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From an email received 26 February 2020.
The licensee of the Connaught Hotel, Herne Bay, from 1945 (January?) to 1946 (June?)
was my aunt, Joan Allen nee Hale (d.o.b. 31 October 1920). She is my
late mother’s sister.
It is Joan's current recollection that the freehold was purchased.
But, whether freehold or leasehold, it was certainly obtained by a
newly-formed limited company, P&J Hotels Ltd.
If my aunt was the ‘J’, the ‘P’ was her husband Peter Allen (1 March
1919 – 20 April 1965).
The reason that my aunt was the sole licensee is that my uncle,
having had a medical discharge from the Royal Navy, in which he had been
an engineering officer, was repeatedly being hospitalised – and would
die at the age of 46.
My aunt had had experience of the licensed trade before the war, as
an employee at The Bull in Barton Mills, and then at The Lion in
Cambridge. So, she had had some experience of the business before she
resigned her commission in the WRNS and became a licensee in 1945. The
starting date of her licence cannot be much earlier than January 1945,
since it was certainly after their wedding on 9 December 1944.
If they obtained the freehold with little capital, that would now
seem remarkable. But the price of coastal property was rock-bottom at
the time, owing to coastal travel restrictions. Although those
restrictions, applying to a 25-mile (later, 10-mile) band around the
coast from Lyme Bay to The Wash, were only in force from the beginning
of 1940 to the end of 1942, property prices did not really recover until
people started travelling and ‘going to the seaside’ again in the late
1940s. Buying the Connaught in 1944/45 might well have been feasible.
I have no personal memories of the Connaught. I might perhaps have
been there on just one occasion, but I would only have been two or three
years old at the time.
Regards,
Bill Freeman. |
