‘I crept in, ordered a pint, downed it in one and left. Job done’
Derby Telegraph columnist Anton Rippon set the ball rolling with reminiscences about his early drinking days
MY first legal drink in a Derbyshire pub? It was December 20, 1962, my 18th birthday, in the Half Moon at Littleover.
Yes, I know that is now within the city limits but, almost 60 years ago, the borough boundary ended at the ring road. And in the county, the pubs stayed open 30 minutes longer than those in the town that
Derby then was. It wasn’t my first drink of alcohol on licensed premises, however. That rite of passage had been conducted a couple of years earlier, at the Byron Hotel in New Normanton. My drinking companion that evening was an old school pal, Arthur Auger, who, although a few months younger than me, introduced me to this adult world.
It isn’t surprising that it was Arthur: in 1980, after leaving the RAF to work for British Aerospace in Saudi Arabia, he made national headlines when he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and 300 lashes after being found guilty of brewing alcohol next door to a mosque.
They released him after a year – he still had to have the lashes – and when I asked him why on earth he’d chosen that location for his illegal still, he said: “Well, I thought it would be the last place they’d look.”
Back to 1962, though. That first legal visit was somehow daunting. I crept in, ordered a pint, downed it in one and left. Job done. Pubs were for mature adults, not for cocky youths who were only just old enough to drink legally.
Unlike today, when city-centre drinking is targeted at the young, 60 years ago, late teenage youths had to serve what almost amounted to an apprenticeship before they were accepted into pubs that were usually the preserve of white male adults of middle-age or older. Even after we’d turned 18, it was more likely that we’d spend the evening in a coffee bar rather than in a pub.
One memory stands out. It must have been someone’s stag night. We’d just crowded into the tiny Mousetrap bar of the Cheshire Cheese on St Peter’s Street, and our kittymaster, John Cheadle, said to the barmaid: “Twenty-three pints of bitter, please.”
She looked down her nose: “Sorry, we don’t serve pints in this bar.’ Undaunted, Cheadle replied: “Well all right then, give us 46 halves.” She carried on serving someone else and we made our way to the Green Dragon, further up the street, where the landlord was more obliging.
Lack of transport mean that almost all our drinking was done in town. There was the rare bus ride out to Repton and the Bull’s Head. And when Grade-2 listed Duke of Devonshire in Belper’s Bridge Street began advertising topless barmaids – well, that’s another story … ■■Read Anton’s weekly column on Page 24