Nancy’s Café was legendary among the twitching fraternity, with infamous bread pudding and beans on toast being served by familiar staff like Ethel the waitress; those days were caricatured by Bill Morton in spoof birding magazine, Not BB.
68 : Nancy’s Café
1970S
Nancy’s Café was legendary among the twitching fraternity, with infamous bread pudding and beans on toast being served by familiar staff like Ethel the waitress; those days were caricatured by Bill Morton in spoof birding magazine, Not BB.
Rare bird news may be widely and instantly available these days, but it wasn’t always that way. Before the modern era of rapid dissemination of sightings via mobiles, pagers and the web, it wasn’t a question of ‘what you knew’ so much as ‘who you knew’. Connecting with the right people was critical to success if you were in the business of ‘ticking’ rarities, and the grapevine that linked those involved was centred on a simple eatery on the A149 in Norfolk: Nancy’s Café at Cley-next-the-Sea.
As one of the country’s top birding spots, the marshes at Cley – once the local patch of celebrated bird artist R A Richardson – attracted many birders to the area as well as birds. The village became something of a social hub as well as a leading reserve, and a hardcore nucleus of birders, many well-known names of the day among them, adopted Nancy’s Café as a home from home.
Nancy’s was owned and run by the appropriately named Nancy and Jack Gull, operating from their own dining room. They employed locals, served cheap fry-ups and other home-made food, and provided a meeting place for most of Britain’s keenest birders, and especially the first generation of twitchers. The communal laissez faire and tolerant atmosphere of the café in its prime (it closed in December 1988, with eulogies in the national media) has been well captured in Mark Cocker’s classic birdwatching memoir, Birders: Tales of a Tribe (2002). It was the place to be for many, though it also had the capacity to seem cliquey to some, especially newcomers to birding.
From a modern perspective, the ‘news service’ available through Nancy’s Café was rudimentary at best. Birders from around the country would call the widely known phone number and ask the oft-repeated question of the day, ‘Anything about?’. A diary by the phone would detail the news, local and national, which – assuming the phone was answered (typically by a birding customer rather than by staff) – would then be read out to the caller. In peak periods, the person sitting closest to the phone would struggle to eat a meal while it was hot. News from elsewhere would also be received and added to the list of rarity sightings already in the book. As a system it worked well enough in its own way, but the limitations were obvious.
Nancy’s true significance, apart from helping ardent listers connect with new birds, was as the launch pad for Birdline, the service that took over the mantle for providing rare bird news. Also Norfolk-based, it began life as an answering machine in the warden’s hut at Walsey Hills NNT reserve just east of Cley. Warden Roy Robinson would record a message and update it as and when work, time and news permitted. Then came a rival network in the shape of the Bird Information Service, also based at Cley and launched by Richard Millington and Steve Gantlett. Before long the two operations became one, and the enterprise expanded with the introduction of premium rate phone lines.
Three decades later Birdline still provides a rare bird news service, as do its regional franchises. Though the popularity of phone-based services has waned, most birders active since the 1980s will at some point have found themselves in a phone box with a pile of coins trying to get news of the latest national rarities – a practice that can be traced directly back to Nancy Gull and her much-loved village café.