Ilex House Bed & Breakfast

Roger and Gwynne Clarke

We have lived and worked abroad most our married life and bought Ilex House in mid 2000 on our return to UK.

Roger is a retired civil engineer and his work took us abroad to the Middle and Far East. We went to Libya in October 1966 where our son was born on 7th June 1967 at Wheelus American Air Base.

1968 took us to Abu Dhabi. Our daughter made her appearance in London on 1st October 1969.

Next move was to Hong Kong in 1973 to build the Mass Transit Railway. The children started school there and Gwynne ran a Playgroup for English speaking children.

She has always had a great love of cooking so she invited a group of ladies to tea one afternoon and served them a selection of home made cakes. She immediately received orders for cakes and requests for cooking lessons.

Chocolate demonstrations were next both in the apartment and at various clubs, schools, teacher training colleges and the Town Gas cooking school.

After the children left for boarding school she opened a shop selling baking and cake decorating items. She was invited to go to Chicago by one of her main suppliers to attend a cake decorating Master class. A classroom was opened on the shop premises where she taught cake decorating and Sugarcraft classes.

Gwynne makes all the bread, cakes, and preserves etc that are served to our guests.