Sergeant Lateus and his lonely heart's club band
Alistair Ward
After 18 months of running a town centre community style pub in Prescot, I moved to a much more challenging venue in Ford, which is one of those areas where Liverpool finally starts to let go and the countryside takes over.
The overlap of urban and rural environment sometimes makes for strange bedfellows. For example, one of the regulars, Jud, was a gamekeeper and amateur taxidermist. He drank with the customers in the bar, a large proportion of whom worked on the docks. Others were lorry drivers or building workers and we all seemed to ex-something.
Several of us were from the merchant navy, a few were royal navy and a smattering of Kingsmen, but all in all the usual mix of men with a story to tell and after a few beers a determination to tell it whether you wanted to hear it or not.
Fellow publicans found it a daunting place but if you could see some of the places I have drunk in around the world it hardly registered on the middle of the scale and at least I was in my own bed every night, not stuck in some God forsaken Indonesian port being bitten by creatures with eight wings, three heads and an enormous sting driven by a hatred of outsiders.
Anyway, my new pub had problems, the kind that today you`d pay good money to have, because no matter what you tried the customers just plain would not go home. In those dim dark days pubs closed at three and re-opened at five, for what purpose I have no idea. Whole areas in the city centre catered for those two sad hours. For instance, the Royal Tiger, Oceans Eleven and a host of places around the end of Hanover/Paradise Street, where people could get a lager and a good conversation.
My day in Ford was punctuated by the horrors of getting them out by 3-40 and also the trauma of closing at 10-30. Lunchtime wasn`t that bad as they would finally de-camp with a bottle of Ringmaster sherry Gerrus to the bookie, who had the misfortune to be on our car park. At 5 o'clock, having lost 3 yankees and a accumulator, they would stagger back in for the evening session, which always, always, ended with singing. Does every Liverpudlian know the words to 'Crystal Chandeliers' and 'Barefoot Days'? maybe they come in a booklet given to every child at their first communion together with family allegiance to a given team and a family pub.
What started as a minor niggle became a major struggle and almost an obsession with me as they just wouldn`t go home. What can you do with a good natured horde of customers that you both know and like who are enjoying themselves? I know what you are thinking, let them get on with it, but 7 nights a week! their stamina was amazing,after a lunchtime session, the bookies and an evenings drinking they still hadn`t had enough so the tables were covered in rum and blacks, rum and peps and, just for a change, neat rum.
The situation was no means limited my pub. In fact all the way down Gorsey Lane from the Cabbage Hall to Allinsons Theatre Club, the whole area was awash with ale. Eventually this came to the attention of Sergeant Thomas Lateus who was in charge of licensing and he decided to attack the situation. Now Tom Lateus was a military man. Rumoured to be an ex-guardsman, he stood over six feet tall, ad looked even taller in his uniform.
a white lateral scar ran down his left cheek. In short he was a threatening presence.He would arrive together with three or four constables at closing time, survey the scene and ask me why the place wasn`t empty as the law prescribed by 10-40. One evening after three or more visits I complained that as the customers wouldn`t clear for his constables, what made him think they`d clear for me? He didn`t take this in the manner I`d hoped and leaning closely to my face and hissed, "You are working up to a raid!"
and left.
I had always envied the Liverpool Sunday lunchtime family gatherings. There were often three generations present, including the benign grandfather who had survived the blitz or served on the Western Approaches and was bothered by little, except news of the latest redundancies.
My family are nomads and we rarely see each other. My father, like mysel, is also ex-merchant navy and, following a hard childhood in Hull, left after the war and didn`t return. He now lives in West Sussex with his third wife where life is a lot easier. So at the Sunday gathering of the clans I always felt like an observer, welcome, but nevertheless outside it all.
On one particular Sunday I was propping the bar up and watching as the customers emptied, when Tommy Ross came bursting into the lounge and exclaimed, "The busies are here and they`re mob handed!"
I glanced out of the window and saw Tom Lateus with about eight police officers pouring out of a van. With a speed that was for me was most unusual and with my headman, Robbie Rotten, who was'nt called after the punk rocker but had acquired his nickname because his apparent lack of personal hygiene, actually working for once, we raced round the pub clearing the tables of any full or part filled glasses.
God was smiling at me that day, there were very few customers with glasses and apart from Billy Lloyd's, no full ones. Billy was an ex-boxer and had fall asleep. He awoke as I swept away his pint but luckily his reactions were not what they had been and so he missed!
As Tom Lateus stood looking at the pub, his officers eagerly scurried about looking for miscreants. I could see the clip-board in his hands with a sheet ready for the names he was sure he would present at my trial. He didn`t even speak to me as his men shuffled, empty handed, back to their van, bowed under the weight of the gaze of the assembled men outside the pub. Those men were witnessing a rare thing, a defeated Liverpool policeman. Jud himself couldn't have done a better job of stuffing them!
Just then, out of the throng stepped a self appointed spokesman and barked, "You thought you`d come out down here and have some of the boys did you with your note pads and helmets, but you didn`t did you?
Like a striking snake an arm sporting three stripes shot out of the vans dark interior and a voice hissed, "No but you`ll do. Drunk and disorderly"
The entire assembly, recognising a superb story for re-telling in Frank Smiths, Stan Waters or a hundred pubs down the Dock Road, roared "Yiss!"
and spontaneous applause sounded as the van headed off towards Copy Lane with the law's honour saved. The spokesman's wife was well respected and well known local district nurse. Local rumour had it she didn`t speak to him for three months.
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