a bit of a rebirth of the old community spirit that villages
used to have. Maybe it might not be all bad.

backwoodsman
September 6, 2011 at 17:14

Engineer is correct – but its pretty damn depressing !
My neighbour
spoke to a DFL couple who had owned a house in the village for two years and
didn’t know where the pub was. The village has 3 streets !

Simon
Gibbs September 6, 2011 at 13:28

No mystery here. None at all.

You see there was a sickness, a premium variety of “need” the passkey to
wealth in an altrusitic system had been obtained. Suddenly helping with the
pub was virtuous, before it would have been honest and healthy work but not
virtuous work.

You see self-interest is not a virtue, happiness is not the goal of life,
unless it is experienced by other people. Not you. Helping yourself would be
greedy. Greed is not good, and nor is helping to maintain your pub. Pubs are
places where you enjoy yourself, not places where you help others (like
church). Helping to maintain a pub owned by a sick landperson that qualifies
that is “good”, that is allowed, that is virtue.

You imply the the people were not altruistic enough to fix up the pub, and
wish they had acted altruistically, but I suspect the opposite is true. They
did not fix up the pub precisely because they were very altruistic.

Perhaps we could have a whip round and send them a copy of Atlas
Shrugged?

nonomad September 6, 2011 at 13:24

So many pubs have closed and /are boarded up out here in the countryside
that i’ve stopped counting ,many have had (freehouses) multiple attempts at
reviving their fortunes ,had a lot of time effort and money thrown at them to
no avail.
But in the next village to us the same thing happened ,pub makes
no money ,owner gives up simply cant attract enough punters and puts in for
change of use to residential,uproar from locals ,ditto as above,owner sells
lease for one year to professional couple with very good track record in
running pubs they have owned,end of lease give up not viable and still the
village want it saved !!!!!!!!!!!!

SadButMadLad
September 8, 2011 at 14:41

So many are closing that there are websites dedicated to them. They are
the new barn conversions.

Now that even delapidated barns are valued in the 100s of thousands pubs
are the new target for property developers. Big house, space for big
gardens, many have character, etc. With PubCos putting in restricitive
covenants when selling pubs which stops them being used as licensed premises
the only option left is residental for many. Pub opposite me was bought and
converted into two properties only months after being closed as a pub.

Pat
Nurse September 6, 2011 at 12:59

And if they hadn’t banned smokers from pubs, the small traditional
community pub would be more than just a memory and and a new housing estate
now.

Sres September 6, 2011 at 13:25

It’s more than just the smoking ban, breweries are putting the price up,
gov are taxing, energy bills soar.

My local hasn’t put up the price of beer in over 2 years, yet her bills
have gone up on all the above. She has a decent clientele mind and any work
she needs doing in the pub the local trades rally to do the work for
her.

Pat
Nurse September 6, 2011 at
18:38

yes of course but not one single factor had as much impact on its own
on that small traditional urban pub with no beer garden.