WEMBLEY warrior Ernie Curtis was back at West Auckland last week, more than half a century after his finest hour.

“The old place seems to have changed quite a bit,” he said. “I bet they don’t even have the tin baths anymore.” They didn’t.

Ernie was West’s centre forward in the 1961 Amateur Cup final against Walthamstow Avenue, still insisted that the 2-1 defeat had been wholly undeserved. “Our goalkeeper twice dropped the ball at their forwards’ feet. They were the only two shots they had, we played them off the park.”

Almost everyone in the Co Durham village had headed south, every bus commandeered and the midnight special train so long that it had to shunt up and down the little station in order to fit everyone in.

The players had travelled on the Thursday afternoon, watched the Crazy Gang – “it seemed quite appropriate, really” – in the evening.

The crowd was 45,000 – “the noise just hit you, even when it was only half full” – the second half shown live on Tyne Tees Television, followed by Torchy and Candid Camera. Deadline Midnight was over by 11 o’clock.

At Wembley, the massed bands of the Green Jackets Brigade played music like My Fair Lady, Colonel Bogey and the Post Horn Gallop.

Ernie, now 85, had brought with him his runner-up medal and the Wembley programme, price a shilling. There was a full-page advert for Bovril – “dynamic footballer Johnny Haynes trains and scores on it” – another for Double Diamond which, of course, worked wonders.

The programme described Ernie as “a well built, roving leader of the attack, his trend to roam deceptive to centre backs.”

“Oh aye,” said Ernie, “I could certainly put myself about a bit back then.”

HE was a shipyard plater on the Tyne, had previously played for Crook Town, joined West because the amateurs of Crook paid him £4 a week and the amateurs of West Auckland offered £6. “Quite canny money in those days.”

His brother Jackie had also played for Crook, earning £6. “I asked the committee why Jackie got £6 and I only earned £4. They said they paid everyone what they thought they were worth. I said thank you very much and went to West Auckland, but I never thought I’d get anywhere near Wembley.”

The club also laid on a taxi to and from the family home in Pelaw, Gateshead. “I worked a five-and-a-half day week in the yard so otherwise I couldn’t have got there, but they treated me wonderfully,” he recalled.

Ernie was so highly regarded, indeed, that the club let him borrow the solid silver World Cup. Won in Italy in 1909 and again in 1911, that long had stood on the bar in club secretary Sid Douthwaite’s pub in the village.

“I wanted to show it off at Pelaw Club and up there they couldn’t believe it. The first night it was packed, the second you’d have thought Cliff Richard was on. I couldn’t get a parking space.”

Between the two, his mother had decided that the fabled Sir Thomas Lipton trophy needed cleaning. “I came home from work and it was in bits, quite small bits, all over the kitchen table. Goodness knows how we put it back together again.

“I took it back to Sid’s and he said that the World Cup didn’t come to bits. I told him that it did now.”

After leaving the shipyard he worked in his father’s betting shops, had travelled back in time last Tuesday with his mate Billy Duncan, who also played a bit for West Auckland in the 1960s but had to catch the bus.

“Ernie was a good player and a good friend,” said Bill. “The nicest, gentlest and most generous person I ever met in my life.”

THE last time I’d seen Ernie, 23 years earlier, was at the funeral in West Auckland of Cissie Summons, queen of the tea ladies.

Cissie was 73 when she died, five days before West’s priceless World Cup was stolen from the workmen’s club. Her funeral was the day after that still-scandalous crime.

For sixty years, on match days and at training, she’d baked and bothered after West Auckland’s footballers, embraced them maternally, offered the spare room when they were far from home.

Before the 1961 Amateur Cup final she’d made a Wembley-shaped cake with icing sugar twin towers; for the club’s centenary reunion in 2003 she’d gone two nights without sleep to ensure that all would be fed.

“We were family and she was like an adopted mother to us,” said Ernie at the time.

“Our players didn’t go to the pub, they went back to Cissie’s,” recalled Billy Heron. “The booze would be piled up in the corner. It was probably why everyone wanted to play for West Auckland.”

The post-funeral column wondered if the minister might not have quoted from the 15th chapter of the Book of Proverbs, the bit about “she is more precious than rubies.”

No matter that the scripture refers to wisdom, and not to a god woman, as popularly is supposed, whoever wrote the Book of Proverbs had clearly never tasted Cissie Summons’s chocolate cake.

ERNIE picked a good night to be back, West Auckland – under new management, as they say outside licensed premises nationwide – beating Guisborough Town 9-0.

It sparked a lively debate about when West had last scored nine in a league match, the likely answer being a vividly recalled 9-2 win against Ashington in February 2002 in which the prolific Roy Allen hit eight – the first after 30 seconds, the second not until 50 minutes – and still missed an 86th minute penalty, his second of the game.

“Ironically I was thinking about taking him off because he seemed to be struggling with a hamstring injury,” said team manager Alan Oliver at the time.

“I knew I shouldn’t have taken the second penalty. It’s unlucky to take two in a match,” said Roy, Hartlepool lad.

Two days later he was pictured in the Echo with eight footballs – wherever the ground is, it’s certainly not West Auckland. The Vic, presumably.

It wasn’t a Northern League record. That’s still held by Jack Coulthard, an analytical chemist who on May 2 1936 scored ten in South Bank’s 13-0 trouncing of Ferryhill Athletic – “In summer weather South Bank ran up a cricket score,” the Echo reported next day.

Jack Coulthard died when the merchant navy ship on which he was travelling was torpedoed in the war. Roy Allen is reported still to be around the Pool but no longer playing football because of knackered knees. Unlike Ernie Curtis, he has not been around to reminisce.