History

This West Sussex pub just off the Petersfield-Chichester road at Hooksway is now a smart watering hole but I remember it in the 1960s when it was a run-down ale house owned by Alfie Angier.

The pub is the only remaining building of a small village which existed on this site but was wiped out by plague - as were several other small villages in this area, I was told, and this corner of West Sussex remains relatively under-populated to this day.

Everybody knew about the Royal Oak but nobody quite knew how to get there, but eventually I struck lucky and managed to visit the place. This was the late 1960s and the pub served no wines or spirits, only beer some of which was brewed on the premises.

There was no counter, only a serving hatch in the single bar and no electricity either - lighting was by oil lamps (Heaven help you if you needed to go outside to the Gents on a dark night). The huge wooden table and seating looked as if it had been there since the time of the Tudors, but there was one chair nobody dare sit down on.

This was the seat of the landlord, Alfie Angier, who would sit there most evenings regaling his customers with the oft told story of the day in the early 1930s when the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) called in there on the way to or from the racing at Goodwood. I hope somebody photographed the place for posterity prior to its 'renovation' and the arrival of mains water and electricty.

Life at the Royal Oak, Hooksway, a century ago, when my maternal grandparents were in charge, was hugely different from what it is today.

It was an old-style ale house, a villagers' meeting place, little changed since it was built in the 1400s. There were oil lamps to be lit, brick and stone-flagged floors to be swept, deal tables to be scrubbed, water to be drawn from a well and a primitive wash-house for laundering.

But judging from my mother's memories it had its lighter moments, and from her parents she learned the resourcefulness and skills which would help her survive her own hard times.

Like many working class families of their day, William Woods and his wife Martha knew tragedy and misfortune and it was one such setback which led them to the Royal Oak.

The couple were married at Stoughton in 1866 and settled in Forestside. By 1875 they already had five children. Then William succeeded his father as gamekeeper on the Stansted Estate, then owned by the Wilder family but now the seat of the Earls of Bessborough.

The appointment meant a move to Woodberry Lane at Racton on the road from Rowlands Castle to Westbourne. There Martha gave birth to six more children including, in 1880, my mother Emma. She was followed three years later by triplets - two girls and a boy. This brought the first family misfortune for within 16 months the boy and one girl had died; they are now buried together in Forestside churchyard.

William and Martha's last child, Ethel Louise, was born in 1885.

Three years later misfortune struck again when William was attacked by poachers he surprised one night. His injuries ended his career as a gamekeeper and led to the move to the Royal Oak in November 1889. Officially William was the licensee but it was the indomitable Martha who, besides bringing up her large brood, ruled over the business.

For his part William was consigned to looking after the seven acres of pasture and woodlands which went with the inn along with an assortment of stables, pig pens, fowl houses, barns and outhouses. Here he kept a range of animals, grew the produce which kept the family self-nourished and made hurdles, chestnut fencing and the like.

Martha meanwhile pursued an "open-all-hours" policy, ignoring the prevailing licensing laws with impunity by the simple expedient of regaling the local bobby with a constant supply of free beer, eggs, wild rabbits and other produce.

Martha Woods In retirement. She died in 1925 aged 85. No photograph exists of William Woods.

By the time William and Martha took over the inn their two oldest sons had already left home, to be followed later by their two youngest sons. This still left the five young Woods girls in residence: Caroline, Agnes, Emma, Martha (the surviving triplet) and Ethel. Their presence was an undoubted added attraction to the local young bucks, among them no doubt, the four Hounsome brothers from East Marden. One of them was my father Owen.

Even then, however, rural life was already changing. Economic turndown and increasing farm mechanisation meant fewer jobs in agriculture. At the same time the extension of literacy and numeracy opened the way to new opportunities and the coming of the railway and the steamship offered a glimpse of new horizons.

William Woods died in 1903 aged 61 and Martha, forced to retire, moved to Oak Cottage, Nyewood. But by then all the Woods children had left home as had all but one member of the two large related Hounsome families at East Marden. They moved to the towns, went to work on the railway or joined the fighting services. Three Hounsome brothers even emigrated to Canada, two of them as early as the 1870s.

As for the girls, they were mostly packed off into domestic service in strange towns where they met their husbands and settled down. Thus it happened with my parents, who met again by chance one Sunday on the seafront in Brighton, where my mother was a housemaid and my father, an erstwhile shepherd boy, had joined a furniture removal firm. They were married in the town in 1902 and raised their four children there.

As for Martha, misfortune had not yet done with her for her eldest son, James, who had moved to Portsmouth to work on the railway, lost a leg in a shunting accident, while another son, William, was wounded fighting with the 21st Lancers at Khartoum and, although he survived to become a "gentleman's valet", died at the early age of 43.

One Woods girl, who did remain in the locality was the youngest, Ethel, who married Arthur "Punch" Glue, a formidable village cricketer in his day, and settled in East Harting. Living there with them was "Uncle Jim", his amputated limb replaced by what looked remarkably like one of the legs from our scullery table. A kindly, philosophical man, he worked and slept in a large shed in the garden, mending clocks and watches.

It was from Aunt Ethel's cottage one autumn morning in 1936 when I was just 17, that I climbed up through the mist over the shoulder of the downs for my first visit to the Royal Oak, bearing a string of "Punch" Glue's home-grown onions as a gift to the legendary, long-serving, licensee of the day, Alf Ainger.

There, in the tap-room, little changed since my grandparents' time, while my overcoat steamed dry before a roaring fire, I talked about the old days with Alf over a pint of ale and a doorstep of bread and cheese. It was a somewhat staccato conversation since, by then, Alf was as deaf as the proverbial post.I have returned to the Royal Oak at various times since to rediscover my roots.

They are nostalgic occasions. And unfailingly, as I sit in the taproom, I fancy I hear again the echo of the Woods girls' laughter as they flirt with the Hounsome boys, unaware that in those dying years of the Victorian age, their world was already collapsing and that the century ahead would bring changes beyond their comprehension.

Postcript: The local connection continues today through the progeny of "Aunt Ethel" Glue. Her great-grandson is the South Harting postman and his wife the postmistress.

Copyright reserved
Robert Hounsome, Poole, Dorset
June, 1999

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