Rowena the Lion heart

Back then, she recalls, a pint of Starbrite was 1/8d and a pint of Exhibition 1/10d – ninepence in decimal currency. Back then, recalls her sister Marguerita, a ham and eggs tea was half a crown and bed and breakfast 25 shillings.

These days it wouldn’t buy you 40 winks.

Rowena has also been looking after the village war memorial for 40 years but that, she says, was only a temporary arrangement.

In 1964, even a bejewelled dot of a place like Langthwaite had two shops, a post office and regular visits from the travelling butcher. All have long since shut up shop.

Today the Red Lion sells everything from books to Beecham’s Powders, maps to Mars Bars. “We get asked for all sorts,” says Rowena, 71. “I can usually find it somewhere.”

When she came, she also grew roses – “10,000 in a field down there.” In 12966 she married Ramsay Hutchinson, a gamekeeper on Sir Thomas Sopwith’s estate; Marguerita, five years younger, married a dales farmer in 1971.

Langthwaite s three or four miles past Reeth, in North Yorkshire. On so glorious an autumn morning as last Wednesday, there seemed little need to ask why the landlady had never wanted to leave – or has any intention of retiring.

“My husband is in the graveyard. My mother and father are in the graveyard,” she says. “I expect that’s where I’ll end up, too.”

HER father was a headmaster in the Leeds area, took early retirement because of deafness, had spent many family holidays in the dales and knew his next move.

“It was either a shop, a post office or a pub; a pub came up first,” says Rowena, who worked behind the bar from the start and took over the licence in 1979.

A few years earlier, 1974 or so, the John North column had with some incredulity come across the story of the country pub outside which a notice instructed customers, some of them umbilically attached to the garment, to remove their caps upon entry.

Like the landlady, the notice remains. “It was a fuss about nothing,” she insists, forgivingly. “Farmers always take their caps off when they go into someone else’s house.”

Bigger problems arose from periodically grim winters – “1965 was really bad, 1979 pretty tough, then there was two years ago” – and in 1986, when Hurricane Charley blew in.

“The water went through nine rooms, three feet deep in the kitchen and not much better anywhere else. Fortunately we were well insured,” says Rowena.

These days they offer neither accommodation nor substantial meals – the menu restricted to soup, sandwiches, pies and all manner of confectionery.

It’s all the better for it, a tranquil, welcoming, little-changing haven for walkers, tourists and locals. “It’s a drinkers’ pub,” says Rowena, “a place where people can meet and talk."

A framed certificate from CAMRA acknowledges that she keeps a good pint, a shelf full of shining trophies reflects that the games teams are dab hands, too.

“There are places in the dales where you can’t move for people eating says Rowena. “First and foremost this remains a pub.”

EVEN for those unfamiliar with dales delights, the Red Lion may look awfully familiar. It’s hardly surprising.

“A magazine once said that it was the most filmed pub in Britain,” says Rowena, a great gallery of photographs around the walls an acknowledgment of countless credits.

It featured regularly in All Creatures Great and Small – “We were the Queens Head in the last series” – and was a frequent backdrop in the Andy Robson television series. Langthwaite and its pub also featured in the mini-series A Woman of Substance and the follow-up, Hold the Dream, starring Deborah Kerr and Jenny Seagrove. Lovely people, says Rowena.

Extra attraction, family and locals often have bit parts, too. “There’s hardly a week passes without someone from America or Australia coming to see where it was all filmed,” says Marguerita.

The speculative sometimes ask if Rowena would be prepared to sell. There’s no chance of it. “I have no desire to go anywhere else. I have a cottage in the village but the pub is still my home. I wouldn’t dream of selling the pub while I still enjoy running it.”

“And,” says her younger sister with much affection, “she’ll still be behind that counter when she’s 90.”

(Headline) Freezer jolly good...

JOHN ELLIOTT has been grafting even longer than Rowena Hutchinson. Last week he marked 55 years in manufacturing with the opening of a new chest freezer line at Ebac, the Aycliffe company which he chairs.

John left school at 15, believes it to have been the biggest mistake he ever made– “two wasted years, I should have left at 13” – and now, among much else, lectures to the learned.

Early next year it’s expected that Ebac will also become the UK’s only washing machine maker, potentially doubling the number of jobs.

The launch was conducted, amiably, by former trade minister Lord Digby Jones, the occasion enjoyable. There were even very good fish finger sandwiches – the sort of thing you can get from a freezer, it was said – though what a Lands lad like John would have made of “thrice cooked chips” is anyone’s guess

Lord Jones is an admirer, featured Ebac in his Troubleshooters television series, recalled Andrew Carnegie’s view that there’s nothing wrong with making money but that it’s what you do with it that’s important.

He also told the joke about the difference between a pelican and a solicitor. (Oh come on, everyone knows that one.*)

John, the most generous of philanthropists, is also much involved in the renewed regional devolution debate, not so much galloping in on a white charger but on a white elephant (though elephants, come to think, are known for charging, too.)

Now 70, he’s still incorrigibly fond of the saying “Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, is a duck.” He may even know what it means.

*You can’t tell a pelican to stick its bill up its backside.