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One of our ongoing themes at You & Yesterday is 'Derbyshire Pubs'. Here Peter Seddon offers a few thoughts on The Panther in Littleover - now re-named The Oaklands - and wonders how it got its original name.

It is all too tempting in writing about Derbyshire's pubs to concentrate on the quaint and architecturally characterful. Yet the sobering fact is that the majority of pubs in the county fall into neither of those categories.

So here is one of those everyday pubs that serve the needs of a local community.

Most people living in Littleover, Derby, could probably name the two 'village' pubs - they are the Half Moon and the White Swan. But there is a third in the Blagreaves area of Littleover, quite a distance from the village itself, which serves a narrower community altogether.

That pub is The Oaklands - on Oaklands Avenue, off Blagreaves Lane - which was for many years called The Panther.

Like many 'estate pubs' it was built by the Local Authority to serve the needs of a Council Estate, in this case the Oaklands Estate which swallowed up open farmland in the 1950s.

The pub was built in the contemporary 'bungalow' design which characterises many Council Estate pubs of the era - at the time it probably seemed very modern, but was essentially a triumph of stark functionailty over style.

Operated by Ind Coope brewery, The Panther opened its doors for business on 12 August 1961. The striking inn sign on the forecourt carried a splendid portrait of a prowling black panther with glinting eyes and a menacing snarl.

The name seems an incongruous one, for the Oaklands Estate is hardly noted for its exotic wildlife. And although some of the residents were quite colourful, there were no intrepid jungle explorers among them as far as I recall.

The local historian Maxwell Craven offered a more prosaic explanation. In his splendid Illustrated History of Derby Pubs he attributes the name to a nod to antiquity: 'The Panther is an age-old traditional heraldic name, but in this case it has been interpreted literally'.

But the question still remains - why The Panther? One former regular brought up on the Oaklands Estate assures me he has the definitive answer. This is what he said:

'When the brewery commisioned the sign the artist got it all wrong. It shouldn't have been a panther at all - it should have been a lawnmower. Quite a few people on the estate worked at the Qualcast lawnmower factory in the Sunnyhill area, the other side of Stenson Road. And residents from the Stenson Road area made the pub their local just as much as those on the Oaklands Estate. Now what you need to know is this - one of Qualcast's best-selling mowers was called 'The Panther'. That's what the pub was named after - not the animal at all'.

It sounds quite convincing. But the real clincher is surely the name of the public bar which was boldly displayed on a sign above its door - THE GRASS BOX. That being the case, it seems The Panther joins one of a number of pubs in Derbyshire to have suffered 'wrong sign' syndrome.

One of the better-known cases is that of the 'Miners Arms' in Brassington, which depicted a coal-miner on its sign. But it wasn't coal-mining that the Brassington locality was noted for at all - it was its ancient links with the lead mining industry. That is what the pub's name truly commemorated - another own-goal for artistic impression!

There is not a great deal to say about what I recall of The Panther's interior. It had a basic bar and a 'posh' lounge, although that term is relative.

At some time in the 1970s the lounge was given a make-over in what the brewery termed 'hayloft' style. Above the entire length of its bar counter was a rustic canopy, and I have a recollection of decorative items on the walls - scythes and pitchforks and other symbols of rurality.

There were even hay-bales stacked into recesses at ceiling height, all quite incongruous for a Council Estate 'local' - presumably a case of the brewery trying to satisfy the Englishman's yearning for a 'country pub'. It may not have been a rural idyll, but it did prove quite comfortable - and more to the point it served a half-decent pint of beer.

Most of the customers were 'locals'. Few outsiders knew of the pub's existence, let alone called there. This was probably wise, for it was not unknown for 'feuds' to be perpetuated on the premises. The car park after closing time was the scene of more than one routine scuffle, and some far worse.

On one tragic occasion - in the early 1970s I believe - a fatal stabbing occurred in the car park. The victim was a young local named John Hardy. And so The Panther became one of the few Derbyshire pubs in modern times to have witnessed a killing.

Exactly when the pub was re-named The Oaklands I am not sure - probably in the 1990s. Yet it continues to serve the Blagreaves area and the Oaklands Estate just as it always did.

The prowling black panther on the sign may have been consigned to memory, but continuity is preserved through the community - some of the children and grandchildren of the original customers are now Oaklands regulars.

Do you remember The Panther? Can you confirm the story about how it was named? If you can add anything to this article just click 'edit' and start writing below.

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