THE prolific Paul Joannou, Newcastle United’s insatiable historian, is turning his attention to the Great War. A book on the Magpie men who saw action in 1914-18 will be published in the autumn.

Paul, raised on Tyneside but now in Edinburgh, has traced more than 150 United players and officials who joined up or did war work at home. Twenty three players or former players were killed, two in munitions factories. He’d welcome word from their families.

None is better remembered than Donald Simpson Bell – Green Howard, Harrogate school teacher, reserve full back – who became the first professional footballer to enlist, won the VC on the Somme in July 1916 and was killed in action five days later.

In 2010 the Professional Footballers Association bought his medal for a reputed £252,000. It’s now in the National Football Museum.

“Some of the men didn’t quite make it on the pitch and are somewhat forgotten by history, but they deserve to be remembered,” says Paul.

Football continued after war began. In 1914-15, Newcastle finished 15th in a 20-club first division that included Sunderland and Middlesbrough, home gates averaging 17,999.

Paul’s first book, a season by season United history, appeared in 1980. Many have followed, from a biography of Hughie Gallacher to an account of the European years, called Fortress St James’s.

The fortress, he worries, is becoming rather less than impregnable. “Newcastle United have certainly kept me busy. There’s never a dull moment at St James’ Park,” he muses.

The book will be called To the Glory of God, taken from the inscription on the club’s own war memorial. Paul would love to hear from relatives of any of the 150: he’s at pauljoannou@blueyonder.co.uk

MORE recent United battles have been well chronicled. The Times last week carried an interview with Amanda Staveley, fronting a possible Mike Ashley buy-out and daughter of Robert Staveley, who developed the Lightwater Valley theme park near Ripon. In her only meeting with Ashley, in a London curry house, she’d been photographed smoking. “I hadn’t had a cigarette for years. My dad nearly killed me,” she says.

WHILE Hartlepool United battle to gain a few pounds, former club chairman Garry Gibson struggles to lose them. Gibson, Wheatley Hill lad originally, has weighed in at Slimming World at 23 stones and been advised, notwithstanding his 6ft 6ins, to lose eight of them. “I was quite excited when they said I was allowed 25 sins a day, but a pint of lager’s 11 of them,” he reports. “I’m determined to crack it, nonetheless.”

BILLY Ayre, recalled in last week’s sports pages as a hard nut of teak toughness, had beneath the bark the softest of centres.

He’d played in the Northern League for Bishop Auckland, Crook Town and Durham City, in the Football League scored 27 in 141 central defensive appearances for Hartlepool. Euphemistically, the press box called him uncompromising.

He’d just been appointed Scarborough’s manager in 1994 when the column squeezed into his broom cupboard office below stairs. On the door someone – Mr Ian Blackstone the fearful chief suspect – had stuck a picture of Joseph Stalin.

Physically the resemblance was inarguable. Philosophically – “though I can be a bit of a dictator” – they were worlds apart.

Six years later, we again caught up at Cardiff City, where the Ninian Park office staff had given him a Bluebirds shirt with number 0. Above the number was the word Billy and below it the word Mates. The former primary school teacher wore it shortly afterwards when running the London Marathon for cancer research,

He’d already survived cancer. Within two years it returned. Billy died in April 2002, aged just 51. However hard to credit, he was a simply lovely man.

LAST week’s column on world beating ultra runner Sharon Gayter noted that her slight frame had been sustained during one of ten treadmill marathons by a total of ten grapes. Things aren’t always so ascetic. Arriving home in Guisborough after the Sunday shift, she discovered that a friend had cooked a roast dinner – “and, dare I say it, I had apple crumble and cream to follow.”

DAVID Burniston in Darlington may not have been alone in spotting the pre-match quote from Sunderland’s Billy Jones: “We have to show them again, get the fans behind us. Get them exited.” By the look of all those empty seats, suggests David, they’ve succeeded very nicely.

….AND finally, the reason that Malcolm Macdonald’s list of Newcastle United appearances includes one “void game” (Backtrack, January 18) is that it was the infamous FA Cup tie against Nottingham Forest in 1974 when a pitch invasion halted proceedings.

Though United eventually won, the FA ordered a re-run at Goodison Park, which also became venue for a third game.

Paul Joannou, inevitably, was at St James’ Park. “It even made me as a teenager write a stinking letter of complaint to the FA, the only time I’ve ever done it. That game is the frustration of my historian’s career.”

Noting that Scott Tominay is being touted for an England cap barely five games into his Man United career – chiefly to prevent his playing for Scotland – Gavin Ledwith in Durham invites readers to name seven England international footballers in the past 50 years whose surnames began with “Mc” or “Mac.”

The column returns on Burns Night.