THE "GLUEPOT."

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 67, 19 March 1936, Page 18

THE "GLUEPOT."

OLD HOTEL TO GO.

LANDMARK IN AUCKLAND:

PATRONISED BY ROYALTY.

Not'for long will the old Ponsonby Club Hotel survive the passing of the three lamps that, from the centre of the cross roads, shed their light on three generations of Aucklanders who passed through its hospitable doors. Yes, the old "Gluepot" is to go, as the original three lamps went; a new building oil its site will soon match the elegant but unhallowed concrete light ■ standard on the curb, by which "the name of "The Three Lamps" is commemorated rather than kept alive.

"Happy is the country that has no history," some one has said; the same remark might be applied with equal aptness to public houses, for the history of the past, like the news of the present, is more often a story of tragedy than of happiness. The old "Gluepot* -may have no history, but it has its traditions. It would be a strange "pub" if it had not; for no building gathers to itself so quickly as does an inn a ( growth of legend. Like the legends of a race, those of a hostelry must have their roots in actual fact, but he who would to-day attempt to chronicle the history bf such an old house as the "Gluepot," ere it is razed from the earth, will garner morfeof fable than of history. Across the space of 60 years and more since the hostelry opened drifts the smoke of countless pipes. The fumes of mighty potations shimmer like the heat waves over the desert and through -them the past appears but dimly, even to those who have travelled' that wayi Looking backward, the. old-timers see the hotel of their young days -as a stage on which a new ca6t has replaced the oldy beloved players, who have leftv but the memory of a. few characteristic gestures, the echo of : a few (of their best "lines." Even the scenery has changed. "I could show you justJwhere he stood when he tossed off his last pint—my only son, Jack," said an old man with a glass of half-and-half/ "but the bar has beeii "altered since, those days, near forty years ago." v-fj*Old Ways and New. Aged heads,nodded, in agreement. New laws had banished the piano from the bar, and .the billiard table from the back room, and had forbidden friendly gatherings, to raise a -chorus as they drank; new-fangled notions had spread linoleum on the floors that ; were wont to be strewn with sand'or sawdust. Nor was the beer of ';tb-day ; the stuff that came from Dan. Arkleis brewery in Newton Road, and sold at twopence a pint. 'On three pints of it. you got a feeling that you wanted to hang yourself, one explained. "That' was a funny, thing, but" everybody got . that way 'OH it. "Like home "breWj it, was, another suggested. . * "But if it's a tale:-; you . would be after-hearing, sure its Ned Quinn would be the man for. you," quoth one. That ,9 his favourite seat--in the corner. , oyer there." An Indian hawker drinking, stout cowered away from Paddy's expansive o-esture, and an 'elderly Japanese mitted a faint smile to appear on his wrinkled cpuntenance —-the . clientele othe "Gluepot" is nothing if not polyglot. "Ned Quinn owned this place once, so he did. He made money at the Thames and bought this pub and settled down, and kept all the boys that he had known at the Thames and hadn't been as lucky as he had, so he did, until all his money was gone. And then he losjvthe pub, and got the old age pension, and he and they sit in that corner" (here the Indian ducked another sweeping gesture) "and drink and yarn until they all went one by one. Sure, it would be Ned Quinn would be after telling you a taldfof the old days. You should have * come, round here two years ago -and seen hiin..- Faith, yes, he's been dead two years more now."

As mention of one incident revived memories of ■ another the old-timers prompted, each other to the' telling of half-forgotten tales of the past halfcentury. It was even affirmed that two British monarch® had drunk in that very har.

Going further back into history, I another greybeard began a story that had to do with the wife of a Sea captain and one of the carpenters who had worked on the building of the hotel, but interrupted it to praise the craftsmanship of the men of tho3e days and the soundness of the materials they used. He insisted on an adjournment to the footpath, where the beauty of the pillars of- turned heart of kauri and their hand-carved capitals could be admired, and pointed out the ■ "rusticated" weatherboarding, each plank . overlapping, a half-groove in' the one below, while another declared that in testing the hardness of the timber he had turned the point of his knife. Auckland As It "Was. Then, turning his back on the build-' ing, he waved his arms over the steep slope of College Hill and the green- circle of Victoria Park at its foot, and, picking out one old landmark after another, tried to draw an airy sketch of the Auckland he had seen when, as a, lad, he climbed the scaffolding with the carpenters who were building the new hotel. As he spoke, the buildings on the slope and the rumbling tramcars seemed to disappear. There was only a rough road, winding through tall tea-tree as it followed the course of a ravine down to the water's edge. The green of the turf on Victoria Park became the green of shallow water,, the anchorage of a fleet of schooners, cutters and ketches, some of which, indeed, are still really there, invisible, buried in the reclamation. Up and down the steep road came carts, bearing building materials, and a few seamen from the vessels wnchoredrbelow, interested to see how the building of the new hotel was progressing. Only here and there on the slope and on the crown of the hill, did the roof of a cottage show above the scrub.

When, at last, the new hotel was opened, there was, he said, some trouble in the obtaining of a licerise, hence it became a "club," of which membership was, of course, purely nominal. The name "Gluepot". was not given to it until later, when the district became more populous. It was given by "women who sat at home gatherin' their brows like the gatherin' storm, nursin' their wrath to keep it warm," while their menfolk, who had just dropped in for an appetiser' ■'before- - tea, for a ; "night-cap." Seamen from the coastal' fleet formed a large proportion of the custom in .the early days, and two clock faces, showing the times 1 of high water a.m. and /p.m. still hang on the wall, but the reclamation of the. foreshore has driven the sea half & mile or more further away _from the "Gluepot than it was then, and few sailors now come that way.