IN downtown Southampton the paint was peeling and flaking on the old Electric Arms beer house, the wallpaper stained by damp and upstairs the plaster had fallen from the ceiling.

However, cheery Maude Louise Whiting continued to move about the saloon bar tidying up in the “pub with no beer.”

The fact that the pub had no beer, and hadn’t had for the previous 36 years, did not seem to worry Maude, for this had been her home for the past 19 years.

The old beer house, then known as 1A, Back-of-the-Walls, Southampton, had seen its saloon converted into Maude’s bedroom, and the public bar changed to become a hall, even though it still had part of the counter in one corner, while the former clubroom was Maude’s sitting room. But the cellar was empty!

The year was 1961 and Maude, as a council tenant, was soon to be re-housed due to the property being declared unfit and the top storey uninhabitable.

Maude, a machinist at the old Pirelli factory, told the Daily Echo at the time: “I don’t mind moving, but I don’t want to leave this part of town.

“I’ve lived in this area all my life, and as a young girl I remember going past the old Electric Arms on my way to school.”

The property, part of an ancient corporate estate, had a chequered history and was an architectural hotch-potch.

The walls of the cellar were thought to have dated back 570 years, and formed the foundation of one of the main watch towers in the East Wall that stood when Henry V’s invasion fleet sailed from Southampton.

In 1750, when Southampton was becoming a fashionable spa, the watch tower was in a ruinous state. It was about this time that stables were built within the ruins of the tower.

But in 1762 they were leased by a Nathaniel St Andre, who was once a court physician, but fell into disgrace as a result of declaring that one of the aristocratic female patients had given birth to rabbits!

Between 1805 and 1819 it was a hatter’s shop used by Moses Band.

Sheds were added during the following 13 years. By 1830 the property had become a tenement, and in 1850 it became the Wheatsheaf Tap pub.

It remained the Tap until 1897, when it became the Electric Arms, presumably because of the town’s electricity station to the north of it.

It ceased to be a beer-house in 1925, but the licensee, George Hale, continued to live in the property.

During the Second World War an incendiary bomb went through the roof, but landed on the pillow of a bed in an occupied room.

At the time the tenant, an elderly lady, lived most of the time in a nearby shelter, and the bomb was not found for three weeks.