IT was Boxing Day 1993. When Eddie Roberts felt a few chest pains he at first assumed that it was simply down to seasonal overindulgence – an underdone bit of beef, as Ebenezer Scrooge in similar circumstances had observed. When the pains grew worse, they called an ambulance.

Three times, North Yorkshire paramedics Tim Calvert and Frank Glover re-started Eddie’s heart with a defibrillator. There had been, they later told him, about a two per cent chance of his getting to hospital and living.

“I owe my life to them,” said Eddie a few weeks later.

Lovely man, family man, as passionate about school sport in advancing years as he had been as a football-daft kid in north Wales, Eddie died last week. His body has been donated to medical science.

He was 84 (after extra time).

EDDIE was born and raised in Anglesey – where he was known as Ned – remained a greatly proud Welshman, studied the Welsh language at Bangor University, but failed to finish the course. Football was blamed.

Instead, he went to teacher training college, met his future wife Edna – good North Yorkshire lass – began teaching at South Bank, near Middlesbrough, in 1957.

“Ah, South Bank, the stories,” says Edna but, perhaps wisely, doesn’t elaborate.

When he got a job teaching geography at Richmond, the family moved up Swaledale to Gunnerside. Eddie didn’t just teach the village’s senior kids, he drove the Percival’s bus that took them down dale to their lessons.

They moved to Richmond in 1975, after he was appointed head of department at Risedale School at Colburn, near Catterick. He became immersed in the Richmond community.

There were positions in the Duck Club and the Conservative Club, the Freemasons, the dominoes leagues and, of course, there was school sport. Though he’d retired from teaching at 55, his family believes that the stress of all his commitments led to the heart attack.

When his son Bryn first visited him in hospital, his dad hooked up to all manner of medical marvelry, Eddie’s first question was how the club was. “I had to ask him which club he meant,” says Bryn. “He had about nine different jobs.”

His devotion to school sport across North Yorkshire led to a 50-year presentation in 2009, but not (to the frustration of those of us who lobbied) to a nod from the Palace.

As secretary of the county School Sports Association he spent countless hours on playing fields, running competitions, organising events.

Once Seb Coe was persuaded to present trophies at the annual awards night. “Coming where I come from, you had to be a fast runner,” he told them.

We’d raised a glass in the Cons Club on his 80th, his pacemaker – “I think it’s king-size” – still keeping up, Eddie still very much walking the walk if no longer chalking the chalk.

Edna urged deceleration, unsuccessful not least – insisted her husband – because she took on even more than he did.

Partly he was driven by a love of sport, he said, but chiefly a love of kids. “When you’re dealing with kids, you have to start every day with a clean sheet.

“You tell them off, you play hell with them, in the old days you’d cane them, but you always start afresh. I’ve never had a kid walk out on me.

“It’s about offering them whatever chance that sport allows. I happen to believe quite passionately that it offers a lot. I’m just a facilitator. There’s no point in doing something unless you try to do it properly.”

These days, of course, teachers have less time – and, who knows, perhaps less inclination – to become involved with after-hours sport.

Former colleague Martyn Coombes had talked of Eddie after the 50th anniversary do. “Teachers can’t give the same time to out-of-school sport as they used to and you certainly can’t imagine anyone doing all that long after retiring.

“Eddie is utterly amazing. We’ll not see his like again.”

EDDIE had also been chairman of Richmond Town FC. In 1992 he organised a sportsmen’s dinner at the Scotch Corner Hotel at which the speakers were World Cup winner Alan Ball and Fr Michael McKenna, a Roman Catholic priest of whom few had heard.

Ball was brilliant, but so was Fr McKenna, a former chaplain at Durham Jail. Eddie had heard him several times previously. “I don’t know about saving souls,” he said, “but I once heard him save a sportsmen’s dinner when Emlyn Hughes was principal speaker.”

SO last Friday to Richmond, a houseful gathered, a great portmanteau – what Eddie called his black box – opened in the middle of the room.

There are countless old football programmes, cherished autographs, dinner menus, programmes from his days singing – as a good Welshman should – with the Apollo Choir on Teesside.

Carys, one of his daughters, recalls the 5s and 3s leagues. “Dad would meticulously draw up the league tables and then have us run into the pubs and drop them off. We weren’t old enough to stop.”

Someone else remembers trips to watch big games involving Eddie’s proteges, on one occasion taking a Swaledale gentleman called Anty Batty on his first trip to London. “He vowed never to go again. Things were even more expensive than they were in the corner shop at Gunnerside.”

There, too, is Adrian Grayson, long time school sports colleague and friend, and the man facing the formidable challenge of embracing the Eddie Roberts story within a memorial service eulogy.

“Good company, great mixer, wonderful organiser, unfailing enthusiasm,” Adrian says of his friend. “There’ll never be another like Eddie.”

BUT what of that great festive anti-climax in 1993? These days, so happily it seems, there are defibrillators on every other corner – more than 10,000, the British Heart Foundation estimates – but back in the early 1990s they were confined to the back of the ambulance (and, even then, bought only through public fund raising.)

First responders in the UK – including ambulance crews – began using them shortly before Eddie was so dramatically to prove their effectiveness.

Previously they’d been available only to doctors – and back then, says the BHF, there was “a little suspicion” of them. Though designed to be used by anyone, the Heart Foundation adds, “medical professionals didn’t want to let them out of their sight”.

Now it’s estimated that every minute after cardiac arrest without CPR or a defibrillator reduces the chances of survival by ten per cent.

“Eddie’s story is a perfect example of the power that defibrillators and CPR techniques have to save lives. Using a defibrillator can double a person’s chance of survival,” says Philippa Hobson, the BHF’s senior cardiac nurse.

“Eddie was granted an extra 24 years of life thanks to the work of those fast acting paramedics and their defib back in 1993. That really is quite remarkable.”

n A memorial service for Eddie Roberts will be held in Richmond Methodist church at 1pm on Friday, November 17.