“Say goodbye to the oldies, but goodies, because the good old days weren’t always good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems” Billy Joel
As the 1970s began, a group of mates, most living within a throw of a cricket ball from the Villas cricket ground, developed a love of the game and all that All Alone Road could offer as a place to grow up.
My childhood started – and continues – there.
Many, many moons previous, long before we ever stepped on the field there was Brian Cresswell Haigh aka Haighy. The old boy hardly seems to have changed over the decades and I suppose there is an art to looking that scruffy.
Haighy celebrated sixty five years at Villas in 2011 so I thought it only right to sit down with the old boy and let him recount some of his tales. As wife Dot handed me a pot of tea, the old eyes misted over and off he went back to an age we can only dream of.
“We started playing cricket around about when I was ten so that must have been about when the war was still going on in the forties.
Down at St Cuthbert’s church on Wrose Road there was a patch of spare grass…if you hit the ball it generally went under the old building which meant you were out and had to crawl under to get the ball back. We were never sure what we might find under that hut.
There were no houses at all and the cricket field stood in acres of ground with the old pavilion up in Critics’ Corner open to the elements, although the Luftwaffe never seemed that bothered enough to bomb it.
There were no toilets or running water; we locked it up every winter hoping that it would still be there when we came back the following year but it was that riddled with holes even the hedgehogs gave it a miss for winter.
We had a bucket for a pee and if you wanted anything else well it was a walk into the long grass. There was a white picket fence around it a bit like Little House on the Prairie, as isolated as it was.
We had now’t in those days just the fear of Hitler coming and stopping play for good. Times were grim! Mind you the odd bomb might have flattened the wicket!
I made my debut for the Under 18s in 1947; the Luftwaffe had gone but it I was more terrified trying to bat on the Villas wicket.
We didn’t have nets – apart from on our windows – or fancy helmets and we never practised because it was dangerous enough playing. I’ll never forget my first match for the Seconds, we only had ten men so some things have not changed.
We started with eleven but when we were warming up with our only two balls, they were both thrown at our opening bowler, Bill Tomkins, a coalman who turned up to games blacker than soot. We often told the opposition he was our West Indian overseas Pro.
He must have had some soot in his eyes and as one ball flew towards his head, the other a bit lower down and he went down pole-axed. He had to be carried off on the back of his coal cart.
A couple of years later I made my first team debut but I had no boots so the Treasurer, Sidney Wilson, bought me a brand new pair of buckskin boots. I got a bollocking from Ernest Jackson, our captain, after getting two quick wickets with the opposition labouring.
Ernest didn’t want the two out as in came Eddie Paynter, ex-England captain, who promptly smashed a hundred; my team mates were livid at me for taking wickets! Nay, how can a young lad understand that one?
Still the buckskins felt that good I took the nails out and went off clubbing in them. I think I met Dot that night and even felt that flush I bought her a coke with a slice of lemon!
The club was run and effectively owned by The Three Wise Men.
Willie Burnhill was a textile man; Albert Berry’s family owned Berry’s print works in Shipley, the Theatre Royal and a local circus which seemed poetic. Finally there was Hubert Long, a respected local banker in the city centre when there was such a thing.
They bought the field from a turnip farmer and eventually sold it to the club for £500 in the forties although I don’t think any money changed hands. Even though we were always skint we had three wealthy local benefactors to bail us out.
Each year at the AGM at the Wrose Bull we arrived to see how big the loss was that year and at the end of the meeting the three of them simply opened their wallets and things were okay again for another year at least.
One year the pavilion just blew away in a storm and we had to collect the scattered bits and nail it back together again. It looked like a patchwork quilt and if you said it was air conditioned you would not be far off.
We didn’t have a garage which was just as well as we didn’t have any equipment. We cut the outfield by hand and it was like painting the Forth Bridge; we just kept at it all year round.
Once again The Three Wise Men came to the rescue and in the fifties we finally got a new pavilion which was opened by the legendary Brian Sellers, former England and Yorkshire captain. Sellers were hard as nails and he stayed to watch all of our first game from the new hut.
One of the opposition was close to fifty so I bounced him – almost 90mph it were – and hit him flush between the eyes, laying him out. Seeing their star man flat on his back unnerved the rest and we skittled them to win the game.
After the game Sellers came up to me and prodded me on the shoulder.
“Did you mean to hit him on the head young ‘un?”
“I did Sir”
“Good lad” he smiled and walked away for some more cake.
There were some great characters back in those days.
Gilly Potter turned up each week, heat wave or not, in a raccoon coat; all he was short of was a hunting hat and a shotgun.
There was the City Gent who brought his brolly to the game each week, come rain or shine. One week Norman Naylor’s dog, Dandy, ran off with one of his expensive Italian loafers never for it to be seem again.
Around the ground things were changing as developers moved in during the Fifties. What was a collection of farm fields and stone quarries started to become new houses.
The old Swain House FC pitch that ran alongside the cricket pitch was swallowed up. We traded a strip of land at the Willow Gardens end to get a much bigger piece at the other end which is why you have the shorter boundary.
It got a bit better in the Sixties when we had a Double Numbers game which raised enough money – by now the Three Wise Men had passed on – to buy our first petrol mower, an ATCO.
Then Gerald “Geraldo” Taylor had on a great idea to mow the outfield quicker. We bought some old gangers and Geraldo fixed them to his dad’s car – borrowed allegedly to go courting each Tuesday – and drove this big grey car around the field in ever decreasing circles.
Mr Taylor Snr had a car permanently covered in grass cuttings.
By this time Granville Lawson was groundsman and I don’t know if it was because he was one-eyed or just rubbish at painting lines because those on the wicket were thicker than motorway road markings.
One day an umpire commented on these were and Granville, not noted for his diplomacy, fixed his one good eye on the umpire and said “they may be thick but they should help blind umpires like thee lad”
Granville also opened the batting with little Wilf Binns who also only had one eye; we only had two good eyes to open the batting, no wonder we never got any runs!
We tried to improve the wicket and dug it up more than once, often being surprised with what we found. One year there was a slab of stone that took ten of us to eventually lift it out and we had to break it up by hand.
Then we found an old mining tunnel that runs across the ground and made the mistake of sending Browny down with a torch, only for him to get stuck. We pulled him out and filled it in before anybody found the City Gent’s missing loafer.
By now although we were surrounded by new houses and had a new pavilion we were still skint from year to year. We didn’t really struggle for players though and there were that many that if you didn’t turn up on practice night you weren’t picked.
We had to wait for smoke from the Selection Committee meeting room to announce the teams for the weekend. As most of them smoked like chimneys it was like a crematorium in there.
There were a dozen members and the Main Committee was over twenty so it was no wonder we got now’t done.
Standards were very good and most Bradford League teams had internationals turning out plus Yorkshire players that could be watched by thousands.
The Bradford Central League was also really strong and many Bradford League players finished their days in the league still capable of playing at a really good standard.
We also had a weekend team that had several days out a year with coach trips.
At Birstwith the opposition walked off the pitch to abandon the game in response to the calling of the local church bells at the behest of the local squire who owned the pitch. The buggers had made sure they batted first though.
We also had a Half Holiday League team as by the Sixties, with Ernest as captain, we had an influx of postmen. Even the tea lady for these matches – Gladys Betts – was a postwoman.
I captained the side when the players went on strike in protest at me bowing to a Committee order to bowl our so-called spinner in those days/ the legendary Arthur “Arturo” Rooney.
Arturo’s best mate was John “Panto” Panton and together they had protested at me not bowling them. Truth was Panto had been done for chucking a few weeks previous. Chuck it? He could barely get it from one end to the other!
Arturo bowled in this baggy sweater big enough to house a family of refugees throwing down “donkey-droppers” that fell from the sky only for a batter to smash them back into the sky.
So we had the other lot about eight down for not a lot and I brought on Arturo with the Committee men watching on. Bang went the first out of the ground followed by several more balls prompting the first ever shutters to be erected over windows.
Finally I brought back my openers and we bowled them out. When I got back to the dressing room everybody was getting changed – the team had gone on strike – nobody would bat!
Eventually, our keeper, a young lad called Terry Crabtree was persuaded to open with me. Terry normally batted at seven so this was a big promotion and do you know what..we won by ten wickets!
The final disgrace though was the only time the First team have been rounded up by the police having been bowled out for the lowest ever total at Thornbury of 13.
We were so down we decided to go out on the ale so we dropped our bags off and got the trolley bus down to Bradford. Later on we took another to a place called the Blue Cat at Guiseley.
Unfortunately, our opening bowler, John Pullan, had the most possessive wife you could ever meet not that John could be bothered with other women as the one he was married to terrified the life out of him.
She ruled him with a rod of iron but remember there were no mobile phones in those days so she called the police! Somehow they tracked us down and, imagine this, told us all to get off home – which we all did without question.
By the time the Seventies came along I was almost into my forties and the new houses had started to bring young kids to the club. Everything was about to start to change faster than ever before but nobody ever found the City Gent’s loafer.”
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