Loadsamoney for the Cops!

There is always money down the back of the sofa when daft politicians want to screw us taxpayers. Read on and be shocked ...

The daily news is often terrifically boring with a succession of special interest groups taking to the media, begging bowls in hand, insisting that "The Government" gives them more and yet more of OUR money. One such outfit is the police who already spend a fortune on endless "community engagement events" rather than crime-fighting. (In high crime Sandwell the local Blues have so little to do they have been going out litter-picking to save Serco a few bob on their multi-million pound contract - nice!)

A few years ago no city in our white supremacist empire would touch the loss-making z-list Commonwealth [sic] Games with a barge pole, but up stepped two Labour Councils determined to shaft their constituents - Bankrupt Birmingham and Corrupt Sandwell in the English West Midlands.

You will have read recently that Birmingham Council was hurtling towards the local government equivalent of bankruptcy yet Labour decided to pile Pelion upon Ossa and blow millions on the parochial, royalist, egg and spoon races etc. The Council has now been placed in Government "Special Measures" and is making swingeing cuts to the vital public services which it has a statutory duty to provide. Birmingham Labour will cause immeasurable harm and suffering to local folk due to its profligacy and ineptitude.

Across the Black Country frontier Labour has made urban dystopia Sandwell synonymous with corruption, cronyism and incompetence. This rotten Council too has been placed in "special measures". The Borough is one of the poorest and most deprived in the whole Country but decided to build what is almost certainly Britain's most expensive leisure centre up a back road in the arse of end of God knows where, whilst moaning about "austerity". The corrupt comrades were so desperate to host the even more recherche swimming and diving events at the ragtag competition they stuck a pin in a map and decided to destroy a precious greenfield site to build the Sandwell Aquatic Centre (aka the "sac" or "scrotum"). More bizarrely still, the building was erected on Londonderry Fields to comply with international sporting requirements and then another small fortune has been spent converting it for leisure centre use. It could still accommodate - yawn - international diving competitions but not swimming ones! There has been chaos already concerning the management and running costs of The Scrotum which is destined to lose huge sums. Oh, and two much used local pools were shut for the benefit of the weirdly-located SAC and Labour are desperately trying to flog one (which is Grade II listed) via blue-blooded estate agents, Savills. 

Don't think this is simply an anti-Labour rant since many Tories joined in this absurdity with central Government also having our pants down for colossal sums, and the former soft-furnishing salesman and hype-supremo, West Midlands Mayor Andy Street, going into paroxysms of delight as millions of pounds vanished down the drain.

Some of us fought against this nonsense from day one, but the combined forces of our two main political parties and our grotesque "royal" family crushed us - ably assisted throughout by the BBC and other mainstream media.

Our friend @eldiablo0786 on X (formerly Twitter) frequently describes the tsunami of criminality in Birmingham generally and Lozells in particular. Anyone following social media in awful Sandwell will be shocked at the litany of heart-rending stories as the victims of crime cry out - usually adding that they have received little or, more usually, no help whatsoever from West Midlands Police (WMP). (Of course, WMP has always been able to find cash to torment those they don't like such as the Justice 4 the 21 campaign group.)

Off I went last year with my banner to the Games Baton Relay to protest at this obscene spectacle only to be confronted with an entire car park rammed with WMP cars, motorcyclists and officers. It was as if a major emergency had occurred such was the astonishing display of Blue wo/manpower and materiel. Ever since I have been trying to find out how much this farcical circus cost us. And now I know - although I was so shocked at the figures I had to go back to WMP and check them.

Drum roll please - Labour and the Tories p*ssed £46.6 MILLION up the wall on the Games policing alone. This was part of an overall security splurge of £97 MILLION when including dosh for private contractors and the military. Local cops had to stop colleagues in other forces from fighting crime on their manors too, and bring them in to help. Happily us taxpayers paid thousands for them all to receive "branded rucksacks and water bottles". Pass the sick bag, Alice!

This is, quite simply, absolutely outrageous - and, of course, this £100 million was only a fraction of the overall cost of the feeble Games. Remember that when you are metaphorically (or perhaps surreptitiously) masturbating in front of the bull at New Street Station whilst waiting for the train strikes to end - although maybe it is periodically snorting at the idiocy of our political representatives?

Photo courtesy of Dave Harrison, Alcester

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Why Socialism is sh*t in a single sentence ...

One surprise of 2023 has been the appearance on TV and radio of a succession of trade union boot boys and (less frequently) girls. For those of us who are getting on a bit, this brings back uncomfortable memories of the '70's, and earlier, when these yobs ruled the roost and the Country was held hostage by their ransom demands.

Recently the top echelons of the legal professional have been making a fortune preparing reports on a succession of unions following multiple complaints of alleged misconduct ranging from bullying, sexism, racism and misogyny by the comrades right through to the sordid claim that a top official at Sir Keir Starmer's GMB paymasters raped a female Labour MP*.

When these shaven-headed mafiosi talk to the media about their "members" we are no longer sure, given the gruesome details provided by the top lawyers, whether they are talking about the poor dupes who stump up their dues for these roughs to p*ss up the wall, or to the insertion of their engorged penises into sundry orifices of their union "sisters".

Back in the day we thought we had an elected Government, but a ghastly galere ranging from the alliterative Jack Jones to the noisome Scargill attempted a putsch. Of course, many sectors of the economy were nationalised at the time giving these hoodlums the power to bring the economy to its knees (something folk should remember when hankering for a return to this mythical 'golden age').

There is a trite saying, "don't wait for your boat to come in - row out and meet it!". But socialism (and its fraternal bastard, trade unionism) is anti-growth, opposed to entrepreneurship and against freedom in all its forms. The adherents of these twin monsters are not the creators but the takers. They expect other people to take risks to create wealth but then demand a share of it like gangsters throughout the ages. They cannot operate in a global marketplace but expect taxpayers to mollycoddle them and their (often failing) industries. They want the state to provide for their every whim.

And so we come to a pathetic grunt called Rodney Bickerstaffe [1947 - 2017], the General Secretary of the Unison trade union which supposedly represented many in the public sector shirkforce. In any other walk of life this guy would have been outed as a boring non-entity, but such was his power in the bad old days that he was frequently described as a "titan" of the trade union movement [sic].

Margaret Thatcher put the likes of this oik back in their boxes. No more beer and sandwiches at 10 Downing Street but lashings of cold tongue pie. When her heir took power - and I mean Blair rather than Major - he too was unprepared to cede power back to the block-voting mob. Indeed, he took steps to reduce union power within his own Party and saved the nation from another nightmare on Great Russell Street [home of the Trade Union Congress, m'lud].

Of course, this came as something of a shock to Bickerstaffe and Co., who anticipated a seat back at the high table after the wilderness years. But at the Labour Party Conference in 1998, a year after Blair's landslide election victory, this supposed "shining wit" showed his true colours as a whining sh*t, pleading to be thrown morsels of influence. He begged Gordon Brown (supposedly Blair's Iron Chancellor who turned out to be a leaking galvanised bucket):

"Don't just give us a vision of the promised land, give us a place in it."

This cipher managed to use the word "give" twice in a single sentence. And that is the word which defines socialism. The left cannot build a block of public lavatories let alone a New Jerusalem. It cannot motivate its adherents to provide the promised land for themselves and their families, but demands that it is "given" to them by the state. Rodney didn't even want folk to struggle onto the mountaintop to see this earthly paradise, but believed that leftists were simply entitled to enjoy its plentiful fruits: "give us a place in it".

The left anticipates another Labour landslide next year and is gearing-up to expand trade unionism and increase its power to dominate (and wreck) the UK economy. Does Sir Woodenarse have the strength of Blair to face down the racketeers (his financial backers)? I somehow doubt it and seem to see the River Thames foaming with much sh*t.

[Did you know that UK taxpayers have to PAY the wages of many union reps under an old scam called "Facility Time". This needs to be stopped asap - contact your MP today!]

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Grand-uncle Jack - the deserter

Most things about my grand-uncle John Pugh, known as Jack, remain a mystery. He was a black sheep of the family, but why did his brothers and sisters refuse to talk about his life - and death - and take that knowledge to their own graves? How did he end up on the killing fields of the Somme? Now, with some help from experts, I know some of the answers.

The Postcard

Many years ago my father (born in Little Hereford) showed me this slightly crumpled postcard and told me that it was his "uncle Jack who was killed on the Somme":

And that was it - no more information was forthcoming. Later in life, I was told by other family members that Jack "deserted" from the army in the First World War yet was, indeed, killed in action. How could this be?

A family of farm workers

There is a tendency to romanticise the past. But the lot of agricultural workers in Victorian times was usually nasty, brutish and short rather than some bucolic idyll of sunny days and cider-fuelled country dances. Agricultural depressions were frequent and new technology began to reduce the need for workers and - actual - horse power. Having said that, this branch of the Pugh diaspora was a sturdy one (for the most part).

Into this hard world came Thomas Pugh. Born at Burford (Tenbury Wells) in 1868 he became, like his father before him, a farm labourer and cowman. He was illiterate - to the extent of being unable to write his name. In 1887 he married the redoubtable Sarah Phillips. They had 12 live children including my grandmother Mary, Gert (a nurse in France during WW1) and, of course, John (Jack). The daughter of one of these siblings describes Sarah as "fearsome" and opines that Thomas must have been "a brave man to impregnate her so many times"!

From a 1905 Birth Certificate

As with most things about Jack's life, even his birthday is a mystery. Various websites say he was born in Whitchurch, Shropshire, in 1894 but this seems to be incorrect. There are documents which clearly show that he was born in Little Hereford - in "about 1893" or "about 1894". When he joined the army in 1915 he did not provide a date of birth but gave his age as "21 years and 279 days" (which would have been either the 3rd or 4th of April, 1893 noting there are two different dates on the 1915 army Attestation Record).

Thomas and Sarah moved around various farms in the Teme Valley including ones at Boraston Dale, Nash, Berrington, Little Hereford, Greete and Rochford. But Jack was gone from the household by the time of the 1911 census. In a couple of documents he is described as either a groom or a horse dealer. At some point he voluntarily joined a Territorial  army force, the 7th Worcester Regiment. But the lamps were going out all over Europe ...

As more and more records became available online, I was eventually able to locate Jack's - frustratingly incomplete - military records. The Attestation Record shows that he gave a pub as his address, The New Inn at Knighton Common, Tenbury Wells, when he enlisted in January, 1915. He was posted to Aldershot where he joined the Horse Transport section of the Army Service Corps (ASC).

On 23rd September, 1915 Jack deserted. This was confirmed by a military court on 19th October. What happened next is unclear but the only record which post-dates the desertion in an army medical record dated 4th December, 1915 following an examination at Tenbury Wells. His ASC service number has been handwritten on the document. This seems to indicate that the authorities had caught up with him. 

But with no more extant records I had run into a brick wall.

Covid Lockdowns

Like thousands of other people during the pandemic I used the lockdowns to have a sort-out. Looking through old family photos I discovered an uncropped copy of the photo from which the above postcard was made. This now showed his military cap. The badge is not that of the Army Service Corps, but that of the Kings Shropshire Light Infantry (KSLI):

Armed with this clue I contacted Tony Abrahams of the Royal Logistic Corps (successors to the ASC) archive. He kindly put me in touch with the incredible Richard Joyner of the RLC Museum. And Richard cracked the puzzle!

By using records from the Register of Soldier's Effects he located a "James Reece alias Pugh" of the 5th Battalion KSLI. More particularly, "James" had named his parents as Thomas and Sarah Pugh of The Barns, Underley, Tenbury Wells - a known address of my ancestors.

What remained for for me to do now was to find out how James/Jack met his end.

From Tenbury to Thiepval

I am indebted to Richard Gough for providing me with a warm welcome in a cold turret of Shrewsbury Castle - home of the Soldiers of Shropshire Museum where I reviewed further records.

It is still not clear where and when Jack enlisted with the KSLI. One record suggests that it was in Ludlow in "early to mid-July, 1915 but that cannot be right as that was before the date he deserted from the ASC. That part of the story remains a mystery but we do know that he was in the 5th Batallion which, for part of 1915, were training at Blackdown Camp, Aldershot. Is it fanciful to suggest that Jack, also in Aldershot, met up with mates from the Tenbury area now in the KSLI, and decided to throw in his lot with them rather than spending his life with horseflesh? The December, 1915 medical after he had gone "awol" suggests he made no immediate move but, in any event, he made the jump at some point.

We can't say when Jack joined the 5th KSLI or when he embarked for France but, of course, we know that he was there in July, 2016. The 5th missed the horrors of the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1st July) but moved up to the front on the 27th (marching much of the way in very hot weather). Meanwhile, a British advance on 15th July had left an exposed salient (or bulge) in the line at Delville Wood near Longueval. The "Devil's Wood", as the soldiers came to call it, became another of the First World War's notorious killing grounds. (There is a major memorial there now to the South Africans who sustained horrendous casualties trying to defend the Wood.)

The 5th Batallion moved into trenches at the edge of the Wood on 21st August. There followed an "intense bombardment" of the Germans before a British attack on the 24th by the 14th Light Division, with the 5th KSLI in the centre of the line. They cleared some of the enemy from the Wood but became exposed and had to withdraw to a second line of trenches. Seven Officers and 197 other ranks were lost from the 5th Batallion in this one fight alone.

On the 28th, the 5th was back in the front line but struggled to defend their trenches due to "incessant rain and continuous heavy shelling". The military diary describes the 28th as being "particularly onerous" which, in normal English, means it was hellish.  The 5th were relieved on the 31st and rested for 11 days, returning to the "battle area" on 11th September.

In another of the main assaults of the Somme battle, two divisions advanced in a combined attack on 15th September. The Battle of Flers-Courcelette had begun. And Jack and his comrades would have witnessed a moment of military history on the opening day when the British first introduced tanks in warfare. Four tanks set off but three were "knocked out" straight away. The curiously-named Tank "Dolphin" reached Flers (see map below) before succumbing to a shell. Incredibly, the reports say that the tank was "carrying spare petrol in tins on the roof" which one assumes didn't give the occupants any chance of survival!

The 5th started the Battle of Flers-Courcelette from "York Alley" in the British trench system and skirted around Delville Wood (blue arrow) heading for Flers and Geudecourt. At first everything went well and they advanced two miles (quite something given the history of the Western Front). But they were held up north-east of Flers by a line of field guns and snipers. The Batallion dug-in at "Bulls Road" which turned out to be the limit of the advance. In the understated military writing-style of the official report the chronicler states that the hour before midday was "a very hectic one for the 5th KSLI".

The problem was that the troops on the 5th's right flank (white arrow on map), The Kings Royal Rifle Corps, were held up at Lesboeufs and "lost direction". The commanders were later criticised for not using the cavalry to break through towards Guedecourt where the Germans had not yet taken up positions. The whole attack stalled.

On 16th September, 2016 the 5th began to withdraw. On that day one officer and two other ranks were killed whilst leaving the battlefield. One of them was Jack. None of the three have identifiable graves and their sacrifice is recorded with the many thousands of others in that sad situation on the Thiepval Memorial. In Jack's case he is named as "J Reece".

The 4th Army Commander, General Rawlinson, sent a formal message:

Both in Delville Wood and in the attacks of 15th and 16th September the 14th Division displayed a fighting spirit and a dash which was worthy of the best traditions of the British Army whilst their discipline and self-sacrifice has been beyond praise.

When two daughters of one of Jack's brothers said they wanted to find out Jack's story their father became very angry and told them to desist. His one comment was that Jack was "no coward". Quite.

Coda

Earlier this year Linda and I stayed in Albert and visited some of the battlefield sites. As with other places on the Western Front it is hard to imagine the scale of the industrial carnage in this now peaceful farmland. 

There are some SHORT (!) videos to accompany this post (links below) where you can watch me cowering from the rain and mangling the pronunciation of the above villages.

We walked through the replanted Delville Wood to the edge to get as close to where Jack died as we could. The birdlife was in full throat and every now and again a deer would break cover and leap away through the undergrowth. No longer hell on earth - nature had won through and life had returned. 

Our thanks to the many people in Albert who made our stay so memorable.

Julian & Linda Saunders

YouTube Links:

Delville Wood, Somme: Part 1

Delville Wood, Somme: Part 2

Delville Wood, Somme: Part 3

From Tenbury to Thiepval

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Brum Sh*tty Council - Jobs for the Brothers and Sisters

There is one class of people that near-bankrupt Labour Birmingham City Council hate even more than motorists - private landlords. Put simply, the comrades would ban private property rental altogether if they had their way. As they can't do this, they do the next best thing aim to hit their enemies in the pocket.

Just as there are bent Labour Councillors so there are "rogue" landlords. No-one can doubt the misery a minority of these bastards cause, and so there is a case for "clamping-down" on the criminal end of the market.

Lest we forget, however, one of the worst "slum landlords" in Brum is not "private" at all but, er, Labour Birmingham City Council!

What the comrades have done is to force private landlords in 25 of Brum's sh*ttiest wards to pay £700 for a licence to operate (valid for 5 years). The so-called "Selective Licensing Scheme" - which is not exactly "selective" as it targets ALL landlords, good and bad, within the 25 sh*tholes - for the new Labour business tax - which apparently comes into operation this June. The obvious flaw in the Scheme is that all landlords are likely, quite rightly, to simply pass on the tax to their tenants by way of additional rent.

Labour is, of course, primarily funded by the trade unions (one reason Keir "Sir Woodenarse" Starmer is staying silent on the alleged rape of a Labour MP by a senior official of one of his biggest paymasters, the GMB Union.) Brum Labour Council actually says this in its terms and conditions of employment:

"Trade Union Membership - Access to New Starters"

In the opinion of Birmingham City Council, each employee should be a member of a trade union in order that collective bargaining in satisfactory and fully representative of all employees. The Council believes that it should promote the benefits of trade union membership to its new employees".

Local people are then forced to pay part of their Council Tax for the salaries of trade union officials via what is called "facility time". This allows the very same taxpayer-funded union officials to use our money to foment strikes that withdraw services many folk rely on, and even to meddle in industrial disputes that have nothing whatsoever to do with the Council. Nice!

When I read newspaper reports about Labour's new Landlord Tax they stated that 130 (yes, one hundred and thirty) staff were to be assigned to "administer" the scheme in the 25 wards. That's an astonishing 5.2 pen-pushers PER WARD! Bureaucracy gone mad and a colossal cost to the City.

It gets worse. Fresh from losing multi-millions on the Commonwealth Games, the BCC website says that this will be 130 "newly-created" jobs for an already bloated and skint Council. And if the 130 are, as above, "encouraged" to join unions that is a massive thank you from Labour to the dinosaur bully boys and girls who fund their Party.

Still, as above, it's the tenants who will end up paying for this crony "sledgehammer to crack a nut" operation. And Brum Leader - let's see the annual figures on how much this Scheme is actually costing folk?

[If any of the new staff are thinking of joining the GMB Union they should heed the words of a 2001 Report which the Union itself commissioned. Leading Counsel investigated the vile organisation and stated that "bullying, misogyny, cronyism and sexual harassment are endemic within the Union". Non-white recruits might also care to note that the QC (now KC) described the top union officials as "white, male and stale" and added, "I am satisfied that the GMB is not a comfortable place to be for many employees and members from Black and minority ethnic groups". Labour Leader Keir Starmer's not bothered about this sort of thing, but maybe you should be before you hand over your money to thuggish unions?]

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Labour's Donations from Peter Hearn

Sky News recently banged on the door of a firm of accountants in Hertfordshire to establish why a Limited Company registered there - with no employees nor website - was the third largest donor to Labour MP's (after two trade unions). MPM Connect Limited is not strictly a shell company as it has healthy finances (it is said to be an "investment company", which is handy as the "person with significant control", entrepreneur Peter Hearn, doles out cash liberally to the likes of Yvette Cooper, Wes Streeting and Dan Jarvis. The three MP's have scored a stonking £345,217 since 2019 from the obliging Mr Hearn, a British citizen.

What struck me as odd, reading the articles via Sky and other sources, was how anxious the three MP's were to stress that the Company was UK registered. Perhaps, I wondered, they were conscious of the statements from their Party Leader, Keir "Sir Woodenarse" Starmer in the House of Commons in February, 2022 when the dead sheep berated unfettered overseas donations from shell companies and claimed that Labour would protect our democracy from the "flood of foreign money" drowning our politics [Hansard 23.02.22].

Curiously, Peter Hearn's Company was actually set up in a different name 20 days before he became a Director by (1) a posh firm of London Solicitors with strong connections to the "Socialist paradise" of Hong Kong, and (2) another member of the Hearn family who, whilst British, told Companies House he was "normally resident" in the, er, USA and gave an address in W23rd Street, New York. That's "foreign" isn't it?

The gone native New Yorker - who holds the Company's sole £1 share - changed his address for service to the Company's registered office address 3 years later - that address being the one also given at the time as Peter Hearn's home address.

No doubt Yvette, Wes and Dan will explain the convoluted Company set-up in due course.

Of course, Starmer himself is a puppet of Labour's major Union donors and is happy to take as much cash as possible from the GMB Union despite their appalling misconduct in recent times, including the allegation that a Labour MP was raped by a GMB official:

https://crowmultimedia.blogspot.com/2022/06/starmer-mumsnet-rape-misgogyny.html

Alas, the MSM haven't got round to investigating all that yet.

iancrowmultimedia@gmail.com

A Life in Pubs #2 - My 1980's Top Three!

Do you have three all-time favourite pubs? Back in the 80’s I did, but now I’m not so sure …

I first bought the Good Beer Guide in 1976, and obsessively “ticked-off” pubs in that and subsequent Guides. By the late 1980’s I would bore anyone who listened with my “top three” without hesitation, but boozers change - frequently not for the better. And I think it is necessary to visit establishments a number of times before awarding gold, silver and bronze to avoid unintentional bias - and this creates obvious difficulties where hostelries are distant from one’s home base.

There is always the danger of one’s perceptions being skewed by memories of particular wonderful occasions, and pubs can be remembered too affectionately through rose-tinted beer goggles. Pubs are not just bricks and mortar etc., and truly memorable visits are a communion of different notes coming together in perfect harmony. This is perhaps why many pub listicles sub-divide the national estate into “best pub with a view”, “best pub food” and so on.

It is possible to enjoy one aspect of the offering without others being up to snuff. I remember truly superb food in a particularly hideous pub in Buckinghamshire, and a truly amazing landlord in what I, ahem, imagine a tart’s boudoir to look like - incongruously set in rural Northumberland. The Scott Arms in Dorset has many good points, including surely one of the finest views from a pub in Britain, but that does not elevate it to the medal podium (although the nearby Square and Compass at Worth Matravers has to be a contender for top-three glory). To win the laurels there has to be a concatenation of elements that produce unqualified delight. In short, there must be nothing ghastly about these places.

I am really struggling to think of my current top trio. My “spiritual home” is the famous “Welly” (The Wellington, Birmingham) but I visit infrequently these days as central Brum is so, er, ghastly and depressing. I have had a long love-affair with London pubs and some on the Suffolk Coast, but can’t think of ones that merit top gongs. The Star in Bath must be right-up there (and is Camra 2022 Pub of the Year) but I have only visited once. The Cotswolds has some gorgeous inns, though most have morphed into “gastropubs” with gastromomical prices to boot. Yorkshire - including Leeds-  has been fertile territory (although I am ashamed to say that I have never visited the pub hotspot of Sheffield!) Derby has become a splendid real ale town, but doesn’t deserve top-three awards. Oh well, I suppose I’m just going to have to keep visiting alehouses until I can send up the white smoke again (and so please, dear readers, let me have your own nominations!)

But what of the 1980’s choice? Here they are:

1   The Olde Ship at Seahouses, Northumberland;

2   The Free Press, Cambridge;

3   The Falkland Arms, Great Tew, Oxfordshire.

We had two trips to - and stayed at - The Olde Ship in the 1980’s (bizarrely meeting my boss - pictured left - from Brum there on one occasion!) The small but perfectly-formed bar, awash with nautical memorabilia, was simply wonderful and the icing on the cake was Allen Glenn, an amazing, friendly, and workaholic landlord. Alas I have not been back since and so after a period of some 35+ years am unable to comment on the place now (and I note that there have seemingly been changes of ownership after the Glenn family sold up - including one towards the end of last year).

The Free Press WAS an amazing pub in the 1980’s. Whatever time of day I went in, the place was packed with locals and folk from the University with a marvellous “flow” of interesting punters (no punt intended) throughout some often lengthy sessions. Alas the place was “refurbed” and not for the better. The last time I visited the first words of greeting were: “Are you eating with us?” - five words that usually have me foaming at the mouth before I have even touched the froth of a well-served pint. I shall try it again next time I am in town, but fear that relegation will be confirmed.

The Falkland Arms is chocolate-box perfect with wisteria flowering against honeyed-stone. Until recent times the whole village was in a time warp, but the local estate which owned it sold it off and gentrification proceeded apace. My wife and I used to particularly like visiting in mid-winter -  enjoying the company of locals by candle and firelight. A truly magical place.

But the dear old pub - still looking gorgeous - has been extended somewhat and a relatively recent summer visit found it crowded with loud, self-important, Oxford academic types. Expensive food has become the dominant feature of the offering - even muscling out what used to be fantastic, if pricey, ploughman’s/woman’s lunches. 

A pub still worth visiting, but I fear the “top-three” status has long gone.

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