Backroom buoyed

The turn played stuff from the 70s; Charlie played hell. He’d taught David Walton, the organiser, during a working lifetime at Wolsingham School. “If you’d pulled a stunt like that in the fourth form, I’d have had you,” he said.

“A wonderful, invaluable man,” said David, vice-chairman of Hamsterley workmen’s and an executive member of Durham CIU.

It may not strictly be said that Charlie’s an unsung hero, since he was one of those chosen to carry the Olympic torch in 2012 but is a man who would prefer (as the Bible has it) to hide his light under a bushel. He has also featured among the Echo’s Local Heroes recipients.

He’s now 81, born in Sunniside but long in Tow Law, not – as they might say in those parts – getting away over clever these days.

Though born with a gammy right leg, he became a Durham County basketball player, played club cricket and decent badminton, took to billiards as a 13-year-old and, later, to snooker. Saturday’s presentation was to mark his 23 years as Durham CIU’s games secretary.

That’s but a fraction of it. At his tireless zenith he was compiling fixtures, and thus producing results and tables, for 41 different games leagues, much of it translated into great acres of words and photographs in Local Heroes and the Club Journal.

“It helps if you have a mathematical mind. I just had a system,” said Charlie, who for years worked in tandem with Maurice Galley, another former pupil, who’s now chairman of the Crook and District Football League.

“We just thought it a bit unfair that well-paid footballers were getting all the recognition and hundreds of people were dedicated to local sport and getting nothing,” said Charlie.

At first we paid him nothing, later a penny a line. Mind, there were an awful lot of lines.

Like a reluctant bride, he was a bit late for the do – so late, in truth, that the CIU feared they’d been stood up. “There were an awful lot of steps to climb,” explained Charlie.

They gave him an engraved trophy and an envelope which – said David Walton – contained a modest honorarium. “The man,” added David, “is unique.”

JIM Salkeld, Bishop Auckland’s five-year-old mascot in the 1946 Amateur Cup final, was pictured, carrot smart, in last week’s column. Barnet’s mascot was Anna Neagle. Happily Jim remains alive and well though not, so far, within earshot. More, with luck, next week.

NEWS of Arnold Palmer’s death this week was accompanied in the Echo by a photograph of the great American golfer at the Open at Royal Birkdale in 1965. “I was there,” recalls retired Darlington newsagent Alan Cooper.

Alan particularly remembers the wait for the presentations, to be made by Harold Wilson. “Everyone was milling around Arnie and he had a word and an autograph for them all.”

Palmer had also remembered the advice offered by Peter Alliss, that if ever he signed an autograph he should make sure folk could read it. “He had a beautiful signature,” says Alan. “Unfortunately I never got it.”

HOLIDAY reading, The Times had a big interview with former Darlington FC chairman George Reynolds – more of whom on the opposite page – much to the chagrin of the twitterati.

“It’s a mental institution the North-East, am I right or wrong?” he demanded of George Caulkin, the interviewer. Since George is a Langley Park lad, he seems prudently to have changed the subject.

The Times thought it necessary to employ asterisks on 27 different occasions, chiefly for what may be supposed the most familiar of the four-letter fecundities and 19 more than the same paper deemed improperly proper in a two-page piece on Joey Barton’s new book.

One set was attributed to Alan Shearer, then Newcastle United’s acting manager, in a blazing row with Barton in which assistant manager Iain Dowie felt obliged to intervene, prompting the player to call him “boxing glove head.”

“It was one of the best put downs I ever came up with,” says Barton.

JOHN Robson, the former senior County Durham fire officer and global mountaineer featured in Tuesday’s column, was rather less upwardly mobile as a football referee. In his first six games in the middle in the Cramlington Sunday League, one of his assistants was the youthful Mark Clattenburg, who’s had charge of almost every big occasion in the past 12 months. “I taught him all he knows,” said John.

….and finally, last week’s column offered the nicknames of four Scottish League clubs and sought their true identities. They were Brechin City (the Hedgemen), Dumbarton (Sons of the Rock), Stranraer (the Clayholers) and Dundee United, aka The Arabs.

On behalf of all surrogate Cider Men still bruised from Somerset’s narrow miss in last week’s county cricket championship finale, readers are today invited to name the other two counties which have still never won the blooming thing.

Back among the near misses next week.