Sixty-Seven Years of Stories: The Nights Mirfield Con Club Members Will Never Forget

You can learn a lot about a club from its committee minutes. You can learn a great deal more from the people who've been propping up the bar since the Wilson era.

So a few weeks back, we stuck a notice on the board by the snooker room and a post on the members' Facebook group: tell us the one night at the Con Club you'll never forget. We expected a handful of replies. We got dozens — some scribbled on beer mats, some typed out at length, and one delivered in person by a gentleman who insisted on acting out the whole thing, pint in hand as a prop.

What follows is a selection. Names have been kept as given, because frankly nobody asked to be anonymous.

The Proposal That Stopped the Disco

Dennis, 74, member since 1971:

"It was a Saturday in November, 1983. The disco lad was playing 'Come On Eileen' — he played it every week, no exceptions — and I'd had a couple of shandies more than usual. I got the DJ to stop the record, got down on one knee in front of the dancefloor, and asked our Sandra to marry me.

She said yes. Then she said, 'Get up, you're embarrassing yourself.' We've been married forty years this spring. The whole room bought us a drink. I still owe half of them."

Sandra, when asked for her side of the story, added only: "He didn't even finish his shandy first. Left it on the windowsill. Waste."

The Wedding Do That Went Until Dawn

If you've been to more than a couple of club weddings, you'll know the pattern: buffet at eight, first dance at nine, taxi booked for midnight. The Con Club, however, has a long memory for the exceptions.

Margaret, who joined in 1968, remembers the wedding reception of local couple Jean and Colin in the summer of 1977:

"It was the week of the Jubilee, so everyone was already in high spirits. The band finished, but nobody wanted to go home, so somebody put a transistor radio on the stage and we just carried on dancing to whatever was on. At some point somebody's dad started singing, and honestly, it was better than the band.

They locked up at half two. The committee were there till the end. I think the kegs were empty by the Sunday and we had to have shandy at the buffet the following week. Nobody complained."

The Testimonial That Got Out of Hand

Not every legendary night involved a wedding or a proposal. Sometimes it was football.

Brian, 68, longtime regular:

"When our lad got his testimonial at the Sunday league, the team decided the presentation had to happen somewhere proper — and that meant the Con Club. Fair play, the committee gave us the back room free of charge.

What nobody accounted for was that the away team came too. And their supporters. And by the time the trophies were handed out, there were a hundred and forty people in a room built for sixty, the raffle had been done three times, and one of the opposition had won the meat draw.

He was a good sport about it. Took the joint home to Castleford and everything. His missus sent a Christmas card for years after."

Smaller Nights, Bigger Memories

Not every story we received was a big occasion. Some of the best were barely nights at all.

Pat, member since 1980, wrote in about the Thursday she and her late husband spent playing dominoes until closing: "We weren't even speaking to each other over some disagreement about the score. We stayed till the end anyway. Best night out we ever had, that — we laugh about it now."

Another member, who asked to be called only 'Kath from Huddersfield Road', remembers the night the power went out during a acts' set in the nineties: "The singer carried on in the dark, no mic, and everyone sang along. Candles came out from behind the bar. You couldn't plan a night like that. You couldn't recreate it anywhere else."

That, we'd suggest, is the point. Sixty-seven years in, the Con Club's real history isn't in the minute books or the price lists — it's in the nights that only happened because a few hundred Mirfield folk kept turning up, week after week, decade after decade.

Your Turn

We know there are hundreds more stories out there — first dates, leaving dos, the night someone's uncle got on the stage and refused to come off. If you've got a memory of the Con Club you'd like to share, pop it in writing to the committee, catch a member of staff behind the bar, or drop us a message through the website.

The best submissions will feature in a follow-up piece later this year. Beer mat scribbles accepted. Pint-in-hand reenactments also accepted, subject to queueing.

Here's to the next sixty-seven years of them.