N.Z. woman manages pub

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33189, 31 March 1973, Page 12

N.Z. woman manages pub

(London correspondent) LONDON. When the British Prime Minister, Mr Edward Heath, drops into his “local” in a village just south of London his hostess is a New Zealander. She is a former receptionist at the Waterloo Hotel, Wellington, Mrs Hilary Evans. This month she made British pub history by becoming the first woman to succeed her husband as manager of a hotel. An engineer who became a publican, Mr John Evans died last morith after having managed the Black Prince at Bexley for three years. Normally the management post would have gone to another married man whose wife would have assisted him. Such is the confidence of the brewery, Bass Charrington, in Mrs Evans that they disregarded normal practice and asked her to be manager of this prime link in their country-wide hotel chain. Social centre The Black Prince is no ordinary pub. Although it offers ino accommodation it is a mansion of a place. It. has five bars, a 200-seat ballroom, three reception and conference rooms, a disco and a grill, all encircled by five acres of car parks. It is the social centre of its area and attracts Mr Heath, in whose constituency it is, for meetings, particularly of Rotary, of which he is a member. Mrs Evans said: “I never dreamt that when I left New Zealand for a British holiday in 1950 my few months away would become ‘for ever’.” With her New Zealand hotel experience as an asset Mrs Evans was soon accepting reception posts in many parts of Britain. In 1960 she married an Englishman, John Evans, inherited five stepchildren, and as a family they moved into the pub management business. ‘"Loving it” They had two other posts before the brewery appointed them to the Black Prince and they put down roots in the idyllic Bexley village, on the fringe of the countryside and about half an hour’s drive from London. The village is old—and will grow only older. There is a total preservation order over it and redevelopment is banned. But in three years Mrs Evans’s world crashed—with the death of her husband. Now she is rebuilding it. Fortified by the confidence her bosses have shown in her she is immersed in the hotel and the deployment of her staff of 30. Was she enjoying it. What was life like now? In. two brisk words she told the whole story—“loving it!"