Old Leyland Gates

[anacortesdamp]

I just read the piece on the Leyland Guardian web-site about the fracas at the Old Leyland Gates pub on Golden Hill Lane. Is that the late 1980's pub across from what was Station Garage after it moved from it's original location near the station? The entry gates to LML were right across the street, but that's not "Old Leyland (Motors)". They only put those gates in around 1975. The real "Old Leyland Gates" were the ones into the factory across Hough Lane from Thurston Road. They dated back to the 1920's.

I've been into that pub a couple of times when visiting Leyland, but I didn't recognise the name. If it is, it's right across the road from where George Damp & Sons' original filling station (as they were known then) was located.

We had a wooden building (really good when you storing oil and petrol!) and two pumps. One pump was electric and the other, though electrically powered, was the really old style with a one-gallon glass container at the top. The electric pump filled the container a gallon at a time and then you opened the valve to gravity-feed the gallon into the car's tank. It was the only pump we could use when the electricity was out, a frequent occurrence in the early 1950's. Then, you used a crank handle to manually fill the glass, and it took a long time of winding to fill it.

One regular customer had an 8-litre Bentley. On on occasion, he came in to fill up and was having trouble starting the car, so he left it idling. Power to the station was out, so we were cranking. My dad went out to fill it and after a few minutes he came back and said "you'll have to switch it off - I'm not catching up".

The customer reckoned that, if you took the filler cap off and listened down the pipe, you could hear the sucking noise if he revved up!

I think petrol was 1s/11d (just under 10p) a gallon then, but I might have mis-remembered. When I got my 1937 Austin Ruby in 1959, the cheapest petrol was 3/11 a gallon (just under 20p).


Frank

[noel]

That's the one Frank. It's had several names. I think The Hog's Head was it's first, then The Cherry Tree, though it may have been th other way round. It is built on what was the entry to the old BF Goodrich / BTR works.

[TonyL]

It was called The Dingman when it first opened

[noel]

good heavens, I'd forgotten that one, of course it was. I wonder why?

[Colin Damp]

I queried "The Dingman" (it opened after I came to Plymouth in 1977).

The story was that one of the overseers in the old Leyland Motors nozzle shop had the job of listening out for the "dinging" noise if one of the operatives - mostly women - let go of the nozzle while grinding it on a turntable, causing it to be flung against the casing around the grinding wheel.

To be honest, I think it was an urban myth which the brewery swallowed, since I've never heard of a "Dingman" and nor could I find anybody else who had.

[Spitfire]

The `Directory of Pub Names` comes up with a similar guess. Apparently - nobody has the definitive origin of the name.

[Colin Damp]

Getting back to gates, does anyone know what happened to the old LM North works gates? They were left there for a while, near to what became the market building. They were certainly there when my dad and sister moved to Kingswood Road in the 90s, but mysteriously disappeared. Health and Safety or something?

[batteryhen]

Colin: I'm pretty certain that it's a dead granny, too, but the version I heard was that the dingman was a tin-basher who took the "dings" out of finished panelwork. Certainly there was a tin-basher on the original pub sign.