A FAMOUS picture of the Jarrow Crusade shows the 200 marchers soaked, thoroughly miserable and quite likely wondering where the next bottle of Brown Ale was coming from.

Unlike last Saturday’s Jarrow marchers, they might not even have been fortified by a hot egg and bacon sandwich from Dickson’s, celebrated throughout South Tyneside. They wouldn’t have been as wet as we were, either.

It was the 21st stage of the Last Legs Challenge, a 14-miler to Jarrow Roofing’s ground that started, entirely appropriately, from the world’s second oldest lifeboat, the Tyne, still beached at South Shields.

It simply bucketed. How long before the maroons went up? What of those in peril on the shore?

In October 1936, the marchers embraced 200 men and just one woman, “Red” Ellen Wilkinson, the local MP. Jan McLoughlin, wife of Roofing’s chairman, became at the weekend the first woman to complete a Last Legs stage.

We were joined by club officials Andy Hudson and Dave Ramsey and by my loyal and long-suffering mate Kit Pearson, a man who forever seems to reflect Kenneth Grahame’s view about a little wet and a Water Rat.

On the site of Simonside Hall, South Shields FC’s home after the Second World War, we’d completed 250 miles – the Challenge’s halfway point.

The route also included several of the area’s non-league grounds, Graham Ibbetson’s 2001 Jarrow Crusade memorial in the town centre and adjoining Jarrow housing developments, one – the Scotch Estate – with streets named after Scottish towns and the other with Australian connections.

They’re joined by Perth Road, since there are Perths in both countries. It’s one of the more imaginative examples of post-war urban planning.

Including rest days, the 1936 crusade reached London in 26 days. Singing Onward Christian Soldiers – some, it should be admitted, rather more lustily than others – we reached Roofing’s ground in Boldon Colliery in five hours.

The next bottle of Brown was just five minutes away.

LAST Legs marks my 20th and final season as Ebac Northern League chairman and will take in all 44 grounds. Hastily arranged, the 20th stage went to Darlington RA – a 12-miler that remained so strictly within town boundaries that we even did a lap of the East Cemetery.

Impossible to get lost in Darlington after 50 years working here – and so it seemed until an Arriva service bus came past with “Luton” on the headboard.

Temporarily disoriented, we made the 7.30pm kick-off with just five minutes to spare.

*Last Legs nears its £10,000 target – half to the Sir Bobby Robson Foundation, half to community-based charities – and will have to look considerably higher. Donations can be made electronically at www.justgiving.com/lastlegs challenge or by cheque made payable to the Northern Football League to me at 8 Oakfields, Middleton Tyas, Richmond, North Yorks DL10 6SD. Thanks.

STUART Bingham, the snooker world champion, breezed into Darlington on Guy Fawkes night for an evening of exhibition matches. Aficionados sat, enrapt, at the front. The rest of us stood, nearer the bar, at the back.

An affable chap, the champ made sure he didn’t lose. It’s one thing playing exhibition matches, quite another making an exhibition of yourself. Poor Anthony Garnett was on the wrong end of a 133 break, but they hadn’t paid £20 to watch Anthony, had they?

The event, at Darlington Snooker Club, coincided with a real ale festival – Fawkes Sake, Fawkes Lightning, that sort of thing – and pie and peas party. Though many of the inter-frame questions were barely audible, most of the answers seemed to be Steve Davis.

“I cried my eyes out when Dennis Taylor beat him in the 1985 final,” said Stuart, who’d have been nine at the time.

Most wore what might be supposed street clothes; some – table manners – dressed for snooker. One chap might have walked in from playing the Co-op undertaker in a 1930s B-western.

Ales also included Bingham’s Best, from Walls – on no account to be confused with the ice cream-maker – in Northallerton.

The evening’s second-biggest success, however, may have been the pie and peas – sixty lots sold, a plate for almost every member of the audience. Like the 1985 world champion, they were also Taylor’s – and like dear old Dennis, world class.

ARNOLD Alton was the first responder – as the medics say – to last week’s column, but was emailing early doors from Lanzarote. There must have been a bloke going up and down the beach, selling the paper.

The first with the answer to that column’s question – the former England cricketer who’ll be 40 on Christmas Day – was David Moyes, in Darlington. It was, of course, the mighty Marcus Trescothick.

Still with cricket, Martin Birtle in Billingham invites readers to name the only two batsmen to score more than 300 when compiling their maiden centuries.

An answer – and more on the passing of Harry Clarke, one of the great all-rounders – when the column returns next week.