In her book The Last Landlady: An English Memoir, writer Laura Thompson tells the story of her grandmother Violet, the first woman in England to be given a publican’s licence in her own name. She was one of the great landladies: “A casual empress on her stool… the person who conjured and orchestrated everything.”
Born in a London pub, (the daughter of a landlord) Violet was the much-revered matriarch of a Home Counties public house. Thompson’s memoir speaks of a no nonsense, sharp tongued and mesmeric woman who embodied her role with all of her being: “She saw the whole of life through that particular prism… Pubs, to her, were not just a job. They were more like a calling… her greatness as a landlady came from the fact that she believed, with a true faith, that a proper pub was a beautiful thing.”
