Some of the bar staff of the time were there – “We were the best barmaids here”, said Wendy Thomas, Mary Clout and June Beresford as one.

They knew the essential skills – like what constitutes good service at a bar. There are places where bar staff seem to look anywhere but at you as you crave to be served, thirst parching your mouth. They never catch your eye. You might as well be invisible.

That was not the ladies’ way.

June Beresford started at the Services Club on March 3, 1969 and worked behind the bar there for thirty years.

She saw the way social habits evolved over three decades, the way the law and attitudes changed so people became loathe to drive and drink.

And the configuration of the rooms at the Services Club has been changed in the last fifty years: "This was a gentleman's bar and I wasn't even allowed to come out here to serve. And you had to have a tie after 9 o'clock in the evening."

If a woman did stray into the men's bar, someone would say, "Madam, you're not allowed in here'.

"How things have changed", she said.

Then there was a mixed bar towards the back of the building. "It didn't bother me", she said, "There was the mixed lounge and that's where we worked".

She had to wear a black mini-skirt and a blouse with a black bowtie, the dress of barmaids in those pre-sexism times: "It was uniform - quite sexy!"

She thinks there was much more drinking in those days. The culture has changed and so have the attitudes of the police and the law.

The bosses weren't there on Sundays and June said the staff would then take liberties and drink cocktails, perhaps too many cocktails.

She still remembers the nerves she had on the first day. "It was nerve-wracking walking in because there were quite a lot of older men. I knew a lot of them".

But one thing which made it easier was that she didn't have to be taught how to pour a beer because she had worked at the Deepwater Inn since the age of 15 and then the long-gone Boomerang on Grey Street.

And she knew what people drank when they walked through the door and have it ready for them by the time they reached the bar: "When you saw them come through the door, you knew what they drank and you had it ready on the bar for them".

Bar staff don't get any better than that. It's a skill that never goes out of fashion.

Not then. Not now.