THE Wensleydale Football League, grass rooted in North Yorkshire, marks its centenary next year. They’re looking for memories and mementoes.

Former league chairman Len Scott humps great volumes of his own – minute books, year books, scrap books – and, a mite more compact, miles more on a memory stick.

Throughout its 99 years the league has been roundly rural, Richmond the nearest to a big city, offering village football from Gayle to Gunnerside, Askrigg to Alphaville (me neither) and Bishopdale to Bowes.

There’ve been Swaledale Saints and Richmond Catholics, Express Dairy and Elders United and, because Catterick’s nearby encamped, Royal Lancers and Green Howards, too.

“No soldiers to be eligible for civilian teams or vice-versa,” said the rule book, guardedly.

Initially teams were restricted to players within three miles of their field. “It was a good rule at the time, stopped all the best players going to the better clubs,” says Len, now chairman of the North Riding FA. “They tried all ways to get around it.”

Chiefly the column has written about Spennithorne, thereabouts shortened to Spenny, headlines like “Spenny dreadful” when things weren’t going well and “Spenny for your thoughts” when they bucked up.

We’d also covered the 75th anniversary match between the league and a Middlesbrough X1, a young dales lad running happily round the pitch at having got Gordon McQueen’s autograph.

There may have been some confusion, however. “I’ve got Steve McQueen,” he said.

THE league’s early benefactor was Edward Rayner, an entrepreneur and horse breeder who paid 100 guineas for the championship trophy, still treasured and said to have cost more than the FA Cup.

Periodically there’ve been two divisions, and competitions for schools and juniors. Now there’s a single division of 11 clubs, in which our old friends Richmond Mavericks – they whose Latin motto translates as “They don’t like it up ‘em” – are title favourites.

Carperby, pointless and with a goal difference of minus 97, is the village which in 2011 won £125,000 from Mars to build a new pavilion, the attendant commercial featuring Peter Crouch.

Continuing question marks, it’s said, hang over a couple of teams. “There’s not a cat in hell’s chance of there ever being two divisions again,” says Len, also an FA Council member.

“I love the Wensleydale League, lots of people do, but adult 11-a-side football is really struggling, especially in rural areas. I’m just grateful it’s still here.”

THE archives embrace everything from the handwritten “suggested rules” of 1919 to a two-page When Saturday Comes feature on Richmond Academy v Buck Inn Broncos, memorably named, in 2010.

The column had picked up on that one, too, reported not only that the Broncos had given the referee a rough ride but that he himself had been told off for wearing a green Football League top.

Soon afterwards he was posted to Afghanistan; it’s thought to have been coincidental.

There are memories of former Aysgarth goalkeeper Harry Walker, known inexplicably as Gobbler, Portsmouth’s winning goalie in the 1939 FA Cup final, and of former Newcastle United keeper Ronnie Simpson, in the Wensleydale on National Service.

“We also try to claim (England international) Michael Dawson, but I think it was only his dad who played in our league,” says Len.

The memory stick embraces a wonderful 1950s cartoon of football at Bellerby – “the inhabitants are rather fond of their dry walling” – and a 1960s photograph of a “power drive” goal for Middleham against Redmire.

The scorer wasn’t on the picture, the caption explains, because he was on the halfway line. It was a promising youngster called Len Scott.

THOUGH pre-dating the league, Len’s memory stick also enfolds a Yorkshire Post cutting from 1905 following a cup match between Leyburn and Brompton and its aftermath at North Riding FA.

Mr F A Robinson, the referee, had dismissed Leyburn player J W Brown. Brown refused to go. “The spectators turned hostile and broke onto the ground,” the report adds.

The unfortunate ref was then “pelted with sods and other missiles”, some of the sods thrown by a Leyburn player called Medcalfe. “The referee had to take refuge in the police station until train time, and then had to be escorted to the station.”

The Rev J Hawthorn, the club secretary, at once resigned. The players were “a disgrace to the town and an insult to him,” he wrote to the county FA.

Sods’ law, Brown was suspended sine die and “the ground and all the Leyburn players suspended until the end of the year.”

Truly there is nothing new under the sun.

  • Len Scott would love to hear from any with Wensleydale League memories or memorabilia. He can be contacted on 01969 622480 or 07712 677661, email scottlen@tiscali.co.uk

….AND finally, the manager said by Brian Clough to have a smile as wide as Stockton High Street and the nicest face in football (Backtrack, April 19) was the late great Bob Paisley, Hetton’s finest.

Best today have a Wensleydale question, and not just who on earth were Alphaville. So readers are invited to name the early 20th century “demon bowler” for Hawes, later Warwickshire, who leant his name to one of English fiction’s best known characters.

Up hill, down dale, the column returns next week.