Double celebration for 90-year-old host

A Shepherd Neame lessee has good reason for a double celebration - 70 years in the trade and her 90th birthday.

Rhona Barnett, of the Rose in June at Margate, Kent, still works every day in the pub. She took over its 20-year lease in 2000 - at the age of 84.

"I started in London at a Charringtons pub on Tottenham Court Road in 1937, to get it up and running for the brewery. In 1940 I moved to a Scottish and Newcastle pub in Sackville Street [London W1].

"We lived at that pub throughout the war - in all our time there we never even had a cracked window, but it was still rather terrifying."

Barnett's next pubs were the White Horse in Regent Street in 1952 and the

Albion in Fleet Street in 1954.

"I spent nearly 40 years at the Albion. All the journalists used to come in and then I watched all the newspapers leave the street when Rupert Murdoch bought his empire," she said.

When Barnett's husband died in 1991, she was given one year's notice to leave.

"I took on the Two Chairmen in Trafalgar Square in 1991 and then decided to leave the city in 2000 to run Shepherd Neame's Rose in June in Margate. The brewery has been very good to me."

Sheps was criticised in 2004 for forcing a 67-year-old licensee to retire, saying it was time for Eddie Dunford to "move on" from the Black Horse in Battle, East Sussex.

l Sheps' results -p15