Interview with Jeff Turpin, Stapleton, March 11, 2014
Jeff Turpin (born 1929) has been running the local Spar in Greenbank Road since 1965. Between 1965 and the early 1970s, he also lived in Greenbank. In this sequence, he recalls how the Greenbank Pub was a central meeting place for the local community during that time.
Oh, I think it would be the local pubs without a doubt. Because they always were really popular. As I say, you know, although there was no drink-driving to worry about then, you still found people just wanting to go within walking distance to go to the pub. They didn’t want to get into a pub and [?] said you shouldn’t be somewhere like that, you know. I know we used to go either to the Greenbank when we lived over there or... it’s changed its name now, this pub place down on the traffic lights by the bank. Robertson round on the corner, Robertson Road, I think it was the Swan. No, the Swan is opposite. There was a pub there. But they all had anyhow meeting rooms and so on upstairs. And we used to go on a Saturday night. If you went to the Greenbank, you would go in the bar in the Greenbank, sit in the corner, so would the little crowd, as you know, they’d done it for years. And taking their turn to get up and dance on this lit area of the floor that was marked out [laughs]. And if there was anything special on, they had a room upstairs that you could use and so on. And other than that, it was... this is while the children were growing up, I mean if we could get bedsitters, babysitters and so on, we were more than happy to do that. Go out with our friends that we’d known for years and go to the Swan or somewhere like that for dance. But if you couldn’t manage, as it say, you would go on to these locals. And they all had little groups playing or something like that to encourage that sort of thing. I found it nice because, you know, you would walk in this... I can’t remember this name of the pub on the corner, which infuriates me... but you could walk in there, you would go upstairs, and the chances are if there were seventy, eighty people up there, you would know sixty-five of them, you know. Because they all came from the area. Things like that are quite different, because I don’t think it happens... well, it doesn’t happen now, does it?