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The Ship Inn was situated at 63 York Street. This pub has now been demolished.

Source: Derek Benson

When my father was demobbed from the Royal Army Medical Corp he set up his first GP practice at 15 York Street, Heywood in 1947 when I was three years old. Soon after we moved in he introduced me to one of his patients, Mr Frain who ran the Ship Inn about half a mile further down York Street who in turn introduced me to his son Thomas who was about six months older than I and had a teenage sister called Dorothy. The Ship Inn became my second home because Tommy’s mum was a superb cook of Lancashire dishes including “pobs” and suet puddings containing almost anything you could think of as opposed to my mum who was the exact opposite. You entered the pub from the main street and a black and white tiled corridor ran from front to back. To the left was two separate rooms — a snug for the ladies and a games room for crib and dominoes. Finally there were the toilets. The right of the pub was an open seating area facing the pub bar, lined with draught pumps, which had a frosted window looking out onto York Street. Upstairs above the pub side a huge room ran the length of the building and above the open fireplace was a huge pair of buffalo horns for this was the meeting place of the local branch of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes. Scattered around the room was a snooker table, a darts boards and various tables and chairs for pub games including a magnificent hand-made bagatelle table. At the rear of the premises on the residence side there was a balcony leading down a flight of iron stairs to a long thin garden. This was matched on the pub side by an enclosed yard which gave brewery wagons access to the downstairs beer cellar. That yard was also Wembley Stadium, the Oval, and the White City running track for Tommy and I as we played for England at football, cricket and ran in the Olympics….. The first thing Tommy had explained to me was that Heywood was known across the county as “Monkey Town” because all the bars in the town had stools with holes in the centre for residents to park their tails and to prove it he showed me the Ship Inn stools — all with holes in the centre. It wasn’t just Tommy making up the tale about the tails. In 1850 Edwin Waugh wrote an essay about “Heywood or Monkey Town as sarcastic people in other parts of Lancashire call it”. The Ship Inn was where Tommy and I broke our alcoholic virginity. !! We would have been about five years old and we were so fascinated by how all the people in the pub seemed to so enjoy the liquid that came out of those draught pumps that we decided we had to try it. So one quiet afternoon we crept behind the empty bar and ceremoniously emptied each drip tray into pint glasses and attempted to down it in one. The catastrophic results were spewed from one side of the bar to the other and we felt we were so close to death that we made a pact never, ever again would either of us touch that vile liquid - a vow I honoured until I was 19 after which I spent a life making up for my abstinence… The Frains moved to Bispham near Blackpool when Tommy and I were on the verge of being teenagers. I don’t remember if it was illness or death that caused the move. From there they moved to Tankerton in Kent. I visited Tommy at both locations but then I was sent to boarding school in Ireland and inevitably we lost touch.

Peter O'Reilly (October 2025)

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