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Five Miles from Anywhere – No Hurry ‘An Immortal Inn’ by Patrick Chaplin
I think it was Steve Williams’ commen t in the Spring Newsletter that I am the Society’s ‘man in Essex’ (but surely not the only one) that made me decide to put goats blood to papyrus and write about a pub outside of my home county and – for whatever reason – one which was, at least at one time, regarded as remote.
Some years ago I discovered the work of James John Hissey, an author from Eastbourne, who, during the late Victorian period and early Edwardian times travelled England, first in a dog-cart, then in a phaeton and latterly in a motor-car and wrote enthusiastically and in great detail about the places he had visited, the abbeys and churches, the beauty of the countryside and the difficulty in finding a car mechanic when he wanted one when he broke down deep in the Fens. Most important to our Society is the record Hissey made of all the inns he visited – some scant and some detailed - and there were hundreds of them.
Just before the outbreak of the Great War, Hissey set out in his motor-car from Trevin Towers, his home in Eastbourne, on a tour ‘into the heart of the real countryside’ looking along the way for ‘the village or country inn to rest at for the night rather than a town hotel.’ This particular tour took in Kent, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincolnshire up as far as Grantham and then returning home via Northants, Oxfordshire and Berkshire.
At one point in deepest Cambridgeshire Hissey ‘failed to trace with any certainty my position on the map, but that mattered little; a road, though it may seem long, is bound to go somewhere, though it be nowhere in particular.’ Eventually the road led him to the Upware Ferry on the banks of the River Cam and there, by the side of the river, he discovered a lonely little inn with the legend ‘Five Miles From Anywhere – No Hurry’ plainly painted on its gabled front. Hissey sat beneath some trees by the side of the inn and ‘smoked a peace-persuading pipe’, watched the river flow slowly by and reflected on life and the fact that he could hear no chiming of any distant clock, no lowing of cattle, no sounds of men’s voices in the fields, no splash of fish in the river; only the occasional shout of “Over” from the Upware ferryman. Unable to find a supplier of photographic film anywhere, Hissey drew a picture of the inn, which is reproduced on a following page.
Such reports leave pub researchers wanting to know more. More is provided by James Wentworth Day.
James Wentworth Day was born in 1899 at Exning, near Newmarket, Suffolk. He served in the Great War and then followed a career in newspapers, becoming personal assistant to Lord Beaverbrook. He was a war correspondent during World War Two, contested the Hornchurch Division as a Conservative Parliamentary candidate in the 1950s and wrote some fifty-two books - including works on sport, ghost stories, history, topography, biography, and country life. He had a deep passion for East Anglia - particularly for the Fens, its people and its places - including pubs like the ‘Five Miles.’
Wentworth Day appears to have had a real passion for the ‘Five Miles’ describing it as the ‘sanctified inn of boy-hood.’ He mentions it in at least four of his books; Farming Adventure (1943), Inns of Sport (1949), Broadland Adventure (1951) and History of the Fens (1954). In Broadland Adventure the ‘Five Miles’ seems to have changed little in the twenty-five years since Hissey visited the inn being ‘busy only with geese and ducks, hard on the edge of the Wicken Fen.’ In Farming Adventure he described the inn as ‘white-walled, red-roofed, its feet in the Cam, its roof shaded by great willows.’ As the yellow and gold of the sunset fled its final illumination of the day across the Wicken Fen Wentworth Day approached the ‘Five Miles’ and stopped for ale.
In 1943 Wentworth Day described the ‘Five Miles’ as ‘an immortal inn’ where for 150 years undergraduates from Cambridge University had ‘known its magic.’ Since the 1860s the inn had been the headquarters of the ‘Upware Republic.’ Undergraduates had rowed by boat or hacked by horse the twelve miles from Cambridge and set up a mock republic there. Wentworth Day wrote of the ‘rumbustious, riotously healthy gathering of sporting, talking argumentative’ students who ‘fished for pike, shot duck and snipe in the fen, poached hares and partridges, fought the bargees for fun and pint pots, started steeplechase races through bottomless barrels for the girls of the hamlet or set them afloat in a skiff on the river with a gallon of ale to drink and nought but their bare hands to row themselves back to bank.’
I wish I’d been there.
Wentworth Day took a glass of ale with the landlord named Jolly (What a truly excellent name for a landlord!) and toasted the memories of those participants of the ‘republic’ whose traditions had ceased a few short years before. They recalled two stalwarts, H. W. Finch, ‘tall, broad, bearded, scholarly, and pugnacious’ and known as the ‘Fighting Barrister’, and Charlie Crisp, ’the unlettered, honest, cheerful cottage sportsman of Upware’ who was ‘a great snipe-shooter, a champion skater, a merry beer-drinker’ and a master of the gun.
On one occasion Charlie declared to an enthusiastic yet gullible undergraduate that one winter ‘there were that many geese up the river that they come over the house-top one night like a troop o’horses. I no more to do but stuck me owd gun up the chimbley and fired her off when I heerd ‘em honkin’ over.’ Charlie said he then rushed to the door but found that he could not open it, ‘Shut fast.’ “Snow?” enquired the undergraduate. “Snow! Blarst!” snapped Charlie in reply. "No. Dead geese! A cart-load on ‘em. Them what I shot out o’ the chimbley!”
A few years later, in the early 1950s, Wentworth Day again found himself at Upware, ‘hard by the undrained primeval wilderness of Wicken Fen’ and in History of the Fens recorded that the inn remained the ‘gathering place of fowlers and fishermen, turf-diggers and river bargees...’
Reading the words of Hissey and Wentworth Day about ten years ago – maybe more – I travelled out to the Wicken Fen in search of this unique inn, its ferry and the peace and quiet of the countryside. I discovered that the inn was of a modern brick construction but of its interior I can tell you nothing. It was gone 2.30 p.m. on a Sunday, the inn was closed and more lenient opening hours were still some time away. To be honest I was glad.
The images that Hissey and Wentworth Day had created in my mind’s eye were an illusion. Time had marched on…and on…and on. The sign and the old gabled front had gone and a new sign, of indestructible plastic, was affixed to wooden posts and stood proud in front of a large, fully-equipped children’s play area. The ferry service was long gone, although there was evidence of it, possibly used as a slip-way for rowing boats. I tried to imagine Hissey’s dilemma when the ferryman had suggested to him there was little point ferrying his car across the river as the roads on the other side ‘be main bad.’ I tried to imagine Hissey sitting under the trees – for they were still there – enjoying his pipe. Honestly, I did try, but the sound of a diesel 4x4 revving up and ripping up the gravel in the car park as it accelerated away disturbed my karma.
Through CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide (2002) I find that the pub is now called the ‘Five Miles From Anywhere No Hurry Inn.’ What does that mean? It makes no sense at all! The road it’s in is ‘Old School Lane.’ Whatever happened to the hardly navigable unnamed narrow lane that Wentworth Day struggled through on his horse?
However, described in 2002 by CAMRA as ‘an unusual pub that successfully caters for many different types of customer’, it is actually true that, although the inn has changed out of all recognition, the essential function of the ‘Five Miles’ has not changed at all; the many types of customer has merely changed from undergraduates, poachers, wild-fowlers, fisherman, bargees merry beer-drinkers and turf-diggers to walkers, boaters, families with young children and people of all ages out looking for a good time and/or good food.
It is clearly a pub which has survived.
Today, a visit to the inn’s website reveals a very successful modern inn, the features of which include award-winning grounds with a large bouncy castle, a Games Bar with a 6 ft projector screen for Sky Sports and the music channels, a Lounge Bar, with seating for 80 and live entertainment every Friday and Saturday nights, karaoke every Wednesday and a wide range of beers and food.
The inn has also expanded on the corporate side, being chosen by Anthony Stockbridge and Associates – a premier UK pub training company – to be their southern venue for all of their training purposes.
Despite all this the management of the Five Miles from Anywhere – No Hurry Inn believe that they have not as yet explored the full potential of the Five Miles – and I believe them.
“But,” I hear you purists cry, “Would James John Hissey or James Wentworth Day have approved? They would neither have approved nor understood.
This article first appeared in the PHS Newsletter Summer 2005 © 2005 Patrick Chaplin
A follow up article by Bob Flood and the connection with the ‘King of Upware’ can be found here
References
Hissey, James John. The Road and the Inn (London: Macmillan & Co, 1917)
Nunn, Stephen P. ‘When Ingatestone was the Home of a ‘Son of the Countryside’ in The Journal (Ingatestone, Blackmore, Stock & Margaretting edition), Issue No. 3, November 2000
Protz, Roger. Good Beer Guide 2002 (St. Albans: Campaign for Real Ale, 2001)
Wentworth Day, James. Broadland Adventure (London: Country Life, 1951)
Wentworth Day, James. Farming Adventure (London: George Harrap, 1943)
Wentworth Day, James. History of the Fens (London: George Harrap 1954)
Wentworth Day, James. Inns of Sport (London: The Naldrett Press, 1949)
Website: Five Miles from Anywhere – No Hurry Inn www.fivemilesinn.co.uk/
Special thanks to Stephen P. Nunn, biographer of James Wentworth Day
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