The Pig's Nose at East Prawle - Best Pub in Devon 2021
I see on social media to today that one of my favourite pubs in the world has just been officially voted Best Pub in Devon at the 2021 at The National Pub and Bar Awards. Which is wonderful and fully deserved, I am sure…
The note on social media reminded me of an article I once wrote about the Pig’s Nose for the Western Morning News in a series we did about great pubs with Otter Brewery. It gives me great pleasure to repeat the article here - although please remember this was written several years ago and I believe Lesley and Peter’s son Joss has a great deal to do with running the pub now…
Some pubs are great, some have greatness thrust upon them thanks to bank-loads of investment, and a few evolve to such greatness under their own brand of charm that they become the kind of institutions that should be preserved for national prosperity.
The Pig’s Nose Inn at East Prawle, perched at the very southerly tip of Devon, is firmly in the latter category. If, after visiting six amazing pubs for this series with Otter Brewery, I had to choose just one hostelry to represent the West Country on the nation’s roll-call of public-house honour, it would probably have to be this one.
Me with my pal, Pig’s Nose landlady Lesley
The others all have their own numerous merits, but there’s something about the Pig’s Nose that happens to suit my own scruffy, odd, mirthful, never-too-serious, eccentric set of requirements.
For a start, a quirky sense of humour seems to run through the Aladdin’s Cave of 10,000 objects that is the Pig’s Nose. That was obvious straight away before we’d even stepped foot in the place…
A blackboard had been put out on the stone steps of the porch saying: “Welcome the WMN and Otter Brewery” and underneath it a real red carpet had been rolled from the interior out into the street. It was the first, and probably the last, time anyone has laid out a red carpet for me in 40 years of journalism.
Then, when you enter the dimpsey but cosy bar, you begin to see all manner of quirky bits and bobs that will make you smile, or chortle, or laugh out loud. There’s a 100 year old phone that landlord Peter Distin Webber has somehow wired up so that it still works. It sits close to a similarly aged till which is also in full working order.
In front of it on the bar all manner of crazy objects wrestle for space - like the tin marked Grumpy Old Git Mints or the dish shaped like a pig in a bath that says it contains aniseed balls. There’s also the knitting. All round the pub there are balls of wool and knitting needles and customers are encouraged to have a go while they’re supping a pint or waiting for food.
“People just knit a square,” laughs landlady Lesley Distin Webber. “I haven’t got a clue about knitting, so all I do is sew up all the squares and make cushion covers out of them.”
She laughs again. And you soon learn that Lesley likes laughing. So does Peter. And so do Otter Brewery’s Patrick McCaig and myself. We spend three solid hours doing a very great deal of alcohol-less laughing at the Pig’s Nose.
We laugh when a regular customer comes in with a small dog named Roy - and the dog, not the man, is given a glass of ale.
Patrick McCaig laughs even more when he’s told Roy will not touch any beer other than the stuff made by Otter Brewery.
We laugh when Peter tells about his career as a road manager in the rock and pop industry. We are beside ourselves when he and Leslie tell us about their failed mission to live in Ireland (“We did carrot growing, keeping donkeys, the lot.)
We laugh when Leslie tells us managers of charity and junk shops for 100s of miles around rub their hands with glee when Peter walks through their door.
Peter and Lesley bought the Pig’s Nose 15 years ago and I have it on good authority from locals in East Prawle that the place was much in need of a change.
The reason Otter Brewery joined the Western Morning News to sponsor this series was so that we could highlight some of the brilliant public houses the West Country still boasts in these darks times when so many hostelries are closing forever.
Some fail despite of oodles of tender love and care and the best laid of plans. Some even go to the wall after highly experienced landlords have taken over and run pubs to the best of their ability.
So perhaps it is an enigma that Peter and Lesley knew nothing whatsoever about the licensing trade when they bought the Pig’s Nose. Indeed, Lesley confided to me that an hour after buying the place she sat in the car on the way home and asked, with sudden sense of horror-filled realisation: “Who is going to do the cooking?”
So it says an awful lot - a really tremendous amount - about this man and wife team that, a decade-and-a-half years later, they now run a public house that truly can be deemed a Great British Institution. When I tweeted I was visiting the place I had loads of replies from people all around the country saying things like: “Lucky you! It’s my favourite pub!”
Here, in their owns words, is Peter and Lesley’s story…
“Most of my working life I was a road manager - when I heard about that job I put a suit on not realising it was actually a roadie carrying the bags,” shrugs Peter mentioning some of the bands he worked with in the 1960s (Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch, Blue Mink, the Searchers,etc)
“I was born in Paignton - my roots are here and I always wanted to come back,” he goes on. “I ran away from home when I was 20; went on the trawlers at Brixham; got shipwrecked; became a beatnik; went down to St Ives; hung out… Then one day I went for a haircut in Wadebridge and the barber said: ‘I know something you could do - be a road manager’.
“And that was it for years. I did escape several times because I always wanted to be in the country,” he added.
“We kept sneaking off to Devon every minute we could,” said Lesley. “We had an old van we used to carry equipment in. On a Friday night we’d chuck a mattress in the back and go off to Totnes to stay with Terry the Tuner.”
After a brief sojourn in Ireland where the pair bought an old chapel and Peter gained what he calls “an addiction for sheds”, they returned to London.
“We came back with renewed energy - got some more studios - but eventually thought: no, it’s got to be country,” he recalls. “So off we went to Dorset. But every thatched cottage we saw, I thought: ‘What’s good of that? What can I do with a cottage? I need to work’.
“That’s when we arrived in East Prawle and saw the pub - and we thought: ‘Yes, it’s like buying a job’. So here we are.
“I’d no idea how to run a pub. The previous landlord took me into the cellar and showed me various pipes and dials. He wasn’t much help,” says Peter who redesigned the whole beer part of the operation so that the barrels are now behind the bar (put there with the help of a kind of Heath Robinson system of ropes and pullies).
“We only did soup to start with, but then we did a few pies and things,” said Leslie referring to her instant conversion from air stewardess to pub chef. “Then it went mad.”
As for the crazy look of the place with all its countless bits and bobs, Peter told us: “I’ve always collected bric-a-brac - it was like that in my London studios. So when we came here, a lot came down with us. I am a bit of a magpie.”
But it’s music that has really put the Pig’s Nose on the national map. Partly thanks to Peter’s contacts from his road manager days, the pub has hosted some amazing big name acts - and part of the reason it’s been able to do so is because it must be one of the only inns in the country with its own village hall attached…
“We’ve got a hall here and we thought: ‘Wow! We must do something with that’. Just before we left London, Wishbone Ash were using my studio and one of the guys said they’d play here. It took us a year, but we plucked up courage and put them on. We were a bit worried because at the time you were only supposed to have two people playing in a pub for some reason - so, because they had two guitarists, I put out signs saying ‘Wishbone Ash - guitar duet’.
“We weren’t licensed at all, never mind a duet!” Peter laughs. “But after that we put a lot of investment in sound-proofing etc to keep the health and safety people happy. People went mad over the performances and we realised we were onto something rather special.
“It was always a sell out - people came from all over the country. It just got too hectic - the parties afterwards were pretty good though,” smiled Peter.
“They certainly were,” beamed Leslie. “They were hat parties. We have big boxes full of all sorts of weird and wonderful hats - and people would put one on and that would change their persona. We got quite famous for the hat parties.
“But it got to the point where we wanted a quieter life,” sighed Peter as if regretting their decision to slow down on the gigging front.
“It’s age,” said Lesley. “We’ve got old.”
“So now we just have acts in the bar - solo artists and so on,” adds Peter. “It’s a lot easier, and more intimate.”
All the while Patrick McCaig was beaming as he listened to the pair: “Every pub we go to has a reason for being there and why people go there,” he said. “What I love about your story is that it seems to have been a solution to your life. What you seem to have created is incredibly warm mayhem - which people have really bought into. And it’s become something really special. I think it’s brilliant.”
“Service is all-important,” said Peter. “For example, we get the barmaids to snip the top off Nobby’s Nuts packets. We are proud that we snip people’s nuts. In fact, there are a lot of funny double-entendres here…”
At this point he trails off to tell a long story I don’t quite understand about a pair of tights and something to do with a hungry dog and some sausages…
Our jolly lunch was coming to an end - as indeed is this series - so perhaps we’d better leave the Pig’s Nose and Going Down the Pub with a very philosophical thing Peter muttered…
“I couldn’t bear the thought of having a house where people just didn’t come in. You’d have to invite them in, wouldn’t you? We take pubs for granted really. Just think - if you went into a normal quiet village and there was no such thing as a pub - and then someone came along and said: ‘Well, down the road there’s a special sort of house where you can just walk in and be welcome’.”
Peter agreed with me that if there weren’t such things as pubs, someone would have to invent them: “It’s true,” he said. “It would scare me to live in a normal house - I’d end up putting a barrel in there and hoping someone would come to see me.”
The coast near East Prawle
