ONE of the Barker brothers, who famously hitch-hiked their way to the 1968 Mexico Olympic Games with four cans of Newcastle Brown Ale, has died.

Cecil Barker, 91, of Newton Aycliffe, found national celebrity as with his brother, Alan, he spent six weeks making his way to Mexico dressed as an English city gentleman.

Both of the Darlington-born brothers had spent many years of their lives serving overseas in the Second World War – Cecil was in Greece and Alan in Cyprus – and during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics were chatting about how much sport they had missed out on in their youth.

“Suddenly my wife suggested that we went to Mexico,” says Alan, who was six years younger than his brother. “It meant six weeks off work and the limit you could take out of the country in those days was £50.”

After three years of planning, they started hitch-hiking from Scotch Corner to Glasgow airport from where a cheap Icelandic airline flew them to New York via Rekyjavik.

“We wanted to do something different,” says Alan, who now lives in Harrogate, “and we decided to dress as two English gentlemen with umbrellas and bowler hats. I remember as we worked our way through Canada, at the Niagara Falls, people were coming up to us and taking photographs of us.”

Amazed by the friendliness of the people who gave them lifts, food and beds as they travelled through the US, they made it to Mexico. They wrote letters back home, which were published in The Northern Echo, and their wives sent out copies of the Evening Despatch’s sporting pink so they didn’t miss out on the football results. Hidden in the paper’s pages was an illicit £5 note to help with a meal.

“Martin Bell, the BBC news man, was staying in the same hotel as us,” says Alan. “We told him we had carried four cans of Newcastle Brown with us to open when we reached Mexico, and he got us to open them in front of the stadium and that went out on BBC television.”

They witnessed first hand some amazing sporting moments. They saw George Foreman win the heavyweight gold, Britain’s Chris Finnegan win middleweight gold and Lillian Board get silver in the 400 metres.

“We were 20 yards away at the end of the sandpit when Bob Beamon set that long jump record,” says Alan. This was one of the great sporting feats of the 20th Century: Beamon bettered the world record by nearly 2ft and set an Olympic record that stands to this day.

Cecil and Alan made their way home through Pennsylvania, the Blue Ridge Mountains and Washington, before landing back at Glasgow on November 5, 1968.

“We were recognised as the Barker brothers at the airport,” says Alan. “A few days later we went to see Darlington play Scunthorpe at Feethams, and the lads in front of us, who didn’t know we were there, were saying “I see them Barker brothers are home”.”

They were invited onto Mike Neville’s It’s A Likely Story TV show, and Newcastle Brown Ale was so delighted with the publicity, it turned them into a poster, and sent them six dozen cans and £100 each.

Four years later, the brothers tried to top their Mexican exploits by cycling on a tandem to the Munich games. “It was a disaster,” says Alan, and not just because the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists overshadowed the trip.

Sponsored by Newcastle Brown whose logo was festooned on their shirts and bike, they made it into Germany.

“But at Saarbrucken we crashed, and Cec broke his shoulder,” says Alan. “We travelled up to Munich with a broken tandem and he got his shoulder pinned there.”

Alan still has his bowler hat in his wardrobe, and he says: “They were trips of a lifetime, talking about them keeps me going now.”

Cecil worked for the Prudential insurance company, and climbed Kilimanjaro in 1997 at the age of 71 to raise money for Butterwick Hospice. He leaves his wife Joan, two children, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. His funeral was held in Coundon on Monday – with his bowler hat on top of his coffin.