Ref who sent off his chauffeur prompts enough tales for a book
9:25am Tuesday 5th February 2008
OVER in the boondocks - the Boro docks, anyway - they tell the story of the local league footballer, Sunday after the Saturday night before, who turns up 15 minutes late, comes on without permission and is properly cautioned by Ray Dowle, the referee.
At the start of the second half, there's again no sign of the ailing player. Eventually he appears, again enters the field uninvited and is summoned by the man in black.
"Ref," protests the hung-over half-back, "I've been looking for a ****house."
"It's your lucky day, son, you've found one," says Dowle, the second yellow followed immediately by a red.
The so-and-so in the black?
"Oh, fantastic referee," they chorus on Teesside, so many stories accumulated about his middle management that you could write a book - a black book, no doubt - about him.
Now Stuart Nelson and Gordon Steel are.
As yet it's untitled. They could do worse than Wise Old Dowle.
There was another occasion when Ray, long a non-driver, had been given a lift to the ground in a player's ice cream van. Thirty seconds after kickoff, lickings of a dog, he was booking his chauffeur.
"Name?"
"Ray, you know my name. I've just given you a lift to the ground."
"Name?"
Inevitably, perhaps, another miscreant identified himself as Donald Duck. It was only going to be a downy yellow. "Well, waddle off to the dressing room, then," said Ray, swiftly changing colour.
Gordon Steel, a well-known local author, even wrote a football-themed play called Studs for the Hull Truck Theatre Company in which the idiosyncratic referee was "loosely based" on Ray Dowle.
How loosely? "Well, he was called Ray Powell," says Gordon.
Now 67, Ray was born in the once-notorious Cannon Street area of Middlesbrough into a family of fish and chip shop owners. "Absolutely useless" as a player, he spent 35 years as a referee, spent a couple of seasons as a linesman in the old Central League - Newcastle United reserves and the like - but was content to nurture the grass roots.
"They can only promote so many," he says. "It's not easy to get to the top."
Only a little feller - "wiry,"
says Stuart Nelson - he retired after 35 years in the middle. "I probably lost a bit of interest,"
he concedes. "I decided to look after myself, instead of going out in all weathers.
"Today I think they call what I did man management. I prefer to call it cussedness."
Stuart Nelson, himself a former local league footballer, recalls a match on Eston's extensive recreation ground.
"Alfie Wilson was playing, hard but fair, but Ray was telling him to be a bit more careful.
"Alfie's dad's come on his bike and he's getting a bit upset.
Eventually Ray sends off Alfie's dad, who goes to watch on the next pitch. Ray comes over and tells him he's sending him out of the rec completely - and to take his bike with him."
All agree that Ray knew his stuff. "The five-a-side league could get a bit fiery, kick off straightaway, you'd always want Ray to be there," says Stuart Nelson.
"Everyone knows Ray, everyone has a story about him.
He could send you off for looking at him the wrong way, but he was the salt of the earth.
There's a real reverence for him on Teesside."
Ray, recovering from pneumonia, admits - chapter and verse - to being recognised from London to Loch Lomond.
Never assaulted, he's once or twice been threatened.
"There was once a player who threatened to put all my windows out. Some of the other players heard about it and put his out first. It can be a bit tough on Teesside, but I like to think it showed I'd earned their respect."
■ The two authors would welcome stories from players, spectators or fellow officials about Ray Dowle. Gordon Steel's on 07515 898286, Stuart Nelson on 07783 956062.
FOURTH time of asking, our friends at Coundon Conservative Club again reached the quarter-final of the FA Sunday Cup - which they hold - with a 2-0 win over Canada, of Liverpool, at the weekend. Paul Bailes and Andrew Thompson scored.
The next round's against Luton St Joseph's, the most successful club in Sunday Cup history, at Crook on February 24.
Two days earlier, Cons' manager Paul Aldsworth has to take the trophy back to the FA.
"I'm hoping," he says, "that it'll soon be back where it belongs."
AN Arctic blast from the past, Angela and Paul Iceton have bought on the Internet the programme from the match on September 6, 1956 between Bishop Auckland and Valur, of Iceland.
Bishops fielded what might be termed a Wembley side. Valur, say the Icetons - aptly-named - had a team in which every player's surname ended in "son."
British Rail thought the occasion so important that they laid on a special train from Crook. Paul and Angela simply wonder what the score was.
Iceland's reigning champions - nothing to do with courage, "valur" is the Icelandic term for a gyrfalcon - the team was on a European tour, having won two and lost two in Germany.
In Co Durham they were outclassed, despite the efforts of goalkeeper Hermansson, said to be an unlikely figure in red shorts with padded thighs.
They were necessary, said the Echo, because of the ash pitches in his home country.
Bishops won 8-1, Seamus O'Connell hitting five, Derek Lewin two and Snaebtornson an own goal. Aronnson scored for Valur. Since even in south-west Durham they couldn't have expected snow in September, it poured down all night, instead.
That same day, Newcastle dropped Jimmy Scoular (who wouldn't have been very happy) after a 6-1 defeat at Birmingham, Ashes hero Jim Laker was contemplating an £8,000-a-year job offer from an Australian cigarette company, and on Bonneville Sands in the USA an unsupercharged 650cc Triumph Thunderbird set a world speed record of 214.4mph.
Fifty years on, Valur are again Icelandic champions, with a 3,000-capacity ground sponsored by Vodafone and still a squad comprising chiefly "sons" (and sons of sons.) The exception's plain Barry Smith, who spent ten years with Dundee. Out in the cold, he's gone on loan to Greenock Morton instead.
THEIR fortunes having fluctuated somewhat - the phrase may be supposed euphemistic - since the Icelandic age, the Bishops are at last on the verge of a move to a new home.
The news would have been revealed in Saturday's programme, had the match not been postponed.
"It could be the spark we've been seeking, it could change everything," says club chairman Terry Jackson, who looked in for a two-hour coffee.
It's likely, Terry supposes, that the new stadium at Tindale Crescent will be named after a sponsor - but they still hope to remember the 1950s' greats.
"I'd love to have a bronze statue of Bobby Hardisty outside the ground. He was a legend and a local lad.
Everyone in football's heard of him. It would be good to remember the other players from that era, too."
The Bishops, Britain's bestknown amateur football club, have been homeless since leaving their famed Kingsway home in 2002.
AFTER Friday's piece on Bishop Auckland and the Munich air disaster, John Briggs in Darlington recalls another North-East connection - Manchester United's first major signing after the crash was Sunderland lad Ernie Taylor. He cost £6,000 from Blackpool.
The diminutive Taylor - 5ft 4in, size four boots - had begun his career with Newcastle United, won a 1951 FA Cup medal with the Magpies and another in the Matthews' final, two years later.
Though Manchester United also reached the final that year, he had to be content with a runners-up medal. He joined his home town club that December.
A former Royal Navy submariner, Ernie died, aged 59, in 1985.
AND FINALLY...
THE Football League club which until the ground was renamed played at Willbutts Lane (Backtrack, February 1) was Rochdale. Terry Wells was first to know.
John Briggs today seeks the identity of the only Football League player to have been murdered - there's a North-East connection to that one; more clues on Friday.