70 not out for the Donkey Dropper

There’s talk of a birthday lunch in a posh restaurant somewhere near Newcastle; Charlie’s a bit worried. “I’m not very comfortable in posh restaurants,” he says. “I hope they have chips.”

He is the most engaging, the most modest and the most generous of men, though mildly indignant that the secret’s crept beneath his guard. “There’s only my family supposed to know,” he protests.

It’s a mild journalistic triumph. For the great unsung hero, it is to be a Donkey Dropper Serenade.

The dear old Demon has been familiar hereabouts since April 1988, when first he was introduced to Backtrack readers. “Charlie’s not just the embodiment of Eryholme cricket, he’s the spirit of village cricket everywhere,”

club chairman Peter Warne had said, and it would be difficult, even now, to put it better.

Since then his competitive wicket total for Eryholme has risen to a truly extraordinary 3,093 and rises yet. He’s still the secretary, still the groundsman, still the flood watcher, still a league management committee member and still has two fulltime jobs.

We meet for a bite of supper at the Chequers in nearby Dalton, where first we’d gathered all those years ago.

Charlie sips a half of Coke.

“You never said anything about something in the paper,”

he protests but, of course, there are compensations. The Chequers has chips.

ERYHOLME’S a hamlet a few miles south of Darlington, the Yorkshire side of one of those great discursive Tees bends that gets it nowhere very fast.

Charlie was born there, a joiner’s son, attended Croft school and was introduced to what might be termed his rather unusual bowling action.

“Like all kids I just tried to bowl as fast as I could but there was a teacher – Gaffer Fell, we called him, a good man – who pulled me to one side and said he’d show me a different way of getting people out.”

It’s unlikely, of course, that Gaffer Fell called it donkey dropping. Whatever it was, it hit the spot – and Charlie, forever in the slow lane, still reckons he’s never spun a cricket ball in his life.

“The thing about slow bowlers is that everyone wants to knock you out of the ground. It’s always been the same. I’m at my best when they try to do that; at the end of the day you know they’re going to fail. What I don’t like is batsmen who think about it.”

After an extraordinary half century, the batsmen of the Darlington and District League seem still not to have learned their lesson.

After school cricket, they’d play informally in the village.

When the Darlington league was formed exactly fifty years ago, Eryholme were refused entry. It was invitation only.

Charlie spent a season with Rockliffe, across the river at Hurworth, before the league changed its mind and, for generations of batters, simply invited trouble.

His best has been 9-21 against Newton-le-Willows; just three years ago he claimed 6-4 against Spennithorne. His finest hour, however, may have been a match at Darlington Cleveland Bridge where he was captain and, captain’s prerogative, opened the bowling.

“They’d never been beaten that season, had knocked up a good score and kept hitting me into the bowling green.

“Peter Warne was wicket keeper and told me that I just couldn’t keep on bowling. I said I’d just have one more over, finished with 9-48 and we beat them.”

He also recalls a midweek cup match at Thorp Perrow, near Bedale, for whom Albert Aurelius – a formidable batsman with Northallerton – was opening. In the first match, Thorp Perrow had smashed them all over; in the second Charlie put two men behind the wicket and did him first ball.

“He never forgot that, didn’t Albert. Hairy duck against Eryholme.”

Once, only once, he also hit a century, against a team of legal bods assembled by Judge Oliver Wrightson, who lived in Eryholme. “They can’t have been very good,” says Charlie.

His greatest achievement of all, however, may have been to mastermind the complete restoration of the ground when the overflowing river literally carried it away. There could never have been Eryholme without cricket.

HE’S still a turkey farmer, still an all-weather grass cutting contractor, still an enthusiastic fund raiser for the Eryholme church. “It gets a bit time consuming, but I think I was put on this earth to work,” he says.

“I can get home from work at nine o’clock and still have the wicket to prepare for a midweek match the following night. But where would I be without cricket?”

These days usually in the second team – “and only then to make up the numbers,” he characteristically insists – he added 27 wickets to his competitive total this summer, including six for not-verymany against Raby Castle.

“Well we had to beat them, we were bottom and they were second bottom,” he recalls.

“We wouldn’t be bottom any more.”

He has “absolutely” no plans to retire – “not so long as we’re fielding two teams, anyway” – still prefers to give the young uns a game.

“So far as I can see, village cricket around here is in pretty good health and the Darlington and District League is brilliant. Every winter we think that we might lose one or two but everyone seems to be holding on.”

The Demon holds on, too.

They’re not dropping the Donkey Dropper yet.

SPEAKING of well-worn cricketers, we hear that John Armstrong – once felled by a flying sightscreen at Shildon Railway – has been getting seriously out of his depth.

John, still an occasional for Etherley in the Durham County League, is also a keen swimmer. The Great North Swim and the Great Scottish Swim having been cancelled because of blue-green algae, John took the plunge last Sunday into Salford Docks.

The British Gas Great Manchester Swim.

The water was so cold that a third of the 2,000 entrants didn’t finish, reports John, a retired chartered surveyor. He did, fifth over-65, but had to be fished out with hypothermia and rushed to hospital, where he spent two days. His daughter, who completed the swim without trouble, was first at his bedside.

“I was told that my body temperate was below fatal level, that I was lucky to be alive and that my lungs had more water in them than most people’s when they drown.”

Back on dry land, his wife Carol has banned him from further immersion.

“Compared to what happened on Sunday,” says John, “flying sightscreens are a piece of cake.”

BRENT “Bomber” Smith rings, too, still just a bairn of 58 despite 45 years at the crease. Familiar with several Co Durham clubs, the last 12 years with Thornaby side Stafford Place – for whom he scored a career-best 91 this summer – Bomber gives himself another couple of years. “People tell me that I’m slowing up,” he says. “I don’t need to be told.”

Referee dogged by an unwanted spectator

ONCE bitten, retired Football League assistant referee Martin Robinson tells reluctantly of what might be termed a mastiff problem.

Martin had a Durham Sunday Cup match on Rift House Rec in Hartlepool, Princess Helena v Sunderland SR Dons. The problem was the large white dog – he insists on calling it a mastiff – that persisted in taking up a position in the sun a couple of yards inside the goal line.

“Every time it was dragged off it would come back to the same spot, like it had laid claim with its towel at half past six in order to beat the Germans,” says Martin, memorably.

By half-time he’d played an added six minutes, all dog-related. At the interval he spoke to a parks department workman. “If you don’t do something about that dog you won’t get home tonight,” said Martin.

Finally, a visiting supporter claimed ownership and shifted it.

Martin, from Darlington, was so pleased that he not only played extra-time and penalties but raised the incident at last week’s meeting of Bishop Auckland Refs’ Society, which he chairs.

“They told me I was a stupid boy because I should straightway have refused to carry on until the dog was properly removed,” he says.

Tail between his legs, the poor lad retreated to his corner.

COLIN Harrison in Knaresborough seeks to correct the assertion in Tuesday’s column that the first player after the late Bobby Smith to score in successive FA Cup finals was Freddie Ljunberg of Arsenal. It was Brian Talbot, he says – for Ipswich in the 1978 final, against Arsenal, and for “some London team” the following year. The correction, for once, is incorrect.

Ipswich’s scorer in 1978 was Roger Osborne who, ecstatic at netting against the mighty Gunners, promptly fainted. He was revived with smelling salts.

WE’RE right, concedes Clive Wilkinson, that Norton and Stockton Ancients’ progress to the FA Cup third qualifying round – they’re home to FC United of Manchester, a week today – is a club best.

Effectively it’s the fifth qualifier.

Twenty years ago it would have been the first round proper.

Clive’s anxious, however, to recall the Cup exploits of the original Ancients – Stockton FC – who in North Eastern League days many times reached the competition proper.

The best remembered may have been on December 20 1947 when 34,261 – including most of Horden, there to see local lad Billy Thompson – paid £3,767 to watch an Ayresome Park replay against Notts County.

County won 4-1, Clive – and others before him – recalling the great Tommy Lawton’s hat-trick of headers. The Echo reported just two, both “classics”, conceded that Stockton had been beaten by a better side.

“They were better,” we added ,”simply because they had Lawton.”

HAROLD Shepherdson, England’s World Cup trainer in 1966, used to recall the 1936 Ellis Cup final at South Bank when he kicked the ball into Wilf Mannion’s midriff – a euphemism – from approximately eighteen inches.

Shep swore it was an accident.

Wilf’s auntie Kate disagreed and set about him with her gamp.

Many years later, Shep was asked his toughest opponent. “Tommy Lawton,” he said, “and Wilf Mannion’s Auntie Kate.”

A CONFLICT of interests tomorrow for Derek Jago, both chaplain and enthusiastic supporter of Bishop Auckland FC and also a lay minister in the Escomb group of churches. The Bishops’ crucial FA Vase match against Billingham Synthonia has a 3pm start – at West Auckland – exactly the time that, a couple of miles up the A68 at Etherley, the licensing service for the parishes’ new priests kicks off.

Derek’s off the pitch perimeter fence. “I’ll be in church,” he says.

And finally

THE world championship that takes place every August bank holiday weekend in Llanwrtyd Wells (Backtrack, September 28) is bog snorkelling. Terry Wells was first up for air with the answer, probably also knows that the annual man against horse race takes there, too.

In the belief that every dog has its day, as Martin Robinson discovered above, readers are today invited to name the last Football League ground with a greyhound track around it.

Back on track on Tuesday.