4
The club as part of the community
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The members got together and decorated this club last time. I mean, to have decorators in would cost a fortune, so the members did it themselves.
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138
Clubs are often commonly associated with beer and Saturday-night entertainment, but there has always been so much more to these institutions than that. The original aim of the club movement was to provide a place for working people to socialise and better themselves, and in this role, clubs gradually became a central part of their community where people would interact and help each other in many ways.
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Five or six of them at the pit sat down and decided we need our own club, and someone says the Granby, that was the road, so they set it up and it became notorious - for fighting, guaranteed. It didn’t matter what side you were on, I don’t think it went a fortnight without a fight. The stewards became legendary, how they ran it. Clubs had strict drinking hours, but the Granby didn’t have drinking hours, it had its own drinking hours, and lock-ins, but you had to be ‘in’. There was an inner circle and an outer circle. If you weren’t 139 ‘in’, you didn’t get in. The committee used to control that.
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Many clubs were based in industrial areas, such as Edlington, Armthorpe and Rossington, where the majority of men would work at the local mine or factory. As a result, the camaraderie that developed during the day (or night if you were on that shift) would often be carried over from the workplace into the club. An intimacy existed within each club that represented a feeling of security and togetherness. Such close-knit communities are difficult to imagine nowadays, particularly for younger people, as Britain’s industrial decline has taken its toll on them; however, the elder generation of club-goers look back to this halcyonic era when, despite people’s relatively low levels of disposable income, there was a sense of solidarity in the community that may be gone forever. Armthorpe Social Club is a prime example: many of the regulars have known each other for decades, both at work and in their local club. The spin-offs from such social cohesion are evident, and they often resulted in an informal support mechanism being part of clubland and community life. Problems could be shared and solved, and you always knew somebody who could help out.
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New Year’s morning - tradition, and it carried on right up to it finishing, like hogmanay in Scotland - you’d be out at your parties, you’d be up all day, some people didn’t go to bed, but you used to take your bottle on New Year’s Day, you’d take your bottle of whisky, bottle of vodka whatever and what you would do is buy a pint of lemonade or pint of soda water or whatever your mixer is, and everyone would share their drinks and say, ‘Happy New Year to you.’ And of course, all the younger ones loved that, but they got a bit out of control. It would become a big singing competition, England versus Scotland. Anything you can sing, we can sing better. So you’d have different singalongs, and so nobody bought drinks, they only bought mixers, and the committee said that was fine. I was on the Granby committee when I was 22, and I thought that was wonderful, that was a great New Year’s Day.
Intake life members’ annual party
The first time I went, Pete Hutchinson took me, he was a Jock lad, union man, called at our house at half past ten with a bottle of rum, he said, ‘Come on, we’re going to the Granby.’ So we walked down and it was absolutely packed solid. A guy on the organ, a few singers, and that was it, you’d get a few English guys getting up, everyone coming with whiskey and vodka, women coming in with sandwiches, and you’ve never seen anything like it. And it went on all day. Forget closing at half past three, it carried on until four, five o’clock until everyone went home. That went on from when I was eighteen until two or three years ago. People used to come back from Scotland. What a day! You’d say to odd people, ‘Come to the Granby,’ and they’d be absolutely amazed, dancing on the table, all good humoured. And you could go in and basically you didn’t pay for a thing if you didn’t want to. There’d be drink everywhere, Southern Comfort, Bells, and as the years 140 went on the drink got better.
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71