One of Pete Brown’s earliest memories is being “held in someone’s arms, in a space that glowed”. This was unusual in Barnsley in the 1970s, he writes, recalling the Technicolor tinsel and fairy lights in his local working men’s club every Christmas. They provided solace from the slag heaps and the permanently grey Pennine skies.
But be under no illusions: this is not a romantic book, lost in misty memories. It is a deeply political one, about the community-owned cooperatives that fuelled the welfare state and the idea of culture for all throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. They rarely get mentioned in conventional historical narratives, Brown writes, despite many books being published about gentlemen’s clubs, their upper-class equivalent. National membership of gentlemen’s clubs at their peak was 200,000. In 1974, 4 million people – about 10% of the UK adult population – were working men’s club members, my family among them, my grandpa sustained by old friends over pints of mild two nights a week.
