Down Orchard Street to the Crown & Cushion
“I WAS ONLY three-years-old but I can remember the siren going off and my mum and dad taking everyone in the pub down to the cellar and we would wait there until it stopped.”
The Crown & Cushion pub in Ashby Square was one of the most popular in Loughborough and Looking Back has spoke to someone who lived in the pub for more than 16 years, and reminisced about his times spent in the area around the pub in Ashby Square and Orchard Street.
Dave Wootton, 76, of Loughborough, said that his mum and dad were the landlords of the pub, and when he first saw the photo of Orchard Street, among those published in Looking Back a few weeks ago, he knew the area like the back of his hand.
Dave said that the building with the tall chimneys in Orchard Street was in fact Bob Young’s bottling factory, and not a brewery like others had suggested before, and that he would often go into the factory when he was younger and watch them fill the bottles of Guinness - which he said was done by hand.
Dave said the road in the dis- tance of the photo was Ashby Square, and this area he knew even better.
Dave recalled that on the left of the photo in Orchard Street there was (still is) the Masonic Hall, a tiny little graveyard, a fishing tackle shop and a number of cottages.
He said that in Derby Square (if you take a left at the end of Orchard Street) there was Tylers - the famous Loughborough department store - a shop called Brooks, a blacksmiths, a shop called Cotes, and the Creamery Cafe, that he said you can just about see on the left of the photo looking down Orchard Street.
He said that he remembered a lot of the shops in Ashby Square, and this included Spurgeons the chemists, Freddie Vann the grocers, Jack Walley the butchers, Vickers bread shop, Emma Dickens junk shop - and he said for one reason or another he can remember Emma owning an old Austin seven car, with the registration plate ‘AAY 999’ which he has never forgot - and then there was Sally Berridge’s fruit and veg shop,
Dave also remembered that around the corner from Ashby Square in Market Street was Kate Shaw’s shop, which was where he used to go in and ask for broken biscuits, and remembers that it was the first place that he ever bought Spangles sweets from.
He said: “We used to make our own entertainment when we were younger, and one of the things we used to do was we used to try not to bite them (Spangles) and would suck them and see who could suck a hole in them.”
Dave said that Kate’s shop was next door to Seatons Garage, and opposite was a big triangular island in the middle of the road that had 10-11 trees on it. But back to the pub... Dave said that the Crown & Cushion was a “proper old fashioned pub” and that everyone who drank in there used to know each other and described it as having its own “community” of regulars.
He said that it would have something on every night of the week, from Whist and Solo to dominoes and darts. He said that there was a 12 inch black and white TV in the living room of the pub and if there was ever any- thing on that people wanted to watch they would come in and sit down and put the TV on.
Dave said that one of his earliest memories was being carried down to the cellar of the pub when he was just three years old during World War Two and the air raid siren was going off.
He said that the siren used to sit on top of the fire station at the corner of Limehurst Avenue and that it was the same siren that was used after the war to alert people that the fire engine was coming out in the town.
He said: “I can’t remember much, but I can remember it never lasted too long because it was nearly always one of our own planes flying over.”
• Do you remember the Crown & Cushion?
Maybe you used to drink in there?
Or do you remember any of the other shops in Ashby Road?
If you recognise any of the names that Mr Wootton does then please get in touch and contact Liam Coleman on 01509 635 806 or email liam.coleman@trinitymirror.com