By Douglas Whitbread via SWNS
An extraordinary gang of old pals have met up at the same pub for a pint every Thursday – for a staggering 56 years.
The band of friends, aged between 78 and 83, have visited The White Swan in Sheffield, South Yorks., for their weekly catch-up since 1968.
And although their conversations have shifted from “soccer and sex” to “pensions and prostates”, they have religiously kept up the “invaluable” tradition.
Peter Thirlwall said he inadvertently helped found the meetups when he started going for a pint with his neighbor Paul Haynes after rounds of golf.
The group later swelled to include seven core members, including Bill Munden, Ken King, Brian Ayres, Dick Cotton, and Mick Sorby.
Now a grandad of five, Peter said he “could not imagine” his life without the regular pub sessions, which let the men share any concerns on their minds.
He said: “It’s invaluable. If you’re a solitary man who just comes home from work, watches TV and goes back to work, you have nobody to talk to about any of your innermost worries.
“Whereas, we can talk to the lads and say, ‘By the way, does this happen to you?’ And they’ll say, ‘Yeah!’
“All these sort of things, we can talk about and we’ve got somebody to bounce it off. We’re never, ever short of a conversation.
“We used to talk about soccer and sex, and now we talk about pensions and prostates… And as you get older, there’s more to reminisce about as well.
“Everybody talks about their ailments – how many times they get up in the night to have a pee. I just couldn’t imagine my life without the Thursday nights.”
Grandad of four Bill Munden, 78, who went to school with Peter, said the only rule among the group was that their wives could not attend.
He said about the weekly meetings: “They’ve probably helped to keep us young, and we’ve been involved in lots of activities together.
“We’re tittering with laughter in the pub, and sometimes it’s a bit of an uproar and we have to be told to shush as we’re making a bit of a racket.
“There are no rules whatsoever, apart from wives are not allowed to come out with us on Thursday nights – that’s a fast rule.
“We do meet up altogether socially as a group, but Thursday nights are boys only.”
Peter, 78, said most of the men in the group were employed at the English Steel Corporation – with some working as Metallurgists and others as electrical engineers.
He said the friends, from Sheffield, had maybe only missed two dozen of the weekly sessions during the more than five decades they’d spent meeting up together.
Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter said the retirees, who have 33 grandkids between them, made sure they chatted with each other over Zoom calls.
And one of the only changes from five decades ago was that some members had given up alcohol and others had decreased their beer consumption.
He said: “Paul moved in across the road from me, and we started playing golf together. Then after golf, we started going to the pub – that was in 1968.
“And it just became a tradition. We went to the pub every Thursday night, and we’ve been to the pub every Thursday night for the last 56 years.
“We don’t do Christmas day. But I bet we haven’t missed 25 Thursday nights in 56 years. And even when the COVID pandemic was on, we did it via Zoom.
“The only thing is, we used to all go out and have three pints, but now we’re down to two pints, and some of them have non-alcoholic ‘Guinness 0’.”
Peter said the bonds that had been forged during the pub meet-ups had inspired members of the group to take on marathons and other sporting challenges together.
He said their shared sense of humor and trust meant the sessions had continued without fail – even when they faced life struggles.
Peter said: “I lost my first wife when she was quite young.
“And then I met my second wife, and there were times when I thought, ‘I really ought to see my fiancée.’
“But in fact I couldn’t if it was a Thursday – I had to go to the pub. That was it.
“Out of the lads, they’ve all been married 50-odd years. We’re not a divorcing group or anything like that. And they’re trustworthy.
“They all have the same standards of behavior. If they say they’ll do something, they’ll do it – they don’t let you down.”
He went on: “We’ve played golf together, we’ve played squash together. And it’s such a good set of lads. We never fall out. We just have fun.
“We’ve got this camaraderie that we can talk to each other about what we’re worried about.”
