THE sporting pink was a Saturday evening institution for everyone interested in football for much of the 20th Century.
Before the days of instant updates on your mobile phone, the sporting pink was the only way to get the scores, particularly if your team was playing away.
Across the country, from about the time of the First World War and into the 1970s and 1980s, every Football League team had an associated pink in its home town.
A first edition of the paper would be printed containing the halftime scores, a second would come out on the final whistle, and often there was a “late final” to tidy everything up – it would be a big seller in the pubs and clubs on a Saturday evening.
Inspired by Norman Cornish’s paintings of street corner newspaper sellers (above), Memories 649 got onto this subject and suggested back then football matches all kicked off at 3pm on a Saturday and they finished at 4.45pm so the presses could promptly get rolling.
READ MORE: WILL NORMAN CORNISH'S WORK PASS THE TEST OF TIME?
Not so, says Newcastle supporter Kenneth Simpson. “Half time was at 3.45pm, but the second half started at 3.55pm so the match finished at 4.40pm,” he says. “Then we dashed to the Marlborough Crescent bus station to catch the OK to Croxdale and Tudhoe.”
The 1920s Marlborough Crescent bus station was cleared in the early 1980s and now the Centre for Life stands on its spot near Newcastle central station.
The Northern Echo’s sister evening paper, the Northern Despatch, produced a sporting pink to cover the travails of the Quakers, and so, in the spirit of the Despatch's sporting pink, this article is illustrated that pictures from exactly 50 years ago that were taken at Feethams and published in the sporting pink.
Over in Sunderland, from 1907, its Echo produced its Football Echo to bring the breaking news of Sunderland FC’s match not only to the city but also to the wider area – Sunderland support seems to flow upstream along the Wear to Durham and Bishop Auckland.
READ MORE: DO YOU REMEMBER THE DAYS OF THE SPORTING PINK?
But this sporting pink, as Dr Keith Green mentioned a couple of weeks ago, had a wonderful habit of changing colour, and now Bruce S Miller, in Fulwell, Sunderland, has painted a full picture of those colour changes.
“It turned white on the day Sunderland were defeated by Aston Villa in the 1913 FA Cup final,” he says. “This was apparently caused by a newsprint crisis.
“After the First World War, the Football Echo was, I believe, printed in blue with the publishers claiming that the paper would “flush pink” when Sunderland won the FA Cup. This duly happened when Raich Carter captained them to a 3-1 victory over Preston North End.
“The pink remained pink until April 26, 1958, when it “turned white with shock” as Sunderland were relegated to the Second Division despite winning their last match of season at Portsmouth – this meant Sunderland lost their record of having played all their 68 years in the top level of English football.
“The first game of the 1958-59 season was a 3-1 defeat at Lincoln City and the Football Echo went blue.
“It stayed that way, even when a 0-0 draw at Southampton on April 11, 1964, effectively confirmed promotion back to the First Division. However, a week later, a 2-1 victory against Charlton was reported on pink paper.
“Relegation in 1970 resulted in blue coming back again, and so the 1973 FA Cup semi-final victory was recorded in a blue edition under the headline: “Next stop – Wembley!”
“The paper flushed pink again on May 5, 1973, with the headline “They’ve done it” when Sunderland won the cup.”
We believe the Sunderland pink remained pink until its final edition on December 28, 2013.
The sporting pinks were printed on coloured paper we think to differentiate them from that day’s newspaper on white.
Not all pinks, though, were pink. Alan Marshall writes in about the Sheffield Star’s pink which made a virtue of the fact that it was printed on green paper. It started in 1907 when it was boringly called Saturday Sport Edition but in 1914 became the Green Un, a name it kept until its demise in 2013.
“As a Barnsley fan,” says Alan, “I loved reading the Green Un as it was the only newspaper, apart from the Barnsley Chronicle, who'd write about us. I lived in London and, handily, it would be on sale at Sheffield or Donny (Doncaster) stations where we had to change after the match.”
The Hartlepool Mail’s sports paper was also a green ‘un.
In the early days before telephones, the journalists who produced the papers must have had a mad Saturday afternoon, dashing off running reports that must have been raced by young boys back to the office.
Ian Wright, now in Nevada in the US, gets in touch to tell how he was a junior in the Echo’s photographic department and helped produce our sporting pink.
“In the very early 1960s, I was a 'runner' for the Sports Despatch,” he says. “At every Quakers home game, I would go with a senior photographer and run his plates back to the office in Priestgate, develop and print an action photograph for the evening pink.
“I’d meet him before kick-off in the Market Place where the Cockerton Club Silver Band would play and, just before three o'clock, they would march down to Feethams and end the performance with a rousing marching number in the centre circle.
“Darlington were then in the Third Division North, usually near the bottom.
“For some obscure reason, they kicked off at 3.15pm when all the other teams kicked off at 3pm.
“I had very little time to run up Feethams, down the alley beside St Cuthbert's Church, over the road and up to the darkrooms, where the process department had to make a plate to go across three columns from my image by 4pm.
“It was always like running up a waterfall – the team was so bad sometimes I had only two plates after 15 minutes of play.
“When the Quakers were playing away, the pink still required an action print to fill the three columns. It was left to the doyen of the Echo photographers, Bill Oliver, to take on the task.
“We would go to an amateur Northern League match and he’d arranged for the teams to come out a few minutes early. They’d trot out to the end where Bill was standing and all (except the opposition goalie) would pack together in the penalty box.
“Bill would enlist a spectator to throw the ball high into the box and both teams would go for it, and he would then take the ‘action’ shot.
“I was with him once and the ref was in the shot. As he walked past Bill, he said: ‘Send us a print, will yer, Bill?’."
By fabulous coincidence, as we were looking through a bound file of the Sporting Despatch to research this article, there before us (above) was a suspiciously staged picture of players in remarkably clean white kits all jumping for a high ball – was this one of Bill’s action shots?
If you have any sporting pink memories, or can tell us why Darlo kicked off at 3.15pm, we’d love to hear from you. Please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk
On December 8, 1973, Darlington drew 2-2 with Peterborough at Feethams. Perhaps they'd have won if Alan Harding had beaten the Peterborough keeper to this ball
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