Days of wine and roses just a fading memory

Gone are the singing rooms, the homespun entertainment and the chirpy local characters with many an amusing tall story to tell.

The flat caps have retreated, the beer has been drained off, as so many of our pubs have bitten the dust.

Just sweep an eye around the borough and note the many pubs that are currently up for sale, or just hanging on (their windows formidably boarded up) in the hope that some brave soul will take up the licence.

Clusters of estate-agent signs flutter from empty pub premises where the pre-Recession folk of St Helens used to regularly pop in for a quick ‘one or two’.

Many of these vacant premises still remain festooned with empty promises. Their exteriors display fading advertisement for “good pub grub”, “happy-hour” drinking sessions and Sky TV sport.

All was set up for the entertainment of customers who just never turned up.

This week I spotted four St Helens pubs for sale on just one estate agents’ list.

Yet there used to be hundreds of successful pubs and clubs in the area. Now they are seriously thinning down. One workingmen’s club after the other has also put up the shutters.

TImes have changed . But why? Well, some of the despairing and surviving landlords complain about the greed of the brewers in over-pricing their ale. It costs over £3 a pint in some of the premises.

Landlords also tell me that when they are marginally successful, they are screwed for extra rent payment by the breweries.

And the many supermarkets also steal the boozing glory, churning out the tins and bottled stuff at bargain basement prices.

Only the late night ‘wine bars’ seem to be bearing up, thanks to the attraction of loud music and sexy, good-looking girls.

Yet it was all so different a few decades ago when you had to fight to grab a seat in a packed St Helens singing room.

Tommy Rafferty and the legendary Ernie Winders stroked the old piano keyboards while customers clambered on stage to sing a number... “The Memories You Gave Me”, “Mona Lisa”, “Catch a Falling Star” and the rest of ‘em.

Tommy would energetically voice the old favourite ballad, ‘Granada’, to his own playing; while Ernie, with a fag danging from his mouth, would quietly churn out the melodies, at a pub elsewhere, pausing regularly for a deep swig of bitter.

I’m told that Ernie took on a piano-playing job at Parr and firmly announced he wanted no pay. He’d do it just for his ‘pub ale’. It didn’t take the landlord long to discover that ever-thirsty Ernie was costing him a fortune in free pints.

He was immediately put on piano-plonking wages and instructed to buy his own liquid refreshment!

At Chessie’s pub (the Exchange Vaults) you’d find ‘Mr Circumference’ as comedian Ken Dodd, who made his youthful bow there, used to call the bear-like Jonty Pilkington.

This one time Saints pack-man, was the unofficial ‘chairman’. He was not fond of loud, atmosphere-wrecking voices in the crammed audience.

And few chose to quarrel with this hefty, formidable character.

The pub singing room was a must for any youngster with a shilling or two in his pocket. And the craze continued right up to the 1960s time of the Beatles who used to appear at the old Plaza Club, where John Lennon was often seen scribbling on an old cigarette packet as he wrestled to write his latest lyric, soon to span the world.

If you were lucky enough to have had a night-out in the old pub concert room, then treasure that memory.

FOR those good old times are never coming back.