It’s clear when you talk to Janet Johnson that her time at The White Horse is still very special to her.
Although the life she leads now is now very different – she and her partner moved to Spain’s Costa Blanca over 10 years ago – she’s very happy to remember those years running The White Horse:
“I have a lot of special memories of my time there and all that we achieved. For us it was all about our community and giving back to the community.”
Janet’s reminiscences seem mostly to do with how she and her late husband Peter ran The White Horse as a community pub.
But before we delve into that, I’m keen to get her take on an idea I’ve heard around the place, that McMullens was forced to sell The White Horse in 2014 because it was somehow failing.
“You don’t win ‘Cellarman of the Year’ if you’re not selling a lot of beer.”
“No, that’s absolutely not right. We made a good living and that continued right up until I decided to leave in 2013. You don’t win ‘Cellarman of the Year’ if you’re not running a successful pub and selling a lot of beer while you’re doing it,” she laughs.
Janet is equally dismissive of the current owner’s claims that The White Horse was in a state of disrepair when she left:
“All the disrepair and disintegration happened after I left. He tried to tell me ‘this didn’t work’ and ‘that didn’t work’, but that’s rubbish. He was trying to tell me it had been neglected for years.
The fact is that McMullens came in every 4 years or so to do a complete ‘repair and redecoration’. They were always doing things.
I used to say ‘look, I’m paying rent, you should do all the maintenance.’ And to be fair, they did. I wouldn’t have lived there if it was as he said.”
“The White Horse was very successful, right up till I left.”
And regarding a supposed decline in barrelage figures, Janet is keen to set another record straight:
“A pub is the only business that gets its rates calculated on barrelage. McMullens used to have a formula whereby wine, cider, spirits, soft drinks etc were incorporated into the pub’s barrelage.
Later, when we were allowed to buy our own wine, cider, spirits, soft drinks and and so on, figures naturally went down because – they’d been taken out of the equation. I worked hard, but the pub was very successful right up till I left.”
“The new house will eat up the micro pub and it will be a residence too”
I’m not surprised when Janet tells me her views about the current owner’s latest Planning Application. She echoes the thoughts of so many of us:
“A house and a micropub? My experience tells me a micropub joined to a residential building is not going to work. How do you have social events with only 5 or 6 seats? In a short space of time the new house will eat up the micropub and it will become a residence too.
And that would be the end of a precious part of Kimpton history. Why would you want to do that?”
I bring the conversation around to ‘community’ again and Janet positively warms to the subject. It was obviously such a shared passion for the two of them:
Janet and Peter Johnson with Kimpton JMI School Head Teacher Diana Diggines
“Peter and I were aware we were making a living from the community. I always believed if you’re doing that, you had to give something back.
We would do anything, try anything and we made a lot of money for charity through what we did.”
Their efforts to make a difference to lives in Kimpton village and beyond resulted in new security equipment for the village school, an annual school Christmas party, new toys and beds for the Children’s Ward at Lister Hospital and beds for parents to stay over and a new incubator for the QEII hospital.
The memory makes Janet smile:
“And to think that was all done from Kimpton village. Another of Peter’s ideas was about helping to revive the Kimpton May Festival with ‘The White Horse Male Majorettes’.
“I did all the choreography and made the costumes and the boys rehearsed in secret. Those who got wind of it were expecting it to be a load of drunks from the pub, but they were really professional.”
That reminiscence jogged a particular memory of mine – Peter on the back of a truck on the High St in his full majorette regalia, shouting: ‘This’ll be you next year, mate!” as I turned away to pretend I hadn’t heard him.
“You can’t buy personality.”
Community Pub of the Year, 1997, Cruela Deville and 101 Dalmatians
These stories lead us back to the future of The White Horse as a community-focused pub. None of us can be sure how things will turn out, but we do have quite a few successful models to take inspiration from.
For Janet, a successful community pub depends on two things:
“Firstly, she says, “you can’t buy personality. You need somebody who can talk to anybody. You need somebody who won’t be put off by others telling them how to do it.
They need to know their own pub and why it’s different, not better but different, from the pub down the road.”
And the second thing?
“You can’t just have somebody from the village who says ‘I’ll have a go'”
You’ve got to have good food. You can’t just have somebody from the village who says ‘I’ll have a go, I can do that’. It needs to be someone who has experience and knows how it all works.
I was lucky to have started in this when I was around 16 years old. All the pub experience I had after that really helped Peter and I make a success of it.”
And instantly, there it is – another memory for me – my Dad over from Australia, going into raptures about Janet’s steak and kidney pudding.
That seems like the perfect note to end our chat on. Great memories of a wonderfully successful landlady, but inspiration too, for what we might achieve in this grand old building of ours.