I am grateful to the lads at Pubs of Manchester for providing a link to a number of long gone pubs in the Oldham area on Twitter and one or maybe two that are still going. The Never Ending Pub Crawl is written contemporaneously, but in this case refers to a crawl of Oldham which took place in February 1987. The aim was to try some Oldham Brewery pubs before they were "Boddingtonised", Oldham Brewery having been taken over by Boddies in 1982 and closed five years later in 1987.
Now this strikes a chord with me, as I too remember doing a similar thing with E reluctantly driving, but regrettably, I didn't photograph them and frankly, with one or two exceptions, I can't remember which they were, or when exactly I went to them but it must have been around that time, though maybe a bit after, as I worked in nearby Failsworth when I moved from Liverpool and there were certainly plenty of OB houses in the old livery dotted around then.
Now as I knew no-one in the area at that time, I used to go out with a few of the people I worked with for a pint and one place I can distinctly remember is featured in the pub crawl above. It was the Rose of Lancaster, a fine old red brick, multi roomed boozer which I fondly remember as being warm and comfortable, but of course, given the passage of time, may have been a draughty old dump. No matter, that's not the point I want to make. What I do remember is that when we went there, there was always plenty of young Asian lads openly and happily drinking beer there. Such a thing, I imagine, is pretty well unthinkable now.Times change and the Rose has long since been knocked down, but my memories of what was a large and somewhat multi cultured drinking establishment remain fond ones.
As you can see from the photo, nicked with acknowledgement from the website above, the pub wasn't quite red brick, but those are my memories and it was always dark when I went there.
The photos are great in the Never Ending Pub Crawl, but why in the old days did we always take photos from so far away? The ones I took then are exactly the same.
13 comments:
Do Asian lads have to hide their beer drinking today? Are they not allowed to drink with whitey?
Not exactly the way I'd have put it.
Thanks for taking a look at my new blog which i had lots of help with in getting it going,but all text is mine and so are the photos.
I dont know what contemporaneously means,i hope it is good but not really sure.
It is early days at the moment,but i will be adding lots of old pub crawls along with more recent ones.
Thanks Alan
From what I remember as a teen and young adult,the white and asian communities weren't nearly as polarised in the 80's and early 90's as they seem to be now.
Anyway, I'm intrigued as to what the "grief" was over outside on of the pubs.
Do Asian lads have to hide their beer drinking today? Are they not allowed to drink with whitey?
Alan: No worries. It just meant you wrote it now but did it then. Very nostalgic and thanks for the read.
I vaguely remember Oldham Ales from my days in Manchester. Many of the brewery’s hundred or so tied outlets only served tank or keg, but the bitter was pleasant enough, and quite similar to Boddingtons (when Boddies was worth drinking).
The pubs were concentrated in a very tight area around Oldham itself. We found this out one night after driving from Manchester, along the Oldham Road, practically all the way to Oldham – not the most attractive of towns I hasten to add! The idea was to sample some Oldham Ales, which we eventually did, but unfortunately the pub was keg only; as described above.
I also travelled to Oldham by train once, with my then girlfriend. I don’t think either of us particularly enjoyed the experience! I don’t recall seeing many Asians either.
Well done Erlangernick, that's a fairly racist statement. I think you're confusing this blog with a British National Party site. 'Whitey' - what the actual fck.
Re the photos - possibly because you had a camera with a fixed lens and no zoom.
Brendon, where I'm from, 'whitey' is slang for the privileged majority of white people, and is not not offensive, or at least wasn't at any time I'm aware of during my old life there. I'm still not sure what to make of TAND's statement of young Asian lads drinking openly being something pretty well unthinkable today. Is there segregation like in the pre-Martin Luther King southern US or something?
I'm really ignorant of the background here.
(Pakistani? Chinese? Asia's a big continent.)
Also, I have no idea how my comment got repeated...wasn't me!
Nick - 'Asian' in British English usage means 'from the Indian sub-continent'; census forms have separate categories for 'Asian' and 'Chinese', which would be confusing if you were pedantic or unfamiliar with local usage. The large majority of British Asians are Muslim rather than Hindu, and have roots in Bangladesh or Pakistan rather than India.
A kind of segregation has developed in a few towns, but it's pretty rare. The suggestion isn't that young Asians are going to their own separate drinking dens, but that they're not drinking at all, and socialising at cafes and shisha bars instead of pubs. As for why British Asians seem to be more likely to identify as Muslim than was the case thirty years ago - and more likely to observe Muslim dietary prohibitions and bring their kids up to do so - those of us outside that community can only speculate, and different people will have different ideas.
Thanks Phil, you learn something new every day. I figured that it was about SW Asian people, after posting my reply. My parents' generation would refer to people from the Middle East all the way over to India & Pakistan as "oriental", whereas Asian is much more the eastern end of the continent.
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