I have often said that a publican attracts the type of customers he deserves, and I have never veered from this. I remember from my own experience, on one occasion, asking a group of young men who ventured into the Duke of Cumberland one evening, to refrain from swearing at the bar, as families were arriving for pre-dinner drinks. One thing that I never permitted at any time was bad language in front of women or children. The young men, who were drinking pints of a brand of strong lager, stopped swearing for a short period of time and then recommenced. I asked them to drink up and leave, and they did so without any problems in the bar. Shortly after they left in their pickup truck, one of my locals arrived to inform me that a large double bed had been abandoned in the centre of my car park. It was seven o'clock on a Saturday evening and the car park was going to become very busy. A couple of my more mature guests, suitably bribed by me, ventured out into the car park and ‘removed’ it. Clearly, the young men who had been asked to leave because of their appalling language decided to do so quietly, but were determined to leave behind them a token of their displeasure in the form of a double bed that they had cleared out of someone's flat.

 

          One of the other issues to consider when taking on a pub that serves meals is the number of covers (seats available for diners) available within the premises, required to make the pub profitable through its catering provision - unless you are focussed exclusively on a pub without food provision (entirely ‘wet-led’).  If you are targeting a pub that is going to offer food, a classic problem arises from the objection of the local drinkers to the requisitioning of the tables in the bar area for the benefit of diners. Whilst, on the one hand, the licensee will want to maximise profits, particularly at the weekend, he needs to be mindful of the needs and wishes of his traditional drinkers, who are more likely to visit the pub between five and six o’clock after work, or after nine o'clock in the evening, by which time, if a licensee plans his operation correctly, most of the diners will have deserted the bar area and the tables can once again be placed at the disposal of the post-nine o'clock drinkers.

         

          Another thing to bear in mind is that if your pub is situated in the countryside, particularly if it is in the village, you will find that many of your locals will have dogs and they will want to bring them to the pub; often they will buy a dog just so that they can visit the pub in the evening with the blessing of the ‘other half’ under the guise of: ‘Just walking the dog, dear, back in about an hour!”

Now, if your public house is awash with diners, particularly if they are sitting in the bar area, are they going to want to see a lot of dogs in the vicinity of the food, particularly if the dogs begin shaking rain off their coats or scratching? This is potentially a controversial and difficult area. It was one of the first challenges I had to meet head-on when I took over the Duke of Cumberland.

 

          The locals are always wary of a new licensee taking over 'their' village/community house, and it could be many days, weeks or months before a new licensee is fully accepted into the fold. The locals will, therefore, be particularly sensitive to any new rules and directives that the incoming publican may introduce so soon after his investiture. In my case, I reckoned that if I requisitioned all five tables in the public bar area it would allow me another twenty five covers from which to profit when meals were being served at the pub in the early evening and at lunchtime. This was the same area that, after nine o'clock, was largely given over to the local drinkers and their dogs. When I first took control of the pub I banned dogs before nine o'clock in the evening. I thought this a bold and practical move, and in terms of food hygiene I considered it to be desirable. But, it was not a popular move. The traditional drinkers moaned and groaned and made their feelings plain for all to see, and eventually I had to work out a compromise with them. With the benefit of hindsight, however, I came to realise that in a rural setting such as a traditional English village, people really were not that too concerned about animals in the bar area, provided they were dogs and not mice!