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End of 57-year link with Trunch Crown –
1971
An association of 57 years with the Crown at Trunch ended yesterday with
the retirement of the licensee,
Mr William Dixon and his wife May.
Mr Dixon who is 76 years old, held the licence for 40 years, but his
wife Mrs May Edith Dixon,
who is three years his junior, first moved to live at the Crown in 1913
when her mother became licensee.
Mr Dixon was courting the daughter of Mrs Ellen Cobb, the landlady
of the Crown in 1914 and
after the harvest was in on the farm at which he was working, William
joined the 9th Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment.
Grenade Thrower
He served in Belgium and France as a grenade thrower.
“We had to get Jerry out of the trenches – or sometimes he got us
out”, he said.
He was at Ypres and the Somme. “I was right in the thick of it.
I just had a charmed life to keep going,” Mr Dixon recalled.
In the battle of Loos, he was reported missing, but a week after
receiving the news,
his family got a card from him saying he was all right.
“We got cut off but we held out,” he explained.
There were 74 men in his over-strength platoon when they were
trapped –
“When they got to us there were 24 and a sergeant left.” He added.
After two years in the front line he transferred to the railway
operating division of the Royal Engineers on the strength of the time he
spent on the railways at Melton Constable as a youth.
The war over, he returned to marry and move to the Crown in 1919. While bringing up their family of two sons and four
daughters, Mr Dixon worked as a gardener at the former Mundesley
Sanatorium from 1924 to 1958.
Flood and Fire
In 1941
the public house, which was then thatched was damaged by fire.
Though losing most of their belongings,
the Dixons carried on their business in a temporary one-story pub.
Mrs Dixon said she had been in Norwich in the 1912 flood “So I
have survived flood and fire,” she laughed.
Having
celebrated their gold wedding in November 1969, Mr & Mrs Dixon now
have 11 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
They are retiring to The Pines at Knapton, a village where three of
their children live.
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