BELLA COWIE is the Rosy Rapid from the earliest days of women’s football in the Durham coalfield with a remarkable Hollywood connection.
In our women’s football special in Memories 637, she is kneeling, staring at the camera from beneath her big flat cap and holding the ball with the initials of her team written on it: “WHRR” – the Wheatley Hill Rosy Rapids.
The Rosy Rapids, the Wheatley Hill Ladies Football team of 1909: Meggy Lowther, Lizzy Luke, ?, Meggy Farrow, Lizzy Champley, Meggy Philips, Bella Cowie (kneeling). Picture courtesy of the Wheatley Hill Local History Society
Great genealogy work by Billy Mollon has found that Bella was born in Wingate in 1891 into a large mining family which have moved from Wigan to work in the coalfield.
Her cousin on her father’s side was a chap called John Bramwell Alderson who was born in 1916 in Horden. He started work at the local colliery but then joined the Royal Artillery where, reputedly, he rose to become a major.
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He was demobbed after the Second World War and married a girl from the US and moved over there to pursue a film career.
Between 1951 and 1990, he appeared in 53 films, often as an uncredited extra, but alongside some mega-stars.
In his last film, Young Guns II, which featured Kiefer Sutherland, he played an unnamed guano miner. In his biggest film, Blazing Saddles of 1974, starring Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder, he played an unnamed gum chewer, while in My Fair Lady in 1964, he appears alongside Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison as “Jamie Doolittle’s crony”.
John Alderson on the left with Errol Flynn and Phil Tully in the 1952 film Against All Flags. Picture: Wikipedia
He appeared in lots of TV programmes, which usually had a western theme. His biggest role was as one of the lead characters in Boots and Saddles, a cavalry drama set in Arizona in 1870, which ran for 39 episodes across the US in 1957 to 1959.
This Hollywood actor from the Durham coalfield died in 2006 aged 90 in Los Angeles.
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