the old pub

The Crown has been tarted up. It now appears to be three rooms where once there was one. It is an old 
 court room, so if you want the full splendour you look upwards. It served the best pint of Boddington's
 I have had for years, at £1.90 against the £2.25 I pay in my local. And this the pub where a customer long 
ago asked the landlord for ice in his gin and tonic and was told, "We don't have any. There's no call for 
it."

Soon, the crush was such that when somebody collapsed at one end of our bar, we hadn't the faintest 
idea who it was for a full ten minutes, during which time we saw blue lights flashing outside our 
particular window. Much later, I found that one of our number had died.*


Here was the regiment of 1986, remnants of the great diaspora. Computers took over from biros. 
Abstemious souls supplanted those who worked hard, drank hard, and followed a near-monastic 
existence.  They numbered around 150.

On arrival, I tried for a drink at one bar and found it defended by a line of photographers who were 
amiably disposed to resist all comers at their corner of the front. No joy there, then. The second bar did 
not appear to be separately manned. The third bar is where I settled.

The names came in and drifted on... Tony Brooks, the great organiser, Cammie Stuart (a relative of his once 
told a waiter in London: "If you'd charged like that at Bannockburn, you'd have won."), Gerry Dempsey, Derek 
Potter, John Maddocks, Ron Baker, Roy Eves, Bill Freeman, Gordon Amory, Philip Aris and John Bell  (I am told),  
Harry Pugh, Terry Hamilton, Colin Gower, John Wardhough, Jimmy Milne, Jim Dakin, Phil Aris,  Dot Storey
 (the secretaries went, too), Stanley Blenkinsop but sadly, not Bob Blake, who was unwell at home... 
More and more, on and on, a regiment intent on its own preservation with no obvious commander, 
unless it was John Maddocks, whom some of us remembered as a sub-editor 
on Daily Express sport, but who is now, I gather, top gun in Daily Express-Star, London.

Derek Potter is the sports writer who met Tommy Smith, the great Liverpool player, in the lavatory and 
Smith said, "Still writing crap, Derek?" And Derek replied, "Aye, Tom. You still playing it?" Then he 
exited smartly because Tommy Smith was robust in word and deed. Derek is writing a book and was 
telling me (scoop!) of an entry: Fellow went into an Irish bar and the barman said, "I'm sorry. We're not 
open yet. Would you like a pint while you're waiting?" 

One of this crew once observed the amply-bosomed landlady leaning over the bar and said, "If those ever have
pups, Edie, I would like one." Reporters used to leave their jackets over the backs of their chairs and sneak off
to the pub, where they hoped they were not to be observed, but where they have been known to come across
the editor fulfilling a similar need.

The Crown caught fire once. Late fifties I would think. At any rate, the then editor of the Express, Dick 
Lewis, was there at the time and firemen poured in with their hoses and axes and disappeared upstairs. 
The troops went on drinking downstairs, of course. Dick Lewis regularly sent up trays of pints for the 
firemen and then joined them, wielding an axe with great enthusiasm. At the end of it all, as he stood at 
the bar, the firemen, job done, filed past to their vehicles, and one said, "Best t' bloody fire since Belle 
Vue."

The Express building itself stood mute in the wilderness of Ypres. Black glass reflecting grey, 
traffic-bound street, a repository of a thousand memories and little else. Luxury flats or office block? 
Yates's blob shop is something else and I prefer not to know what.

By coincidence, I had listened, earlier in the week, to a talk by a man whose grandfather produced 
hurdy-gurdies in Ancoats-street: wonderfully precise, and beautifully crafted instruments. The men 
wore long, white aprons in a corner building. Anyone who knows Ancoats now would be nervous of 
walking its lengths at night these days. But then? The grandfather was perturbed that the Italian 
contingent in the annual city parade did not have a proper band, so he bought instruments and formed 
one.

There has, I am told, been talk of turning this glum area into an Italianate masterpiece but like most, I 
will believe it when I see it. At one time, the Express crew were losing a car a night to thieves. I lost one 
myself, and the added injury was that I had just filled it to the brim with petrol.

From the Crown - after a paper-plate of stew with red cabbage, eaten with a plastic fork - I sidled into 
the gathering darkness around 6pm to catch a train. It was late and overcrowded, so nothing much
had changed there.  The survivors of this particular Ypres were left swopping ales and ailments with the 
enthusiasm they showed for combative conversation in their younger days. And that was that.


*Brian Whittle, 59, a respected journalist in a fraternity of journalists and much missed..