Simon Kellow (publican)

 Sponsored by the Beechbourne  Herald & Courier  

Simon Kellow, sole proprietor of the Blue Boar in Woolfont Magna and churchwarden, S Margaret Woolfont Magna, is one of the seniormost members of the absurdly ramified Kellow-Burridge family who have dominated the pub trade in the District for many generations.

Life and Education
Simon Kellow was born 11 January 1959 to George and Mavis (née Burridge) Kellow, who kept the Boar. George and Mavis were fourth cousins, part of the extended Kellow-Burridge-Ford-Partman clan; Mavis, like George, like their son, had been effectively ‘born in the saloon bar’, her own parents keeping the Old Bridge at Shifford Ombres.

Simon Kellow was educated at the C of E village school in Magna and then at the Secondary Modern in Tisbury. As soon as he was permitted to leave school, he was sent by his father on a course of apprenticeship, through a publicans’ old boy network, taking placements all over the country, from East Anglia to the Home Counties to the North to the Midlands.

This course of work experience and apprenticeship in the provender, victualling, and pub trades was, in sometimes unexpected ways, the making of him. In the Midlands, he became – perhaps unlikelily – confirmed as a lifelong devoté of Northern Soul, which he’d first encountered and fallen for on a trip prior to his apprenticeships: although, as a ‘mighty sturdy lad’, he cut no figure or figures in the dance floor and rather obviously did not use speed, as his weight on the scales attested. And a stint in the galley aboard RFA Fort Austin in the placid waters of the Med, for 1982’s Exercise Spring Train, ended unexpectedly with his being caught up in the Falklands War.

‘Oi didden go to war, it did come and vind me. Next Oi knowed, Oi were actin’ as a Petty Ovvizer, nigh-enough, in the Vleet Auxiliary in a ruddy war zone.’

It was in fact Simon Kellow who was given the honour of pulling the first pint, down the Globe in the liberated Port Stanley, for the then Maj Gen Jeremy Moore CB OBE MC & Bar, the Royal Marine commander of the ground forces in Operation CORPORATE:

‘General Moore, he did zay as it were the best [pint] he’d ever ztood his Ztaff.

‘And the dearest bought.’

Career
Upon his return from these adventures, Simon Kellow reported himself to his father, who promptly packed him off again, although this time only to Shifford Ombres. George Kellow had rather died than have admitted how proud he was of Young Simon; but he was unfeignedly and legitimately disapproving of his outlandish notions of how to run a pub, picked up, no doubt, in such foreign parts as Bilston, Rochester, Fakenham, and Burnley; of the modish, cosmopolitan ways he’d learnt in such metropoleis as Brum and Bradford, Wigan and Warrington and Wolverhampton, Norwich and Nantwich, Maidstone and Middlesbrough; and, particularly, of his altered way of speaking. George Kellow was no fool: he knew his trade, in his of all districts, relied heavily upon tourist traffic; and he knew what trippers and tourists expected in and of a rural West Country pub landlord.

Simon was packed off forthwith, to the Old Bridge, then in the hands of his namesake Si Burridge’s widow, Auntie Marge, with George Kellow’s instructions and reasoning in his ear: ‘Get thi zlowed down, lad; and larn to zpeak proper again, do’.

The Old Bridge under Auntie Marge was certainly the place to ‘get slowed down’: somewhat to the vexation of Simon’s cousin and contemporary, Jack Burridge, who was to inherit it. Young Jack had been sent to the Boar in place of Simon, in a straight transfer; when the cousins saw one another from time to time, Jack Burridge was always full of wonder at all the new things and modern notions George Kellow was trialling, down the Boar: to Simon’s carefully hidden hilarity, as these were all of them innovations Simon’s cunning old dad had berated him for suggesting.

Down the Bridge, in turn, Simon, always a placid enough man, a countryman and slow mover, though clever as the Duke himself beneath it all, soaked in the atmosphere of the place, and observed all the subtle methods which went into running a friendly, peaceable, countryside pub without the traffic or bustle of the King’s Head in Norwich or the George & Dragon in Sandwich, let alone the Queen’s Arms in Brum, say. He sunk into as into a warm bath.

And he married, in 1988, Jenny Partman, whose family were connected with the maltings in the Vale and who called cousins with every Calley and Beckett in the Downlands. Soon after, steadied to his father’s satisfaction, he found himself, with his wife, back in Magna, down the Boar.

George Kellow died in October of 2000, leaving Simon his own master and ‘Sole. Prop.’ of the Blue Boar (‘A Free House / Real Ale & Cider’), and – by then – father to Nick Kellow, the eldest of the three children Simon and Jenny were to have.

In the years since, Mr Kellow has continued to run the Boar; has served as churchwarden at Magna church time and again; has sent his young bull of a son, Nick, off on his own round of work placements; has himself aged from young bull to a great tun of a man who looks like one of his own ale-casks; and has burnished his reacquired West Country rural accent to the point of near unintelligibility and an inability to leave it off even when not playing up to tourists.

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">He has also worked with His Grace and Sir Thomas Douty on a Rail Ale scheme for the W&CR; been active in every worthy parish cause; and, most recently, with son Nick, has, with ducal aid, restored and reopened the old Woolpack in Woolfont Crucis, which (the freehold having been sold in 1953, during the abeyance, by the Taunton Estate Trustees) had been taken over by a group of ‘vurriners’ from up Melksham way, tarted up, renamed the Ring of Bells, and been run, bankrupt, into the ground.

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">He also, for all his stolid and beef-witted exterior, helps set, and runs, the most challenging Quiz Night of any pub landlord in the Three Kingdoms: one which has reduced Oxbridge dons and Fellows of All Souls to helpless bewilderment, upon occasion. (The rule in the Woolfonts is not to hope to win unless on a team captained by Headmaster Trulock; His Grace; the C of E clergy; or Sher Mirza, ostentatiously sipping squash and getting the answers right; to which has been added the codicil, since their attaining their majorities, that one can do quite well with Rupert or James as a captain, also.)

Personal life
<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Simon and Jenny Kellow are the parents of Nick, Sally, and Mabel. Nick Kellow, having finished his apprenticeships and work placements, runs, as of 2017, the Woolpack, in Crucis. Sally is training at the maltings in the Vale; Mabel is training in sales at the Woolfont Brewery.

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Mr Kellow keeps wicket on occasion - ‘when’, according to the Duke as captain, ‘we don’t use him as the screen’ – for the Woolfonts Combined CC.