Hard times

They’re thinking of rebranding it as a sports bar, apparently, sports bars being very trendy. “What,” said 82-year-old Keith Hopper – one of that happy band to have played both cricket and football for Durham County – “you mean we’re not?”

Keith was joined by Arnold Alton and by Alan Brown, a Shildon lad like K R Hopper, but perhaps better remembered at Crook Town, for whom he twice appeared in the FA Amateur Cup final, hitting the winner in 1964.

“The older I get, the further I was out,” said Alan.

Organised by the ever-admirable Durham Amateur Football Trust, it was a cracking evening. They remembered the great West Auckland dam bust, the mysterious matter of “expenses” – Keith Hopper reckoned that Whitby Town paid win bonuses in crabs – and, as our generation is wont to do, occasionally wandered off subject.

Alan Brown had just been charged £640 for a window. “My first house in Alexandra Street only cost £650,” he said.

On much their views varied. On the hardest men they’d faced, they were as one. It was Terry Melling of Tow Law Town – “made Vinnie Jones look like a backward choir boy,” said Arnie Alton.

Terry was from Haverton Hill, Billingham bank of the Tees, worked in the shipyard and became a sergeant in the Coldstream Guards, thereafter reprising the biblical bit about by their stripes shall ye know them.

He played for Tow Law in the mid-sixties, joined Newcastle United without making the first team and was 26 before his Football League debut, for Watford – “a brave, bustling centre forward,” says one of the websites.

Thereafter he travelled a bit, hit 40 goals in 129 Football League appearances, ending with six in 21 games at Darlington. He’d now be 75. Up guards and at ‘em, whatever happened to Sgt Melling?

PLAYED in and played out by the music of the Grimethorpe Colliery band, Derek Newton’s funeral in the lovely church of St John’s, Hipswell – near Catterick Garrison – proved a fitting send off.

We’d recorded his passing last week, an all-round sportsman greatly familiar around the villages of Richmondshire, but also a Northern League goalkeeper for Evenwood Town and for Shildon.

Gillian, his daughter, recalled that Derek had dislocated his shoulder – “again” – after falling from a tree while doing monkey impressions, talked of the storm during which her motorbike-mad father had searched a bog with a metal detector in the hunt for a Royal Enfield, mythically submerged there.

Then there was the occasion on which the ever-gregarious Derek had looked into the Scotch Corner hotel for a pint and ended up spending the night with the cast of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Derek was 82: he talked a good game, too.

A REPLACEMENT bus service between Darlington and Newcastle – last week’s column – clearly hasn’t been the only problem facing the railways. Martin Birtle spotted the Caledonian Sleeper, usually operational between Euston and Fort William, somnambulating through Billingham – the new Road to the Isles.

LAST week’s note on Sedgefield-born jockey Andrew Thornton, still chasing his 1,000th winner, mentioned his wedding to Yvonne Dennis last year – when all but two or three thought they were there for the couple’s son’s baptism.

Wendy Acres, in Darlington, recommends the movie. “What I have in my hands is a marriage licence,” announces the priest at Husthwaite parish church after parents and baby take their seats. The congregation all but corpses.

“It’s wonderful, never fails to cheer me up,” says Wendy. “The face of the lady in the front row on the left is unforgettable.”

It’s easily googled, or via the blog for the Carr House Farm guest house at Ampleforth, North Yorkshire.

APPLAUDING a CBE for Durham County Council leader Simon Henig, the first column of 2016 observed that he was also the North-East’s most fervent Leicester City fan – and thus hoping for a double whammy.

Maybe so, suggests Brian Dixon, in Darlington, but there seem to be quite a few urban Foxes about.

At the Cornmill branch of Calendar Club – January sales, 40 per cent off – he noticed an excited father and son bagging the last Leicester calendar. “They HAVE got one,” said the bairn.

“I didn’t dare count up,” says Brian, “how many Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham, Liverpool and so on were humiliatingly remaindered.”

….and finally, the only lower division side to have won an FA Cup tie against Arsenal in Arsene Wenger’s near-20-year tenure (Backtrack, January 14) is Blackburn Rovers.

Martin Birtle, again, today recalls the 1986 Test match between England and New Zealand at Lord’s in which England used four different wicket-keepers. Who were they?

Keeping canny, the column returns next week.