CUSTOMERS heading for this old Blackburn pub (pictured) 32 years ago were seeing double even before they'd had a drink .

For, suddenly, the hidden-away hostelry in town-centre Mount Street -- now covered over by the car park of Morrison's supermarket -- acquired an extra name.

Its real name was the Dolphin Hotel, but the explanation for the extra epithet that made it also the King's Arms for a spell in 1968 lay in the pub's location -- as the nearest one to the old Dutton's brewery.

Indeed, by then, the Dolphin was virtually part of the brewery, being only accessible from Foundry Hill and a narrow ginnel running from the Boulevard to Cicely -- after expansion of Dutton's five years earlier had cut off the approach to it from Well Street and then shut half of Mount Street to all but trucks going to and from it. So when, in the wake of the 1964 takeover by the giant Whitbread empire, Dutton's bosses considered designs incorporating the new owner's emblem -- the white Whitbread tankard -- in their pub signs, the try-out was done on the handiest hostelry. In fact, the brewery made a mistake with the new sign for the Dolphin -- they had not intended to replace the Dutton's name with Whitbread's.

But the Dolphin was a name that vanished less than two years afterwards anyway -- in January, 1970, when the pub was demolished because of still more expansion by the brewery.

It closed only the night before it was pulled down -- and was literally drunk dry by grieving regulars of the friendly little bolthole.

Among them was one of the founders of the then-emergent Campaign for the Revitalisation of Ale -- now the powerful Campaign for Real Ale consumer group -- who claimed the Dolphin's sign as a souvenir of happy hours spent there.