A Whitbread Pub for many years, run by Dave & Lee Higgins in the late eighties & nineties during which time it was extended and the restaurant at the back added. Dave later moved to the Isle of Wight taking his infamous Red Fire engine with him to the Woodvale in Gurnard. He left the pub trade a couple of years later taking on a role behind bars of a different kind at a prison on the Island (he works there!). Living in West Cowes, not far from Yarmouth where he met Lee.
Dave had researched the pub’s history and it’s thanks to him that these old pictures are still around…
Home to the FA cup during part of the second world war and the background to the popular quiz question “Which team has held the FA cup for the longest period?” The answer is Portsmouth FC who won it, then WW2 postponed the contest. The cup had been kept in the City until the threat of bombing raids when it was moved to the safer location of The Bird in Hand public house in Lovedean. The landlord kept it under his bed although it was paraded around the pub from time to time and it’s said that some of the pub locals drank ale from it.
Today The Bird in Hand has a website here.