Fact #15837
When:
Short story:
A year and a half after it opened, Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in Soho, London, England, UK, Europe, is finally granted a licence to sell alcoholic drinks.Full article:
Ronnie Scott : We had great difficulty getting the liquor licence, because to do that you had to have an emergency exit and there just wasn't one.... You came in, and if there was a fire you burnt to death! That was it.
It's amazing, really, we rigged up a kind of a Heath Robinson emergency exit thing. We were a basement, and this was some way that got you upstairs or something, on to the first floor and out through some firm that was on the ground floor. And amazingly enough, the licensing people okayed it.
We could only serve members, of course, and there was a committee. Pete, myself. Benny Green and somebody else were on what we laughingly called the committee; we had meetings, took minutes and the whole bit, hilarious, really.
That helped, certainly, people began to come down the place rather than go to a pub, because they knew they could get a drink and hear music as well.
(Source : Interview by Les Tomkins, 1979)
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It's amazing, really, we rigged up a kind of a Heath Robinson emergency exit thing. We were a basement, and this was some way that got you upstairs or something, on to the first floor and out through some firm that was on the ground floor. And amazingly enough, the licensing people okayed it.
We could only serve members, of course, and there was a committee. Pete, myself. Benny Green and somebody else were on what we laughingly called the committee; we had meetings, took minutes and the whole bit, hilarious, really.
That helped, certainly, people began to come down the place rather than go to a pub, because they knew they could get a drink and hear music as well.
(Source : Interview by Les Tomkins, 1979)