HEREABOUTS identified for three decades as The Elderly Secretary of the Bishop Auckland Referees’ Society, Terry Farley is stepping aside from that position after 54 years. “I was just getting the hang of it,” says Terry, a youthful 83.

He becomes president, succeeding the late George McKellar, former Third Lanark goalkeeper and man about Darlington.

A few years ago, Terry was made MBE for services to refereeing and richly deserved the honour. A few years before that he had a triple heart bypass.

A former Football League referee, long in Newton Aycliffe, he’ll mark in January an incredible 65 years of active service as a Durham County ref – and still officiates at university games most weeks. “It gets me out of the house,” he says.

We meet again at a Refs’ Society meeting at the Manor House in Bishop, probably the only pub in town in which the column had hitherto never wet its own whistle, the gathering addressed by Premier League ref Bobby Madley.

Still just 31, Madley – as in sadly, not gradely – began 14 years ago in the Wakefield and District League and is now on the FIFA list. He has a political history degree, taught briefly, but now works full-time for the professional game match officials’ organisation.

His presentation’s first rate, includes the little known fact that top link referees are forbidden from using social media – all very well for him, but not for an unfortunate chap of the same name in Michigan, who’s had some extraordinarily nasty tweets.

At one point he even has two of the lads singing Baa Baa Black Sheep – they’d be better sticking to whistling – for which each receives a new pair of boots.

Terry Farley, lovely man, is happy with the pair he’s got. “Like me”, he says, “there’s a good bit life in them yet.”

The Times on Monday reported that Ernie McGarvey – “the oldest football referee in Britain” – is hanging up his whistle. Mr McGarvey is 81. The Times is mistaken.

MOURNED here last week, Grand National-winning trainer Denys Smith earned an affectionate obit in The Times. Much of it was familiar, one plaudit hitherto unknown. Denys, ever-chivalrous, always held the door open for a lady. The old English gentleman was 92.

FRANK Watson, in Teesdale a true local hero, died last Wednesday. He was 77.

He’d long played cricket for Barnard Castle, captained the seconds and continued playing when his son, Conrad, became skipper. “An exceptional slip fielder and a very good all rounder,” says Conrad – an all-round interest which extended to painting, poetry and country music, about which he also wrote.

Frank was also for many years the secretary of the local darts and dominoes league – Betty, his mum, had herself been a dab hand at both – and penned informed, affectionate and oft-droll reports for the Teesdale Mercury.

We occasionally crossed paths, Frank happy to explain why in Teesdale the 3-2 domino was known as Gentle Alice (“there’s no harm in her”) and to suppose that there were players who brayed away like Cockfield Band.

Others in columns past have talked of chewing on like Cockfield Band and (alas) buggering about like Cockfield Band. None, not even Mr Neville Kirby, has ever been able to explain how those gentlemen earned their lackadaisical reputation.

We’d last seen Frank in the Rose and Crown at Mickleton, the conversation turning to a woman’s place around the domino board. In the Barney league they’d long been embraced; in the Darlington and District League they’d been resisted.

Frank duly reported it in the Mercury. “Modesty,” he said, “prevents me from printing my reply.”

His funeral is at St Cuthbert’s Church, Cotherstone, at 10am next Monday.

WE wrote a couple of weeks back of the opening of Barney Cricket Club’s magnificent new pavilion, supposed that if the town band had been turned out – in the sense that the town fire brigade was once infamously turned out to douse Mr John Wesley’s enthusiasm – it might have played O Worship the King.

That’s the hymn with the line “Pavilioned in splendour and girded with praise.”

If not exactly playing the band, as the column’s old mother used to say, musicians’ secretary Bert Chidzey is anxious to point out that they weren’t invited – we’d not suggested otherwise – and that, since they receive no council funding, civic events like Remembrance Day are attended at their own expense.

Hence they’re just Barnard Castle Band.

AS occasionally befalls, we bump at the football into that redoubtable local league cricketer Bobby Orton, familiar for 45 years but sidelined last summer through injury. A couple of days earlier he’d passed 60, discovered a new lease of life, contemplates a comeback with Durham Over-60s. “Shares in Deep Heat are definitely falling,” says Bob. “My knee’s getting better.”

….and finally, what made Mohammad Shami the odd-man-out among the 22 players in the first Test between India and England (Backtrack, November 17) is that he was the only one never to have scored a first class century. Malcolm Dunstone in Darlington was first up with the answer.

Readers are today invited to suggest the all-time Football League/Premier League record held by Jack Rodwell of Sunderland.

For the record, and one or two other things, the column returns next week.