10:01am Saturday 27th February 2010
TODAY’S the day, Shildon’s first appearance in a national quarterfinal for 51 years and a little home-from-home work must, please, be indulged.
I was there, the silly kid with the red and white top hat and the hopelessly hopeful expression. Only the expression survives. Keith Hopper was there, too, not just Shildon’s outside right but a Shildon lad, to boot.
“I remember it very well,”
he says. “The pitch was really just a sea of mud, a question of hoofing the ball as far as you could and seeing who’d be on the end of it.”
It was February 21, FA Amateur Cup, home to Walthamstow Avenue.
Willington had won it in 1950, Crook Town in 1954, Bishop Auckland successively from 1955-57.
We Shildon lads would gather three or four deep on the Hippodrome corner on the Sunday after the final, watching the victors in their open-top bus, heading homeward with the spoils.
One day, we told ourselves, Shildon would be at Wembley, too. “There’s no question that the players thought the same way, certainly we had a very good team,” says Keith.
It was, of course, a very long time ago. On the Monday after the match, The Northern Echo (price threepence) also reported that Labour party leader Hugh Gaitskell had watched Darlington’s 3-2 victory over Gateshead and thought the Quakers “simply splendid”, that fifty people were still in West Lane hospital in Middlesbrough six weeks after a food poisoning outbreak and that Horden lad Brian Longstaffe had been cleared by Castle Eden magistrates of failing to have proper control of his milk horse.
That’s how long ago.
We were known as the Red Devils, for reasons which doubtless eschew explanation. These days they wear blue: blue riband, it is to be hoped.
Four thousand people thronged the Dean Street ground, probably twice as many as will crowd in for today’s FA Vase match with Whitley Bay. The papers talked of cup fever. “Oh aye,”
says Keith, “there was.
“We’d started right back in the preliminary rounds against the likes of Hamsteels Welfare and St John’s Gospellers” – the former existed, the latter probably didn’t – “so even to get that far was an achievement.
“It was a really big occasion in the town, and typically of Northern League clubs at the time, the camaraderie between the supporters was fantastic. The Walthamstow people were being asked back home for tea, then taken down the club afterwards.”
Strictly speaking, of course, it wasn’t the Amateur Cup at all. Not the Corinthian, Carthusian, cross-my-heart-and-neverhad- a-penny-piece competition that its idealistic founders may have envisaged.
“We probably got a few bob, but there wasn’t much left after I’d paid my fare from the Army base at Grimsby,”
says Keith. “The money didn’t matter. All I wanted to do was play football.”
Walthamstow scored after 26 minutes, Bishop Auckland school teacher Jack Thompson equalising five minutes into the second half from Hopper’s cross. Behind the goal we went daft; dafter.
Though centre forward John Curran was injured – good player Curran, Richmond lad – Shildon continued to press, ceaselessly thwarted by visiting keeper Dennis Wells, though West Cornforth farmer Malcolm Willans made several good saves at the other end.
“Shildon deserved to win,”
said the Echo headline – well, of course we did – though the claim that we had almost 90 per vent of play may be a little more inexact, the work of a red devil.
Skipper and left back Joe Nelthorpe, a Sunderland lad who worked as an iron moulder and could thus himself have been cast, thought it a “grand tie.” The team was still confident, he added, about the replay.
KEITH Hopper was born and raised in Scott Street, New Shildon, an All Saints church choirboy and an all rounder of very considerable talent. He played both football and cricket for Durham County, spent 25 years in the Northern League and batted for Bishop Auckland until a few years ago.
Now 76, he lives in Darlington with his wife Helen, still skis, still runs – “only two or three miles at a time” – still umpires in the NYSD.
Other than a reasonable diet, he finds it hard to attribute his fitness. “A bloody good wife to look after him,” says Helen, inarguably.
Being a Shildon lad in a Shildon shirt caused problems of the sort identified in St Matthew’s gospel, however: a prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.
“I always felt I needed to play 20 per cent better than anyone else,” says Keith.
“I can’t ever remember being a hero in Shildon. If I scored a hat-trick, someone would tell me when I came off that I’d missed another three sitters.
“I remember once speaking at a function in the town. I said it was the only time I’d appeared in Shildon without someone shouting ‘Get yoursel’ away home, Hopper.”
Still he keeps the cuttings from that February day in 1959, still treasures the little illustration sent anonymously through the post – Shildon lads call it an acrostic – identifying the squad as Wembley winners.
It wasn’t to be.
The Red Devils perished 3- 1 in the replay. Though the mighty Bishops lost 2-1 at Barnet at the same stage, Crook won 3-0 at Briggs Sports.
“I’m sure we were as good as some of the teams that won it, it just wasn’t to be,”
says Keith. He never did play at Wembley.
Eight weeks later, Crook beat Barnet 3-2 in the final.
Once again half of Shildon took its accustomed Sunday afternoon place on the Hippodrome corner, once again cheered home someone else’s team.
This year, blue heaven, it’s all going to change. This year will be hopelessly, hopefully different.
NOTHING much to do with Tiger Woods, one of Durham City Golf Club’s better known members decided to warm his balls in the microwave before a winter league game last Sunday. It’s said that warm golf balls fly better off the tee.
What they don’t do is take kindly to a microwave oven, which explains why, shortly afterwards, it exploded.
“Fortunately he’d just gone out of the door, but it wrecked the microwave and didn’t do much good to the kitchen, either,” reports our man at the 19th. “Like Tiger’s, his wife wasn’t very happy at all.”
The North-East micro-climate prevailed, anyway. After three holes the match was abandoned; snow.
A FURTHER salutary warning against male domesticity, we hear of a fearful accident to Great Britain water polo star Scott Carpenter – a Co Durham lad presently taking the plunge down under – while washing up.
Scott, from Tudhoe near Spennymoor, had scored 60 goals in his first eight Victoria State League games for Richmond Tigers and was earning rave reviews.
“They couldn’t believe he was British,” says George, his dad.
Last month, however, a glass broke in the washing up bowl, almost completely slicing off the end of an index finger. Surgeons decided to remove it completely and graft it back on.
Back in the deep end just a month later, Scott made his national league debut for Victoria Tigers, scored six in two games against the Freemantle Mariners – the Manchester United of Australian water polo – and was voted the Tigers’ best player.
Digitally enhanced, he hopes the Tigers will make the play-offs in May.
“He’s loving it,” says George, himself a record breaking polo man. “The temperature’s been between 30-45C. Over here we can’t even do that in Fahrenheit.
GEORGE Carpenter may be finding things positively tropical compared to Dave Errington. He’s the chap who, passing mention in Tuesday’s column, is heading from Moscow to Roddymoor for the village football club’s reunion.
“It’s bloody freezing. Over here even the snowmen wear long black coats and carry Kalashnikovs,” says Dave.
Roddymoor’s above Crook, what might be called the foothills of Tow Law. Dave played in the 1980s, became team manager, moved to Moscow for work reasons, helped form an expat league and now plays for an Anglo- Dutch outfit called the Storming Clogs.
“The Brits are the cloggers and the Dutch wear them,” he helpfully explains. “It can get a bit tasty. Taking on the Turks is like the Ottoman empire has been unleashed on us.”
From Russia with love, the Roddymoor reunion’s on March 5 at Crook Golf Club.
“We have a longevity that not many local clubs can boast and deserve a night of celebration,” says Dave. “It’s not just a football club, it’s a community.”
TUESDAY’S piece on the great Colin Milburn, who died in the car park of the North Briton in Aycliffe Village 20 years ago tomorrow, said that he’d only once played cricket for his native Durham – 109 against the touring Indians when just 18. The Beardless Wonder points out that, after his accident, the Burnopfield Basher twice turned out for the county while playing for Chester-le-Street. As with his first-class comeback, it proved frustrating – 30 runs in three innings. “It was just sentiment,” says the Wonder. “The poor lad couldn’t see.”
A LITTLE belatedly, a splendid traveller’s tale from Darlington’s game at Morecambe a fortnight back.
Richard Jones and friends had, as usual, travelled by train. Back at Morecambe station, however, they realised that one of their number was missing – and that he had the return tickets.
Contacted by mobile phone, the absentee revealed that he’d gone with some other fans to nearby Lancaster and would be joining the train there.
Before that, the guard approached. Not only had their mate the tickets, they explained, he also – worse yet – had the bottle opener.
The Northern Railman was understanding. Not only would he await their colleague, he had a bottle opener in his bag.
The lads drank his great good health. “Now that,” says Richard, “is what I call customer care.”
QUITE a few knew that the Football League ground which has staged both a test cricket match and an FA Cup final (Backtrack, February 21) is Bramall Lane, Sheffield – a test in 1902 and the 1912 FA Cup replay between in which Barnsley beat West Brom. Paul Harrison in Darlington was first up.
Sheffield’s last first class match, adds John Bell in Burnhope, was Yorkshire v Lancashire in 1973.
Today, something different – for the first time in all these years, a picture question. That’s Keith Hopper pictured in the centre of the front row during his Army days.
The player immediately on his left went on to win 36 England caps. Readers are invited to identify him.
Shildon’s lure notwithstanding, the Railroad to Wembley continues today – weather permitting – with Norton and Stockton Ancients’ FA Vase quarter-final at Barwell. It’s from deepest Leicestershire that the column reports on Tuesday.
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