The pubs where you had your first drink ...legally!
READERS SHARE THEIR MEMORIES
WHEN we asked Derby Telegraph readers in which Derbyshire pub or bar they had their first legal drink of alcohol, we thought that it would bring back a few memories.
It did more than that – it produced a list of hostelries stretching from the north to the south of the county, pubs that remain favourites, inns that have undergone changes of name, and taverns where, sadly, last orders were called many years ago.
Sometimes that first visit is also a benchmark to what else was going on in a person’s life.
On our Derbyshire Live Facebook post, Andy Wood recalls: “It was at Ye Olde Dolphin in Queen Street, run by Bill and Norah Nattrass. At the time I worked as a mechanic at Kennings, just across the road.”
In contrast, Sarah Leeson can’t recall where she enjoyed her first legal drink – “Somewhere in town, quite possibly somewhere that no longer exists” – because she couldn’t hold her 18th birthday party at the Moon Hotel in Spondon; she’d already been drinking in there with her father since she was 13.
Tracey Sweetie didn’t have to find another venue. She was drinking at the Hollingwood Hotel, Chesterfield, before her 18th birthday, but no one seemed to mind.
Charlie Morley is another who can’t remember, although he can narrow it down to two: “First legal drink would have been at the Derbyshire Yeoman on the ring road. First illegal drink at the Meynell Arms at Kirk Langley. Or it might have been the other way round.”
Sharon Jones is quite certain, though: “Illegal was the Midland at Langley Mill. Legal was the Vaults at Eastwood.”
Some recall exactly what that first legal drink was. For Les Carnie it was
I’d been going in the Old Bell Hotel for years, but my English teacher took it over just before I was legal.
Keith Harrison
a Bacardi and Coke at the German-style bierkeller that was under the Irongates Hotel in Derby. Robert Powell’s first legal tipple was at Loscoe Miners’ Welfare: “A bottle of Taddy’s Nut Brown, then a pint of draught Double Diamond.” Jacqueline Beresford thinks that it was probably at the Crown at Allenton, on a college release day. She knows that it was a Cherry B.
Wayne Houldsworth remembers the Beau Brummel (formerly the Chaddesden Park Hotel) and the pint of Skol that “blew you up before you got drunk”.
Ant Taylor’s first was at the Grandstand Hotel that used to provide such a lovely backdrop to a day’s cricket at the County Ground before the building was demolished.
Liz Scott recalls her first visit. Again, it was to a pub no longer there – the Blue Pool on Stenson Road. For Brianna Richardson it was the Grange Hotel on Ingleby Avenue, another vanished local watering hotel.
Martyn Ford sampled his first legal drink at “the sadly lost Wheel Inn at Findern”.
For Andy Radage it was the White House Inn at Ambergate, “now sadly gone, forever missed”.
Norwegian Rams fan Gudmund Yttredal enjoyed his first legal pint in an English pub at The Merry Widows opposite Derby railway station.
The pub was once the Wright’s Vaults but eventually adopted its long-standing nickname.
Keith Harrison had to mark his 18 th birthday drink at Ramsden’s in the Cornmarket. “I’d been going in the Old Bell Hotel in Sadler Gate for years, but my English teacher and her husband took it over just before I was legal, so I had to move to the downstairs bar at Ramsden’s.”
Wherever it was, that first legal drink was certainly a landmark event.