Family tradition
Craig is very much a local boy with strong canal connections. He was born in 1967 in the village of Barby, on the ridge to the north of the Oxford Canal.
There is something of a pub-running tradition in his family His grandparents Ted and Amy Allen were publicans, and during the late 1940s ran The Ship Inn at Braunston, the village where Amy was born. An old coaching inn on the London to Birmingham road, it stood at what is today the entrance to Braunston Marina.
When Craig was growing up in Barby in the mid-Eighties, his father bought the Vulan for family boating. It was a converted 70ft former FMC steamer, built in 1906, which still had its original elm bottom. The experience gave Craig the bug for the canals.
After leaving school he trained as a TIG welder, and went on to make stainless steel kitchens for the catering trade, including McDonald’s. This he found a very useful experience when he moved into working on narrowboats and from the 1990s fitting them out as well. His kitchen-building experience also gave him invaluable knowledge when giving his pub’s kitchen a makeover to modern standards and for supplying food quickly.
In 1999 Craig started his own business – Evolution Narrowboats – first based at Whilton Marina and then at the premises of Pro Build Narrowboats near the canal at Stockton. They built the hulls, which he then fitted out and painted – completing 14 in all. He then continued working on the canals in various capacities. put my super-sleuth Jenny on the case to find out what she could through the internet. She responded that the earliest article she could find was from 1817. The Grand Junction Canal was formally opened from Braunston to Weedon in 1796, so the inn could well have dated from around that time, being built next to both the Top Lock on the Buckby Flight and Watling Street, and at a pivotal point in the Watford Gap.
The 1817 article was an advertisement for sale or rent of a newly built ‘brick and slated’ pub called the Duke of Wellington, ‘adjoining the Grand Junction Canal, the Norton Locks, and the Old Watling Street road…with a range of buildings used for stabling, hay and straw barns; together with a pump and well of excellent water.’
Was this name later changed to The New Inn? Maybe other gems of past history will come to light in times to come.
However, I should mention in passing the alleged suicide of a young girl, Matilda – surname unknown and likewise when it happened – sometime in the olden days. But the pub, under successive owners, has always claimed she was kept as a slave worker by her cruel uncle who owned the pub. She was locked in one of those small rooms, painting Buckby cans, until she could take no more and hanged herself from one of the hooks on the ceiling beams, used for hanging Buckby cans.
It is all said to have happened on a hook above what is today Table 11… and this is advertised on the board by the canalside entrance. So don’t hang around. Book that table now! already see a queue of loyal customers waiting to come in. They included a retired couple from Long Buckby who had always come for lunch every Friday – he to eat fish and chips, and she anything but.
Soon Craig and his young team of three were flat out serving drinks, and it was time for me to leave. The weather was warmish and people were sitting outside, beside the ‘Niagarously roaring lock’, as a Canal & River Trust volunteer wound the paddles. Some of the summer was still ahead, and people now wanted to enjoy themselves again.