Monday 25 May 2009

Girls Allowed

Further to my previous article, about the "gentleman's buffet", the last bastion of male chauvinism was once the workingmen's clubs.
In my local club in Primrose, Jarrow, ladies were only allowed in the "lounge". All other parts of the club were banned to them until government regulations forced changes to be made.
Oddly enough, the consequence has been a deterioration in the behaviour of the "gentlemen" and much more trouble than in former times.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Alive and kicking

http://www.shieldsgazette.com/news/Menonly-club-wins-Camra-award.4807478.jp

Paul Bailey said...

When I first went up to Manchester, as a student in the early 1970's, there were still a handful of pubs with male only bars ("Vaults"). Strangely enough there was usually a woman serving behind the bar!

Stonch said...

Yes, you'd have to be careful who you had behind the bar in one of those...

I must say, the idea appeals. From time to time I have to (embarrassingly) ask men to tone down their language to avoid upsetting other customers - and this is a nice pub (or so I like to think)! Often, the blokes doing the effing and blinding are in fact perfectly decent people who just want to blow off some steam, which is surely one of the reasons people pile into pubs and neck pints after work. Perhaps some form of limited revival of this idea in large pubs would work - and without the need for gender discrimination. You could just call it a "noisy bar" or something euphemistic like that. Oh, wait a minute, this wouldn't work because twats ripped all the partitions out of pubs in the 1980s, so big pubs are just barns...