Dirty Stop Out’s Guide to Working Men’s Clubs: New book covers rise and fall of clubs in Sheffield

By fostering an alcohol-free environment enriched with middle-class values, the goal was to cultivate a more harmonious home life and reduce spiralling cases of domestic violence.

It’s fair to say the Victorian minister who conceived the first Working Men's Club would have turned in his grave at what the movement became: a multi-million-pound supplier of subsidised alcohol, years spent fighting to ensure women remained second-class citizens, and early educational pastimes like libraries replaced by entertainment spanning Bernard Manning to Sunday lunchtime strippers.

Despite its faults, the Working Men’s Clubs were a much-loved national institution that peaked in popularity during the 1970s.

Sheffield became a northern epi-centre with over 150 thriving venues in the era.

Neil Anderson’s new 'Dirty Stop Out’s Guide to Working Men’s Clubs' celebrates the heyday of this movement that helped create some of the UK’s biggest light entertainment stars of the era.

Local names that went on to national fame includes Marti Caine, Paul Shane, Bobby Knutt, Charlie Williams, Bernie Clifton and many others.

But despite up to four million people a week visiting the Working Men’s Clubs in their heyday and the institutions attracting some of the biggest names in entertainment, there really was only one star of the show – the bingo.

The annual club trip took tens of thousands of kids to the coast every year – for many youngsters, it was their only visit to the seaside.

Neil Anderson, author of the new 'Dirty Stop Out’s Guide to Working Men’s Clubs,' said: “I think it’s vital that this massive part of Sheffield’s working class history is celebrated and preserved.

“I had the pleasure of interviewing scores of entertainers, patrons, committee members, and more for the book, and it made me realise just how little is left of the movement today.”

It was teetotal social reformer Reverend Henry Solly that formed the Working Men’s Club & Institute Union (CIU) in 1862.

Its motto was simple: “Recreation hand in hand with education and temperance.”

Neil added: “By the 1970s it’s fair to say the movement was probably shifting more beer per week than half the pubs in the UK.”

Dirty Stop Out’s Guide to Working Men’s Clubs is published by Dirty Stop Outs and is available here: https://dirtystopouts.com/products/dirty-stop-outs-guide-to-working-mens-clubs