A tale of two social clubs
‘If someone had suggested a drag king cabaret night 20 years ago, there would have been a couple of cardiac arrests’
By Dan Hayes
To say the Manor Social Club has had a chequered history over the last decade would be something of an understatement. In 2016, 50-year-old grandmother Gillian Poulson died after what police described as “an altercation” at the club. An 18-year-old woman was arrested in connection with her death but no further action was taken. Five years later, in 2021, a fire ripped through the building, causing extensive damage to its front door and the foyer. Police arrested a 32-year-old man near the scene on suspicion of criminal damage, arson and assault.
That fire could well have been curtains for the club. Thankfully, two years ago it was bought by entrepreneur Peter Eyre, who rebranded it into one of his chain of Pocket Sports Bars, which includes outlets in Rotherham and Mexborough. These days, any hope this buy-out inspired looks like nothing more than a false dawn. Earlier this month, a council notice appeared on the club’s doors saying it was to be closed pending a licensing review. The notice doesn't go into great detail, but listed the reasons for the review as “the prevention of crime and disorder, public safety, [and] the protection of children from harm”.
The club is just up the road from me, so I take a short drive to have a look around. The imposing building still has its distinctive tiled frontage, a throwback to its glory days. But there’s no sign of any activity inside. A torn and tatty poster for a performance by glam-rock tribute band The Glamned last October flutters in the breeze. Next to it, inside a glass frame, is an advert for another music night — but I wouldn’t bet on DJ Simon coming back anytime soon.
Outside Arundel Ex-Servicemen’s Club and Institute a hundred yards down the road a man is smoking a rollie outside. “Debt — they ran out of money,” he says when I ask him what happened to their neighbours. “It used to be the best club in Sheffield,” he continues. “Not one of the best — the best.” (While debt won’t be the reason for the council requesting a licence review, the hearing may now never take place, given the business has closed down, meaning the full story could remain uncertain.) Inside, the Arundel’s barmaid tells me that the three local working men’s clubs — Park and Arbourthorne, Manor and Arundel — used to form a short pub crawl and regularly attracted thousands of people every week. Now, this is the only one of that trio left.
The Tribune has covered working men’s clubs before. Back in January 2022, we found a few still clinging on against the tide of closures. Clubs at Killamarsh, Firth Park and Shiregreen weren’t exactly thriving, but they were surviving. Now, after Covid and the cost of living crisis, there are even fewer left, with the Manor club just the latest in a long line of closures.
Finding out what happened to the Manor club hasn’t been easy. Peter Eyre himself hasn’t got back to me despite multiple attempts to contact him. After posting a message on a Manor estate Facebook group, I was sent several messages from customers and former members of staff alleging poor management and questionable employment practices. However, the final straw allegedly came when the roof of the concert hall fell in one day, revealing a worrying amount of asbestos. Subsequent inspection by the council’s health and safety department found that the CCTV system wasn't working and the fire extinguishers were empty. The place was essentially a death trap, they claim.
If this is to be curtains for the Manor club, it’s a fairly ignominious end for a once legendary venue. Under my Facebook post, dozens of people left messages of their memories. Many people from the Manor remembered going to the club with their families when they were kids. “Used to go every week with my grandparents, uncles and aunties. Those were the times,” wrote one person. “Didn’t [Sheffield-born Emmerdale and Benidorm star] Bobby Knutt used to perform there back in the day?” asked another.
Some wondered if this tragic demise was basically inevitable: a result of the passage of time, changing leisure habits and the cost of living crisis. It’s an obvious explanation to reach for, but I’m not entirely convinced. After all, on the other side of the city, it’s possible to find evidence to suggest that we don’t need to call time on the working men’s club just yet.
Compared to the gradual and then sudden decline of the club in Manor, Crookes Social Club is an entirely different, more cheering story. My Tribune colleague Daniel Timms lives just a few minute’s walk away and says the business seems to be thriving. One recent Friday night he went in and found a surprising scene — the club’s traditional working class clientele, sitting cheek by jowl with middle-class newcomers and university students, all playing bingo. I wanted to find out how they have managed to buck the trend.
As I arrive, club manager Maurice Champeau immediately takes me into the massive, 500 capacity concert room, a physical manifestation of how popular the club was in its 20th century heyday. Under his management, it appears the good times are coming back. Last year, the hugely popular Irish indie folk band Villagers packed out the vast space. Legendary folk band Fairport Convention have played there recently and the concert hall is also home to Sheffield Jazz, who host concerts there 30 times a year.
Champeau will celebrate his tenth year of working at Crookes Social Club next month, a huge milestone in an industry as marked by rapid staff turnover as hospitality. Back in 2014, he was managing a few bands, some of whom played gigs at the club. Over a casual conversation with some committee members one evening, they mentioned that the institution was in serious financial trouble.
It was a fork in the road, a call to arms of sorts, and one Champeau found impossible to ignore. He agreed to work at Crookes Social Club for six months to see if it could be saved, but vowed that would be it — once he’d stabilised the business, he would be out the door. It would not be an easy task. When he arrived, the club massively overdrawn at the bank and was struggling to pay the electric bill. Cash flow was “dire” and they were finding it difficult to make payroll. They had even started selling off old silver trophies to raise cash.
The problem? “No one was doing the maths,” he says. For example, a regular tea dance needed an instructor who cost £150 a pop, but only seven people ever attended. “People said ‘but we’ve always done the tea dance’,” he says. To which he replied: “Well, you might have always done it but, if you carry on, you’re going to be boarding the place up.” He adds that they would also regularly pay £500 for an evening’s entertainment, only to have a few dozen people turn up, wiping out any profit they could hope to make on the bar.
A decade after he promised to spend just six months in his position, time has made a liar of Champeau. At the very least, however, he has proven that saving the club was possible. Doing so required him to essentially recreate the club’s business model, making it less focused on its members. A controversial move perhaps, but one that has preserved the establishment they love for the future — and hopefully future generations of members too.
Members’ entertainment used to take place in the big concert room, but over time Champeau moved it to the smaller bar and lounge area. Here, typical working men’s club fayre like bingo, quizzes, singers and mediums are still hugely popular on Saturday nights. However, unlike before, the big room is now used seven days a week, 12 hours a day. Saturday nights are booked solid until next June. As a result of the changes that have been made over the last decade, the club has just been able to invest £20,000 to get the bar and lounge refurbished. “We could never have dreamed of doing that 10 years ago,” Champeau says.
Do the two groups — the club’s traditional customer base and its new fans — ever clash, I ask. “It can be fun on occasions,” he says. “If, 20 years ago, someone would have come to the committee of this club and said we’re having a drag king cabaret on the stage, people would have fallen off their chair. There would have been a couple of cardiac arrests.” He admits that some of the membership — maybe 10 or 15% — left as a result of the changes he made. But he felt that, in order to ensure there was still a club to join in another 10 years time, they needed to attract younger people. While members’ wishes are still taken into account, these days 70% of the club’s income comes from non-members. “That’s why we’re still here,” says Champeau.
Prior to its reinvention, there was a credible threat that Crookes Social Club could have ceased to exist, not just as a business, but altogether. The building is owned by a property development company in Doncaster, who bought it from the brewery 15 years ago as a potential development site. Champeau says that, if he hadn’t made it possible to pay the rent and upkeep on the building, this developer likely would have flattened it to make way for student flats. Now, they are more than happy to let it stay how it is. Just a few weeks ago, he signed another 20-year lease.
It would, however, be overstating things to claim that Champeau is the sole reason the club is doing better these days. The changes that have taken place outside the club’s doors probably helped a little too. During most of the time Crookes Social Club has been running, the surrounding neighbourhood was a strongly working-class part of Sheffield. Now the area is nearly unrecognisable. There are not only more students, with the time and disposable income to go to the pub, but also more middle class people, who moved to be close to their work at the universities or the hospitals. As a result, house prices have gone through the roof, with basic two bed terraces selling for £250,000.
They club has had a bit of luck as well — just before Covid it was used as a filming location by the Everybody’s Talking About Jamie film, which meant the management didn’t have to borrow during the pandemic. The club seems to be a popular location for filming, probably due to its distinctly throwback look. It was recently used to film a new music video for the Pet Shop Boys, while Joe Elliott from Def Leppard makes a point of using the venue to shoot in whenever he can. (The club was one of the first venues the Sheffield rockers ever played in 1979, for which they were paid the princely sum of £60).
The club’s president Carol Milner — a 72-year-old who has been a member for 28 years — is nevertheless happy to give Champeau most of the credit. “If Maurice hadn’t taken over when he did, this place would have been shut,” she tells me. The main changes have been a move away from the enthusiastic amateur days and towards a more professional approach. And they also had to address the stigma that can surround working men’s clubs, as being the preserve of men with flat caps and whippets. “A woman president, they would have turned in their graves,” Carol says of these bygone members. “But you have got to go with the times and how it is now.” Part of this rebrand involved changing the name: it’s now Crookes Social Club rather than Crookes Working Men’s Club.
Whatever your view on the club’s decision to move away from its legacy, it’s undeniable that this process has achieved what they hoped it would, bringing in groups who would have never used the club before. The University of Sheffield student darts club come to the club every Saturday, set up four dartboards in one of the function rooms and buy drinks all afternoon. And every Thursday, the Crookes and Crosspool Gaming Society (a group that plays games like Dungeons and Dragons) “pack the place out”, Carol says. “There are so many that they have had to limit numbers to 48 and they have a waiting list,” she adds. The majority of people who use the club opt to become members, paying £5 a year to get cheaper drinks but also buying into the club and feeling like they are a part of it as well.
As I leave, Champeau reveals that the owners of the Manor Social Club asked him for advice when they first bought it, which indicates they were at least interested in adapting the club to modern times. However, for whatever reason they either didn't or weren’t able to follow his advice. “A failure to evolve is what killed the Manor and many, many more,” he says. “Dial House, one of Sheffield’s most famous clubs, went for exactly the same reason. It’s not that people don’t want to come to clubs, but you’ve got to give them a reason to.”
More of Karina Lax’s photo project In The Club can be found on her website.
Key is changing the name, even I wont go to a 'working mens club' as I worry it will be fill of old blokes that dont want women in there. I often went past Manor Social Club and saw lots of smokers outside (almost all older world weary) and wondered who was allowed to go there. It never seemed 'welcoming'.
But Crookes also has the advantage of neighbourhood gentrification which the Manor lacks...
Interestingly in NZ WMCs are still going strong, they are essentially just event spaces, a pub, a disco, function rooms and restaurant. But oddly the wearing of hats is strictly forbidden!
Pete Brown’s recent book Clubland covers the rise and fall of WMCs quite well, and this article reflects his thoughts on the need for clubs to be adaptable to survive. It’s possible as Crookes club shows (and Lane Top apparently), but so few manage it. It’s amazing how once mighty clubs like Dial House and Southey have disappeared.
Brown argues that Wetherspoons has taken over many of the functions of WMCs, and I think there’s some truth in that.