Speaking Personally.

The Mrs Beeton of today.

OUR COUNTY`S QUEEN OF COOKS

By James Wentworth Day. Essex Countryside Magazine April 1971.

Picture: The founder of the best-loved sailing club on the Essex coast, Mrs Winifred Mary Hone, has died. She was a great character and a superb cook. In this photograph she is seen with the late "Admiral" Wyatt who built many well-known yachts and fishing smacks.

A Woman who was to my mind, and in the estimation of many others, one of the most remarkable and lovable characters in Essex has died. She lived in a converted boat-house on Mersea Island, which she had turned many years ago into a small, unpretentious but highly esoteric club known as the Social and Sailing Club. There are lots of small clubs devoted to both social life and sailing round the coast of England, but none, I think, that could boast of having provided a wartime dinner for Winston Churchill, of which he remarked gratefully "One of the best dinners I have eaten since the war began. I won't spoil it by asking how you managed it".

Nor do I know of any other club of that sort into which you might walk on a winter evening and find the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Goddard, peacefully enjoying his oysters in the company of men who had dredged them up from the bottom of the creek and of a winkler, straight off the mud, who had opened them in the Kitchen.

The founder of this remarkable club, which despite its distinguished visitors was and is utterly classless - that is its magic - but exclusive in its own personal way, was Mrs. Winifred Mary Hone. When she died in her eightieth year just before Christmas a light went out. She was unique. To begin with she was a descendant of John Evelyn, the famous Carolean Diarist, from whom she may well have inherited her powers of shrewd observation, quick summing up of character, pungent wit and downright manner. She could not tolerate fools lightly. You either loved Mrs. Hone or you ran from her. I was one of many who loved her.

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Her husband was of equally distinguished literary ancestry, for he descended from John Hone, the Irish eighteenth - century miscellanist and Diarist, the author of Hone`s Everyday Book and A Dictionary of Quotations. The result was a unique blend of erudition, personal charm, Irish wit and superb cooking which attracted people of all sorts and conditions from the far corners of England.

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There was no pretentious yacht club quackery about "Mrs. Hone`s", as it was known to yachtsmen, the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy from the Lizard to John o` Groats. There were no brass guns, white tops, brassy blondes or weekend sailing butterflies "moaning at the bar".
You could walk into Mrs. Hone`s and find anyone from the late Duke of Grafton or the Earl of Portsmouth or Sir Victor Raikes, twenty - two years M.P. for South-East Essex, to "Admiral" Bill Wyatt, Commodore, boat - builder and smack skipper, and Bob South, the present Commodore, who is a master rigger in the shipyard next door (he recently rigged the longest yacht spar in the world), who has crossed the Atlantic seventeen times in sail and furthermore distinguished himself one winter night under the moon by bagging nine wild geese to one shot from a twelve-bore loaded with number six shot.

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You could find a merchant skipper or the donkey man from a tramp steamer swapping elaborate untruths with Ted Milgate the winkler, or the late Councillor Charlie Prigg, who not only blew himself out of his boat with his own punt - gun but owned a "racing new - market donkey" which kicked him in the teeth, bit the parson to whom he sold it and chased the curate round a tombstone.

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Mrs. Hone attracted just those sorts of characters. She was the queen of "characters" herself without any deliberate intention of trying to be so. She could have made a fortune in London as a restaurateur; indeed, she helped to found the famous Wig and Pen Club at the top of Fleet Street, opposite the [contd...]

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Transcribed by Joe Vince June 2023

Date: April 1971