MEMBERS of a West Dorset family recently enjoyed a long-awaited reunion in the Crown Inn in Uploders near Bridport – their former family home.

Janet Gillham contacted Looking Back to let us know that several of her relatives were visiting from New Zealand and wanted to see their ‘ancestral seat’.

So they met up in the pub and had a fabulous time.

Janet said: “We were a gathering of cousins, some visiting from New Zealand and anxious to learn where our parents and grandparents grew up, in particular the licensee of the Crown way back in the early 1900s.

“Then the licensee was Mrs Adelaide Louise Bartlett, grandmother to some of us but great grandmother to our New Zealand relatives.

“The family history attached to the pub is unique in that grandmother Bartlett’s family had held the licence continuously since it was built more than 200 years ago. She herself was only 18 when the death of her parents left her the youngest licensee in the country.

“She went on to have nine children, two of whom emigrated to New Zealand while a daughter Kate took over the licence of the pub in the 1930s.”

Mrs Gillham, who lives in Charlton Down, also remembered how busy the pub got during the Second World War.

“We children were often involved in sleepovers while our parents helped aunt Kate in the bars. We often slept ‘top to tail’, four or five in a bed, which we thought was great fun.”

And when the family got together at the Crown for their reunion, they were able to revisit the site of many of their high jinks.

Janet said: “The present landlady kindly took us to their private living quarters to see the rooms we used to sleep in many years ago. Our get together in the old family home was a great success and we followed it with a visit to the family graves in the churchyard at Loders.”