When Ron Cook came down to Maxey, seven years ago – following the death of Ron’s brother Adrian, who was landlord of the Blue Bell at the time, he was thinking about how he might leave the Sheffield area, where he was in the butchery trade and how he might persuade his hairdresser wife, Kathleen, to start a whole new life together running the pub.
Kathleen and Ron at behind the bar
In the event, Kathleen needed some persuading to leave her career and lovely house in Derbyshire and it took six visits for her to make up her mind!
“She wouldn’t come until all the upstairs rooms were decorated,” said Ron. “She gave us a date – and then surprised us by arriving two weeks early!”
The Blue Bell is now fully refurbished to Kathleen’s satisfaction and it has been such a successful venture, that the couple have plans to extend the building, creating space for another bar, a function room and to turn the existing bottle store and cask area into a fitted industrial kitchen.
The hard work the couple have put in has reaped rewards in that the pub has won several awards from CAMRA including the 2005 Gold Award (for a clean pub with good beer), 2006 Pub of the Year, 2007 Community Pub (for the whole of Cambridgeshire) and recently a Certificate of Excellence for beer from Caskmark.
Ron and Kathleen offer three permanent beers: Fuller’s London Pride, Black Sheep, Absolution from Abbeydale, Sheffield, two different lagers, one cider, Guiness, John Smith’s Smooth as well as three Guest beers, which change on a regular basis. Add to this, wines from all over the world and twenty-three different optics and you have a selection that makes your head spin before you’ve touched a drop!
The Blue Bell is very much a community pub and is the headquarters for the Maxey Charities, an organisation which runs different events over a year, normally raising around £1,000 each for between four and five charities, including the Deeping Men’s Group and the East Anglia Air Ambulance.
Noticing a buzzard keeping its beady eye on the till, you may be surprised by the amount of stuffed animals and birds around. This is a little indulgence of Ron’s which began when a customer encouraged him to go on a trip to a Cowbit taxidermist where he was taking a kingfisher. After that Ron acquired a pair of pheasants and “it all started from there.”
Now, it’s all stopped because Kathleen has said:” That’s enough!”
Today Kathleen can say, truthfully, that she has no regrets about coming to the Blue Bell.
Not sure what to expect at first, she described how when she and Ron arrived in Maxey as ‘total strangers’ the village people welcomed them and accepted them straightaway.
“It is a completely different way of life from what we were used to,” she admits, “but we love running the pub. People say we can’t go out, but our friends come to the pub to see us. The best part is, we always have a good laugh.”
