Parker, the King of cards

Eric can't remember the opposition, only that two of their players were sent off by referee Jim Parker after an attack of the internecines.

It makes a paragraph in last Tuesday's column. "Anyone remember . . . ?"

The following day we're at Lancashire FA headquarters in Leyland to chat with Derek Lewin, a scorer in each of Bishop Auckland's hat trick of Amateur Cup wins from 1955-57.

After an agreeable couple of hours, we're heading for the door and for the station when Derek observes that the chap over yon was a Football League referee.

"Oh aye, what's his name?"

"Jim Parker." Serendipity squared.

Remember E J Parker, aka the Preston Strangler, aka many things much ruder?

"On aye, that match were nothing," says Jim - for he is a good Lancastrian - "there were a much better match involving Darlington the year after."

Then there was York v Scarborough, during which City manager John Bird became so agitated that he had to be reminded of the error of his ways by the North Yorkshire constabulary.

"That were another of my riots," says Jim.

Did you have many, then?" asks a sympathetic colleague.

"Oh aye, lots."

Jim Parker had more cards than Clintons, more headlines than a phrenologists' convention. In a much traduced calling, he was the hacky blackest of the black sheep.

The Observer updated his card count every Sunday, a cautionary tale if ever, others wrote of black books and of red mist.

"Oh I could be a bad bugger," he says. "Either they played it my way or they didn't play it at all."

Perhaps inevitably, therefore, he is thoroughly and immediately likeable, a man of immense charm and of great good humour. Still refereeing junior games, he'd sent off a schoolboy the previous Saturday for head butting.

"A schoolboy," he repeats. "I ask you."

In his ten years in the Football League middle, 1985-95, he was formally described as a Preston garage owner. Now 59, he works full time for Lancashire FA. "Discipline officer," he says, "what else?"

The match which Eric Henderson remembers - thanks also to readers John Briggs and Simon Weatherill - was a Leyland Daf Cup tie in December 1990, Andy Toman's hat-trick ultimately giving Quakers a 3-1 win.

"I were down the bottom end and saw something going off, when I got there the language were terrible," Jim recalls. "I sent one off straightaway, to try to separate them, and then finally sent the other one. I remember to this day him saying that he's so-and-so sort it out in the dressing room and tearing off after his mate. I believe there was a helluva battle."

Both received two match bans, the referee accepting that no blows had actually been exchanged on the pitch.

Eleven months later, Chesterfield were at Feethams in an FA Cup first round tie, nine players booked, three more - all from Chesterfield - sent prematurely packing. They included Teesside lad Lee Turnbull.

Headlined "Parker's three card trick", the Echo report noted that it brought his seasonal yellow card total to 86, his red cards to nine in four games and that both sections of the crowd had rehearsed the song familiarly reserved for out of favour referees.

Though it didn't provide the words, which seemed a bit of a pity, the report added that the match had had just one "borderline" tackle. "Mr Parker maintained his reputation as the Football League's king of the cards."

Jim Parker - short shorts, shorter shrift - has much more by which to remember it. From out of a Lancashire FA filing cabinet come merrily tumbling Chesterfield's fuming fanzine, the Daily Telegraph's off-with-his-headlines, a T-shirt produced by Mission Impossible, Darlington's own lamented fanzine.

"I wasn't booked by Jim Parker," it says in six inch capitals. They can't have sold many of those, then.

The Crooked Spireite, Chesterfield's fanzine, devoted nine paroxysmal pages to the man they simply called EJ, including a rather neat cartoon - he liked it, too - called "Dr Frankenstein builds his creature."

E J, they said, was free to roam the countryside ruining people's livelihoods by sending them off for sod all. "Every footballer and supporter in Preston has a duty to brick up his front door, let his tyres down and sow minefields across his front lawn every Saturday morning. We have to stop him somehow."

The FA rejected all three appeals - "looking for fairness from them is like looking for a condom machine in the Vatican toilets" said the Crooked Spireite - though E J himself once ended up before an FA tribunal, charged with bringing the game into disrepute.

The allegation was that he'd called Justin Robson, Bryan's kid brother, an alliterative fanny, Jim Parker's defence that he'd simply called him a fanny.

He was represented by Peter Willis, the former Co Durham polliss who in 21 years as national president of the Referees' Association handled dozens of similar cases and, like some Victorian panacea, was never known to fail.

The fanny business maintained his 100 per cent record. "Formidable feller, Peter," says Jim Parker.

After a hands-on experience with the Preston Strangler, he offers a lift back to the station - not just to Leyland, but to Preston - and a chance for further reminiscence.

Happy days? "Oh aye," says the Strangler, "the happiest days of my life."

Friday's column on Derek Lewin said that Bishop Auckland had won at Ipswich in the FA Cup third round in 1954-55. They didn't, as Keith Belton in Stockton points out.

The match ended 2-2, the old second division side equalising through Corbett Cresswell's late own goal. Bishops won the Wednesday afternoon replay 3-0 - two goals by Frank McKenna, another from Jack Major - young Belton conspicuously absent from the 9,000 Kingsway crowd.

He was a pupil at King James I Grammar School, which bordered the ground. The headmaster was the formidable Neddy Deans. "He made it clear that anyone skipping school to attend the game would be tied to a goal post and flogged to within an inch of his life," recalls Keith.

"None of us kids was in any doubt that he meant it. My dad had to go instead."

Former Northern League centre half Arnold Alton, now in Heighington, recalls a Darlington Reserves match around 1960 - North Eastern League or North Regional league - in which two Quakers were sent off after a less than pacific exchange. "I think they were sacked, that being in the days when money wasn't the be all and end all and people running clubs had some principles." Arnold thinks they were called Smith and Duffy. Anyone remember....?

Paul Dobson in Bishop Auckland has been filling in one or two on-line censuses about stadium facilities. "Being a Sunderland fan, I told them I was spoilt, as our ground's the best there is."

Also on the list from which to choose "ground with the best facilities" were Bishop Auckland and Spennymoor - who share with Bishop and were this month fined £2,500 for the stadium's well chronicled inadequacies. Paul's a bit surprised. "I think they should be told," he says.

And finally...

Last Friday's question has been overtaken by events. The three teams who'd lost most FA Cup semi-finals - seven apiece - WERE Arsenal, Everton and Newcastle United . . . .

Brian Shaw, again, today seeks the identity of the only man to play in six post-war FA Cup finals.

More final straws on Friday.

Published: 19/04/2005