Three and Six for a Pint: A Trip Through the Con Club's Price Lists, From 1958 to Now
Photo: Paul Chapman, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
There's a battered ledger in the committee room cupboard that most members walk past without a second glance. Inside it, in fountain pen as neat as a schoolteacher's hand, is the answer to a question we get asked surprisingly often: what did a night out at the Con Club used to cost?
We pulled that ledger out, raided the committee minutes from three different decades, and cornered a few members who've been propping up the same spot since the Wilson era. Here's what we found.
1958: Three and Six, and That Was Being Flash
When the club opened its doors in 1958, a pint of bitter was priced at three shillings and sixpence — though many members made a night of mild at two-and-nine. Cigarettes were sold singly behind the bar, a packet of crisps cost tuppence, and the whole evening, raffle included, could be done for less than a ten-bob note.
Of course, that sounds like nothing until you look at wages. A mill worker or a man on the railways in late-fifties Mirfield might take home around £9 or £10 a week. So that three-and-six pint was roughly two percent of the weekly wage packet. Scale that to today's wages and you'd be paying the best part of £7 a pint — which, mercifully, we're not.
1978: The Bagley Era and the Birth of the Big Saturday
By the late seventies, the club was in full swing. The minutes from the 1978 AGM record bar prices of 28p for a pint of bitter, 24p for mild, and — a sign of the times — 45p for a lager and lime for the ladies. A bottle of Newcastle Brown would set you back 33p.
Average take-home pay in the area was around £65 a week by then. A member could have four pints, a packet of pork scratchings, get the bus home and still have change from two pounds. Long-time member Dennis, who joined in 1976, remembers it well: "You'd have your wage packet on the Friday, put the housekeeping in the jar on the mantelpiece, and the rest was for the club. Nobody counted pints because nobody needed to."
1998: Coolers, Karaoke and £1.60 a Pint
Fast forward to the nineties and the ledger's handwriting gets noticeably less elegant. In 1998, a pint of bitter cost £1.60, lager was £1.80, and a short with a mixer came in at £1.95. The club had just installed the new coolers in the cellar — a committee decision recorded, wonderfully, alongside a motion about whether the karaoke machine should be allowed on a Tuesday (carried, narrowly).
Wages had climbed to roughly £300 a week for many local workers, meaning a pint was still comfortably under one percent of the pay packet. The famous Saturday night concerts were £2 on the door, and the raffle — then as now — remained the true economic engine of the club.
Today: Still the Best Value in Mirfield
Which brings us to the present. Yes, prices have gone up — nobody's pretending otherwise, and the breweries haven't done us any favours. But compare like with like: a pint at the Con Club remains a good deal cheaper than anywhere in town, members' prices cheaper still, and the entertainment is thrown in for a fraction of what you'd pay in Leeds or Huddersfield.
The maths across all four eras tells the same story. In 1958 a pint was two percent of a wage. In 1978, about half a percent. Today? We're still hovering well below what the high street charges, because that was the whole point of founding the place in the first place.
Why It Matters
The ledgers aren't really about beer. They're a record of a promise made in 1958: that ordinary working folk in Mirfield would always have somewhere affordable to enjoy themselves. Every committee since has kept that promise, sometimes against the odds.
So next time you're in, raise a glass to the members of 1958 who wrote those first careful figures in the ledger. Three and six well spent, every bit as much as tonight's round.
The full set of historic price lists is pinned up by the bar if you fancy a look — and yes, the 1978 karaoke motion is framed.
