Maureen Richards at the Lord Somers

A LEGENDARY pub landlady of Somers Town who lived her life in the same street will be laid to rest next week at St Mary’s Church, where she was married.

Maureen Richards worked and raised a family at the Lord Somers in Aldenham Street from 1963, running it single-handedly for many years until it shut down and demolished in the 1990s.

Her daughter Lisa said her mother had been a quiet type who transformed into “a real people’s person” with a great sense of humour after being thrust onto the frontline of a “gangster” pub in old Somers Town.

Lisa said: “It certainly wasn’t a normal life and she changed a lot because of what she had to face. I’ve been speaking to her friends and I think everyone would agree that it was a very hard pub. No one who didn’t live around there would go in there.

“I do hate the word really, but it was very much a gangster pub. You’d have the Krays and the Richardsons in there, the Chapel Street mob … She would face them all.

“I remember for a time the football hooligans used to come. Two-hundred football fans turned up and they smashed our pub to bits. I remember thinking we were going to die and Mum coming up to my room and saying ‘put a pillow over your head, I will stand on bottom of steps and no one will get up to you’. She sent Nan into the toilet with the money. And she stood there and told those men, ‘You’re not coming past me.’ She was only five foot.

Maureen with her family

“But you’d also have people like Barbara Windsor and Frankie Warren, and the singers Peters and Lee – they also used to come in because it was a really well-known place.

“I think Somers Town changed from having a lot of old-school gangsters, to an area of gangs. But it didn’t really matter to her, she would still bar them whoever they were.

“If one of them beat someone up in the pub, she would bar them until they apologised. I remember this one man saying he wasn’t going to apologise after a fight. And he said if she didn’t let him back in he would stone us children. And she said ‘go on then’ and sent us off to school the next day. They didn’t do anything of course, and the next day they were back saying ‘Sorry, sorry, can we come back?’”

Maureen Richards

The Lord Somers sat on a corner building with 15 rooms that Ms Richards went on to bring her three children up in, for many years alone after her husband left.

Lisa said: “Everyone round the area knew my mum. And a lot of people, their relationships started when they met each other there. It had its problems, but it was a real strong part of the community. But in the end, well, you know, pubs go down don’t they? She lost everything to it, every penny. But she was not bitter about it. She ended up moving out and living in a flat just across the road and working delivering post for the politicians down at Parliament.”

Lisa recalled a kind-hearted but strict mother who made sure her children never took drugs and always had a job, adding: “But it became a bit like I was her mum when the Alzheimer’s got bad, and I remember she used to say to me ‘don’t let anyone hurt me’. I used to think, you’ve been punched, you’ve been stabbed, you’ve been through so much – you’ve had a very hard life. I don’t know how she got up in the morning sometimes.”

The now long gone Lord Somers pub

Lisa said her mother would love to deck out her home in freshly cut flowers, enjoyed a dance on a night out, and liked to watch her TV favourites, Murder She Wrote or Columbo.

She leaves behind her three children, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, and her two lifelong friends from Somers Town, Janet and Brenda.

The funeral service will be held in St Mary’s Church, Somers Town at 2pm, on April 22, before a service at Islington Crematorium, High Road East Finchley at 3.30pm.