Taken from A Critic’s Corner – Ch 28 – How Not to Build a New Clubhouse.
Hopefully, this piece may be of interest to those who want to know a bit more about the club’s recent history…enjoy.
We ended the 1990s in some ways much further ahead than when this story really began some twenty years ago and in some much less so.
The old changing rooms were built after the Second World War, as folklore would have it single-handedly by Haighy though nobody has ever seen him lift a shovel in sixty years. These had been rebuilt towards the end of the 1980s so some progress there.
The practice facilities were also about to be revamped with our one and only successful bid to Sport England who provided around 40% of the project cost.
We were also about to enter a new era with our admission to the Airedale-Wharfedale Senior Cricket League.
On the field we were competent at best, off it we were a shambles and the bar – opened in 1983 – had brought more than it’s fair share of problems not unique to our club in any sense.
It did and still does rely on goodwill and honesty; sadly those values were abused by several members shameless enough to indulge their own greed and stupidity; for a long while we had a lot of this to contend with.
Mostly though the members revelled in their own little place despite the awful Greenall Whitley beers on offer. If we ever ran short of weedkiller for the wicket Grunhalle lager was a good substitute.
As a result of a few, after nearly twenty years with a busy bar, the club had no money and a clubhouse that refugees would have declined a stop-over in.
Those of us that had seen the start of the Eighties begin with such optimism had arguably taken our eye off the ball and allowed a hard core to bleed us dry.
We reached the nadir one winter when at a committee meeting following another recent break-in, having found little of value to steal, the local druggies had stolen the payphone from the wall.
As the members treated the payphone like the bar there was no money in that either but we needed to replace this and the treasurer approached me for the £120 replacement cost from the Junior account.
Several years earlier we had started what became known as our “offshore account” – aka the Cayman Islands account – designed to ring fence the junior funds from the general anarchy that prevailed at the time elsewhere.
We had no choice but to help, after all this was the cricket club’s money, but if this was how bad things were then how much longer could we go on? There was a recognition that things should and could be a lot better.
So, at our lowest point we decided that we were going to replace the clubhouse. Borne out of madness, wild optimism, sheer desperation or pure blind hope – take your pick – the clubhouse project was conceived.
Much has been made over the last decade or so about the power of lottery funding. Surely it was there to help clubs like ours that were not seeking simply a handout, but a fair and proportionate level of assistance?
From bitter experience, Sport England were a shambles. Administered largely by tick-box idiots, attempting to work with them was impossible. Blinded by political correctness and only interested in headline grabbing projects they were spectacularly useless.
Two detailed bids were each refused for entirely different reasons; it was a farce and a huge waste of time and effort. With estimated costs circa £150k we had been hoping for a sum equal to around half; it soon became very clear that we were on our own.
The basic problem with this type of funding is that it is delivered by bloated bodies like Sport England and for a club to receive a grant it must turn itself into some form of socially and politically correct Utopia.
If you could provide the perfect mix of bisexual, ethnically diverse, disabled and those socially excluded from society then you had a chance.
Thankfully, we did have Lady Luck on our side in many forms throughout the project. By this time we had shed ourselves of most of the light-fingered brigade; some of them simply vanished for pastures new and others dropped off the perch.
The club’s finances were now controlled by new Treasurer, Juli Pargeter, daughter-in-law of the “bar manager, Alan. Uniquely for the club she was even a real accountant able to tell us what we had or did not have; for a while the latter was more relevant.
However, the man that really made the new clubhouse a possibility was Derrick Armitage, a builder by trade who turned college lecturer after a horrific on-site accident.
Derrick not only provided the technical know how but also gave us an idea of how we could achieve what we did for around a third of the quoted cost and had the contacts we needed to get the job done.
True it did mean employing a tag wearing, hashish smoking brickie and a couple of stand-up “chippies” who kept us all entertained; simply put it would not have been possible to do this without him.
He also remained patient and restrained when the idiot minority post-completion made ridiculous suggestions that this had been a “good earner” for him. Not on our budget!
Derrick tragically passed away after a long illness in 2013 and the clubhouse remains a testimony to his skills and qualities as a man and a builder; we owe him greatly.
There are other people very deserving of a mention here even though they never sought a public thanks.
Our architect was Robert Rhodes of Janus Architects who gave his time and limitless enthusiasm completely free; he even had the patience to tolerate Browny who turned up one morning, having had no involvement with the project at all, to demand we knock down the toilet walls because they were not big enough.
Steve Feeley was our long suffering plumber pushed to the limits by the endless visitors and suggestions made as he worked his nuts off for “Kosovan” wages as he put it.
The site had so many visitors each weekend we must have rivalled the local theme parks. In they rolled leaving yet more suggestions as to what we should and should not do. Had we charged them an entrance fee maybe we could have afforded some of their suggestions.
Fortunately, other members did get stuck in and one other small bit of good fortune was twofold.
The project was always constrained by the narrow entrance drive to the club. Our piece of good fortune was the day of the delivery of the roof trusses as Billy Stockdale allowed us to march them through his garden.
Good fortune number two was that it was the school holidays so Sam and Joe Lawrence plus mates were around. And actually there was a third bit of luck as dad Rick actually managed to get Joe out of bed, something that took some considerable effort in those days.
Our groundsman Donald helped us throughout the whole project with generous private donations, working with machinery on the ground that we all knew we wanted to replace but simply could not afford to.
Chiz too brokered a deal with a local window supplier and also with a couple of brothers, Mick and Albert Dunn, who had that all important JCB bringing a great deal of expertise to the project and at pricing rates you would deem to be from the “community” tariff.
In addition, several customers of mine at the time simply provided goods free of charge or at sizeable discounts.
From the minute Mick’s JCB crashed into the old pre-fab there was one guy that I could always count on no matter how tough it got. He was last to leave that numbing first day as we pulled apart the old place and never flinched whatever the task.
One Saturday afternoon spent with our hands up the freezing waste pipe to the main toilets was perhaps the afternoon that tested us both trying to locate the join to save yet a few more quid but Our Kid was simply magnificent.
How on Earth though did we manage to raise even the optimistic fifty grand from a standing start in broadly four years especially having effectively run a registered charity for years?
We tried all the usual things: sponsored this, that and everything else. Twice Molly and I walked – supported by our pal Nigel Winckles – from Gargrave to Apperley Bridge, a 26-mile haul.
I wore a strappy blue dress and Molly a Matron’s uniform and hobnail boots; it was no wonder the swans attacked him two years running.
On the second walk Nigel was fortunate to have the Marsdens accompany him and his cross-dressing mates. We were grateful for the company as it is fair to say the majority of the members simply preferred to look the other way.
The big push behind the fund raising was the support we were able to muster from the Barclays Community Team and two fabulous girls, Jeannette and Kendra, who helped me maximise every project we had backed by the bank’s community programme. So that’s where all the money went!
Without the support we got from Barclays in that five-year period we would never have got close to replacing the clubhouse. Poetic that the club blinds are Barclays blue?
On Saturday, 10th February, 2007, we opened our doors on the day the first snows of winter landed with a cruel and heavy vengeance. Doors were still being fitted and the memorabilia (painstakingly researched and provided free of charge by Brent) was still being hung.
We had got there, with a lot of luck, many friends and in spite of all the apathy and lack of interest from those best placed and most able to help us.
It took us until November to actually formally open the place largely because the work continued and the onset of the new season took precedence.
Our guest at the opening night was non other than Harry Gration from BBC Look North. Harry was a true gent driving from switching the Christmas lights on at Meadowhall up to the Villas and managing to fit us in en route to South Africa with the great Sir Geoffrey Boycott.
He was funny, extremely courteous, put up with Haighy and Browny all night and rounded off a very good night for all those that attended.
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