Spotlight On ... Working For A Living

The Bonny Cravat Inn: where generations of my family worked for a living.

When I think about the different ways generations of my family worked for a living, some stories gather around a farm, a trade, an occupation or a small piece of land. This story however gathers around an inn.

The Bonny Cravat Inn at Woodchurch, Kent, in England became, for generation after generation on the paternal side of my family, a place of work, endurance, and family continuity.  It was not simply somewhere my ancestors appeared briefly in the record.  It was a workplace woven through the lives of the Ramsden, Fullagar, Hukins, and later Bourne families for well over a century.

  The Bonny Cravat Inn, Woodchurch, Kent
— a place where generations of the Ramsden, Fullagar, and Hukins families worked for a living.

Source: “The Bonny Cravat, Woodchurch” by Oast House Archive, via Geograph, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.

This was no ordinary inn.  By the time members of my family began keeping it, the Bonny Cravat was already old.

Edward Hasted, writing in his History of Kent and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent (Volume 7 of the 1798 second edition), noted that Phebe Goble of Woodchurch, by will in 1692, left a charitable bequest of £2 per year to the poor to be paid by her heirs forever, from a farm called the Bonny Cravat, “now an ale-house”. 

I love that passing reference because it gives such an early glimpse of the place.  Long before it became part of my family story, it was already there in village life in the 17th century.

The building that stands today belongs mainly to the later part of the inn's story. The National Heritage List for England lists the present Bonny Cravat as a Grade II building dating from about 1800, and the Woodchurch conservation material notes it as a prominent inn in the village, opposite the church.  So, the business itself is much older than the surviving structure. 

That feels fitting somehow.  The place of work endured, even as the people and the building changed around it.

The list of Bonny Cravat Innkeepers and Publicans sourced from the Woodchurch Local and Family History site using records compiled by the Woodchurch Ancestry Group.

When I first came across this list of innkeepers and publicans associated with The Bonny Cravat, I did not just see names in sequence. I saw husbands and wives working side by side, widows carrying on after loss, sons following fathers, brothers taking their turn, and one village inn becoming part of my family’s working life across generations.

Woodchurch 1902 - The Bonny Cravat Inn on the left
Source: Woodchurch Local and Family History site 

A family workplace in the heart of Woodchurch

One of the things that stands out most strongly in the record of innkeepers is the repeated evidence of partnership.

My paternal 7th great-grandparents George and Mary Ramsden née Eastland were both part of the inn’s story. 

So were my paternal 6th great-grandparents John and Elizabeth Fullagar née Potter. 

In a later generation came my paternal 4th great-grandparents John and Elizabeth Fullagar née Bourne. 

Then, decades later, my paternal 3rd great-grandparents James and Susannah Hukins née Fullagar took their place there too.

Again and again, the same pattern repeats. Not simply a publican, but a couple. Not only a man’s occupation, but a household economy.  An inn like this was never run by one person alone.  There were customers to serve, stock to buy, food and drink to prepare, rooms and fires to manage, accounts to keep, neighbours to receive, children to raise, and all the ordinary messiness of life going on in the background.

This record makes that shared labour unusually visible.  The women were clearly part of the story, often carrying on after a death because there was no real alternative.  That is one reason the widows stay with me so strongly in this story: 

Mary Ramsden née Eastland. 

Elizabeth Fullagar née Potter.  

Elizabeth Fullagar née Bourne. 

Mahala Bourne-Rolfe née Chacksfield.

Their names are not mere interruptions in a male line of innkeepers.  They are part of the real substance of the story.  Each represents a woman who kept both household and business together at a difficult moment, because the work still had to be done.  Family history so often lets a woman slip into the background, but here they stand plainly in view.

The long family connection - Ramsden, Fullagar, Hukins, Bourne.

The first recognisable names on the list of innkeepers are direct ancestors -

• George Ramsden, my 7th great-grandfather, kept The Bonny Cravat for thirteen years from 1706 to 1719. 

• After his death, Mary Ramsden née Eastland, his widow and my 7th great-grandmother, continued from 1719 to 1720. 

Later came direct ancestors and distant cousins from the Fullagar and the Hukins families. For close  to 90 years, from 1734 to 1820, the running of the Bonny Cravat passed largely between these two families.

Listed innkeepers from the Fullagar and Hukins families are highlighted with hearts

The Fullagars carried a long stretch of the inn’s history. 

• John Fullagar, my 6th great-grandfather, appears for twelve years from 1734 to 1746.

• After him came Elizabeth Fullagar née Potter, his widow and my 6th great-grandmother, who ran the inn for four years.

• The inn then passed to John Fullagar, son of John and Elizabeth and my 5th great-grandfather, from 1750 to 1758.   He would not have worked alone either.  His wife, Sarah Fullagar née Gilham, my 5th great-grandmother, would have been part of that working household.  Sarah was the granddaughter of George Ramsden and Mary Ramsden née Eastland, the first of my ancestors connected with the inn, so the knowledge and habits of innkeeping may well have run through the family as naturally as any inheritance.

• Later, the inn returned again to yet another John Fullagar, my 4th great-grandfather and son of John and Sarah Fullagar née Gilham.  He ran the inn for twenty-one years from 1782 to 1803.

• Elizabeth Fullagar née Bourne, his wife and my 4th great-grandmother, continued running the inn for thirteen years after the death of her husband, from 1803 to 1816. Once again, no doubt she had been working alongside her husband during his years at the inn.

• The son of John Fullagar and Elizabeth Fullagar née Bourne, Thomas Fullagar, then took over from his mother in 1816 and ran the inn for four years.  Thomas, whilst not a direct ancestor, was my 3rd great-granduncle.

• Samuel Fullagar appears from 1856 to 1865.  Again, whilst not a direct ancestor, he was my 3rd cousin 4x removed, great great-grandson of the first of my Fullagar ancestors who ran the inn - John Fullagar and Elizabeth Fullagar née Potter. 

The Hukins family formed another thread. 

• John Hukins, my 5th great-grandfather, kept the inn for seventeen years from 1758 to 1775, and he too was almost certainly supported by his wife, my 5th great-grandmother, Elizabeth Hukins née Howe.

• John was followed by his brother James Hukins for seven years from 1775 to 1782.  Whilst James was not a direct ancestor of mine, he was my 5th great-granduncle. 

• Decades later the inn returned to both the Hukins and Fullagar families through James Hukins and Susannah Hukins née Fullagar, my 3rd great-grandparents, who were there for thirteen years from 1824 to 1837.  

Susannah was the sister of Thomas Fullagar, and the daughter of John Fullagar and Elizabeth Fullagar née Bourne. James was the grandson of John Hukins and Elizabeth Hukins née Howe.  By then the family connections around the inn had become dense and interwoven.

Another view of the Bonny Cravat Inn at Woodchurch,
the village inn that remained part of my family's working life for generations.

Source: “Bonny Cravat – Front Road, Woodchurch” by Brian Chadwick, via Geograph, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.

Another branch of that wider story - Bourne - appears in the 1850s. 

• Edmund Bourne, my 2nd cousin 4x removed, ran the inn for four years from 1852 to 1856.  He entered the Bonny Cravat story through marriage to Mahala Rolfe née Chacksfield, the widow of Henry Rolfe. 

What makes this part of the story especially striking is that Mahala had already been keeping the inn on her own for three years after her first husband Henry’s death. (Henry Rolfe had been the innkeeper from 1845 to 1849, undoubtedly supported by Mahala). Again, Mahala was not simply a name bridging one male innkeeper to another. For those years after the death of her first husband, she held the business together in her own right, before Edmund married her and joined the next phase of the inn's working life. 

Although Mahala was not a blood relative of mine, she belongs with the other widows in this story who kept the Bonny Cravat going when life could easily have pushed everything off course.

The work behind the names

What I love most in stories like this are the small details that remind us what the work may actually have looked like. 

• A Kent Archives publication, drawing on Woodchurch parish records for 1765, notes that John Hukins, innkeeper at the Bonny Cravat, was paid “beer for buryings” at local wakes. That tiny detail is one of my favourites because it brings the inn to life. It reminds us that this was not simply somewhere people came to drink. It was part of the village’s social fabric — present even at moments of mourning.

That wider role matters. 

• In villages like Woodchurch, an inn was rarely only a drinking house. It was a meeting place, a landmark, somewhere people heard news, settled arrangements, and crossed paths with neighbours. Standing opposite the church, the Bonny Cravat sat right at the centre of village life.

There is another layer to that history too — one that gives the Bonny Cravat a darker edge.

• Local tradition links the inn with smuggling in the eighteenth century, and that its strange and memorable name may have come from a French vessel remembered as La Bonne Crevette or La Bonne Corvette, in contradiction to the information in Hasted's text. 

Inns such as the Bonny Cravat sat where so many worlds met: respectable village life, hard-earned daily labour, travel, gossip, business, and sometimes things less lawful. 

• Smuggling was rife in Kent in the eighteenth century and continued into the nineteenth, and by the 1820s the district around Woodchurch was associated with men from the gang led by George Ransley, better known through the history of the Aldington Gang. In October 1826 Ransley and others were captured, and the gang’s members were later tried on capital charges.

During the years when James and Susannah were running the Bonny Cravat, they would almost certainly have known of the local smuggling world, even if only through village talk. 

• Stories remembered later say that the Bonny Cravat itself was sometimes used as a courtroom, and that proceedings connected with captured smugglers were held there. Perhaps that is a village memory rather than hard fact, but even as memory it is vivid and revealing. It suggests how closely public life, danger, and daily work could intersect in one place.

There are other old tales attached to the inn as well.

• One says the cellar, still used for beer, once connected by tunnel to the nearby church, perhaps with origins reaching back to the Reformation. Another recalls condemned smugglers being hanged outside the inn after trial. Whether every detail survives exactly as it happened or not, these stories cling to the Bonny Cravat because it was clearly one of those places where village life was lived at close quarters — not neatly or gently, but vividly.

An honest reminder about risk

One detail in particular stops this story from drifting into nostalgia. The Bonny Cravat was not just some picturesque old public house or quaint place where my family members lived and worked.  It was also the place where debts had to be met, and where the rougher edges of local life came right up to the door.

• In 1837, James Hukins appeared in connection with relief for insolvent debtors, a reminder that keeping an inn was never a guaranteed road to security. Family history can sometimes make an old inn sound comfortably picturesque, but for the people living it, it was work tied to risk, debt, and uncertainty.

I think that is central to the story. The Bonny Cravat was a place of continuity and family labour, yes — but it was also part of a precarious economy in which fortunes could shift quickly.  Bills still had to be paid.  Stock still had to be bought.  Losses could mount.  A bad run could undo years of effort.

By the end of 1837, my 3rd great-grandparents, James and Susannah, found themselves in dire circumstances and were in severe financial trouble. They could no longer continue at the inn and a mere two years later they were preparing to emigrate.  

From Woodchurch to Australia

One part of this story did not end in Woodchurch.

When my 3rd great-grandparents James Hukins and Susannah Hukins née Fullagar left the village and emigrated to Australia in 1839 with their family, the Bonny Cravat story took on a longer reach. In one sense, the inn itself was left behind.  But in another, the habits and knowledge shaped there travelled with them.

I find that continuity especially moving, because the family's connection to public-house life did not disappear in Australia. Two of their sons — my 2nd great-grandfather Adolphus Hukins and my 2nd great grand-uncle John Hukins — were both running pubs in Australia in the 1850s.

There is something remarkable in that. A family shaped for generations by the life of one village inn in Kent carried that working knowledge across the world. What had been learned at Woodchurch was not lost.  It became part of the family's Australian story as well.

Seen that way, the Bonny Cravat was more than a village inn attached to one side of my family tree. It was a workplace woven deeply into my family's life, part of a tradition of labour that crossed generations and, eventually, continents.

Sources and notes

With thanks to the local historians and record keepers whose work helps bring places like the Bonny Cravat back into view:

This post draws on a family document, Innkeepers and Publicans of The Bonny Cravat, based on material from the Woodchurch Local and Family History site and records compiled by the Woodchurch Ancestry Group.

This post also uses Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 2nd edition, volume 7 (Canterbury: W. Bristow, 1798), in the Woodchurch section under “Charities,” which preserves an early reference to the Bonny Cravat as an ale-house.

Additional context comes from Kent Archives, Issue 15 (Autumn 2019), which quotes a 1765 Woodchurch parish record noting John Hukins, innkeeper at the Bonny Cravat, being paid for supplying “beer for buryings.”