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Leeds Years - Article

Leeds Years Batley Years
Old photo of a pub front

Grove Inn in the early days of  the Folk Club

The Grove Folk Club


I went to all the folk clubs in Leeds as they sprang up, but the Grove was always my favourite, and I don’t recall missing many Friday nights there in the five years I spent living in Leeds.

When I picked up the flyer advertising the opening of ‘The Seven Hills Folk Club’ at the Grove Inn, Back Row, Holbeck, I asked whereabouts it was. I was told it was just down from City Square, under the Station
‘Dark Arches’ and it was on the right just off Victoria Road, but they omitted to tell me it was not visible from the main road, as it was hidden by the mills that surrounded it. I had a right devil of a job finding it on the first night!

The Grove Inn is an old-fashioned traditional Yorkshire Corridor pub. As you enter the front door, the long corridor runs the length of the pub, and access to all the rooms and the bar is gained from it. The Folk Club is held in the concert room at the rear. Before the folk club started there the Grove had been frequented mostly by Irish Catholics who attended the Irish Dances at St, Francis’s Hall just farther down the road, but as folk scene flourished in the early 1960's, the Grove fast grew to become the place to go in Leeds on a Friday night.

Originally the folk club was named after the resident group, ‘The Seven Hills Folk Group’ that started it. The group was Keith Marsden, his first wife Christine, Keith’s older brother Howard and Brian Senior, and as quarters of the group hailed from Morley, and Morley was built on seven hills they thought the name apt. Shortly after the clubs opening Howard suddenly died and Christine decided to leave the group to look after her two growing children. Keith and Brian then adopted the name 'New Heritage', and changed the name of the club to ‘Folk at the Grove,’ or has it has been more colloquially known, 'The Grove Folk Club'.

Inside a pub room with tables

Grove Folk Club Concert Room

The rectangular Concert/Folk Club Room has a small corner stage at the rear with an adjacent, Double Fire Exit Door. In the folk clubs heyday, the 1960’s and 1970’s, the crowded room became very hot and extremely smoky, as none of the windows in the room opened. To alleviate this, the Fire Doors were usually thrown open at the interval, and on doing so the smoke would billow out of the room. The doors would then remain open for the rest of the evening. If you were sat near the stage, to get to the bar it was then quicker to go out the door and around the outside, and back into the pub through the side door and join the queue for the bar in the passage.

During those formative years I made friends with all the performers, both resident and visiting guest singers. The residents, Keith Marsden, Brian Senior, Geoff Wood, Bob Spray, Rennie Pickles, Allan Robinson, Jim Potter, One Eyed Jim (Greenwood), The Belfast Child, Bernard Davey and the Highland Piper Davey Anderson. They were all real characters to a man.

In fact, in those first few years at the Grove after Christine Marsden stopped singing, I don’t recall another female singer at all. In Leeds, in the first decade of the folk clubs, there was a dearth of female performers. Later there were a few, notably, Sue Garth Mason, Janet Jones, and Eileen Thorpe and Eileen Heaney both of Irish extraction, but you had to press them real hard to get them to sing, There were two husband and wife duos who ran their own folk clubs, Bob and Carol Pegg at the Royal Sovereign, Kirkstall and Kevin and Barbara Young Jimmies folk Club at St. James Hospital.

The Grove, like other folk clubs at the time, was set up for the performance and promotion of British traditional folk music and song. It featured not only English traditional, but Scottish, Irish, and Maritime traditional music and song as well. With residents like New Heritage, the Cropper Lads plus others it was always a great club for chorus singing, but the guest nights added a new dimension, featuring the best traditional performers at the time.

The club on guest nights was run on the standard folk club format. The evening would start with the MC plus a couple of resident local singers filling the first 20 minutes or so, then this would be followed by a 40-minute spot from the evening's guest. There would then be an interval of 15 minutes for socialising, replenishing drinks and buying raffle tickets. It would then restart as before with a short set of songs from the locals, and then the guest would do their second set to finish off the evening.

two men singing, one with a concertina

Bob Davenport and Louis Killen

There were many memorable nights with many traditional performers, here’s some of my favourites:

Louis Killen, the Tyneside singer and concertina player.
Cyril Tawney, the ex-sub mariner the singer of West Country traditional sea songs and modern maritime songs, mostly self-penned.
Bob Davenport, the Red-haired Geordie.
Jack Elliot, an ex-miner from Durham with a wealth of songs and stories.
John Doonan the ex–shipyard working piccolo player, known as the
‘Whistling Welder.’
Packie Byrne, the Irish singer, whistle player and storyteller from Donegal, and there were many others.

There were plenty of exceptional club nights but the most unforgettable one for me was Friday 17th May 1968. I got to the folk club during the interval directly from Leeds Hyde Park Terrace Maternity Hospital following the birth of my eldest daughter Sally. Christy Moore, the evening's guest, bought us both a double brandy to whet the baby’s head.

In In the early years there were several spin-offs from the Folk Club, ‘The Holbeck Moor Mummers’,
‘Wednesday Night in the Bar’ and on club nights, there was always a handful of Irish musicians making music in one of the two side rooms.

Men in costume performing in front of an audience

The Holbeck Moor Mummers in 1963

The Holbeck Moor Mummers
Whilst doing research Brian Senior came across a mention of Mummers in the Holbeck district in an old copy of the Leeds Mercury newspaper. Shortly after, while at Cecil Sharpe House in London he saw a mummers play performed and decided it would be a good idea to form a Mummers group at the folk club. He obtained a couple of play scripts, cobbled together a play from them, found some willing members of the folk club to take part and the Holbeck Moor mummers were formed. The original team consisted of Brian Senior, Geoff Wood, Ivan Robinson, Steve Ordish, Steve Ford and Paul Blake. Their first performance in public was at the Smiths Arms in Wakefield in December 1962. In the late 1960s I was drafted into the team a couple of times to stand in for Geoff Wood (The Doctor) and Brian Senior (The Gallant Knight) as they were indisposed at the time.

Wednesday Night in the Bar
Geoff Wood, the club’s doorman and raffle organiser was the main instigator of the ‘Wednesday Night in the Bar’. On the first night, a makeshift stage was assembled in front of the fireplace, it was made from some upturned, empty beer crates and a wooden board, and the singers performed on it. It started out as just good fun, but as it became popular local guest singers featured weekly, and they were all paid a flat rate of three pounds (£3). After I'd moved to Batley in 1968, I went back and guested in the bar a few times.

I went to the Grove quite regularly during the 1970s and 1980s whilst running the Batley Folk Club, but on moving to Whitby in 1990, I lost track of the Grove and Folk Club.

In 2002 I was invited to perform at the folk club’s 40th Anniversary party and stayed with my old friend Bob Spray, but the last time I was in the Grove was a few short years later when I stayed with Brian Senior to attend Bob’s funeral and wake.

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Mick Haywood is a traditional folk singer & folk song collector who has run and organised folk clubs and festivals for many years. He now lives in Whitby, North Yorkshire.

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