Oddfellows Arms Hotel, 140 St Helens Road, Bolton

 

Oddfellows Arms pictured in 2014

SUMMARY

Opened c1840s. Became a Magee Marshall pub c1893 and was rebuilt in 1895. It became a Greenall Whitley pub following their takeover of Magees in 1958 and the closure of the brewery in 1970. It last opened in October 2020. In April 2021 it was announced that the pub would not be reopening.

ODDFELLOWS ARMS  HISTORY

Nobody knew that when pubs in Greater Manchester went into lockdown for a second time on 23 October 2020 it meant the end of the Oddfellows Arms after around 180 years as a pub. Six months later, in April 2021, the Bolton News reported that owner Admiral Taverns had taken the decision to close the pub. Landlady Margaret Wilson, who had run the Oddfellows for 15 years, said “I had an inkling that they would close the pub as there are lots of maintenance issues which need to be fixed.”

The story of the Oddfellows goes back to the middle of the 19^th century. The 1841 census shows John Crompton as a publican in Daubhill. The word 'publican' was used to describe the licensee of fully-licenced premises. The only fully-licenced pub in the area was the Stags Head, a little further up the Bolton to St Helens Turnpike Road - as St Helens Road was known at that time - and Peter Boardman was the licensee from the 1830s to the 1850s. So it is far more likely that John Crompton was a beerhouse owner at what was to become the Oddfellows.

John Crompton was succeeded as landlord by his son Richard who was listed as the pub's owner in 1855. By that time he would only have been in his early twenties. In 1854 he married Fanny Bowker, herself the daughter of a pub landlord in Atherton, and the couple would spend over 20 years at the Oddfellows. During that time the district of Daubhill changed immeasurably. The Bolton to Leigh railway pre-dated the pub having opened in 1828, but between 1862 and 1867 the local firm of Tootal, Broadhurst and Lee built Sunnyside Mills by the side of the railway line and just a couple of hundred yards away from the Oddfellows. That led to a boom in the local population. A whole network of streets were built on either side of St Helens Road to accommodate the new workforce.

The pub was sold in October 1878 and an article in the Bolton Evening News described it as “a beerhouse, the Oddfellows Arms, St Helens Road, Daubhill, with dwelling house, occupied by Richard Crompton, term 940 years, ground rent £2, £940.” A price of £940 equates to around £94,000 in 2025 prices.

The Oddfellows was one of a number of trades guilds and friendly societies that sprang up in England in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The name comes from the term 'odd fellows' - craftsmen from an assortment of trades. In 1810 TheIndependent Order of Oddfellows Manchester Unity was formed and still exists to this day. In 1832 the Ancient Noble Order of United Oddfellows, Bolton Unity was formed and was in existence until 1962. The branch was meeting at the nearby Stags Head in St Helens Road in 1872 and it is possible that a move to Richard Crompton's beerhouse further down the road led to him naming the pub after the organisation. Oddfellows branches frequently met at local pubs and members would often take something “for the benefit of the house”. As a result pubs would name themselves the Oddfellows Arms. It's still a relatively common name and there were at least two other pubs in Bolton with that name. The Ancient Shepherd on Bold Street was known as the Oddfellows in 1843 and a pub on Bradshawgate carried the name from the 1850s until its closure in 1938. The Loyal Willow Tree lodge was meeting at the pub from at least the 1930s onwards. The lodge was wound up in 1968.

In 1892 the Manchester Courier reported that Mr W Edge, the owner of the Oddfellows, had applied for a spirits licence for the pub. Daubhill was described as “a rapidly growing part of Bolton” and Mr Edge offered to surrender a beerhouse licence at Queen Street in the town centre as well as an off-licence. He even offered the council a patch of land although the article failed to say where. Nevertheless, the council rejected the application.

In February 1895 a soup kitchen was opened at the pub. Poor weather had put many local people out of work and a number of businesses provided relief. The pub's landlord, Joseph Edge, put five shillings towards the cost of food; a local baker, Mr Small, provided bread.

By 1895 the Oddfellows was owned by Magee, Marshall and Co, a local brewery set up a few years earlier at Cricket Street, about half a mile away from the pub. Magees decided to rebuild the Oddfellows and re-construction was completed that year. An article in the Bolton Evening News on the Daubhill area in 1974 gave an idea of what the pub was like before the rebuild. Sarah Jane Brooks, then of Longfellow Avenue but a Daubhill resident for most of her life, remembered the Oddfellows as being a small, four-room beerhouse. However, she pointed out that in the nineteenth century most of the buildings on that part of St Helens Road – including the Oddfellows – were only reached from the roadside by going down several steps. “Everything looked as though it were built in a hole,” she said.

The Bolton Moor Boxing Club was headquartered at the pub from November 1947, but reports at the time suggested that the Oddfellows had been previously used by boxing professionals Arthur Killeen, Joe Greenwood and Jack Lord. Greenwood, who is said to have fought in over 500 bouts, was once described by Nat Lofthouse as being Bolton's greatest ever sportsman.

The pub's landlord for over 30 years was Jack Asma who took over in the late-twenties and was there until September 1960. His daughter Irene was a GI bride – one of a small number from Bolton. During the second world war Irene was a stenographer for General Dwight D Eisenhower at Bushy Park near London. She married an American soldier, Donald H DuBois, in 1944 and featured in a Bolton Evening News article in March 1946 immediately prior to leaving for Tidworth camp along with two other local women who had married American soldiers. The trio then sailed to the United States from Southampton. Later in life, Renee Dubois, as she was then known, featured in a Bolton News article reminiscing about her time growing up in the town. She died in January 2021 aged 97.

Part of the upstairs living quarters at the Oddfellows were damaged by fire in 1971. Temporary manager Brian Walker said the fire was caused by a cigarette that he left on an ashtray in a bedroom. “I went downstairs to answer a ring at the front door and when I came back there was all this smoke,” he said. The fire brigade were also called out to the pub in November 1980 – but for an entirely different reason, A punter playing on the pub's fruit machine thought his winnings were 10p down and tried to reach inside the machine to retrieve a missing coin, His hand got stuck and after 40 minutes of trying to free him the landlady dialled 999. “When we arrived at the pub a man was on his knees on the floor with his hand firmly stuck up the chute,” a spokesman for the fire brigade told the Bolton Evening News. “We took the back off the machine and unscrewed the tube to release him.”

But the perhaps the strangest occurrence involving the Oddfellows and the local fire brigade came in September 1997. Twenty firemen turned up to fight a fire in the upstairs room of an adjoining building – but the 15 people drinking in the pub knew nothing about it. "About 15 people were still drinking in the pub when we got there. There's a solid wall between the pub and the out-building so I don't think they knew it was on fire,” a spokesman for the fire brigade said.

Ad from October 1972

The Oddfellows began hosting regular music nights in the early seventies. Local guitarist Steve Bowie featured regularly, but like many local pubs the Oddies invested in an electric organ and hired someone to play it every weekend. Country and Western nights were added in early 1979 featuring 'Nashville Special' a band who were still playing at the pub in 1983. After a hiatus music was reintroduced on a fortnightly basis from November 1984.

In 1985 regulars got up a petition to have the relief manager Stan Lomax made permanent. Two hundred people signed the 'Save Our Stan' petition and sent it off to Greenall Whitley. “Since he took over this pub has become a really happy place and the place has improved 100 percent,” John Hamilton, chairman of the Oddfellows' sports and social club said. Stan, a local lad, was keen on the idea. “I know 90 percent of the people who come in here and would like to stay as manager if Greenalls will let me,” he said. However, Greenalls had already decided that the pub would be transferred to a tenancy and the petition failed.

John Hamilton's comment about the beer quality deserves a little more scrutiny. It was a keg-only pub for many years but the November 1983 edition of the Campaign for Real Ale's Manchester magazine What's Doing reported that Greenalls had put on their new beer, Original Bitter, although they served it at the Oddfellows through an electric pump rather than a handpump. Certainly the quality of the beer improved enough over the coming few years for the pub to be included in the national Good Beer Guide for 1991.

Greenalls eventually got out of brewing in the early nineties to become a pubco. But in 1999 they sold off the remainder off the remainder of their pub estate. Following its closure in 2021 the Oddfellows was put up for sale and Admiral Taverns got a price of £427,750 + VAT when they disposed of the building in September 2021.

The Bolton branch of Camra have an excellent page on the Oddfellows with links to photographs and articles on the pub.