Latest
Genial giant
Gentle giant wrestler
Gordon Renton was
finally floored by an
umbrella in
Inverness
HE was 5ft 9ins, weighed 25
stones and at one time it
would have taken six men to
carry the bier. The genial
Gordon Renton, alias the
fearsome Farmer's Boy, was much
lighter when he died, aged 62, two weeks
ago.
Gordon was a professional wrestler
from an earlier age, traded blows with
the likes of Big Daddy and Kendo Nagasaki,
was coached by Mick McManus.
"No wonder," muses Jenny, his widow,
"that he had to be so nasty."
Gordon also toured Pakistan with
Giant Haystacks who, being 7ft and 40-
odd stones, ensured that not everything
would be plane sailing.
"Haystacks was scared of flying. They
had to knock him out to get him aboard,"
recalls Jenny. "They booked four seats
for him, but they hadn't counted on him
going to the toilet. When the plane landed,
they had to dismantle the toilet to get
him off it again."
They lived in Catterick Village, North
Yorkshire, had been married for 27 years.
Invariably the villain in the ring, big Gordon
was every pound a gentleman outside
it. "He was nice as ninepence, daft
as a brush," recalls Jenny. "He'd do owt
for anybody, except me. In 27 years, I
think he made the tea four times.
"He wouldn't even get angry with me.
If there was trouble brewing, he'd just
take himself off to bed."
She still has his £300 wrestling cape,
bull's head motif on the back, and a leotard
that once had fitted the hyperbolic
Haystacks, though somehow it hardly
seems possible.
Gordon insisted that non-televised
fights weren't fixed, admitting only that
wrestlers knew how far to go without
causing serious injury. It didn't always
work out that way.
"One fight at Catterick club he did a
belly flop on this poor feller and his lips
turned blue. I could see Gordon's face, he
thought he'd killed him.
"Our son Billy wanted to wrestle, but
Gordon wouldn't let him. He had a lot of
health problems, whatever they say
about it being fixed, and put a lot of it
down to that. You're really abusing your
body, aren't you?"
His decision to throw in the towel,
however, came after a fight in Inverness
when the injuries were caused by a member
of the audience.
"This woman hit him with an umbrella,
so Gordon took it off her and
snapped it. After that,
her husband laid
about him with his walking stick. He
came home with weals all over his back.
"They weren't paid much, whatever
people thought. It just didn't seem worth
it any more, all the way to Inverness to
be beaten by an old man with a walking
stick."
Mind, there was also the incident at
Darlington Baths Hall when Gordon's
two sisters set about his opponent with
their stilettoes.
Though he'd worked in agriculture,
the Farmer's Boy became a lorry driver,
loved his family, loved his football. The
house is hung with Sunderland memorabilia;
he was also a committee member
of Arngrove Northern League side
Northallerton Town,
where they loved
him. Steve, his son-in-law, remembers
five of them heading in a Ford Corsair
to a Darlington match at Wembley. "I
still don't know how everyone got in," he
says. "Like five sardines in a tin," says
Jenny.
Sadly, the only "wrestling" image they
can lay hands on is the one below taken
to accompany a column in 1974. Both of
us were rather more hirsute in those
days.
Memory suggests there was another
Farmer's Boy, a more slender feller
called Pete Ross from Rushyford or
somewhere. There was nothing to suggest
they were twins.
Gordon had talked in 1974 of medical
attempts, inevitably ill-fated, to
get him to lose weight.
"I only feel right when I'm about 26
stones," he said.
His training diet included 12 pints a
day. That morning he'd breakfasted on
six rashers of bacon, a "few" sausages,
four eggs and half a loaf. All he'd had
during the day, though, was a steak and
five or six potatoes.
"He could be a champion but will have
to get a bit more into condition," promoter
Max Crabtree observed.
Counted out for the last time, the
Farmer's Boy's overflowing funeral was
at Catterick last Friday.
GARSDALE Methodist chapel is
west of Hawes, middle of
nowhere, utterly glorious.
Hawes brass band accompanied a
Songs of Praise afternoon there last
Sunday, and more of that glad occasion
in the At Your Service column
shortly.
Sid Shoulder, the percussionist,
compels individual attention and
not just because - "I'm 23" -
he lied about his age.
He's 88, returned to
drumming just 18
years ago, is involved
with five different
music
groups and recently
stood down after
ten years with a
sixth, the Wensleydale
Stompers. "Well," he says,
stomp and circumstance, "you can't do
everything, can you?"
Best of all, Sid Shoulder was a
Shildon lad, sang when a bit bairn in All
Saints church choir, played cricket for
the BR with Jack Watson, Fred Brownless
and them.
We'd last seen him eight years ago at
the opening of Spennithorne and Harmby
sports ground, comparing him -
somewhat fancifully - to Genial Harry
Grout.
Now in Leyburn, he was 70 or so when
he detected - or thought he detected - a
sense of rhythm in his grandson. "We
had a twin tub washing machine and
when there was music playing, he'd tap
away on the side of it.
"I saw an advert in the Echo for a
drum kit so went out and bought it, but
after a month or so it seemed he wasn't
really cottoning on. I had to do something
with the kit, hadn't I?"
Now he sings with the East Witton
Singers, plays with the Hawes band, the
Mike Rose Trio, the Hurworth Jazz
Group near Darlington and a quartet
called the Octogenarians, whose total
age tops 350.
It's a fiddle, as a music man might say,
nonetheless. Saxophonist Ken Griffin
doesn't even qualify. He's 92.
For Sid, a former charge nurse, the
only problem arises when the Hawes
band and the East Witton singers perform
their annual Christmas concert together
for the Yorkshire Air Ambulance.
Last year it raised £2,400.
"I'm finding it a bit more difficult to
get off the stage to get from one to the
other," he admits. "Music helps keep me
young and gives me a lot of pleasure,
but I have to thank the Lord for being
so kind to me."
Up at Garsdale chapel, built by
navvies working on the Settle and
Carlisle railway, he helped produce one
of the most joyous afternoons in
memory.
"It was wonderful, I'd far rather play
in a place like that than in the Royal
Albert Hall," he says - and for Sid
Shoulder, happily, the beat goes on.
The place of champions
IT may best have been known for its
coke works, its workmen's club and
for having a very canny brass band.
Now however, the County Durham
village of Fishburn - population less
than 2,000 - can boast two world
champions.
Our old friend Bert Draycott proudly
regained his world spoons playing title
last year - a kinkering kong, as old
Spooner himself observed - and no matter
that the spoons world may be a little
circumscribed.
Bert, we discover, is also now featured
in on-line advertising for the Müller
product range. "When I'm not playing
spoons, I'm using them to eat Fruit Corners,"
he claims.
Last weekend Fishburn lad Tom
Stubbs - a bit younger than Bert, just
72 - became world singles kurling
champion at Hayling Island, in Essex.
He may be the only title holder in world
sport who likes to play with one hand
in his pocket.
"It's an attempt to prove that I'm laid
back, but really I'm as wound up as anyone
else," says Tom, a retired driver. "I'd
never played competitive sport in my
life. It's incredible to be a world champion
at 72."
Parish clerk John Irvine is unsure
how his council will react. "I don't know
if Fishburn is into ticker tape welcomes,
but he'll certainly get a letter," he says.
Invented in England just eight years
ago, "new age kurling" is now claimed
to be the world's fastest growing sport,
already played in 47 countries.
Based on ice curling, it can be played
on any smooth wooden surface equally
by young and old, disabled and physically
handicapped. Tom and his wife
took it up just two years ago.
"It just grabbed me," he says. "It's
very social, a good way to make friends,
but the real appeal is that it can be
played by anyone and all with an equal
chance."
John Irvine, at 60 still a Mainsforth
cricketer, is among 11 people - so is Bert
Draycott - who regularly play at Fishburn
Kurling Club from 4-6pm each
Wednesday afternoon.
"Tom's a very unassuming man, but
he's taken to kurling with a passion,"
says John. "I couldn't have been more
pleased when I heard he was world
champion than if I'd won it myself."
Kurl or cure, the Fishburn club has
now started taking the sport to schools
and older persons' clubs throughout the
North-East.
John Irvine thinks there may be other
potential champions in their midst.
Today Fishburn, tomorrow the world.
HAD he lived, Rob Luke would
have been 21 tomorrow. Instead
it's the day when his parents release
a second CD in his memory.
Rob was a 19-year-old music student at
Newcastle University, an accomplished
and innovative singer, instrumentalist
and composer, when he took his own life
one Tuesday morning in March 2007. He
was a perfectionist, too.
His last note contained a simple message:
"Please do something with my
music."
Last August we told how his parents
Brian and Sylvia and sister Katie had released
a 19-track CD, simply called
"beach", in his beloved memory. It sold
well.
Katie had taken the cover photograph,
Rob's guitar amid the surf on South
Shields beach, which the family loved.
Called Tuesday Morning and with 21
tracks - no need to explain either - the
final CD of Rob's work carries Brian's
photograph of the same guitar laid to
rest on a cold morning, with the North-
East's own angel watching over it.
Rob was brought up at High Shincliffe,
near Durham, his musical ability evident
from the time when he would sit on
his father's lap, drumming up a storm
on the back of a Littlewood's catalogue.
"The heart warming response to the
last album has given us the will and support
to be able to go on and produce this
one," says Brian, a retired police officer,
now in Crook.
All but one of the tracks are his own
compositions. The third, Twinkle Twinkle
Little Star, was written by Jane Taylor
in 1806 and given an up-tempo approach
by Rob. "I hope," says his dad,
"that she would have approved."
Proceeds from the CD will go to local
charities, probably including the Spennymoor
Youth Theatre with which Rob
was much involved.
It's available from tomorrow, price £8,
from the HMV music store in Durham
and from Windows in Newcastle.
and finally, much of today's column
was written on a picnic table in North
Lodge Park, Darlington - a very pleasant
place on such a day. Forget the cuckoos
and the daffs, the surest sign of
spring is the writer taking the air and
escaping the telephone. Long may the
sunshine continue.
10:28am Thursday 8th May 2008
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