If the polliss had had walkie-talkies in 1963, Peter Willis might never have become a football referee.

If Peter Willis hadn't become a referee then Kevin Moran might have stayed on the field in the 1985 FA Cup final, and if Kevin Moran had stayed on the field then Peter Willis might not now approach Her Majesty's Press Corps with a high velocity barge pole.

We are old friends, nonetheless, which is why the three-hour chat over Wednesday lunchtime will be (he insists) the only interview to mark his final whistle after 18 hectic years as national president of the Referees' Association, and why the cautionary notebook - the column's, not his - was flourished only for the final 45 minutes.

What went before must largely remain hugger-mugger and silly beggar, though he rejoices so greatly in a story of his days as a hard- nosed Durham traffic policeman that perforce it receives a more public airing.

PC Willis had stopped a speeding motorist outside Brancepeth. "Can you help me, officer," pleaded the driver, "I'm looking for a s***house."

"You've won the pools, son," said Peter. "You've just found one."

The gentleman pleaded guilty.

He is 6ft 3in tall and with skin of commensurate thickness, as straight and as upright - the two are not necessarily synonymous - as befits a former guardsman and with hands like county council snow ploughs.

Like wooden goal posts, his virtues appear almost old fashioned. "You can't put brains there if they aren't there, but you can have honesty and good manners and be clean in mind and body," he insists.

"As a referee I even used to say please and thank you. People might have thought I was being sarcastic, but I meant it."

He'd told the RA that he would give the presidency for two years and, hands on, has seized every moment of 18 without receiving, or wanting, a penny.

Even when successful in a libel action against Jimmy Greaves following the 1985 final - Greaves had suggested that Moran was only sent off because the match was "on the box" - he insisted the damages go to a referees' charity.

"It was dirty money and I didn't want it," he says. "It was the principle that mattered. He'd made me out to be dishonest; he didn't know Peter Willis."

He has traversed Britain by train, has 237,000 miles on his 12-year-old car - "the only new car I've ever had was a police car" - has never lost a case in which he represented a Referees' Association member.

He never claims expenses under 100 miles ("I'd have been going there, anyway"), allows himself just 25p a mile thereafter, £10 a day for meals and £40 overnight allowance, even in London.

"It's the members' money. I would spend their money as I would spend my own, very carefully," he says.

As an advocate - experience speaks here - he is pugnacious, combative and eloquent, as passionate for the novice in the Peterlee League as for the prima donna in the Premiership. If all barrack room lawyers were like Peter Willis, they'd be growing tomatoes in the Catterick glasshouse.

Even approaching 65, he admits, he would probably have continued but for a stroke almost two years ago whilst driving home from a "hellish" week on the road.

"If that's what death is like it's not frightening, I just don't want to experience it again for a long time," he says.

When nominations closed for his successor, the RA's 18,000 members had between them not mustered a single name. Inaction speaking louder than words, it's what's called being an awfully hard act to follow.

A pitman's son, he was born in Newfield, near Bishop Auckland, delivered Despatches round the doors, believes that his standards are grounded in those early wartime years.

"I've never represented anyone I didn't believe to be honest," he says. "If I thought someone was wrong, I'd tell them so."

He went to Spennymoor Grammar School, kept goal for Willington Juniors and for Tow Law, signed for Newcastle United and played occasionally in the Reserves but was in a queue behind the great Ronnie Simpson and joined the polliss instead.

In his early 20s he was village bobby at Cassop and Quarrington Hill, south-east of Durham, doubling as village team goalkeeper when constabulary duty wasn't to be done.

"They'd come around the police house on Saturday mornings to see if I was playing but sometimes I couldn't because the Store or something had been broken into during the night.

"After an hour or so there'd be a note under the door: 'It was so-and-so who burgled the Store. Now can you play this afternoon'."

In 1963, however, he turned up and the referee didn't. Since the polliss was the only one with a whistle - all may at last become clear - he found a new job.

In 1968 he became a Football League linesman, by 1971 - the year he was elected chairman of the Durham City Referees' Society - he was in the League middle.

It was astonishing progress. "Well," he says modestly, "there were nine vacancies that year."

In 1982 he refereed the League Cup final (by whatever name), three years later - recently retired from the police force - he was awarded the referee's dream ticket, Manchester United v Everton at Wembley.

In the week leading up to it he'd refereed a schools' match at Ushaw Moor and addressed a referees' meeting at High Wycombe - "not because it was near Wembley; I'd said I would do it months before."

It will principally be remembered as the occasion on which Moran became the first player to be sent off in a Cup final, after an incident with Peter Reid, now Sunderland's manager.

A national debate ensued in chambers as diverse as the House of Commons and Wear Valley District Council, though what it had to do with either of them cannot easily be imagined.

Until now, Willis has never spoken to the media about it, refusing a Sunday tabloid's substantial inducement to spill the beans and blow the whistle. "Neither I nor my integrity has ever been for sale," he'd explained at the time.

Seventeen years on, he has no regrets. "The fee was £43 in those days, but I'd have given them £1,043 just to do it.

"I did my job on the day, though it was really Paul McGrath who caused the problem. If he'd booted the ball up the field as he should have done, I'd have been 30 yards behind play as usual.

"Moran just kicked him. Peter Reid might well have gone higher up in the air than he needed to but I saw what happened and I had a decision to make. I either put the whistle on the ground and walked off, or applied the laws of the game and sent him off."

The Sunday People gave him nine out of ten. Usually, says Peter, it was five.

"It's never caused me a problem. I've never felt guilty about it, because it was the right decision.

"I just wish it hadn't happened because I'd rather be remembered for other reasons."

When he became national president, in succession to the ever-admirable Fred Lightfoot from Spennymoor, who had to stand down for family reasons, the Referees' Association had little money and rented offices near Wolverhampton.

Surprised at the amount of work involved? "Absolutely aghast. I suppose I expanded with it"

In 1992, after he had initiated a major fund-raising drive - "renting was like putting money down the toilet and flushing it" - they bought new headquarters in Coventry, run by just three staff and a part-time clerk.

A recent consultants' review recommended that his job be reclassified as chief executive with a "fairly substantial" salary and, too late, a new car.

His own office ("much to my wife's disgust") is in the spare bedroom of their former police house in Meadowfield, near Durham.

Helen Willis has been hugely supportive nonetheless.

"She probably knows more about referees and refereeing than I do," says Peter, and it was only after a long talk to his wife that he decided at last to take things easier.

The stroke, he believes, was probably delayed by his lifestyle and not accelerated by it; his chief regret is that the fun seems to have gone from the game.

"Even in schools matches, the abuse you hear is terrible."

He is almost fully recovered, has resumed golf at Crook and snooker in Willington and has shed two stones from his substantial frame.

Though "immediate past presidency" will sustain involvement - particularly if there's still no new president after the annual meeting in June - he will miss the daily encouragement of referees.

"You don't do it for material things, you do it for friendships and I've friends everywhere," he says.

"The value of that payment is something you just can't buy."

* He'd told Helen he'd be home by 2pm; it was 3.30 before we turned out of the pub. It'll be different, he swears, after June.

"At last," said the president, "we're going to have some time."

Published: Friday, March 1, 2002