JACK Snowdon, the last survivor of the Willington team which famously won the 1950 FA Amateur Cup final at Wembley, has died. He was 91.

“Tall, thin and agile,” said the Wembley programme. “As tall as a mountain and as majestic,” said the Daily Express.

Willington played near-neighbours Bishop Auckland – “just a fourpenny bus ride away,” said Pathe News – a repeat of the 1939 final, at Sunderland. The Bishops, once again, were expected to win comfortably.

That Willington won 4-0 was said chiefly to have been down to the man they nicknamed The Spider, because of the way his long arms appeared to wrap themselves around the ball.

“Snowdon has never played better. He saved high and low shots with equal facility,” reported the Echo. “If the FA Cup final is only half as good as this one, it’ll be truly marvellous,” commentator Raymond Glendenning told his Home Service listeners.

“Willington played in England colours and like the England team,” added the Express.

Jack, a lovely and wholly unassuming man, had been admitted to hospital in Durham last week. On the sign above the bed, the space for real name said “John Snowdon” and for familiar name it read “Spider Jack.”

“It gave the nurses something to talk about,” says Stewart Smith, Jack’s cousin. “It was the match of a lifetime.”

JACK was born and raised in Willington and, save for National Service, never left the town. More than any, he knew the excitement which that final appearance had caused.

Folk, he once told the column, were selling their bedroom furniture in order to meet the train fare. Others would buy a Doggarts’ club for £25, sell it for £20 and ensure the wife and bairns had a weekend in London as well.

“Around £30,000 which otherwise would have been spent locally has been taken to London and no-one minds a bit – not even the unpaid rent man,” said the Northern Despatch.

Two days before the final, Jack had badly twisted his ankle when tripping on a pot hole in an unmade road. He spent the night having treatment at Dr Crichton’s, travelled south the following morning with a walking stick and a slipper on his foot.

It wasn’t the only problem. The Willington committee was so mean, and the definition of “amateur” so flexible, that the players held a secret meeting in the bathroom of Jack Stephenson’s the butcher’s to discuss withdrawing their labour.

That the committee would only pay for 11 shirts explains why two squad members on the team picture were wearing something else entirely.

Fifteen trains headed to London from south Durham. Many thousands more travelled by bus. The crowd was 77,000, receipts £17,500. The Band of the Royal Marines played Skaters’ Waltz and Easter Parade, the still-remembered Arthur Caiger led the crowd in singing My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean and One Man and His Dog.

Though Joe Robinson, Stan Rutherford, Bill Larmouth and Matt Armstrong all scored for Willington, it was the lanky Snowdon who caught the expert eye.

Arsenal came in for him the following day, but Jack was committed to a career in planning. Hamsterley Village made an offer, too – a chicken and a dozen eggs.

The FA also named him in a touring party, but Jack broke his collarbone in his next match for Willington. He was never asked again.

JACK became chief planning officer at Wear Valley District Council, retired 36 years ago, was a hands-on president of the club for which once he’d starred so memorably.

Anxiously trying to drum up support, he even fixed a megaphone to his car and toured the town on match day. “Times change,” he lamented. “Football was everything to people in 1950. If we played Crook, two miles away, two shuttle buses would run a service starting at 12.30pm. If we played Shildon, they’d put on a special train.

“The megaphone didn’t make one iota of difference. People just said I was crackers.”

He’d also compiled a newsreel video of every Amateur Cup final involving North-East teams since 1935, long held onto the Wembley match ball, gave his winner’s medal to the Durham Amateur Football Trust.

He was born on Christmas Day – we’d attended his 90th birthday party – died on Easter Day. His wife Dorothy predeceased him. There were no children.

l Jack’s funeral is at St Stephen’s Church, in Willington, just up the road from his home, at 1.15pm on Tuesday, April 12.

Travellers tales

DECKED bravely in blue and white, Willington’s ground remains familiar from Jack Snowdon’s derring-do day.

It was there on Monday morning that Darlington Travellers Rest – president, Backtrack – contested the final of the Colin Waites Trophy, for Crook and District League second division clubs.

Down the years our boys have been the Greyhound, the Cricketers, the Model T, the Hole in the Wall and possibly one or two others. It’s not so much a football team, more a pub crawl in search of a bit of sponsorship.

By whatever name, they last won a cup in 1991, though long-serving secretary Alan Smith recalls another occasion on which they did at least reach a final.

Beaten in the league’s main cup competition, they were invited to contest a subsidiary competition, got a bye into the semi-final, lost in the last four, but were reinstated when the opposition was found to have played a couple of ringers and, of course, lost in the final.

On Monday, they played Alston Moor Social Club – the Crook and District spreads far – took the game to extra time and penalties, lost again.

League officials were a bit disappointed with the crowd. “Last year it was Bishop Hogans; drank the bar dry,” recalls league president Maurice Galley.

Games in hand, the Travellers can now concentrate on the league – and hope for rather more luck than against Ferryhill Town. “It was one of those games where if we’d fallen into a barrel of breasts we’d have come out sucking our thumbs,” Alan Smith wrote in the programme.

I got to present the trophies, to commiserate a bit. It may be true that everything comes to he who Waites, but also that some things take a little longer.