POTTERING about the World Billiards Championship, an event desperately diminished, last Friday's column recalled Willie Smith, the Darlington linotype operator who twice became world champion in the 1920s.

Willie's remembered elsewhere, too. He features, frame by frame, in the vast new Dictionary of National Biography.

Son of the landlord of the Golden Cock - The DoNB, a little too familiar, calls it the Old Cock - he despised snooker, though twice lost to Joe Davis in 1930s world finals.

The DoNB shares a quote with last week's column. Asked which rules of snooker he'd change, Willie replied "All of them." Known frequently as Darlington Smith - "I was always conscious of doing it for Darlington," he once said - he was declared a professional at 15 after accepting half a guinea expenses for an exhibition match at Middlesbrough Conservative Club. "His resentment at this highhanded decision was to influence his relationship with authority throughout his career," says the potted Biography.

Amateur footballers of the time felt similarly uncomfortable over the money which inexplicably found its way into their boots.

He played for a while out of the Highland Lad in Norton, Stockton, backed (as one of these columns long since observed) by Lord Castlereagh.

We never did make clear if Lord Castlereagh was the local nob, or the name of the next pub down.

The same column, in 1976, recorded Willie's record 2,743 billiards break. "It took me three hours and seven minutes and I had to stop for my tea in the middle," he said.

The DoNB also notes his contempt for what he called nursery cannons, where professionals simply inched the ball forward, cushy along the cushion.

"Willie played the billiards of the common man," Clive Everton once observed.

When others persisted, Willie turned, sad handed, to snooker, became a radio commentator on the sport and played billiards in front of George VI.

Willie asked him how he played billiards. "Very badly," said the king.

Part of his 1937 match with Horace Lindrum became the first to be televised; his game with Davis in 1955 the first officially to produce a 147 break.

Inevitably it was Davis's.

"Everyone was second to Joe," said Willie.

He'd moved to Leeds and died there, aged 96, on June 2 1982.

The former printer's devil had retired 16 years earlier, never suspecting that he'd become a National treasure.

That 1976 column also claimed that Willie Smith was "the only world champion Darlington ever produced at owt." The world has become much smaller, and sport much broader, since then. Has the dear old town produced any others?

BACK from a Scottish sojourn, Tim Grimshaw in North Shields sends a copy of the Dunfermline v Motherwell programme from earlier this month - and another tasty morsel, for afters.

The programme recalls the game of March 2 1935 in which the Pars included William "Tiddler" Murray, said to have been "a skilful outside left from the Durham village of South Church." Winger and a prayer, Tim wonders what's known of him?

South Church is a village near Bishop Auckland, its only acknowledged sporting connection that the pub - unhappily closed when last we passed - was named Red Alligator after Denys Smith's 1968 Grand National winner, trained up the road.

Bill Murray was born there in 1898, began his football career with Eldon Lane and played for Bishop Auckland after World War I, winning an amateur international cap against Belgium.

The Northern League's millennium history - which calls him Tiddly, though in a sober sort of way - notes his two goals in Bishops' 8-0 thrashing of Scarborough in October 1919, when the crowd was 2,500 and the gate £94 10s 4d.

Bishops won the league, Scarborough finished bottom, losing 16-1 at South Bank three weeks later - a game too onesided to be interesting, said the Echo, and which remains the League's second highest score.

South Bank had put 21 past North Skelton Rovers on an anxious April evening in 1895.

Billy Murray signed for Derby County the following summer, scored once in 15 Middlesbrough appearances in 1921-22 and after 11 seasons at Hearts had a final fling (if not quite a Highland fling) at Dunfermline.

More food for thought, Tim also sends a flier for his halftime bridie, reproduced herewith.

"Fortunately it contained meat and not much recycled paper," he says. As Tiddler Murray might have said - and W A Stephenson certainly did - little fish are sweet.

MARCH 2 1935 was also the day that Bobby Gurney, another Bishop Auckland product, scored his 150th goal for Sunderland in the 3-0 first division win over Blackburn Rovers.

Though noting that the club had never had a more wholehearted player, The Northern Echo also observed that the milestone passed completely unnoticed.

The former Silksworth pitman had scored 131 goals in a season for Hetton Juniors and had a single, successful season with the Bishops - where he was spotted by Charlie Buchan.

Twenty goals in his first four reserve games probably convinced the directors that Buchan knew a promising player when he saw one.

The pipe-smoking Gurney, said in All the Lads to have been "a magnificent ambassador for the club both on and off the pitch", remains Sunderland's top scorer, 228 goals in 388 games, despite twice breaking his leg.

He played for England against Scotland in 1935, for which he earned £6, was Sunderland's top scorer for seven successive seasons and hit the club's first ever Wembley goal in the 1937 FA Cup final triumph. They got a tenner for that, but had to buy dinner for themselves and their wives at a Lyon's Corner House.

He became manager of Peterborough United and twice of Horden CW, of Darlington for five and a half years and of Hartlepools for nine months.

Between times he worked - because footballers still had to - as a sweetie salesman, a brewery rep and a part-time driver for an optician.

A lovely man, he died, aged 86, in 1994.

WHATEVER happened to big Malcolm Allison, a question prompted by Middlesbrough's match at Sporting Lisbon last night?

The once colourful Allison, who'll be 78 in September, is (unsurprisingly) the only man to manage both sides and - says Boro fanzine Fly Me To The Moon - the only link between the clubs.

Boro boss from 1982-84, he remained in Yarm until four or five years ago but was last heard of in the Manchester area.

"He just seems to have vanished off the scene, I don't think he's too well," says a former acquaintance.

FMTTM reckons his reign a false dawn, a phenomenon with which Middlesbrough followers have become all too familiar.

The final straw, it says, was Allison's comment that it was "better for the club to die than linger slowly on its death bed." With justification, adds the fanzine, Mike McCullagh sacked him shortly afterwards.

FA Vase semi-finals tomorrow, and Jarrow Roofing happily in the dark about Didcot, their Oxfordshire opponents.

"We've never sent scouts anywhere," says team manager Richie McLoughlin. "Teams field reserve players, or deliberately use a system that's unfamiliar." On Tuesday night it was just as well they stopped at home.

Didcot's game with North Leigh was abandoned after 30 minutes when the floodlights failed.

Tomorrow's big match is expected to finish in daylight.

AHEAD of the Association of Cricket Umpires and Scorers' annual meeting at Chester-leStreet tomorrow - blood on the carpet expected - the Durham Coast League is desperately seeking more men in white coats.

"Since the formation of the North East Premier League there has been a distinct shortage of umpires in all other leagues," says Coast League chairman Roy Simpson.

The league is even willing to buy newcomers a coat, a copy of Tom Smith's - the umpires' bible - and to pay their training course fees.

Umpire building? "If it attracts new blood, we'll do it gladly," says Roy. He's on 0191586-2660.

FORMER Newcastle United trainee Tony Dinning is on the market again: bidding began at 99p, and has been brisk.

This is e-bay, pictured right, the electronic auction house, of course.

Still a week to go, by yesterday there'd been 50 offers and a top bid of £3,200. Dinning, Wallsend lad, has been more formally sold for £1.4m in a Football League career which chiefly embraced Stockport County, Wigan and Wolves. Now he's at Bristol City, where he appears to have his critics.

"If you'd like to make a bid outside e-bay," says the vendor,"a can of Coke and a bag of chips will suffice."

Delivery is said to be free - "the further away from Bristol the better unless, of course, Bristol Rovers want him." Happily, not everyone agrees.

A fan of Stockport, where Dinning made over 200 appearances after leaving St James' Park in 1989, reckons he was great.

The sale fee is 15p. "You'd have to wait for a free listing," he adds,"before you could get all our lot on there now."

And finally...

THE team which Gretna replaced in the Scottish third division (Backtrack, May 15) was Airdrieonians.

Since we're in Scotland, Paul Chinery in Darlington today invites readers to name the six Scottish League clubs which play south of Berwick-uponTweed.

Border line case, the column returns on Tuesday.

Published: 18/03/2005