IT was dubbed 'The Battle of the Beer.'

On one side of the counter stood defiant Winifred Gresham. On the other were the inhabitants of a Hampshire hamlet.

They wanted Mrs Gresham out. She was adamant she was staying put.

They alleged - to use court vernacular - she was not 'a fit and proper person to hold a licence.'

In turn, she condemned them as "the most small minded people I have ever met. Their claim is slanderous and a slur on my character."

And she vowed: "I am going to fight this all the way."

It was not so much a fight, almost a war as the battle waged on and on.

The confrontation was all the more complicated because the George & Dragon pub she ran in Faccombe - population 53 - in north hampshire formed part of the estate of Mrs Sophia Butler-Henderson who had died 18 months earlier.

Since then the pub had been sold and the estate's trustees had also taken the villagers' side.

That smacked of "feudalism ," roared Mrs Gresham, convinced the trustees were behind the move to kick her out.

As for the villagers she sneered: "They don't use my pub. I don't have anything to do with this village at all."

So it was down to a judge at at Andover County Court on February 21, 1979, to decide her fate.

Mrs Gresham told the court how she had ploughed £20,000 savings into bringing the pub up to bed and breakfast standards since taking over the licence eight years ago.

She won the the judge's admiration - but lost her case.

"If it was my task to decide it according to where my sympathies lie, Mrs Gresham would win by a distance," sighed Judge C S Rawlings. "But I have to make a decision according to the law."

He then granted vacant possession to the trustees with a stay of execution for six weeks.

Her counsel John Powell suggested the trustees should compensate Mrs Gresham - who left the court in a flood of tears - compensation fo the 'huge finance" she had put into the business.

Typically Mrs Gresham fought on - and again lost at the Court of Appeal in London in July.

"It's like a bad dream," she lamented of the ruling delivered by Lord Roskill.

So on August 10, she was due to go - but her opponents were in for a shock.

At a so called farewell party, dressed in an elegant green evening gown, she stunned villagers by declaring she was not going until the trustees paid her in full for the fixtures and fittings.

She firmly rejected the first offer of £2,500 less £1,300 for rent and court costs.

The trustees came back with a revised offer of £5,000. "The biggest insult yet," she sneered. "I am being victimised and exploited."

Eventually, she left - after a 10 month battle in December - with a smile on her face.

"I have got the settlement I wanted. If the owners had taken a reasonable attitude, there would have been none of this unpleasantness. But when we arrived at an agreement, I was happy to give them vacant possession at the earliest opportunity. They tried to treat me like a serf and failed."

So close to Christmas, she moved into a hotel in Andover, with plans to buy a bungalow.

However, three months later, she announced that she and her second husband had bought a pub near St Mary Bourne.

As for the George & Dragon, it was sold to Brigadier James Landon, a top military official in the Arab state of Oman who had also bought the Faccombe estate for £2m.