Tales of Wild West Durham

He spoke in what properly is called the Long Dining Room, where hang the Zurburan paintings, though it’s possible that the ongoing Bishop Auckland FC exhibition in the Charles I room next door may also have been an attraction.

His last talk had been at a workmen’s club in Ashington. “It’s a bit different,” said Harry, author of The Far Corner – voted one of the top 50 football books of all time – and of Slipless in Settle, which won the MCC/Cricket Society book prize in 2011.

Middlesbrough fan, born in Great Ayton but now up in Hexham, he also wrote a Guardian column for 17 years but since perforce it was chiefly about the Premiership, is rather glad to be shot of it.

His blog explains: “Trying to find something fresh to say about the babbling brook of hyperbolic bulls**t that is The Most Exciting League in the World (TM) sucks the joy out of you. Believe me it’s a massive relief to listen to Jose Mourinho and not give a tinker’s, and an even bigger relief not to have to listen to him at all.”

The Bishop Auckland talk was called Running For Your Life in Wild West Durham, a reference to a tale told by the late Bishops’ winger Ken Twigg about having to lock themselves in the dressing room somewhere up there after a particularly hostile encounter.

It couldn’t have been Stanley United, not the Little House on the Prairie. A lady who’d helped her mum make the teas back in the 1950s had brought one of those tartan-covered autograph books with the mighty Bishops side star-spangled across the first page.

“Bishop Auckland were the only visiting side we did tea for. It was a reciprocal arrangement,” she said.

Harry told of the Zeppelin raid on Hartlepool United – the pilot was Marlene Dietrich’s Uncle Max – and of the time they filmed Supergran at North Shields’s ground, George Best iridescent on the bench.

Someone asked what he thought of the North-East’s big two – “a disgrace” – someone else sought his favourite Northern League ground.

Crook Town, he supposed, and not least for the rows of washing out the back. “Last time I was there, a bloke said I probably wouldn’t remember him, but we’d had a bit of crack in the toilets at Wembley.”

It was the first of a series of Auckland Castle lectures and to date, said the chatelaine, much the best subscribed. Since the others have rather more arcane titles like “Solo Deo Honor et Gloria: re-interpreting the art and architecture of the Cistercians in northern England in the late Middle Ages”, it’s possible that they’re aimed at a slightly different demographic.

AMONG the castle crowd was Peter Henderson, whose 80-year-old dad, Mick, featured hereabouts last September – refereeing two football matches in one day, and no problem so long as he got his sausage and chips in between. Mick had just texted to say that the next dads-and-lads’ golf match would be at Durham City at 5.30 the following morning. An inveterate member of the dawn chorus, he still plays off 22. “The only difference between my dad and Dick Turpin,” said Pete, “is that Dick Turpin wore a mask.”

MICK’S familiar in the Over 40s League, whose presentations were held in Sunderland the following evening – and for the first time without Kip Watson, co-founder and faithful figurehead, who died last year.

It prospers yet, 75 clubs next season in an area from Richmond to Ashington and in action until May 30 – or would have been, at least, had not Shildon Grey Horse fallen at the last hurdle, fined £25 for failing to fulfil a fixture.

Age is in any case comparative. Over 40s secretary Vince Williams had just been beaten by a 94-year-old in the Sunderland dominoes league. “No one’s letting me forget it,” he said.

None of the footballers is yet 94, though the veteran of the year award went to our old friend Frank Stocker, 62, of Ferryhill Greyhound. Frank played six times, failed to score but won a man of the match award. “It was a sympathy vote,” he said.

Again the column was invited to do the honours, again sent homeward with a bottle – what Kip used to call his medicine. “He’d have haunted us if we hadn’t given you something,” said Vince.

It was Southern Comfort, and on the dusky last train back to Darlington, it seemed entirely appropriate.

ON Friday evening to the Wearside League’s annual dinner, with which unofficially was combined Stockton Town FC’s presentation night.

The menu card listed eight awards. All but the admin award, efficiently won by a gentleman called Golden from Sunderland West End FC, were lifted by Stockton.

They were the league, the league cup, the Sunderland Shipowners’ Cup and the Monkwearmouth Charity Cup. Kallum Hannah, 56 in 43 games, won the scoring award while goalkeeper Michael Arthur, just 17 conceded in 34 games, took the “safe hands” award.

The major trophies, it should be said, are not the usual EPNS-ities. Rather they are magnificent examples of the Victorian craftsman’s art, if not worth their weight in gold then certainly in solid silver.

The Shipowners’ Cup benefitted the orphans “asylum”; first contested in 1889, the Monkwearmouth Cup raised funds for the local hospital and does still. That’s 126 years for the same cause. Might it, wondered league chairman Peter Maguire, be a national sporting record?

THE Wearside League itself was founded in 1892, following a letter from Chas Kirtley in the Sunderland Daily Post and Herald inviting interested clubs to a meeting in the Central Coffee Tavern.

Though the trophies were lustrous, other circumstances reflected late-Victorian poverty. The annual subscription was but five shillings, the paradoxically named Royal Rovers allowed to play on the sands with cheap India rubber balls costing fourpence apiece – many of which ended up in the drink.

By the second season they’d clubbed enough to buy a case, but still hadn’t enough to afford a bladder to go inside it. Rovers played instead with a second-hand rugby ball. There appeared to be nothing in the rules which said it had to be round.

Back then, the Wearside’s southernmost shore was Seaham and its most northerly reach Boldon. Football’s formularies now mean that places like Whitehaven – on the opposite coast – are in the Wearside, too.

None may have been as surprisingly named, however, as Egypt Rovers, who joined in the 1890s. Eastern promise notwithstanding, this was a team from the Hendon area of Sunderland, that of Cairo Street and Tel-al-Kebir Road. Little Egypt, of course.