Jonathan Lindley is the chair of Bamford Community Society which runs the Anglers Rest, a pub in the middle of the village of Bamford in the Hope Valley of the Peak District, which was saved from a sale to developers in 2013 when residents launched a share offer and bought the premises for £280,000. The Anglers Rest now serves the community as a pub and meeting space with a snug for music and folk groups, a cafe in the daytime for tea and cake and a post office. Lindley says the Anglers Rest never made much money but “it was a going concern – and then we had corona”.
When did things start to change?
The pub was quite busy right until the government said you have to shut. We noticed people were cancelling their Mothering Sunday bookings. When we got the notice that we had to close, we closed the pub and cafe immediately.
The post office was told to close, which was a blow because a lot of people draw their pensions out in cash. We sort of appealed – we wrote to them and said we’d like to stay open part time, and they agreed to two mornings a week as long as the pub was closed. We don’t offer a full service but people can buy a stamp, pay a utility bill, or draw a pension and withdraw cash.
How did you manage financially?
We furloughed the pub and cafe staff and realised we can’t afford to pay the post office staff when we are only open two days a week. The post office doesn’t really make any money anyway, but it’s a vital community service. It’s normally cross-subsidised by the other parts of the business, so we needed to find a way to keep it open without employing the post office manager.
Two things happened. I wrote to the local MP to say that it was a bit of nonsense with the furloughing – because she is furloughed she is not allowed to do it voluntarily two days a week. They can’t have intended for a community facility to be shut – I was a civil servant for nearly 40 years, and I know that sometimes when policy is made quickly it’s not quite right when implemented: not everything is fully thought-through. The local MP wrote to the chancellor and we are awaiting the outcome.
The second thing that we did, we asked the members if they would be prepared to have basic training to run the post office as a volunteer. At the same time, someone that used to work for us, who has been furloughed by her new employer, she has come along to volunteer for us. She is fully trained, she ran the post office for four years. And she is doing it voluntarily. It’s brilliant. It allows us to keep a community facility open for a steady flow of people.
What other services are you offering?
Using the Anglers Rest as a hub, we have an initiative called Helpful Bamford where a rota of nine people sit on the phone and people can ring to get shopping collected, prescriptions collected, veterinary medicines collected and have a friendly chat with someone. We use the Anglers Rest phone number so people know where to call.
The legal entity is the Bamford Community Society, for anything we do financially in this Helpful Bamford initiative. For example, we got a grant from Foundation Derbyshire to do food parcels and they needed and bank account for that.
Happy Mother’s Day.
We are serving takeaway Sunday meals 12 – 4 pm
We are here for help and assistance 01433 659317. pic.twitter.com/9aK5aO8GSJ— The Anglers Rest (@AnglersBamford) March 22, 2020
We approached the local cafes and businesses for perishable stock. We bought it from them and distributed it with the idea that some people would pay for it. One cafe had £400 of bread, cheese and eggs that we bought, bundled up and offered it to people in parcels of £15. Most have paid for it, so we can give that money back to the charitable bit of the council. But without that underwriting we wouldn’t have been able to do it.
Yesterday someone wanted hayfever tablets, the pharmacy can’t take phone payments so whoever is collecting the tablets has to get them without paying because we don’t want volunteers to be touching cash. So we used the grant to set up a tab in the pharmacy so we can collect the medicine and the person receiving it can pay us back
What’s next?
There are all sorts of issues that arise from a lockdown being eased – I can’t see that people are going be coming in and standing next to one another at the bar, or sitting at tables eating for a while, the tables aren’t widely spaced.
I can’t see that the older clientele of the cafe wanting to come back until there is a vaccine. So we’re starting to think about how to adapt our business model. We’re thinking about doing more on takeaways. Can we introduce more space in the dining bit of the pub by rearranging things? At the moment no-one knows what the future will look like. All of us feel that the pub will take quite a while to get back to normality.
People will remember the places that helped them
The chancellor must extend the furloughing if lockdown continues. For the hospitality trade that is essential. Because we’re the centre of the community, the most important thing for us is maintaining a place where people can say: “If I need help, I can go there.” This is altruistic, but it’s a good business proposition as well. People will remember the places that did that. Our strapline is: “More than a pub, a community hub,” and this crisis has given us the opportunity to demonstrate that.
