The Commodore Club, Heysham
Away from blank-wrapped populations alongside the bay
windows foisting premature Christmas,
a risky counter-slide, heading north, winter’s cold scent, the vanishment of leaves
uncoils the fused armature . . .[i]
The Commodore Club, Heysham
Does Christmas encourage unusual social combinations? Perhaps. But The Commodore Club in Heysham[ii], tragically threatened with imminent closure[iii], in its inclusive and ever-friendly way, has long stimulated an intermixing of the apparently traditional with the naturally or resistantly bohemian.
Christmas Day in Heysham, 2021
It was only two years ago when, invited by writing and performer friends, Jim and Martin[iv], I was fortunate enough to encounter The Commodore Club – a place more than able to reverse chronological time and revive a superior social history . . . The club began aboard an old light ship vessel called the Comet, berthed beside the Stone Jetty in Morecambe, moving to its current premises “on the somewhat sturdier ground of Heysham Road,” in 1954.
Merry Christmas in Egremont, Dec 2021
One member I met recently, Peter Jackson – a fine karaoke singer – has been going to The Commodore for 25 years and has known the club since 1968. I can’t imagine how he and other regulars will cope if the evening performance of the specially-scripted pantomime, Carry On Up the Commodore, on the 28th December, proves to be the club’s swansong.
Ravenglass Post Office, clinging on, December 2021
Holmrook, Christmas 2021
“The Commodore has long been a safe space for all serving and veteran Armed Forces personnel, and is a base for the Royal Naval Association, the Morecambe Bay Submariners’ Association, and the Merchant Navy Association.” Yet among its members and friends are many artists, writers and poets. Some might argue that to an extent, sailors, replacing the land’s relative certainty with the fluidity of tides and the risks of the oceans, become accustomed to existing beyond the pale, just as many artists and writers inevitably become outsiders or eccentrics.
Cardboard Holy Night
The Commodore Club stage and bar, 2024
Although neither my daughter nor I took the microphone during the party for a friend on the 30th November nor at December the 7th’s “Christmas Cracker”, we really enjoyed trying to sing along with songs from Fiddler on the Roof, Abba, Wham and particularly Mary Poppins: “Chim chiminey, chim chiminey, chim chim cher-oo” . . . splendidly performed by another writer and actor friend, Geoffrey, complete with costume, soot and brush!
Windows in space 1, December 7th2024
Windows in space 2
The night of the “Christmas Cracker” was rife with gale warnings. By evening the wind was scouring the prom, raging through the gaps in the terraces and slamming the deserted West End streets as we struggled around corners and fought our way forward through meteorite storms of grit and flying litter, past rolling wheelie bins, Christmas decorations and night windows floating in space. Strange that the photographs here are all so still:
Windows in space 3
As we reached the steps and entered, in contrast to the whirling night, The Commodore enveloped us as a space station lost in deep space might welcome misguided travellers. Calmly and increasingly cheeringly, it rediscovered comfortable tropes from another century: bingo, raffles, quizzes, karaoke and above all, generous conversation. As with my first visit two years ago, a sizeable buffet selection was also laid out for members and guests to enjoy.
Windows in space 4, December 7th2024
After the wind-blasted streets with their glowing yet marooned windows, this convivial sense of refuge reinforced the better aspects of the Christmas season – a season renowned for its ability to traumatise. Materialism may try to contradict the dark all year round, but in ticking the boxes with overstated emphasis, does Christmas only highlight the degree to which we often struggle to paper over our own cracks?
Fairfield Road tipping into space, 7th December 2024
Personally, I suspect this is why from Boxing Day onwards, if revellers and rest-takers alike are unable to walk through frost, snow or sunlight to revive their spirit, glumness can take control and the relief of holiday be replaced by an inertia arising from over-indulgence. The engine drags and stalls, requiring the jump leads of New Year to temporarily embrace the future before a second collapse. Without the right weather, it is hard to reset our optimism, to escape the encroaching darkness into the myth of the season. Eventually, like it or not, we are forced to return to that more abiding and monotonous myth – the ever-declining path of daily human reality in the 21st Century.
A reviving winter sun, Kendal, December 2021
Whether or not Christmas is an enormous universal regression, during which almost all of those whose cultures are heavily swayed by its crash-up of hijacked legends and tenuous hopes, try to go back to the beginning – to see and feel their younger selves reflected in the baubles on the tree – there is little doubt that for good or ill, its nostalgic bane gets under the skin.
Curtained window in space, December 7th2024
In this season of religious muddle and material excess, annually the temptation arises to grant its indiscriminate estuary the clearer meaning it cannot grasp. Always, before it can reach the unknowable sea beyond, the festival ebbs into New Year – bringing resolutions as weak and self-deceiving as those made across the world after covid: that we would try to make a better world.
Windows in space 5, December 7th2024
Ravenglass, West Cumbria, December 2021
The ultimate spirit of Christmas is as enigmatic and insubstantial as this blurred half image from Ravenglass in West Cumbria. Perhaps there are those whose possession of a greater belief in aspects of Yuletide’s collective myth – religious, familial, consumerist (cynical or blissfully ignorant) social or alcohol-fuelled – allow them to maintain a clearer overall faith? Others may always prefer to cherish an inspired doubt – during the nights of which they will always be grateful for the lights and company of such homes from home as The Commodore Club . . .
Merry Christmas at The Commodore, December 7th 2024
Malcolm O’Neil faultlessly sings Mel Tormé’s [v] Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire
and Chris Rea’s Driving Home for Christmas. December 7th – 8 th2024
Finally, long after midnight, we headed homeward, the wind outside had reduced a shade and a beacon of traffic lights changed for no-one. A cat hesitated on a wall in Grenville Road while a shattered chimney pot appeared miraculously to have missed all the parked cars nearby. The better aspects of Christmas played over in my head and thanks to an acceptance gifted by The Commodore, I felt happy to retreat from the season’s enigma, glad perhaps that it can never be fully cracked.
© Lawrence Freiesleben,
Heysham, December 2024
NOTES All notes accessed between 7th-11th December 2024
[i] Fragments from an unfinished poem in progress (Nov-Dec 2024): The Pine Lake Manoeuvre
[ii] morecambecommodoreclub.co.uk/
[iii] www.beyondradio.co.uk/news/local-news/interview-fundraiser-launched-to-save-heysham-club-for-navy-veterans-facing-closure-within-weeks/
[iv] Notes from an email from Christmas 2022: “Some other friends from the writer’s club were around by the outdoor stalls and we all ended up walking down to the Commodore Club – a wonderfully evocative anachronism. Jim (Lufton) and Martin (Palmer), also known as the Dynamite Duo (See internationaltimes.it/avenues-and-alleyways/), are regulars; I was signed in as a guest. The Commodore is like a throwback to the 70s in the best possible way. Very friendly clientele keen to see a new and relatively young face (hardly !!!). The beer comes at low-profit rates and there was a free buffet from an earlier event to which everyone could help themselves. With humorous Karaoke (some not even remotely trying to fit the words to the music) round the corner (you can ignore, it but everyone claps at the end whether or not they were listening) and the general atmosphere of a decommissioned battleship . . . so far, I can’t remotely sum it up.
We had some very interesting shouted conversations. Another friend wants me to compile a list of challenging nights for the film club (e.g. the Robinson Trilogy & Ivan’s Childhood for starters, regardless of popularity: “Stuff them – they have to learn to think!” he stressed . . . he’d already had a few pints.
I think The Commodore is a genuine ex-Naval club which, casting its nets wider to survive, has perhaps become weirdly entranced by the left-leaning/anarchist writers and bohemians of West End Morecambe/Heysham . . . as though we are some species of deep-sea aquatic life – Mermaids and Mermen hooked ashore to dwell with the other denizens among the sea clocks, helm wheels, ship badges, portholes and bowlines . . .
[v] From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Torm%C3%A9: Melvin Howard Tormé (September 13, 1925 – June 5, 1999),[1] nicknamed “the Velvet Fog”, was an American musician, singer, composer, arranger, drummer, actor, and author. He composed the music for “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”) and co-wrote the lyrics with Bob Wells.
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