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Terry Prior Caretaker at Townstal Community Hall I


t’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,


“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.”


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


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