It’s been open since 2004 and has enjoyed a strong following from people attending everything from puppy-training classes to tap lessons, but with high running costs and the loss of some regular groups Townstal Community Hall desperately needs more members, helpers and clubs to sign up. Caretaker Terry Prior tells Steph Woolvin it really is a case of ‘use it or lose it’…
There isn’t much Terry doesn’t know about this hall. He has been lovingly taking care of it since it opened 14 years ago. He takes bookings, replaces light bulbs, mends leaky taps and turns up everyday to make sure users have locked up properly and switched off the lights. “My wife, Maureen, would say I am too involved,” he says with a jolly smile. “She thinks I should start slowing down at the age of 83, but I love this place and the committee relies on me. There’s no one to do it if I stop.”
Terry is used to this line of work - he was the caretaker at Dartmouth Academy for 13 years. “Of course, it was Dartmouth Community College back when I started. I helped them out for a short time when their previous caretaker had to stop. I was 65 at the time. The head called me into his office and said if I could just work for them for a year I would be doing them a huge favour. I said ‘why not’. I finally retired 13 years later!” It was during that time that Terry took on the role of caretaker at the new Townstal Community Hall, so not only was he way past retirement age - he was doing two jobs!
At one stage they had so many people enquiring about bookings they had trouble slotting everyone in, but these days the booking sheet is looking a bit quiet. They used to have events day and night with activities like yoga, bingo, Pilates, dog training and drug rehabilitation. They’ve recently lost a couple of high profile regulars like Slimming World, which has made a big difference to their finances: “It costs around £850 a month to keep this hall going so it isn’t cheap and we need more groups to use it so we can keep running. The problem is a lot of these groups need people to come through the door for their sessions or they can’t afford to pay us and if their numbers drop they pull out. In an ideal world I would love this to be a real community hub where people met to chat and have coffee or even lunch.
"It would be great to have youth groups and activities for the elderly and mums and babies, but we need volunteers and donations for that. We have to charge groups or it’s just not viable for us.” Terry says their rates are very reasonable at £12 an hour. They get requests for small room hire at a reduced cost but at the moment they only have the one big hall to offer. “I would like to see a mezzanine floor built with a couple of meeting rooms up there, that would open up more potential for us, but again it’s the cost of building it.”
Terry is a determined character. He left school at 14 and went into the grocery trade in his home city of Plymouth: “I was a wheezy skinny thing. I remember my mum coming home and telling me she had got me a job in Underwoods. It was a proper old-fashioned grocery store with jars of coffee lined up on the walls. I used to make up bags of broken biscuits! We were lucky enough to source Typhoo tea which was ‘the’ tea back then; we used to put it aside for special customers.” Terry left to join the army at 18. He did his two years national service, but if you agreed to sign on for three years, you got double the pay so he says a few of his mates thought that was worth a punch so he stayed for three.
He was in the catering corps and throughout his time in the army he travelled to far-flung places like Nairobi where he cooked in the Officers’ Mess. “It was quite a novelty because I was cooking the game they had shot, like gazelles. I used to have all these wild animals hanging up around the kitchen.” After a few more years in the military he moved to Dartmouth and started work at the Royal Naval College in 1956. He stayed there for over 30 years and was chief cook for the final 10. His hard work in the services paid off as he was later awarded the Imperial Service Medal.
He then became a painter and decorator and met Maureen, but shortly after he suffered a heart attack. He recovered relatively quickly and was asked to take a medical trial for Guys Hospital who were trying to discover if medication could suffice as an alternative to a heart bypass. “I went up four times a year for 10 years. At first I would catch the train up to the capital but then they started sending a car to pick me up! I would be taken to the front door at Guys then they would do a few tests, I had to get on the treadmill, that kind of thing, then they would bring me back home!”
Now he spends his day pottering in the community hall and enjoying a nice lunch with Maureen. He says the hall is very much part of the community and he wants it to stay that way: “Everyone who uses it says the same thing - that it’s a lovely big bright space with so many facilities including a fully working kitchen. We just need more groups to use it and more volunteers to help us run it - and we would like more people to book it for parties. There is the space to have a bouncy castle, or a big dinner party or a disco.”
The hall is home to Dartmouth Players who use it to rehearse each week and they also store all their equipment up there. “If we had more groups like that using us on a regular basis it would really help.” The hall recently suffered a spate of vandalism – windows were smashed and the outdoor water butt was damaged. “They aren’t major things but it will cost a couple of hundred pounds to put it all right. It’s a shame as it is just a few people ruining it for others. I do believe that generally the community supports and loves this hall, we just need to work together to make it more of a social hub and keep it thriving.”
For all booking enquiries email terryandmo142@gmail.com
