Full steam ahead
It's not only the Steamboat Inn that has given up smoking - some of its customers have too. Adam Benzine reports on a pub clearly on the rise.
Licensees are slowly starting to come to terms with the fact that within 18 months they are going to be forced to stub out all traces of smoking from their pubs. It's looking likely that summer 2007 will bring a complete ban on smoking in enclosed spaces - but for two licensees that day has already come.
John and Rose Deakin run the Steamboat Inn, a large and picturesque family pub situated next to a canal in Long Eaton in Nottinghamshire. The couple's 15-year-old daughter, Samantha, also helps out the family by waitressing at weekends, and it's for her benefit that the Steamboat has been smoke-free since the family took charge six months ago.
Samantha suffers from cystic fibrosis, the UK's most common life-threatening inherited disease. The disease can affect a number of organs in the body, including the lungs, clogging them with thick, sticky mucus. For Samantha, this means that working in a smoky environment could prove fatal.
For the Deakin family, running a smoking pub was never even an option - despite six out of 10 of their regulars being smokers. They've effectively had a ban forced upon them since day one, yet by diversifying their business and focussing on developing other aspects of the pub, the Steamboat Inn has become a pub to be proud of.Confounding expectations
"The smoking thing isn't such an issue any more," says John. "It was to start with, all the locals from the pub next door told us they'd never come in. They said 'You've made the biggest mistake of your life', and that they'd give us three months and then we'd be desperate to have them back in the winter, and that it would never work and so on.
"But all you've got to do is have awareness," he adds. "We welcome smokers, and we make every accommodation for them so that they can smoke outside, it's just that we're friendlier to non-smokers."
The family's accommodation for smokers extends from obvious necessities such as installing patio heaters outside the pub, to smaller things such as having a break every two rounds during pub quizzes, so that the smokers can go outside and light up.
"Smoky environments cause serious damage to Sam's lungs," says John. "She couldn't come down here if it was a smoking pub, she'd have to be sat upstairs in her room all night. Even the most hardened smoker, once we explain to them that it would be doing her damage, doesn't have a problem and goes outside to smoke.
"We had one guy come in here who said he would never go in a non-smoking pub, who was very aggressive and loud. But when we explained the situation to him, he didn't mind at all."
John and Rose decided to run their own pub after five years of marriage. Tired of working lives that meant little time to see each other - Rose was a sales manager for a paper company and John ran a Mercedes dealership - they decided to move into an industry which would allow them to work together.
"We looked at lots of different areas but always kept coming back to pubs," says John. "I'd worked in pubs when I was a student to supplement my grant, so it seemed a natural choice. We wanted to run the kind of pub that we would go to, and I think there are a lot of people around like us - two thirds of the population don't smoke."
Hunting down the right pub
However, finding the right pub proved no small task. The family had to find a pub within 25 minutes drive of Nottingham City Hospital, so that Samantha could be rushed there should an emergency arise. The family eventually looked at more than 50 pubs before taking on the Scottish & Newcastle Pub Enterprises lease.
In order to keep the customers in while keeping the smoke out, John and Rose have shifted focus onto a number of other areas of the pub, such as quiz nights, live music and in particular, putting on high quality pub food.
"We don't do 'pub grub', but it's not haute cuisine either," says John. "It is still pub food, it's just of a very high quality. We still serve fish and chips, liver and onions and bangers and mash, but they are the best bangers that you can get, and it's fresh fish that we dip ourselves and fry up. Everything we do is aimed at quality.
"We do something called 'Challenge the Chef' on the first Monday of each month, which is essentially Ready, Steady, Cook. The cook gives you a list of all the ingredients he's got in the kitchen, then you choose the meat, vegetables, the sauce you want it cooked in, and so on, and the chef cooks you an individual meal to your specification. The reaction we get to that is fantastic, and we often put the final dishes on the specials board."
Necessity may have made the Steamboat Inn a smoke-free pub, but hard work, determination and a commitment to good food is what has made it an ongoing success. The pub is now in its sixth month, having survived a burglary, a fire and two floods. And if that wasn't enough, four of John's regulars have quit smoking since the pub went smoke-free.
All of which just goes to show that, when the smoke clears, there's really no keeping a good pub down.
Pictured: Rose and John Deakin of the Steamboat Inn in Long Eaton, Nottinghamshire, with daughter Samantha
- Pub: The Steamboat Inn
- Location: Long Eaton, Nottinghamshire
- Licensees: Rose and John Deakin
John and Rose have been running the Steamboat Inn, a Scottish & Newcastle Pub Enterprises lease, as a smoke-free pub for six months. Their daughter's respiratory disease means that smoky environments are harmful, so the Deakins have had to focus on other ways to draw customers in - with tremendous results!
