Lynton and Barnstaple - Operations and Development

It won't taste the same because a different water source will be used.

 

Reality check time

The aim is to rebuild the railway, not to become a brewery nor a distributor throughout the country.

Wise up people!

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr5d97ylnyvo
Moving production is to keep the ale brands alive, Exmoor ale are working on "bringing the brewery back to Somerset".

 

It is sad when big breweries close down the local ones, and move production to a far away place, with different water, to keep the brand alive. That happened to Fremlins in Kent (it no longer exists) when Whitbread moved it from Maidstone to Faversham.
A similar attempt by InBev to move the production of the Hoegaarden white beer to a central brewery in Liege also failed. After protests from drinkers that it wasn't the same effected a change of heart, and production went back to Hoegaarden.

Exmoor beer is not Exmoor beer without water from Exmoor.

It explains why, when I ordered a pint of it in the Black Venus a couple of weeks ago, I was told it was 'off'

 

I saw those projections as part of the prospectus, shortly before the purchase but after the 2018 planning had lapsed. Reading it raised a number of significant concerns even before I got to the numbers themselves, concerns which meant that I could never have invested.

 

Ah a voice of sanity! Thank you @ghost

As @Michael B wisely notes (it's almost as he has some professional background in accountancy and corporate governance....) the Trust can call all of the shots through the A Shares. The B shares are at this point essentially worthless, so anyone (including the Trust) buying them would be doing so on the basis of it being a donation to fill in the colossal hole gifted to the railway by the combined strategic genius of Ian Cowling and Peter Miles.

All that really matters is the L&B family continuing to own the premises, and as they become available, buying up the other properties on the site. In the grand scheme of things, it's essentially irrelevant whether OSHI survives as a pub or not. As @ikcdab points out, the Trust isn't here to subsidise anyone's local, I'm afraid.

 

Indeed, and the refusal of Ian Cowling to making it clear before the offering closed that the planning permission for, er, a railway from WB, which was central to the financial projections had, er, lapsed, was the witholding of a material fact, and was almost certainly in violation of the listing rules. Were you asking why I didn't invest? Look no further.....

 

At least in principle there may also be option 3:

I have little understanding of company law, but it is certainly not unknown for the directors of a limited liability company to wind it up and set up a new one doing the same things from the same premises the next day. That seems morally bad but apparently can be OK legally.

Can someone tell us when it is legal and when not?

In this particular instance the shareholders, including the Trust, would suffer, so the individuals who are both directors of the company and trustees would be excluded from the decision. But how would it harm the local community if the pub re-opened the next day?

 

The mortgage company might have a problem with this...

 

I said morally, because there are various legal constructs that can be used but are generally considered poor morally - the “pre pack” administration being one such.

The challenge for the L&BRT/LBBC is that there is a tension between what is economically optimal, what is optimal in heritage terms, and what is best for relationships. As some discussions yesterday have shown, staunch supporters of the railway who would normally focus strongly on economics and heritage would be seriously upset by applying that logic here.

One final observation. The conversation here is entirely hypothetical. If detailed plans were being made to do anything than try to trade through, I would absolutely expect them to be kept very quiet until ready to deploy; anything else would undermine the intended result.

 

The highlighted bit is a very cogent observation. The optimum for all three of those at once is not going to be possible, but somehow the L&B family has to achieve something that's not too bad for any of them.

 

It also needs to be understood that the choice is not a free one, and that the balance between the three options will be affected by the legal obligations on charities and companies.

 

There isn't one. The secured loan is from Grimoldby personally. He is a director of LBBC.

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Sorry to drag this back several pages, only just catching up.

I've no idea but could it be that the 3000 is counting members, and the 2163 is counting memberships?
1 couple = 2 members, 1 family = 3+ members

As I said, no idea, but this might explain the apparent larger-than-expected discrepancy.

 

Indeed, and the conflicts of interest occasioned by people holding roles on multiple boards

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Phoenixing is the term often used. The liquidators want to make as much money as possible for the least work. If the directors want to carry on in the same field, selling the assets to them is a straightforward option.

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Back in the day, it used to be one member, one membership, so it didn't matter how many people were on that one membership card. L&BR Membership starts with the letter of the Surname of the family, so if your name was Smith, the membership card would be Sxxx, but that would cover all the people in a family on that one card, no matter what type of membership you had.

It would only change if the various people on that one card wanted to take out individual memberships, so the number that was quoted would have been the total number of membership types and not the total number of members. In fact that there has been a drop in the numbers indicates to me that we have lost a lot of members which may or may not just be individuals but could also be families, or couple as well, also don't forget that this lost also indicates that we have also lost several significant donors as well in the process.

Like I said, back in my day, it was acceptable to lose say 1 to 2% of the membership per year, but this was always made up each year, if these figures are correct (and I can't see why not), we have lost in 3 years something like 27.9 % of the membership. If I were still Membership Secretary, I would be ringing alarm bells by now and contacting all those who have left, asking why they chose not to renew.

Also, I guess there may well be other reasons for this drop (retirement, lack of progress or interest in the project, COVID-19/deaths of older members, lack of money to support the project), but it should be a concern of the membership secretary to come up with new ways to encourage people to join or to rejoin.

Going back to when I was involved, we had a much higher membership than 3000 members (I don't have the figures to hand, but I am sure it was closer to 5000), but then we also had a more active operation with Woody Bay just about to be open, and everything was so much more positive about the project as a whole.

Something else that the membership secretary should be able to find out is just how many are still members after, say after 10 years? And also they should be able to know what sort of support each member has provided to the trust in the past, be it financial, physical, or something else. I have always considered the role of the Mem Sec to be very important to the health of the Trust, as they are the first people who see if anything is going wrong and if the membership starts to withdraw their support.