In recent years at Weobley, Herefordshire, rain or shine, Jules Whitmarsh could be found walking Berkeley, his rescue pug, perched regally in a pram. Man and pug taking the air with stoic faces, processing glacially uphill on Portland Street, all encounters greeted with a pre-emptive shout of “Bloody awful!” followed by a grin.
Berkeley had lost the use of his hind quarters and Whitmarsh wasn’t far from losing the use of his, so when opportunity presented they would pause to pass the time of day, Whitmarsh railing against the Tory government and always adept at using his perceived antiquity to hurry away from intellectual traps, or boredom. This bluster, his escape route, concealed a shy and self-effacing man who across nearly half a century masterminded the creation of two notable country restaurants, educating and enabling generations of youngsters who sought work in his kitchen.
His work was abetted by his flame-haired partner Juliet and their chance acquaintance with the celebrity chef Keith Floyd, a neighbour at Bristol when both were pursuing unfulfilling careers in education.
Through Floyd, the couple became bewitched by French country cooking, experienced on family holidays; potages, cassoulets, terrines, pâtés, simple delicious food that wasn’t readily available in 1970s Britain.
There was a derelict pub for sale, at Llowes, close to Hay-on-Wye. Hay was then a downtrodden town with a declining population but in the earliest throes of becoming home to an unlikely cultural revival, often accompanied by wild misbehaviour.
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Julian and Juliet Whitmarsh bought the Radnor Arms in early 1974 and spent nearly a year patching the structure by themselves before finally employing a builder. When they opened for trade “we had a bar of some sort, a kitchen of some sort and at night we could still see the stars through the gaps in the old stone roof”.
Word of Whitmarsh’s cooking spread as did the Radnor’s reputation for being “open all hours” and Hay’s hippie glitterati swarmed the pub with Whitmarsh frequently driving his refreshed clients home in the small hours.
Often he would pop out from the kitchen after midnight to discuss St Paul (or anything else that was engaging him) with the assembled congregation before abruptly stomping back to complete the washing up. Regular patrons included Marianne Faithfull and the late April Ashley (obituary, December 29, 2021) who arrived one evening wearing an extravagant feather boa before departing for an outdoor tryst, returning sans boa as if nothing had happened. The feathers were discovered scattered across the garden.
“People’s lives were very private, there was no social media, nobody worried about drinking and driving. If you ran a pub you had to be the soul of discretion,” recalled Whitmarsh. “People were having sex round the back of the log-pile in the garden then they’d come out with their wives for dinner three nights later. You didn’t say anything.”
Richard Booth, the self- declared “King Of Hay” (obituary, August 23, 2019) was another late-night regular at the Radnor Arms. One evening he arrived carrying the weekly takings from his bookshops and, for reasons best known to himself, proceeded to scatter £15,000 in notes around the bar. These were collected by staff on all fours across the next 24 hours and placed in the safe. A couple of days later Booth’s company secretary arrived, looking pained, having tracked his employer’s every movement in a vain hunt for the loot. Whitmarsh kept him on the wire for a time, all innocence, before revealing that the money was safely cached.
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Over time, as word spread and bookings multiplied, kitchen relations could be fraught and pans were known to fly under pressure. Prisoners were rarely taken. A timorous inquiry about nuts would be met with a full-on bellow: “Nuts? Of course there are f***ing nuts in it . . . this is a restaurant, not a f***ing health farm!”
One evening, fed up with tardy guests, Whitmarsh greeted his late arriving clients at the door armed with a meat cleaver. Something had to give. By now the couple had a young family. “Ten years is long enough to run a pub, it’s exhausting. We decided to do something different.”
The last straw came when a local worthy demanded Christmas lunch for all his staff on December 2. “December 2? I suppose that’s quite normal now, but this was 1984,” Juliet said. “We’d had interest in the place and I sold it two days later.”
They moved to Weobley, Herefordshire where Jules Café-Bistro was founded in 1985 with the conversion of an old village shop, and many of their clients followed, including the Herefordshire “Wednesday Wheelers”, a band of 30 diehard cyclists who had populated the Radnor Arms from its earliest days, attracted by real coffee, delicious pastries and the ambience of a French country café complete with red geraniums outside the front door and the scent of sweet peas on the garden terrace.
The Rollers, the Bentleys and the Jags parked up on Portland Street for lunch and supper, and selected from a simple menu of French country cooking, using fresh local ingredients. Nobody arrived late. The Radnor Arms is long gone, a private dwelling since 2015, but Whitmarsh’s tradition of encouraging the young persists at Weobley.
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Their pupil Tom Evans has adopted the mantle of head chef at Jules Café and runs his own sidebar business, the Weobley Brewing Company.
Julian Miles Whitmarsh was born at Hodge Hill, Birmingham in 1936, the son of Arthur Whitmarsh, a schoolmaster, and his wife Isobel. He was educated at King Edward’s School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he arrived in 1953 as an exhibitioner with the highest marks in his year, achieving a second in English.
After leaving Cambridge he taught briefly in Birmingham before becoming a lecturer in humanities at Bristol Polytechnic. At the wedding of mutual friends in late 1971 he met Juliet Vickers, a lecturer in drama studies at Wolverhampton and proposed before the end of the reception. They were married in early 1972 and had two sons, Tobias, an army officer and Henry who works in social services.
On his 86th birthday Whitmarsh wrote: “It has not been an easy life but it has been one of intense and beautiful revelation.” To explain what he meant he recalled how, as an eight-year-old, he found himself alone one day on Hatterrall Ridge “among the bees and the heather, under the fathomless sky” and he felt at that moment that “everything was alive, and me a part of it”.
Jules Whitmarsh, restaurateur, was born on May 11, 1936. He died of undisclosed causes on November 3, 2022, aged 86