COMMITMENTS in Cumbria, and the sure and certain hope of a Cranston’s meat and potato pie, meant that the column missed last Saturday what may well have been the last Northern League match at the once-sceptred Billingham Synthonia stadium.

“The oldest cantilever stand in the country since they knocked down Highbury,” insists stalwart tea hut supremo Madge Stamp. Others may suppose differently.

The attractions of Synners v Willington notwithstanding, the last rites may not have been as spectacular or as memorable an event as the inauguration.

Then owned by ICI, the stadium was officially opened on September 6 1958 – “the finest amateur sports field in the country,” said Lord Derby, treasurer of the Amateur Athletics Association.

“Everything was magnificent. A great day for sport in Billingham,” reported The Northern Echo, no less unequivocally.

The football team drew 2-2 with Bishop Auckland – “a glorious display of skill by the home team,” the Echo enthused – though it was the athletics meeting which preceded it which may most eagerly have brought to its feet the thousands in the huge new stand.

Competitors included 17-year-old Dorothy Hyman whose 10.7 in the 100 yards was a tenth of a second inside the “English native” record and Peter Radford, whose 9.6 in the men’s event equalled the British all-comers best.

Derek Ibbotson, who just a year earlier had set a 3.57.2 world record for the mile, could only manage third at Billingham behind Peter Clarke; Arthur Rowe, a giant among shot putters, threw 55ft 10ins. There was even a 3k steeplechase.

These days, it’s reckoned, the cost of essential repairs and refurbishment to the stand would be £200,000. The utilities bill is £1,400 a month, the boiler’s beggared.

But was Lord Derby right? First rate the facilities may have been, but was everyone at the Central Avenue stadium strictly amateur?

AFTER Derek Ibbotson set his 1957 world record on the cinder track at the White City, he was photographed swigging a pint of milk – a gesture, he later admitted, for which the Milk Marketing Board further refreshed him with £100. He died in February, aged 84.

When Arthur Rowe died in 2003, the obituary in the Scottish Sunday Herald pointed out that while the 18 stone colliery blacksmith was highly popular – and greatly successful – at Highland Games, the Yorkshireman’s first response when invited was usually “’ow mooch?”’ Nor, it’s fair to say, would the Northern League’s amateur footballers have expected to find nothing more than a tin of dubbin in their boots.

Dorothy Hyman, like Rowe from the Barnsley area, had already helped Britain’s women set a 4x110yd world record, won three medals in the 1960 and 1964 Olympics and was named Sports Personality of the Year in 1963.

Now 75, she worked as a Coal Board clerk and has a stadium named in her honour in her native Cudworth.

Peter Radford, now 77, became a world beater despite a childhood illness which left him in a wheelchair. Just days after Billingham, his 20.8 equalled the European 200m record.

He became an author, chairman of UK Athletics and professor of sport at Brunel University.

There’s no suggestion that he or Dorothy Hyman broke the rules of amateur sport. Arthur Rowe became so fed up with its earning capacity that he joined Oldham Rugby League club, bought a new house and car with the signing on fee but only lasted a few weeks. He became world caber tossing champion instead.

SEPTEMBER 6 1958? Second division Middlesbrough beat Liverpool 2-1 though only the young Brian Clough was said to be a danger, Newcastle United won 3-1 at Spurs, goals from Alan O’Neill and Don Kichenbrand – one from Leadgate, the other the Transvaal – gave Sunderland victory, goalkeeper Joe Turner earned Darlington a 0-0 draw at Gillingham and Hartlepool, “outclassed in every department”, went down 4-2 at home to Torquay.

The back page also reported that, after just one game for Bishop Auckland, Seaham lad Alan Spence had signed pro for Sunderland – for whom he’d made his debut as an amateur in a 7-0 defeat at Blackpool, the club’s first relegation season.

Though he made just five Sunderland appearances, Spence set a Darlington record with goals in seven successive matches. He later became a teacher. Anyone know what happened to him?

UNTIL 1962 it was possible to get to Penrith by direct train from Darlington, 64 miles in two-and-a-half hours via Barney, Barras and the breathtaking Belah viaduct.

These days the better bet is to beg a lift on the opposition coach, which is what happened on Saturday.

The touristy folk call Penrith the gateway to the Lakes; a paean-piece in the Sunday Times a couple of months back supposed it “a gritty stone-built town which loves its food.”

It extolled guinea fowl and braised pig’s check, cordon bleu and Cumberland lamb but, inexplicably, never once mentioned Cranston’s marvellous meat and potato pies, perfected in Penrith since 1914.

The football team, perhaps best remembered under the management of Alan Ashman – the only poultry farmer to lead out a team in an FA Cup final – are at home to Guisborough Town.

Penrith secretary Ian White apologises, says that the shop only had steak and kidney, is ungratefully (and ungraciously) abused and, bless him, heads off to one of Cranston’s food halls to source the real thing.

The town’s downside, like all Lakeland’s, is that it sometimes forgets to stop raining. Saturday’s gusty but sunny, Guisborough arriving on the back of four successive wins but still in a relegation place in the Ebac Northern League first division.

At half-time it’s goalless and largely uneventful. Thereafter Guisborough step it up. Scored by 17-year-old Louis Goldsack, their third goal of four – goalkeeper and half the defence forcefully lobbed from the touchline, inch-perfect, in off the post – already a lifelong memory.

The young un’s submerged by team mates, suffused with superlatives. Lovely lad, they reckon, big future. It’s even wholly reasonable to suppose that Louis Goldsack’s goal to be even better than a Cranston’s meat and potato pie.

However lustrous his future, there’ll never be higher praise than that.

BETTER late, we head on Monday for the Billingham derby, Town v Synthonia. “God hates a Synner but he loves the Town,” says a banner.

You can tell that Billingham’s going up in the world. When the PA asks the owner of a silver Mercedes kindly to shift it, half the ground walks out.

Two days earlier, a 315 Synthonia crowd had had a day of mixed emotions – talk of former players like Biffer Smith and Harry Armstrong, a keeper who went an entire home season without conceding a goal.

The young Brian Clough had been a Synthonia man, so had former Grandstand presenter Frank Bough. “There were quite a few ghosts,” says club secretary Graham Craggs.

The two grounds are less than 400 yards apart. That Synners can’t contemplate moving across the road is partly vecause Town also host the youth and reserve teams of Hartlepool United.

Monday’s 11am kick-off starts slowly – “There’s always a bit of clinker in the boiler at the start of morning matches,” someone says – doesn’t really accelerate and ends goalless.

Synners are promoted, Town will be fourth or fifth. The crowd’s 421: by the time we get there, someone else has eaten all the pies.

LIKE Esau, Alan Hamilton is a hairy man. It’s three years since he bothered the barber, around ten since last he was clean shaven. All that changes on Saturday.

Alan, a retired regional bank manager, is secretary, groundsman and very much else at Darlington RA FC, successful in a long battle against relegation from the Ebac Northern League.

Others might suppose it’s no time to let the grass grow beneath their feet: at the RA they’ve not much option. The 1960s cutter, a great beast of a thing deified not entirely affectionately as the Green Goddess, needs a new cylinder and other work costing £500.

Since that’s about £500 more than they have, Alan will undergo a very close shave indeed after the season’s last game, at home to Whickham.

“I can’t really say that I’m looking forward to it, but it seemed the only way,” he says.

Like his slightly manic mane, the sponsorship pot’s fast growing. Clearly they’d welcome more – that’s unless anyone has a cut-above mower, of course.
“If we get more than £500 we’ll spend the rest on grass seed,” says Alan. “It would be a shame to have the cutter working again and nothing for it to cut.”

Alan Hamilton can be contacted on 07872 324808 or at nobbydarlo@ntlworld.com. Saturday’s match at the Brinkburn Road ground kicks off at 3pm.

FOUR months after his wholly unexpected heart attack, 75-year-old former FIFA referee George Courtney plans a return to the middle. The old butcher’s dog is booked for a charity match at Newton Aycliffe’s Moore Lane ground on May 13. The consenting consultant was a Leeds United fan who’d seen George’s debut, Leeds v Leicester, in the old first division. “We talked about it for 20 minutes,” says George. “Then he told me I was fine.”

THE column a few weeks back sought the identity of England’s three oldest living cricket captains – Mike Smith, Ted Dexter and Ray Illingworth. Martin Birtle in Billingham sends the score card (4d) from the England v South Africa test at Trent Bridge in 1960 in which all three played but the skipper was M C Cowdrey.

England won by eight wickets, Ken Barrington top scoring with 80 in the first innings, M J K Smith bagging a duck in his only knock.

For neither the first nor last time, however, the star was F S Trueman – 5-27 in the South Africa’s first innings, 4-77 in the second – who never captained England at all.

Martin recalls, however, that in 1968 Fred used his column in The People to announce his retirement from cricket – the same weekend that Yorkshire offered him the captaincy.

“Too late, the presses were rolling. The one honour he wanted above all was denied him.”

TRULY an old friend, Mick Henderson had charge of the Wearhead United v Darlington Travellers Rest game on Saturday. “All over the pitch, just a little time to get there,” reports Travs’ secretary Alan Smith. The ref’s running may still be faster than his driving. “A huge queue formed behind him going back down the dale,” says Alan. Mick Henderson is 83.

THE recent unveiling of the statue of Ronaldo (is that who it was?) reminds Manchester City fan Dave Kilvert of stepovers and of Albert Emptage, a post-war City right half.

Emptage – “now there’s a name to conjure with” – oft attempted that particular trickery. “Frequently he was dumped on his backside by unimpressed full backs,” recalls Dave, from Darlington.

Old Albert, indeed, may have spent rather too much time on his rear. In 136 appearances, he scored just once.

Dave was also present at the final game of 2007-08 when, as recently we recalled, Middlesbrough beat City 8-1. The keeper, he says, had been warming the bench all season but was finally given a game.

That was the 6ft 7in Andreas Isaksson, for whom it was to be the last of his 19 first team appearances but who was capped 133 times by Sweden and ten times named his country’s goalkeeper of the year so must have been half-decent.

Poor Dave still can’t forget that match at the Boro. “8-1, what a cv. Provided his distribution skills were good, a perfect fit for Pep.”

PALINDROMING on, the last two columns have recalled footballers like the Boro’s Heine Otto, whose surnames can be spelt the same backwards as forwards.

It’s almost incidental that Chelsea fan Brian Dixon recalls that in the Blues’ second division promotion season, 1983-84, Boro and Otto were the only team they failed to beat.

What Brian really wants to report is that his personal best for the 5k Darlington parkrun – one of many such hugely popular events – is 25:52, also palindromic.
The reason that it hasn’t improved since October, Brian insists, is that he wants the next notch also to be a numerical palindrome: 24:42. “It would be a big leap at any age; at mine most certainly.”

...and finally, the only manager in the top two English divisions to have been capped by England (Backtrack, April 13) is Nigel Clough – now at Burton Albion but who spent his early years on the Fens Estate in Hartlepool.
No doubt inspired by the call to the colours of Mr Jermaine Defoe, Don Clarke today invites readers to name the other 13 post-war internationals to have played for England while on Sunderland’s books.
Ten might be doing well. Know them by their stripes next week.