Historic Newport pub hits the buffers

10:25am Monday 12th January 2009

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By Mike Buckingham »

WITH its jazz band in full swing and a procession of characters in and out of its doors, the Engineers' Arms was a place of gleeful and boozy eccentricity.

Mike Buckingham remembers when the pub was in its heyday, and Newport didn't take itself quite so seriously.

WHEN the apes leave Gibraltar the fortress will fall.

Ravens fleeing the Tower of London will portend the end of Britain as a major power, both of which seemed more likely propositions than the closure of the Engineers' Arms in Baneswell, Newport.

But now, let the island fortress be apeless and the Tower unravened.

The Engineers has closed its doors leaving two generations of ageing hippies and bohemians, jazz lovers and a Friday night conclave of bibulous solicitors homeless.

The pub which in its latter years was to become an island of defiance in a city centre increasingly given over to soul-less drinking hangars opened 160 years ago to serve the navvies excavating the Great Western line tunnel from which the nearby Tunnel Terrace takes its name.

For most of these years the pub was the haunt of railwaymen long before health and safety and any notion that one should always be sober whilst at work.

Footplatemen and drivers slaked their thirsts their in the days when being sober at work was not mandatory. It was only with the demise of steam that the railwaymen ceded their place at the bar to a motley crew of college lecturers, lawyers and estate agents, wannabe poets and novelists, journalists and painters.

Some of the painters earned their money doing up local houses but at the creative end of the market were such as John Selway, now an internationally-known name, Phil Muirden, also a scion of Newport Art College in its glory days and Brian Gardiner, a landscapist who streetscapes of Newport and Pontypool have won critical attention.

Under the management of Roger Boswell and his wife, Diana the 'Engines' reached the peak of its reputation as a slighty racy venue where one could go to listen to the Acme Jazz Band, drink excellent pints of HB and of course, smoke.

With Bob Gribble blasting away on the trombone and the rest of the Acme in full strum and blast, so dense was the crowd that those drinking in the small bar facing Albert Terrace and East Steet and desirous of visiting the gents' had to walk outside and around to the East street entrance and duck back into the back bar where the loos were situated.

The front bar or men's bar as it was usually called (although ladies of some fortitude were known to use it) suffered its worst disaster 15 years ago when fire broke out, severely damaging the century-old wood panelling and smoke-damaging stock on the optics and shelves.

'Bozzy' as Roger Boswell was known promised that fire-damaged stock would be sold off at a preferential rate to regular customers but those who shuffled through the ashes and picked their way through the smouldering timbers did so in vain; the cut -rate drinks never materialised.

The damage was repaired and life at the Engines returned to something like normal tempo for a few years until the present mood of puritanism began to take hold.

The virtual disappearance of the liquid lunch-time and after-work refreshment undoubtedly played a part in the pub's decline, in common with so many others.

The enormous mirror in the middle bar, painted with a jazz theme by Phil Muirden eventually disappeared, as did the enormous model of a Mississippi steamboat made by Jan Preece, local historian and erstwhile curator of Pill Heritage Centre who held court in the men's bar.

The Engineers has closed because innocent joy has all but been eradicated from 21st century Newport.

There was a time when academics went for a drink with their students and reporters covering trials at the Crown Court or magistrates' court telephoned reports from the payphone in the corner of the men's bar.

Newport has transformed itself from a town into a city, with all the bridges and office buildings, proposed campus developments and luxury flats that such a title merits but an indefinable sense of fun has gone.

We are bigger and more prosperous than we were when the jazz boomed out and the ale flowed.

And with the closure of the 'Engines' sadder, too.