The hotel was owned by Mr Andrew Thomson of Stratford in London. The keeper was William Allen, formerly a groom in Haddington, who married an innkeeper’s daughter, Caroline MacDonald, from Invernessshire. The Allens took over from Janet Keir who died in 1906.

The hotel had developed a reputation as the meeting place of the area’s wits, with humorous poems decorating the walls.

By 1920 the tenant was George Kermack and in 1921 the hotel closed, as did the Buccleuch Hotel, the result of a local temperance poll. The Allens then ran the Douglas Hotel.