Vale The Glad, you’ll never be forgotten

EVERY day on my walk to and from work I pass a pile of rubble on Ruthven St that has a wealth of memories.

That rubble used to be The Gladstone Hotel.

The Glad was the weekend meeting place for my mates in our youth.

The CBD pub was the official “home” of our footy club All Whites (now Brothers) and after sweating it out on the training paddock at Holy Name we’d trek on down to the “Happy Nacker” and undo all the good work the training had done by spending a couple of hours at the bar.

Just like the TV show Cheers, for us The Glad was a place where everybody knew your name.

In those days of the 1970s, even the pub’s cockatoo in a cage at the back door would bid welcome to customers with a screeching “Get out ya bastard!”

After-work drinks on a Friday were something of a ritual in those days.

Most pubs in the ’70s offered the first Friday drink (a 7oz beer) to regulars free of charge and there were always free bar snacks of hot boiled potatoes and butter, cheerios and occasionally fried fare.

One of the funniest things I saw at The Glad was one Friday when an out-oftowner turned up for a beer and a bite to eat and sat at the bar.

He ordered — and paid for — a plate of prawn cutlets which was eventually placed on the bar in front of him.

Unfortunately, the tradies behind him assumed that the prawn cutlets were just part of the Friday snacks and were soon leaning over the poor bloke’s shoulder and helping themselves to his dinner.

I can still see that poor guy’s expression as those sweaty blokes were leaning over him, eating his tucker.

I never did see that bloke back at The Glad.

If you got hungry out of lunch or dinner hours, you could always order a toasted sandwich from the bar.

The sandwich wrapped in plastic would be placed in the little toaster oven and you’d end up eating as much plastic stuck to the sandwich as the ham and cheese filling.

Then there was the pool table over which there were more fights than St Patrick’s Day in Belfast of the 1970s.

I remember the power blackouts of the late 1970s and early 1980s when we’d all sit around the bar drinking by candlelight.

Talk about romantic, 20 blokes in the flickering light fighting over whose shout it was.

During one blackout during the Gordon family era we even lost one of the barmen.

Mick had been serving in the darkness but hadn’t realised that someone had opened the cellar trapdoor in the floor behind the bar.

With drinks in hand Mick walked back toward the bar only to disappear down the open trapdoor.

To his credit, he didn’t spill a drop and soon climbed back up the ladder and resumed serving.

There are so many more memories in that rubble on Ruthven St and it’s probably a good thing that what’s left of those walls can’t talk.

❝ Twenty blokes in the flickering light fighting over whose shout it was.