Starting Up with Baz Butcher @ The White Hart

If I am to have my time again, the beautiful and ancient village of Wytham is the place where I would like to be born, live, be married – probably not have children this time – and be laid to rest.

So when an email arrived in my inbox advertising the tenancy of The White Hart, I gasped with incredulity.

I spent the best part of 2014 looking for another business to take on, feeling that we had earned our spurs at the St Giles Café.

Many hours were spent trying to find decent-sized restaurant premises in Oxford and each time I was thwarted by the vagaries of A1/2/3 planning consent or the lease having already been snapped up by another chain restaurant.

My first job, very fresh-faced out of university, was working as an area rep for Watney, Mann & Truman Brewery. I moved effortlessly from my full-time student-drinking days into being given some 130 pubs to look after, stretching from the Mortlake brewery, through Richmond, Putney, Wandsworth, Clapham and Lambeth to Brixton.

This was 1981 when all pubs were authentic boozers, with separate bar rooms, some of which you entered at your peril. They were the life, soul, playground and trading ground of their very local communities. Landlords and landladies ruled the unruly.

I left the job after three years, two stone heavier and joined the world of advertising, but in those precious three years I met so many extraordinary people and witnessed some pretty scary things – not least the landlady who was forced to hand over her wedding rings at knifepoint as her pub burned to the ground at the height of the Brixton riots.

Fast forward to the inbox. A Wadworth pub tenancy for the White Hart at Wytham – which I renamed The White Hart of Wytham and signed for on the dotted line on Monday, January 19.

Cue 16 builders, decorators and assorted craftsmen at 7am on Tuesday, January 20, and in five days and nights we restore a 17th-century Grade 11 listed building to its former glory. In 1992 I had undertaken a 16-month restoration of a similar farmhouse in Blackthorn, near Bicester, that I thought was going to be my family home for ever more until my late wife developed progressive multiple sclerosis and the bottom dropped out of my world. She passed away in August 2013, RIP.

We opened quietly on the evening of Saturday, January 24, so as to give the locals their pub back with minimum disruption.

When I closed St Giles Café to refurbish, a gentleman walked in and asked me what on earth I thought I was doing.

Two days before signing for the White Hart, I had gone, with my Mr Fix-It building project manager, to have a quiet beer and a final check of all the work we intended to do.

On this occasion, I was confronted by one local resident who said: “What on earth do you think you are doing in our pub on a Friday night?” It was actually a Saturday night, though I didn’t have the speed of mind to inform her of that, but left fuming and anxious about what was going to happen next.

Oxford Mail:

Well, the regulars have come back in their droves and new customers have returned three or more times.

Seventy-five people turned up for Sunday lunch on our second day and 90 more turned up last Sunday.

We’ve had a major gas leak, the water having to be turned off for the entire village for the evening, but The White Hart of Wytham is back, the log fires are burning again and we roast, smoke, pickle and cure.

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The White Hart of Wytham, Wytham, near Oxford, 01865 244372
whitehartwytham.com