Pubs

The interior of a local pub, date unknown. Please contact us if you can add any information! Courtesy of the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & Rutland.

Interviewer: Was there any pubs in the village?

Mr Morton: Oh yeah… three pubs in the village there was then. They used to drink plenty of beer, it were about three pence a pint then. That was all the amusement they’d got.

Interviewer: So the pub was the sort of centre of village life at the time?

Mr Morton: Exactly, and that were about top and bottom of it.

Interviewer: Did women go in the pub at all?

Mr Morton: Very, there were only I think if I remember rightly when my dad kept the Blue Bell there was two women who used to come in - now I ain’t going to name them - but there were only two as I remember ever went in the pub. Women didn’t go in pubs them days.

Interviewer: So women had to stay at home?

Mr Morton: Yes. And put up with the men when they come from the pub. Oh dear me, well. And there used to have singing in the pubs you know. Chaps’d get up and sing songs and the ladies were, were a pianist and her husband was a singer as well, and it used to go off very nicely. There you are, that’s how you had to go on, and the pubs were the mainstay of the villages there’s no doubt about it. Until the end of the war, the end of this war [Second World War] and then things changed didn’t they? For instance on May 23rd 1940 a man took over the New Inn at Sharnford, come from Ratby. A chap named Jack Bailey, that was his name. Then the Coventry blitz came along didn’t it, later on, in the October I think, no, October yeah, of 1940, and no end of people went, crowded down to Sharnford, and he found them accommodation in every room of his house nearly, and that’s why he was made so popular. So, that’s what I say, your pub was the mainstay bit of attraction, you’d got nothing else anyway, without you went to, as I say, you went to Hinckley to go to the pictures.

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