FEATURE caused by a spark from a railway engine. On George’s return from the conflict, having lost an eye, he once again took up the licence and Virtue became the hostess until her death in 1932 at the age of 75. George sustained a further injury in 1921 when he was ploughing close to the station and his horse kicked out and caught a chain which injured the side of his face which had already been so badly damaged in the war. He left the Railway Hotel to go to the Stamford Arms in 1928 and the licence was transferred to Arthur Boltz at the Bourne Petty Sessions. Arthur was born in Wisbech in 1887 and at the age of 32 he had married Eva Luff in Kings Lynn. His tenure was not without incident; in 1928 he was before the beak for allowing a mare to stray onto Station Road. PC Freemont had looked after the animal for an hour, and Arthur claimed that it had escaped while he was eating his lunch. The couple’s son Bernard sustained a broken collar bone and a strained neck while playing with other children in a room at the hotel in 1932. Many will associate exotic animals with the Pet Refuge, but there was a precursor to this in 1934 when Bernard had left the hotel and was confronted with a 4ft long snake. With great presence of mind he encouraged the reptile to curl itself around the handle of his fishing net and skilfully manoeuvred it into a box over which he placed a sheet of glass. The markings were black and green and experts pronounced as being venomous; it was thought that it had arrived in a banana case left at the
station. It was kept in captivity from early morning to late afternoon when it escaped by moving the glass, much to the alarm of residents at the hotel! Tragedy struck during the Second World War when two airmen were knocked down and killed on the railway near the Stowgate crossing by the Grimsby to King’s Cross express shortly after 10 pm on 16 February 1945. They were part of a party guarding a crashed plane at Stowgate and were returning along the line when the tragedy occurred. Just after the war in 1949 Soames & Co was bought by Steward and Patterson who installed a prominent yellow and blue sign at the hotel, easily noticeable as passengers alighted from the train. During the 1950s the Hares were recorded as the licensees. Richard Hare, son of the licensee, escaped with minor injuries after it was reported that he had been involved in a car crash in 1955 with Peter Mason on the main Bourne to Peterborough Road. The Railway Hotel was taken over by Watney Mann in 1963 but with the closing of the station to passengers in 1961 and goods in 1964, its fate was sealed and it was closed in 1966 and put up for auction in 1968. Peter and Josephine Clifton fell in love with the old building and spent three years stripping out the interior with its winding staircases and corridors and re-covering the ground floor with parquet flooring. One of the bedrooms was converted to an upstairs bathroom, downstairs was a small dining room and large lounge with a large stone fireplace and farmhouse kitchen. The couple, who had two children, Nicola and Ashley, then opened as a hotel (a kennel) with a very different kind of clientele, and with eight dogs of their own, including Alsatians, Poodles and a Corgi with a litter of puppies. In February 2011 the couple moved out of the Railway Hotel, leaving it to another Peter and Anne McNish who now run the award-winning business ‘Kennedy Wild Bird Food’ from the site.
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Soames Brewery lorry.