FOREWORD – when I first attempted to write a book some five years ago, most of it came out without much structure and was held together by the editing skills of my old pal Judith.
Every now and then I like to go back and dust off some stuff that I hope you will enjoy. This is the story of how we built the first clubhouse at the cricket club way back in 1983.
When I first discovered Villas, our pavilion was little better than a crumbling wooden shack, held together by an annual application of the cheapest paint we could find and with appalling sanitary facilities.
If the male “facilities” were bad then the ladies, housed in an adjoining old pigeon shed, were Third World.
Each month someone had to empty out the frothy blue mess into a freshly dug cesspit. As none of us were navvies the shallow hole often brimmed over for days.
The clubhouse entrance was flanked by the two changing rooms with wooden shuttered windows, a look of The Little House on the Prairie, except this was The Wreck on All Alone Road.
There was a small kitchen area backing on to the male toilets – a brick wall and open air pan – which sort of suggests that all this modern day hype around health and safety may be a touch overdone.
As kids we were more at risk from a clip round the ear for nicking the sweets than Ebola.
Captain Birdseye
In those days the teas were prepared by Jean Baines, partner of Mick Johnson aka Captain Birdseye. In later years, he was a regular member of the second team and extremely valuable largely because he owned a VW Camper van, which became the team bus.
As young lads we had to meet at Birdseye’s house which also operated as a working aviary as Birdseye loved his budgies and believed in a bird being able to fly at least from living room to kitchen.
So we sat there nervously wondering if the VW would splutter to life and watching his beloved Jean preparing the club teas under constant threat of being buzzed by some errant, shit-bombing budgie. Nobody ever died of avian flu though.
Property Ladder
The old clubhouse was mounted on giant wooden sleepers and quite often the ball would go under the hut, meaning that somebody had to crawl under to retrieve it from the eerie, rubbish-laden darkness.
Our new found skills as tunnellers came in useful though when the twenty-man selection committee met on a Tuesday because you could crawl beneath and hear which old goat still wanted to keep one of his old cronies in the team and keep you out.
We stayed long enough to know whose tyres to let down before we left, had we not made the team.
The hut was like an ageing mistress in that it was always in need of a touch up and some long overdue attention. Yet as rickety as it was, it was our den and we lived in it.
As an enterprising fourteen-year old I could not face the onset of another cold winter excluded from our hut so I borrowed a key from Chairman Haighy on the premise of extra practice – in October – got one cut and we started the winter in relative warmth.
We were always trying to tart it up in some way. One year John “Bodger” Lee and I decided to enlarge the dressing rooms by doing an early Changing Rooms and moving the partitioned walls outwards to make the rooms bigger.
Now I have always admitted to being useless in the DIY department but Bodger was too and yet we both set about re-jigging the old shack. With us both up stepladders we started to feel a tad concerned, having freed the inner walls, when the roof above started to sag.
We only just avoided it caving in.
White Shag Pile
So we settled on a makeover and Bodger gave me thirty quid of the club’s limited money to go get some new carpets for the changing rooms as I had my dad’s Ford Capri which was as good as a van.
A deal was struck and I bid farewell to Mr Khan’s Bazaar and headed back to the club, delighted that I had achieved a big discount to carpet both rooms; the only problem was that nobody else shared my enthusiasm for the brilliant white shag pile.
In 1982/3 Bodger led the project to build the new clubhouse. The committee had opted for a sectional, pre-fabricated building with an estimated life of fifteen years; progressive and forward thinking it was not. If Bodger and were were involved it might not even make fifteen years.
Bodger engaged me as his labourer. On of my jobs was knocking out holes in various walls for the pipe work. Trouble was, I rarely got the right wall and spent just as much time filling in holes where there should not have been any.
A New Clubhouse
The decision to erect the new clubhouse was a momentous one for the old guard as the club had seemed to be perpetually broke. I suppose the committee could barely believe its luck when a brewery offered to loan the funds.
In truth the building was crap. To burgle us thieves simply pulled a section of the building away with the targeted cigarette or fruit machine still stuck to it. No point in crawling through a window with this shack when you could take the whole wall with you.
We were to continue to keep getting robbed over many years, but that was mainly certain members failing to grasp the concept of paying for their beer.
Demolition Man
Once the clubhouse was up and running, we turned our attention to the even dodgier relic of a score hut which was one of the more disastrous ventures we undertook fuelled – as ever – by endless enthusiasm and blind ignorance.
We had come across an old scout building that was in huge concrete sections and offered to us if we could dismantle it and transport it back to the club from Leeds. So we spent a tortured weekend risking life, limb, asbestos poisoning and worse.
The threat of asbestos was barely understood in those days but was evidenced by Dave Tattersall’s rapid hair loss subsequent to that dreadful weekend of punitive hard labour.
When we finally got the slabs back to Villas many of them just crumbled and we just about managed to bolt enough together to build what resembled a nuclear fallout shelter rather than a score hut.
Its glory, however, was short lived as Bradford Council objected on grounds of planning permission stating that it was not in keeping with the area. Pity they hadn’t employed the same logic before they constructed most of the city centre.
Hangover Valley
Our very first bar – funded by the generosity of Greenall Whitley Brewery – owed much to hard work by many dedicated volunteers rather than handouts and the club began to thrive.
There were some daft nights with one early promotion a Pernod night, at twenty-five pence a shot. Just how drunk can a man get on a fiver? It snowed heavily that night, so we had an impromptu breaststroke race across the car park.
The brewery must have loved our committee because we took every offer they threw at us; we had 20,000 boxes of matches printed with the club’s picture on them, notwithstanding that we had 200 members at best, most of whom did not smoke.
These were heady days and in a few short years the club was relatively rolling in it so the decision was made to finally replace the old hut which had remained in place as the changing rooms.
The following season we opened spacious new changing rooms with showers, inside toilets and a great view across the field. If only we had stuck with the white shag pile.
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