New book salutes the boys of Berwick (From The Northern Echo)

New book salutes the boys of Berwick

9:36pm Sunday 14th August 2011 in Backtrack By Mike Amos

It's a wet Monday night in Berwick-upon-Tweed: soaked to the skin as they might say on one side of the border, fair drookit on the other.

The paper shop has bills proclaiming the Scotsman and Sunday Post on one side of the door, the Newcastle papers on the other. The confectioner's has Berwick Cockles and Edinburgh Castle rock, the tourist information centre promotes the Royal Scottish Borderers Museum and the Rag Bag morris dancing team (than which nothing on earth may be more English.)

The rain, and Edinburgh Woollen Mill, are multi-national; the shop simply called Danish Design is clearly there to confuse both lots.

The Berwick Advertiser leads, by no means for the first time, on idiocy on the Holy Island causeway. Unless the SNP has sent in a snatch squad, Holy Island's in England, too.

In the Free Trade, fortunes shackled to a single, surly hand pump, the darts players are simultaneously discussing Josef Locke.

"Josef Locke," says a newcomer to the debate, "is that anywhere near Fort William?"

Berwick's north of the river, but emphatically in England, has been since 1482 when we and the Scotties finally concluded a sort of cross-border pass-the-parcel. The poor place had changed hands 13 times.

Nor, contrary to widespread belief, is Berwick still at war with Russia. The Russians have other battles on their hands.

The town hall, or town hall and cell block museum as the tourist information supposes it, is in Marygate, a building with more chandelier bulbs than there may be Saturday spectators at Shielfield. It's dominated by portraits of town worthies; they and the Queen of England. .

It's there on Monday evening that Tom Maxwell launches his wonderfully readable book about the only English football team in the Scottish League, the side for which half the North-East has a soft spot.

It's the town with a permanent identity crisis. The football club crest has the lions of both England and Scotland, they and a bear - Tom Maxwell supposes the bear to be peeing against a tree. The club shop sells two different scarves, one with St George's cross, the other with St Andrew's.

Edinburgh's 57 miles to the north, Newcastle 65 miles south. "For a lot of people from Berwick," writes Maxwell, "it's the feeling of being rejected by both nations that causes the biggest frustration."

To Scottish League opponents they're never just English but, shall we say, fatherless English. Most unlettered English fans perceive them as Scottish. Scottish b******s, just the same.

Tom Maxwell was born in Edinburgh but returned to the family farm a mile or so on the southern side of the border. He's always supported England, and Berwick, though probably not in that order.

As a kid, he'd tell contemporaries that he followed Berwick Rangers. "Yes," they'd say, "but who's your BIG team."

Berwick, young Tom would protest, were his big team.

"I can measure my Berwick childhood through a succession of English strikers," he writes of back garden games. "I went from being Gary Lineker through to Alan Shearer and then Michael Owen.

"By the time Wayne Rooney arrived on the scene, my dad was using Wembley Stadium to grow asparagus."

His dad's Fordyce Maxwell, a familiar columnist on the Scottish national papers. Fordyce is English, too, played more than 500 games for Wark in the North Northumberland League, supported England with such passion that the we'an had little alternative than to follow in father's footsteps.

He's also a journalist, but played just once for the school B team. "I was what my PE called a trier," Tom writes, "but what Jock Wallace might have described as s**te."

We shall hear more of Jock Wallace very shortly.

The publishers have been crafty, promising not just beer at the launch but pies and Bovril, too. The finest Scotch pie I ever ate at a football ground was at Shielfield, and these are just as good, if a little less likely to grease the chin. Lisa, Tom's mum, goes round with second helpings.

On the can it says "The cream of Scottish beer," a claim which an Englishman might suppose oxymoronic.

It's a fair bet, nonetheless, that this bit's the town hall and not the cell block museum. "There doesn't seem to be too much demand for the Bovril," says Fordyce.

About 80 are present, many of them former Berwick players like Jim Jefferies, no longer wearing Hearts on his sleeve, and Russell Craig who's said with some justification to bear a more than passing resemblance to Santa Claus.

Trouble is, they've only put out about forty chairs. When the brief formalities begin, it's a bit like an attempt on a world record for musical chairs.

Fordyce says he'd always thought it was the author's mum who was most nervous at a book launch, but now knows it's his dad.

Tom, clearly overwhelmed by the turnout, is both nervous and emotional. "Thank you very much," he says, and sits down again. The book does his talking for him.

As admirable, informed and thoroughly entertaining as it is, it's impossible not to entertain the unworthy suspicion that the whole thing is really just another excuse to celebrate the events of Saturday, January 28, 1967.

It was the day that Berwick Rangers played Glasgow Rangers in the first round of the Scottish Cup, the 13,500 Shielfield crowd 1,500 bigger than the border town's population. Berwick won 1-0 - "the biggest cup upset in the history of British football," Tom supposes.

The Northern Echo the following Monday morning was four-par prosaic - "the biggest Scottish Cup shock for years" - preferring to concentrate on Wyn Davies's FA Cup hat-trick for Newcastle at Coventry, on how Sunderland had beaten the mighty Mansfield Town and how Durham City rugby international Stan Hodgson had been sent off for the first time in his 20-year career.

The Scotsman had been altogether more excitable. "It was Arnold Palmer missing a six-inch putt," waxed John Rafferty, deliriously. "It was Arkle tripping over a match stick, it was Walter McGowan knocking down Cassius Clay….it was the most ludicrous, the weirdest, the most astonishing result ever returned in Scottish football."

Big Jock was both Berwick's gargantuan goalkeeper and martinet manager, a man said to redefine scary, whose regime - it's recalled - was akin to legalised brutality.

We'd attempted to interview him back in 1989, when he was manager of Colchester. "His post-mortem comments," the column observed, "are a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and broad Glaswegian, difficult to translate and even harder to reproduce in print.".

Sammy Reid, who scored the 32nd minute winner, is down from Wishaw for the book launch. If ever there were a Wee Man, it's Sammy. "I was only at Berwick for a season and a bit," he says, anxious to dispel notions of a one-hit wonder. "I did score quite a few other goals as well."

Other 1967 survivors include Craig, Ian Liddle, Andy Rogers and Gordon Haig.

"I'm sure I've just seen quite a famous actor," says a lady with a mouthful of mutton pie, but in the Northumberland town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, none is more famous than these.

Though the players are reckoned to have been 95 per cent Scottish since Berwick joined the league in 1951, though they train in Edinburgh and not in Berwick, it's a little ironic that both the club's all-time leading scorers are English.

The leader's Eric Tait, signed for £50 and two footballs and scorer of 109 goals in 526 midfield matches. Now long familiar in the Northern League, assistant manager of Ryton and Crawcrook Albion, he is perceived as having an accent drawn from somewhere near the heart of Midlothian but was born, just, in England. Eric's on holiday. Ken Bowron, 114 goals in 136 games, is busy signing autographs.

He was a Tyneside lad, played for Newcastle United's youth team but turned down professional terms because he wanted to go to university, played Northern League football for Crook Town, Bishop Auckland

and Whitley Bay and is now 72.

"Most of the time I was the only Sassenach," he says. "You got a bit of the English b******d from the other teams, of course. I became a marked man by some of the Scots, but the fans grew quite quickly to accept me because I was scoring goals."

He and his wife both taught in Berwick, the pupils altogether more courteous. It was 50 years ago. another age: they'd shout "Come on, Mr Bowron," it's recalled.

He'd scored twice in the last minute of his trial game, hit 50 in his first full season - "the Scottish league was much more competitive than the Northern League" - scored what's reckoned one of the finest goals Hampden Park has ever seen.

That was against Rangers, too, 1963 Scottish League Cup semi-final - "there was talk of Celtic being interested after that," he says. but eventually he signed for Workington for £2,500, played just eight games and is now back in Whitley Bay.

"I'm like a lot more," says Ken, "among the results I always look for first is little Berwick Rangers."

John Bell, a Berwick director, talks of the club's "long and prestigious history." Long, anyway. In 60 years Scottish League membership they've won just two titles; in 1992 the club came close to oblivion.

The chairman had disappeared, the ground had been closed, the season's last game - the last ever game it was feared - had to be played at the Meadowbank Stadium in Edinburgh.

The crowd was just 277, including the Backtrack column, though the refreshment kiosk still ran out of Irn Bru.

"Truth to tell the Scottish second division strugglers have had a fair few ‘last' games recently - more funerals than the Co-op undertaker," we wrote.

There, too, was 36-year-old Stuart Bell, a railways quality manager from Redcar who'd stopped supporting Sunderland because he reckoned English players too mercenary and had bought a Berwick season ticket instead.

Needless to say, he added, his wife thought he was barmy.

There was also the occasion that they faced George Best - playing for Hibs, but so greatly under the influence that he was subbed at half-time - and when Paul Gascoigne wore Berwick's bumble bee stripes in a match against Newcastle United to open the new Northumberland FA ground in Newcastle.

Tom had asked NFA chief executive Rowland Maughan why Berwick weren't allowed in the Northumberland Senior Cup. "Horrendous" travelling problems, he said.

Now 36 himself, Tom's having a good night at the town hall. There are queues for autographed books longer even than for the mutton pie stall at Shielfield. "It's a new season, I'm always optimistic in August," he says.

The attitude is essentially English, but he's still a borderline case.

The Lone Rangers by Tom Maxwell is published by Northumbria Press (£17.99.)

And finally...

we'd invited readers to name eight teams in Leagues One and Two who'd bounced back after relegation from the Conference. The list should have included Carlisle United and excluded Accrington, who are a new club.

John Hirst, Doncaster Rovers fan, points out that his club are a ninth to bounce back - but they, of course, are now enjoying a fourth season in the Championship. "Their form in 2011 suggests it may be their last for a while," says John.

The four who've twice been relegated into the Conferece are Darlington, Chester, Halifax and Lincoln City.

A nice one today from Martin Birtle in Billingham - what was unusual, he asks, about the County championship cricket match between Hampshire and Northants in August 1938.

Back with a catch-up column on Tuesday.