A call to Arms

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In the second My Kind Of Pub focusing on industry figures and their favourite pub, Phil Mellows talks to entrepreneur David BruceSome 17 years ago,...

In the second My Kind Of Pub focusing on industry figures and their favourite pub, Phil Mellows talks to entrepreneur David Bruce

Some 17 years ago, when Bruce's Brewery and the legendary Firkin pub chain began to take off, David Bruce and his wife Louise decided it was time to flee the mean streets of Battersea, South London, and live in the placid backwater of Hungerford, Berkshire.

Two weeks later the peace was shattered by the crackle of a Kalshnikov. David came home from work to find Louise still under the kitchen table where she had dived for shelter six hours earlier. She had been hanging out the washing when mass murderer Michael Ryan rampaged through the village.

"You don't expect that kind of thing to happen in Hungerford," David pointed out, superfluously. But, overall, the move proved a good one. For one thing, he discovered the Dundas Arms.

The freehouse sits on an eyot clasped like a pigeon in a fancier's hands between the River Kennet and its accompanying canal. David stumbled on it while on one of his regular rambles through the countryside. He has moved out of Hungerford now, but is even nearer the Dundas, just a mile away over the hill.

"Don't you think this place has great communications?" he said, climbing off a ramshackle bicycle which he leaned across against the porch before taking a seat by the water. You could tell we were in the country. He didn't bother to lock it.

As well as the possibility of arriving by boat or barge, the train from Reading stops at Kintbury station, on the other side of the canal. So does the road, so the Dundas car park is across the bridge.

"My Sex Club meets here every Christmas," David continued briskly, explaining the Sex Club is a typical Brucian play on words, standing for Self-employed Entrepreneurs something-or-other. No matter, as long as it sounds rude. The man who revelled like a schoolboy in all those Firkin puns hasn't changed much.

"I'm thinking of graduating on to spoonerisms," he suddenly said, dropping a bombshell. "We almost called a pub the Duck and Firkin once but decided against it."

On cue, some ducks paddled by on the canal. "Isn't this great!" yelped David, shaking a pepper pot over his potted shrimps. Owing to a gust of wind, the pepper never reached its destination but blew horizontally across the water. "Ha, ha, ha! Sneezing ducks!" he gasped.

Ducks were becoming something of a theme of the lunch. "You didn't notice whether there was duck on the menu, did you? That would be a bit strange."

It was hard to say. The bottom half of the chalkboard was permanently obscured by a regular, who obviously liked to feel himself the centre of attention. The Dundas Arms, despite serving some fine food and having a large formal dining room, has a good share of steady-drinking regulars, David among them, and serves beer from Hungerford's own microbrewer, Butts.

There is no jukebox and no fruit machines, and if it has anything else in common with David's pubs it is the philosophy of "keep it simple".

The Firkins that made his name were traditional pubs stripped bare. They brewed their own beer, of course, but really they became so popular because they offered a completely different atmosphere to the staid big brewery-owned houses that dominated London at the time.

Instead of the red carpet there were bare boards, instead of the jukebox there was live music, often just a bloke with a guitar, but customers were positively encouraged to get up on the benches and dance.

It would be difficult to imagine that happening at the Dundas Arms, but there is a similarly informed mood about the place.

As far as the Firkin chain today is concerned, its decline is a matter of genuine sadness for David. The first of them, the Goose & Firkin, born in 1979 before he discovered the beauties of alliteration, is still paraded as the original, yet for David it is now nothing like what a Firkin should be.

He recently went to Denmark Hill to proudly show someone the Phoenix & Firkin, probably the best of them, carved out of a burnt-down railway station with the centrepiece of a gigantic station clock and a miniature train running around the top of the bar.

He was shocked to find it wasn't there any more, as if somebody, at least, should have told him.

The Firkin estate, having exploded in size following its takeover by Allied Domecq, is now shared between Punch and Bass and is generally regarded as a "brand" with no future. David clearly feels quite possessive about it and he reveals that he tried to buy it back on a couple of occasions as it passed through the hands of half a dozen companies but he was outbid.

"I might try and buy the name back even now," he muses, as the idea had just struck him. "But they wouldn't be brew pubs this time."

His current venture, the Capital Pub Company, has yet to open its first pub, but he has made offers on four properties, all in the London area, and only that morning he had clinched several hundred thousand pounds from backers.

"That means I can buy you lunch," he said.

His partner this time is Clive Watson, the former finance director of Regent Inns. David admits he needs a hard-nosed money person by his side and has never really got on with the City. That was part of the reason for him selling the Firkins, although things really started to go wrong when he opened a pub in Bristol, as he readily confesses. "I never make the same mistake twice. They are different mistakes every time."

Even so, David made £6.6m out of the 12 Firkins and he has been behind a variety of projects since, including using his brewing expertise to help set up plants in the United States and the Far East.

The most amusing part of the Capital Pub Company subscription offer is the part that lists his current directorships which include not quite yet real firms such as Fleece Ewe & Runne, Frothblowers Marketing and Inn Securities.

He also used the money he made out of the Firkins to set up a holiday charity for disabled people, the Bruce Trust, which now operates four barges on the very Kennet & Avon Canal that flows past the Dundas Arms. The landlord, who goes by the name of David Dalzell-Piper, is an elusive character who, according to David, is very hands-on in the kitchen and leaves the running of the bar to a chap called Malcolm.

David Dalzell-Piper ghosts by, leaving a knuckle of lamb and a chicken salad before disappearing just as mysteriously as he arrived. The pub also has letting rooms, an observation that over a digestif whisky sparked a typical Brucian story about a couple of German wheat beer brewers called Hans and Wilma who once stayed there.

Too complex to reassemble, it involved a pun along the lines of "Thai'd house" and, inevitably, a duck.

It was time to go home.

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