Treasured Tales: Queen of Clubs City!
Queen of Clubs City! Researching and writing 'The Dirty Stop Outs Guide to Coventry’s Working Men’s Clubs'
Coventry’s once vast network of Clubs included one of the country’s oldest – Coventry Working Men’s Club, established in 1860.
It became the first Club ever to be visited by a reigning monarch when Queen Elizabeth II stepped inside in 1977 as part of her Jubilee Tour. This was a high point for the City and the club movement as a whole. Ruth Cherrington’s own interest in the Clubs began as a child when she would go to the local Canley Social Club with her family. Later in life she decided to write about the Working Men’s Club’s heritage, from how they were established and ran to why they were so popular.
This book is the culmination of years of research and more recent collaboration with local Facebook groups, through which Ruth gained many great insights, memories and often hard-to-get images and memorabilia. Ruth will describe how she set about documenting the City’s clubs, meeting the challenges and virtually meeting hundreds of club members, both past and present.