TONY STAFFORD's Monday Musings - Pic Steven Cargill / Racingfotos.com

Monday Musings: Reliving Past Lives

I don’t know if you have a story that you tell and retell where one of the two main participants (the hero) has disappeared from your life for at least half a century while the villain remains so visible that his comments round by round on the Usyk/Fury fight on Saturday night were there for all to see who look at the Daily Mail sport website, writes Tony Stafford.

I am about to abort that singular source of sports opinion not least because, over the past couple of months, its offering has been gradually going over to a fee-paying split with ever more of the output barred to the normal reader.

Also, its irritating policy of putting up potentially interesting headlines and forcing you to read three paragraphs before revealing just which (usually) Manchester United player is going out with which Love Island “beauty”, gets so annoying.

Back in the late 1960’s I was in my first stint with a newspaper, the Walthamstow Guardian. Its close rival for local coverage was the Express and Independent, more centred on Leytonstone. At the time, my friend Graham Phillips and I used to share coverage of the same now redundant football team, Walthamstow Avenue, travelling in the team coach to their away matches.

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In those days, aside from the Football League with its four divisions, First, Second and, sensibly, Third, North and South – how the clubs in say National League South, such as my mate Steve Gilbey’s Aveley in Essex near the Dartford Tunnel, would love not to have to travel every other week to the likes of Torquay, etc.

The amateur game had its principal competition, the Amateur Cup, and Walthamstow Avenue had been one of the best teams in the 1950’s when the occasional amateur player even got in the full England team. Avenue’s star was Jim Lewis and he was still around to talk to us now and again as we watched the regular matches in the Isthmian League, as it was then.

Graham, my best man RTS (Dick) McGinn and I all played cricket together for Eton Manor. Dick’s father was the tenant in a great pub in Tottenham Court Road in London’s West End and that’s where we had the evening reception in 1969. Not long after, Dick’s irascible old man decided to hand in the tenancy without a word to his wife or two sons.

This tale though happened a few months before that shameful episode. I played every Sunday for Pressmen, a team largely of local paper journalists, with two “bosses” one of whom was Jeff Powell, at the time my sports editor at the Guardian.

If I say he was the worst footballer I’d ever seen it was an under-statement, especially considering what a high regard he had for his ability. The two things that I can still picture was his technique for trapping a ball, by jumping with both legs and blocking the ball with his shins.

Secondly, he was to display the same aggression as he has in his articles for the Daily Mail over more than 50 years. His favourite admonishment was to shout, “Stick it on him, son!” as one of his teammates went into a tackle.

Graham had played for England schoolboys and I’d asked him to come along to play for us. He agreed and after the first game, where his skill was largely wasted as balls were played behind rather than in front of him, our leader later declared back in the office, “Don’t rate him!”

So the man who was big mates with some of the Leyton Orient players he met while having that job with the only Football League team in our area, and later claimed to be pals with Bobby Moore, captain of the 1966 World Cup winning team, you could say, started out with questionable credentials.

Graham’s father, Charlie, was manager of the Eton Manor senior team which won its League title three years in a row. The coach during that period was one Alf Ramsey. They continued to converse for the rest of his and, as he became, Sir Alf’s lives. Charlie gave strict instructions to his sons never to make public the correspondence between them.

I’ve told the tale to literally hundreds of people over half a century and then suddenly on Friday a note came from the office saying a certain Graham Phillips had made contact and wondered if they could pass on a message to me. The last time we spoke was at least 50 years previously.

He was studying at Swansea University and he and his friend Pete Suddaby, later of Blackpool  FC where he played for almost ten years racking up 300 appearances, invited Dick and me down to go to the dogs at the flapping track at Forestfach, but known as Swansea Greyhound Stadium.

I remembered going there but recall very little of the occasion. I contacted Graham, relieved to find he was still up and about, and he said he has pretty much a photographic memory of everything that happened in that time of his life.

He recalled that I was doing my brains (nothing unusual there!) but for some reason I had recognised the name of a dog running in the last race from my days going to Clapton dogs in East London. Somehow, according to Graham, Daybreak Again had been injured but I’d known it was pretty good at Clapton. We got 8/1 and cleaned up and Graham remembers me as having tipped everyone and bought dinner for all the group afterwards. Do you think I can remember any of that!

He wanted to contact me as next April, there is going to be an event in Bishopsgate, London, covering the days of Eton Manor Cricket Club where we both played and the idea is to try to get anyone who did represent the club to come along. Can’t wait.

I stopped playing regularly when I got to Fleet Street, weekends being busy for me at work, but Graham played for another ten years. As to the football, a couple of weeks after the Forestfach weekend, he injured his ACL – as he says, he invented the injury - and never played again. Maybe Jeff Powell wasn’t wrong after all.

It was salutary to learn that Dick McGinn, at six feet tall, probably too tall ideally to be a wicket-keeper but very proficient for all that, died in Perth, Western Australia in 2009.

He had contacted me a year earlier and we sent emails back and forth, usually about Test Match cricket. He emigrated after getting disenchanted with the pub/hotel business in the UK. He got a nice job over there and played Grade cricket at a high level. I must say I was jealous at the time.

Suddenly, after a year, my emails went unanswered. He had told me he was ill and Graham said it was an aggressive form of cancer that he had been fighting. Even after knowing that was what must have happened, it still came as a shock.

The blows continued. People we knew that had died, some several decades ago. One teammate age 40 had early onset dementia and spent thirty years in care before finally passing. Then there was the joy of hearing of those that are still around. That call, which probably lasted an hour, brought home just how much life is a numbers game and when your number is up, off you go. The point was, mostly these were fit, active sportsmen and none you thought would have been singled out for such a fate.



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I suppose you were wondering why I hadn’t said that I’d noticed yesterday how the days were seemingly (and actually) getting longer. Yes, we’ve passed the Winter Solstice, the shortest day and (so far) have survived to see another Christmas.

It was my dad that couldn’t wait to get me to join Eton Manor and the application went in on my 14th birthday. The grounds are now a part of the Olympic Park, while the clubhouse was demolished so that the A12 could be built to link Blackwall Tunnel with Redbridge and then on to the M11 and North Circular Road.

To have been able to experience all the facilities for all the sports you could wish to try, and the formative years where your own character developed – mine edging more into horses and dogs, betting and usually losing - was a privilege for someone in Hackney.

Even earlier, the horse racing gene developed over Christmas when, with my dad and two of his uncles and one cousin, we watched the King George every year on Uncle George’s ten-inch TV screen. Halloween (1952/4) and Galloway Braes, in between, were the names engraved on my brain. Then, between races it was back to playing Solo Whist, a fantastic game which I would love to have the chance to revisit.

Seventy years on, I can still smell the aroma of the massive turkey that was always provided coming through the passageway down to the living room in Clapham South. Dad always wanted to come to live in the equally massive upstairs flat, but the tenants refused ever to move. Still, it meant I could join Eton Manor. Thanks, Graham, for reminding me of all of it.

- TS

 

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