Ian Moore – The Royal Arms Pub in Gosport
Simon: I had heard that there were Pubs in Gosport that if you went in there and you didn’t smell of diesel, then people looked at you suspiciously. These were Submariner’s Pubs because this was true in the Cold War time, because they’d be like, ‘Well, what are you doing in here listening to us effectively and concerns about that.’
It was. I mean the Submariner’s Pub in Gosport was the Royal Arms, the ‘RA’, the infamous …
Simon: Oh, it was called the ‘RA’ was it? I didn’t know that.
Yeah, the ‘RA’, the Royal Arms Pub, which literally is just down the end of the road here, in Stoke Road. It’s been shut down for many, many years now but it was run by the matriarch of the Gosport Submariners.
Simon: What was her name?
A lady called Sonia. Sonia, she owned the place. She was the one who actually … it was Sonia and Darcy, her other half. Darcy, he always wore a bow tie, he always wore a waistcoat, and he was always put upon by Sonia, and he used to hate Submariners with a vengeance.
Simon: Really? Running a Submariner’s Pub?
We were the bane of his life because we would constantly rip into him all the time. We’d constantly be taking the mickey out of him, constantly trying to get Sonia to come out from around the other side of the Bar and all this sort of stuff, and she was loud, she was proud, she was crude with the best of us and all this sort of stuff.
But the ‘RA’ was fantastic, absolutely brilliant, especially for single guys because it was the sort of place where you could go in at any time of day that it was actually open.
Going back to the ‘70s, it used to shut at 3 o’clock in the afternoon or whatever it was, we didn’t have this 12-hour bar, 24-hour bar type of thing, apart from onboard the submarine itself. But quite literally if you were at a loose end and the ‘RA’ was open, you could go in there and you would know somebody, and if you didn’t know anybody, the mere fact that you were a Submariner, you would make a whole new bunch of friends while you were actually in there, because there was always guys there and they were always Submariners, all the time.
It was a Submariner’s Pub. Everything about it was submarines. All the plaques and the photographs around the walls and things, was all about submarines.