GEORGE Reynolds’s 80th birthday fell last Thursday. George himself fell the day before, involuntarily measured his length, looked like he’d been bare knuckle battling at HMP Durham with Mad Frankie Fraser (deceased.)

So when the surprise party was pulled on him on Saturday night, the lad was still so much not himself that he asked for no photographs – not for the popular prints, anyway.

That’s how grievous – how self-effacing – the bodily harm was, though the suddenly shrinking violet did produce from a jacket pocket a picture taken shortly after the terrible tumble outside his home in Durham City.

His face and nose were badly battered, his finger ends mangled. His ribs? “I don’t know,” says the former safe-breaker and Darlington FC chairman whose autobiography was called Cracked It, “I haven’t been to the hospital.”

Party guests include Dennis Stafford, who featured several times in Cracked It and who relentlessly pursues his innocence over the 1967 “one-armed bandit” murder of Angus Sibbett, shot beneath a railway bridge in South Hetton.

George Reynolds? “The greatest, top man, known him 40 or 50 years and never had a fall-out,” says Dennis.

Since those 1960s days at Bishop Auckland magistrates court – George held in the dock, the wet-eared column pent in the press box – we’ve been 50-year mates, too.

You speak as you find, don’t you?

THE party’s at Witton Hall, Witton-le-Wear, two or three miles south of Crook. Alex, George’s daughter, had told him they were going out for a curry.

George had bought and lived in the old hall, knocked it down 20 years ago because his third wife said it would stir too many memories of his second, built the £7m mansion in its stead.

A bit poignant to be back? “Not really because it’s a reminder of what I achieved. Lots of people said I’d achieve nothing. Only my mam believed in me,” says the man labelled “mentally deficient” by Sunderland education authority, but who 16 years ago was No 112 in the Sunday Times rich list with an estimated £250m fortune.

He had a £2m helicopter, a yacht not much smaller or less ornate than the hall, a fleet of top-of-the-range motors and other homes in Marbella, London and The Lakes.

Jon Skerratt, the hall’s present owner, is a personable Australian businessman – and former brickie – who 12 months ago bought the house on-line while in Thailand. “I was looking for a nice country house in England,” he says.

Though the hall has four letting cottages – “an air of subtle sophistication woven into the serenity,” says the website – the owner has allowed free use of the bar, swimming pool area and grounds. “Jon has been brilliant,” said Alex. “It’s so nice to be back.”

A hot air balloon sails silently, secretly, overhead. The biggest surprise of all? “No,” says Alex, “not even we thought of that one.”

THE story is broadly familiar. Born and raised in seaside Sunderland – the Barbary Coast, he likes to call it, and he its last pirate – George was already stealing (“it was steal or starve”) when sent at the age of eight to eight punitive years in approved schools in Worcestershire.

A Royal Navy petty officer at 21, he thereafter ducked, dived, bobbed, weaved, spent time inside for things which he claims he didn’t do, got away with any amount that he did and finally followed his mum to Shildon, where she opened a little shop called Cat’s Nest.

He was an ice cream man, started Shildon Cabinet Makers, opened the GR Club (of fond memory), grew Direct Worktops and George Reynolds UK, sold the worktops business for £41m and in 1999 bought Darlington FC, paid off its £5.2m debt and built a 25,000 capacity stadium on the outskirts of the town.

Witton Hall bore grand testament to his wealth. “Susan was adamant she didn’t want the house built as some country pile mausoleum, all show and no substance,” said Cracked It, published in 2003. “She wanted it to be a home that we could live in comfortably and that we could enjoy.”

To furnish it they toured the world. On a trip to Harrods, they spent £1m in an afternoon. There was also a secret vault, concealed behind a full-length mirror, in which goodness knows what was concealed.

Much of the building work had been done by friends and family, overseen by Richard Tennick, George’s cousin and faithful right-hand man. Scaffolding was in the expert hands of Ronnie “Rubberbones” Heslop, George’s former partner in crime and the first man over the wall of Durham Jail.

“Ronnie never charged us a penny,” recalls Richard at the birthday party. “It was so tricky they had to use ropes and pulleys, like the Egyptians building the Pyramids.

“People say it was built on the proceeds of crime. It wasn’t, it was built on the proceeds of years and years of hard graft, up to 18 hours a day. George absolutely deserved it.”

STILL visibly shaken by the fall, the birthday boy barely leaves his chair all night. He now lives – comfortably but altogether less opulently – in a top floor apartment in Nevilles Cross, runs an e-cigarette business from a shop in Chester-le-Street, reckons to supply 200 other shops and to have a half share in a factory in China which makes e-cig equipment.

He calls up workforce images on his phone. “They’re my girls,” he says. “I’m at the top again.”

For a man always overweight and who smoked getting on for 100 a day – those and the occasional well-photographed cigar – he has survived remarkably well.

“The secret is not to give up work,” he says. “I’ve seen people pack up at 65 and they’ve been dead in six or eight months, died of boredom. I’ll be working until they fasten down the box.”

Regrets? “Not really. It’s been exciting if nothing else and I’ve always tried to enjoy it, even inside. I’ve enjoyed the good times and the bad and I’ve had some good friends. You have to make the most of it, don’t you?”

And Darlington Football Club, for whom he foretold the Premiership? “They blame what happened on me, but before I left they were going quite well. People in sport always want someone to blame. Look what happened to them after that. I was the only one who put his money where his mouth was.”

His ebullience is temporarily absent. He sips a half of lager, nibbles at a birthday cake iced in the shape of a particularly formidable looking safe. The accustomed soundbites are but nibbles, too.

The poor lad insists he’ll be fine. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve been down and come back before. I may be 80, but there’s plenty of life in me yet.”