BETWEEN the ages of 16 and 18 when girlfriendless – which was the usual state of affairs since we were unattractive, self-opinionated spotty herberts – my school chums and I would repair on Friday nights to James Nelson’s sports club, or Jimmy’s, as everyone called it.
This imposing establishment at the top of the steepest street in Nelson, Lancashire, included football and cricket fields, a pavilion, changing rooms and a cellar with half- and full-sized snooker tables plus, most importantly, a licensed bar.
The club was built by the Nelson family in memory of employees killed in the Great War and was for the benefit of workers at Valley Mills, one of the town’s major employers and later to become part of the Courtaulds empire. My parents both toiled there, Dad as a tackler and Mum as a weaver, which is why the under-age presence of my friends and myself was tolerated at the club so long as we did not disgrace ourselves. Needless to say we were always on best behaviour, particularly because the ale at less than two bob (10p post-1971) a pint was among the cheapest in town.
We would arrive at about 9pm, sink a few beers and enjoy a couple of frames of snooker on the smaller table – the full-size seemed at the time as big as a cricket field.
Round about ten o’clock the card school would begin. This was strictly big-time and no place for schoolboys but we were permitted to watch from a distance. The game was three-card brag and the weigh-in, the initial cost of taking part, was 10p each. Seven or eight tubby middle-aged blokes would sit round the table, weigh in and the game would begin. As a rule, the most serious players would ‘go blind’ for the first few rounds, meaning they would bet without looking at their cards. Anyone who weakened and took a peep had to pay double stakes to continue or ‘stack’ – throw in his cards. Hence the conversation would go ‘ten blind’, ‘ten blind’, ‘ten blind’, ‘twenty seen’, ‘ten blind’, ‘twenty seen’, ‘stack’ etc.
By the time the big guys even looked at their cards there would be two or three quid in the middle (bear in mind that the typical mill worker’s weekly pay was around the £20 mark). Then the real high rollers would up the ante, often as a bluff to scare off the small fry. Players would drop out rather than risk the weekly housekeeping, leaving usually two at the end to slug it out. I remember an epic encounter when it transpired that one player had a prial of fours and the other jack queen king on the bounce (a running flush). A prial, of course, takes precedence.
The pair shovelled in ten bob at a time for what seemed an eternity before the running-flush owner surrendered his last few coins and muttered: ‘I’ll see you.’ His face when the three fours were turned over became ashen and he tottered off home to explain to the wife where his wage had gone. There was probably £50 on the table – the equivalent of £750 today according to the Inflation Calculator although I would say that’s an underestimate.
Phew! After that we were emotionally drained, and we were only watching.
At closing time we would wend our way home via a succession of chip shops – it’s amazing how much fried potato a teenager can put away after a few pints. At the first one, in Pine Street, the owner would be waiting at the door praying it was one of our Jimmy’s nights. He would drop a fresh batch of chips into the fat and by the time they were ready we were ravenous.
By the time we got to Railway Street we had polished them off so we dropped into another fish frier for a top-up before crossing the town centre to the Enterprise chippy in Leeds Road (we called it the Starship after the space craft in Star Trek). The Enterprise was run by a Chinese family who made the best chips in Nelson.
Given the Friday-night grease intake, it was no wonder we were spotty. We would part at that point heading our different directions home, shouting cheery insults.
Sadly the Enterprise is no more, and neither is Jimmy’s sports club, which closed in 2000 two decades after the demise of Valley Mills. As I wrote here, there are only two pubs left in town, neither worth a visit. Poor old Nelson.
Old jokes’ home
My grandfather is always saying that in the old days people could leave their back doors open. Which is probably why his submarine sank.
A PS from PG
[Bertie Wooster, who has a terrible hangover, encounters a prospective new valet – Jeeves.]
‘If you would drink this, sir,’ he said, with a kind of bedside manner, rather like the royal doctor shooting the bracer into a sick prince. ‘It’s a little preparation of my own invention. It is the Worcestershire sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it extremely invigorating after a late evening.’
I would have clutched at anything that looked like a lifeline that morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if someone had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the treetops and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.
‘You’re engaged!’ I said, as soon as I could say anything.
PG Wodehouse: Carry on, Jeeves
Great stuff Alan. I only saw the Jimmy Nelson building in its final days before demolition, when it was boarded up and surrounded by waist-high weeds.
When considering inflation I always think of the price of a pint of beer. When I started going in pubs (early 1980s) bitter was about 50p a pint; now it is between £4.00 and £5.00 in most places, a ten fold increase.
Inflation is one big lie, of course. Inflation is the deliberate government act of printing more money, which makes all the existing money in circulation worth less, thereby stealing your wealth. But, the government want you to believe inflation is nothing to do with them, and that they (the government) can heroically take measures to reduce it. There was no inflation for most of the 19th century, when we were a great power.
We need a taxpayers’ strike,