Arthur Newton

Such was the interest in The Imperial Cafe we have asked Margaret McKay (nee Holmes) to tell us more about the man behind the counter - Arthur Newton.

Margaret recalls her grandfather with great affection. She says “We were very close when I was a child. I loved him dearly - even though he wouldn’t let me leave the table at dinner time until I’d eaten up all my vegetables - an event which once caused me to be late for school (the Green School) because, as I tearfully confessed to Mrs Howitt, ‘I wouldn’t eat my brussel sprouts’”!

My grandfather, Arthur Newton, was the youngest of six children and when he was about eight his father died. ”From clogs to clogs in three generations” I heard him say many times, and my mother told me that his father had drunk away whatever money the family had. At about the same time the two girls of the family died in a flu epidemic. My grandpa told me that his mother had two children lying dead in the house at the same time, (in the early 1890s). These were difficult years for the family. Arthur’s now widowed mother then took the youngest children and went back to Grantham, her home town. She had to stay with relatives for a time and Arthur was lodged with an uncle, who kept the Blue Lion, a big pub/ hotel in the Market Place of Grantham - I think it’s now an Insurance company’s offices. He was given an attic bedroom where there was no lighting but he was allowed to have a candle to see his way to bed. He told me that in the night, when it was dark,

rats would come out and run over his bed. Hard to imagine anything better calculated to make the iron enter the soul, and yet it didn’t. He also had to ‘pay for his keep’ by helping in the kitchens, running errands etc. - and still go to school of course, at least until he was thirteen. That was no easy childhood, but ironically, all that experience served him well when, twenty years later, he and Kate started up The Imperial Cafe in Market Deeping. Nobody could skin a rabbit quicker or pluck and disembowel a chicken better than my grandpa! However, it wasn’t all grind and hardship at the Blue Lion because it was also in those years that he developed an intense love of the countryside, and of growing things. What started out as a chore - he would be sent out mushrooming, very early in the morning, before going to school - became a passion for the country life and the habit he had been compelled to as a child, to get up and out early in the morning, set the pattern for the rest of his life. Eventually his mother was able to rent accommodation in Grantham - she had found work at a hotel - and Arthur, about to leave school, went back to live with her. He was now able to contribute something towards their expenses as he just then secured an apprenticeship at the engineering firm of Hornsby’s in Grantham. He became eventually a fully qualified engine fitter mechanic and continued working for Hornsby’s until the move to Market Deeping in 1915. He was persuaded to this move, as hinted in an earlier piece, by his soon to be wife Katherine Garton. The move to Deeping gave the opportunity for both of them to be their own boss and for Arthur to have the chance of cultivating his very own garden. But he never forgot what it was like to be a powerless and penniless child, sleeping in a dark room with only the rats for company. He would never be unkind to a child - though they should eat up their vegetables! Margaret McKay Arthur Newton at Hornsby’s