Sunday dinner at the club: the Fed, the committee and a carvery

The working men’s club began as a respectable idea. The Rev. Henry Solly founded the Club and Institute Union in 1862 as a middle-class charity, aimed at education and recreation without alcohol. The working men took it over quickly, and drink was allowed. The CIU says it’s the oldest club union in the world, and says its members can use more than 1,200 clubs across the UK.

The beer that started a brewery

After the First World War, the clubs of the North East had a complaint. According to the Morning Advertiser, brewers were charging them full excise duty on beer while supplying casks that had “often been watered down from 570 standard gallons to make 851”. The clubs’ answer was to brew their own. Clubs on Tyneside and across County Durham and Northumberland raised the money.

The Northern Clubs Federation Brewery was founded in 1919, when it bought an old brewery in Alnwick. That one turned out not to work, so brewing began on Hedley Street in Newcastle in March 1921. The brewery moved to Dunston in 1980 and was sold to Scottish & Newcastle in 2004. Heineken closed it in 2010. It was “the Federation, or Fed for short”, and it became the biggest and best known of the club breweries.

The rules

A club is a cooperative, run by its members through a committee that’s usually elected every year. The rules “tend to be vigorously enforced”, and the committee hands out warnings and bans. The rule that matters on a Sunday is this one: non-members can’t get in unless a member signs them in, and many serve food.

Where to get your dinner

Here’s the honest bit. We couldn’t find a menu online for any of the clubs round Stanley, so we can’t tell you which ones do a Sunday dinner. On our map there’s East Stanley Club on Chester Road, Oxhill Central W.M.C. on Eden Terrace, New Kyo Constitutional Club on Croft Terrace, and South Moor Sports & Community Club on Third Street. Ring ahead, and find a member to sign you in.

For a Sunday dinner you can count on, the bar and restaurant at South Moor Golf Club in Craghead says: “Every Sunday you can enjoy our carvery from 12noon to 3pm.” It does a takeaway carvery too, and it says vegetarian and gluten-free meals are available on request. It’s a different kind of club, but the gravy works the same.

If you find a club round here that does a proper Sunday dinner, log it. That’s exactly what this map is for.