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Picture source: Dave Dunmall

The Queens Head was situated at 9 The Square and has now been converted into private housing.

Moving to Birchington in early 1980, the first thing my wife and I did was try all the pubs in the village. We soon decided the Queen's Head suited us best. A friendly atmosphere, real fires, and lovely Fremlin's bitter on handpump, brewed up the road (well, 20 odd miles away) in Faversham. Initially we stuck to the public bar, a large space with lino floor and dartboard, but chatting to the jolly locals in the saloon through the archway to the other bar, we soon found ourselves invited through and became locals ourselves. Such a lovely crowd. All much older than ourselves. We were in our early 20s, and what a store of experience and humour we found in that crowd. The pub was run by Fred Masters and his wife Joan, who had been there since Fred was demobbed at the end of the war, assisted by various bar staff, the most stalwart of whom was Charles, a short, swarthy, rugged, rather deaf farmworker with enormous forearms. I reckon I drank four pints of Fremlins pretty much every night there, til the sad day in 1993 when Whitbread called time on Fred, possibly on his 80th birthday. New licensees came in, but it wasn't the same, and the pub closed for good a year or two later, to be turned into housing. I miss the place every day.

David Hannaford (April 2021)

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