Recalling the thrice-played final

Almost 200,000 people watched those three FA Amateur Cup finals, five and a half hours football played over 12 days between Northern League rivals just five miles apart.

Kenneth Wolstenholme, broadcasting to an audience bigger yet, thought the first match the finest two hours of British sport in 1954. He hadn't seen the second, says Bobby Davison. He hadn't seen the third.

"Oh they were hellish hard games," says Bobby. "Hellish."

Lovely feller, he had played for the Bishops in losing Wembley finals, Now, though he still lived in Bishop Auckland in the house which amateurism paradoxically paid for, he was captain of Crook Town.

"I was called a few things down the pit, even the manager called me, but the worst was a woman who lived about 20 yards away," he recalls. "What do you do. I had my reasons for going."

Bobby is 81 now, long left the North-East for Alfreton, in Derbyshire. If age has wearied him - "I hope you never grow old", he says, poignantly - it has diminished him, too.

For almost 15 years he walked tall though Northern League football, a commanding 6ft 2in centre half who rejected several professional offers, including Blackpool's in 1946.

"I asked them how much Stanley Matthews was on, they said twelve quid. I said I'd have that, too."

Now he is four inches shorter, the white stick necessary both because of a hereditary optical problem - "I've had 12 operations, my son's had six" - and because of gout in both feet.

"How do you get gout?" he wonders sporadically, as if seeking to discover it and not forever to be rid.

He is a changed man, however, when invited to remember his cricket and football, his solitary England amateur cap, his hard shifts and happy days down the collieries of the Durham coalfield.

When recalling the 1954 FA Amateur Cup final he is entirely, enthusiastically and intoxicatingly born again, reanimated over nothing headier than a pint and a half of shandy in the Derby Tup in Chesterfield.

"It's the most I've had to drink for five years," he says. "You don't bother when you're on your own."

Many more still talk of those April days, of ghost towns and high spirits, of fifty bob on the train to London, seven and a tanner on the north terrace at Wembley, Johnny Ray at the Palladium, Ted Ray at the Strand, Abide With Me all around the stadium.

Bishops were favourites, unbeaten all season in the amateur game, top of the league with a possible 35 points out of 36, 189 goals. Twice already they'd beaten their neighbours.

Just six months earlier, Crook's own programme had described the team as "feeble and of little significance", presaging an 11 game unbeaten run. In the second round replay they'd beaten Romford 6-0, in the third put five past Walton and Hersham, in the quarter-final scored ten against Hitchin before a Crook crowd estimated at 20,000.

"If they put me in me coffin tomorrow, I'd still say that at the time we had the best amateur team in the world," insists Bobby.

Crook had men like Fred Jarrie, a goalkeeper with hands like a royal flush; Eddie Appleby, a winger so fast he ran in the Powderhall sprints; musically minded John Taylor, his baritone as beautiful as his ball control and Jimmy McMillan, uniquely to win four Amateur Cup winner's medals.

Most of all, says Bobby, there was Ken Harrison, a free scoring centre forward signed from Annfield Plain effectively by the skipper himself. "When we got Ken I told the committee we'd win the Cup," says Bobby.

They did.

In the semi-final at Roker Park they'd walked over Walthamstow Avenue after a draw at White Hart Lane and were then coached by the great Joe Harvey at St James' Park. "He worked us so hard I had to come downstairs on me backside," says Bobby.

"Everyone was two yards faster. Not big headed or anything, I could do 100 yards in 11 seconds to start with."

At Wembley they drew 2-2 after extra time, though Bishops' left half Jimmy Nimmins had broken his ankle after just four minutes.

No substitutes then. "Never in all the history of Wembley as a cup final centre has a greater display of pluck been seen than that displayed by Bishop Auckland," wrote Pat Reekie in the People.

The replay also ended 2-2 despite Harrison's goals in the first four minutes. At Ayresome Park his lone strike proved decisive, though Bishops' Ray Oliver had an effort contentiously disallowed for a foul on Davison.

Then as now, Bobby insists it was the right decision. "I could jump as high as that table but Ray was all over me, I thought he'd broken my shoulder blade. When I fell I gashed me knee so badly, I thought I'd have to come off."

He indicates a newspaper photograph of him being carried round the Boro by exultant team mates. "See me knee there, that's the wound."

Hadaway man, Bobby, it's clarts.

"Clarts? The ground was as hard as hell," he says, rolling up his trouser leg to reveal the scar, like a Freemason coming out of the closet. There were other injuries, too - none, he insists, caused by having too much money in his boot.

Homeward from Middlesbrough in an open topped bus, they were welcomed in Bondgate, Bishop Auckland by buckets of water - "at least I hope it was watter" - and at Crook by the Church Lads Brigade band.

Fifteen thousand thronged the ground to hail the heroes, speeches inaudible, players engulfed. "I told them I'd promised them the cup," says Bobby and he promised them it again the following year. The following year, however, Big Bob was once again on his travels.....

He was born in Nettlesworth, between Durham and Chester-le-Street, said by his father to be able to kick a pail across the room when he was two. A bit older, he practised by trying to kick a tennis ball through the slats of the lavvy door.

At 13 he won a Herbert Sutcliffe bat for scoring 156 in two hours for Kimblesworth school, took six for precious few as a 16-year-old for Kimblesworth against Crook and became the first man to hit a century at North Bitchburn.

His cricket clubs, usually as professional, included Shildon, Peases West, Mainsforth, even Stanhope. In the Northern League he played football for Shildon, Bishop Auckland, Crook, Willington and Stanley United - always, officially, as an amateur. In three seasons at Bishop Auckland, he says, he was paid £2 a week, although he never saw the colour of their money because it went directly to pay the mortgage on 77 High Seymour Street. After three years it was paid. Either the story, or the mortgage, may have been subject to inflation.

"Some of the other players got ten times what I got but I never asked, it didn't worry me," he says.

Playing Durham and District League football for Stanhope, at the end of his career, he earned £4 a week - petrol money, he says. Bishop to Stanhope is 15 miles, a gallon of petrol was probably about four shillings.

He's still a bit anxious about it, lest the Revenue men turn spiteful. "If there's any letters from the taxman I'll bin them," promises Bill Wheatcroft, his postman and unofficial chauffeur.

His one cap came later in 1954, during a second spell at Shildon and while working at Middridge drift mine, nearby. "I'd spent all afternoon shifting stones, finished at nine o'clock, cycled home, got changed, got the last train to Darlington and the midnight to Kings Cross.

"Joan Regan and that tall feller, Max Bygraves, got on at York. Nice people.

"At the hotel I had two hours sleep and then I had to go training. I could do it because I was so fit. We played Northern Ireland, beat them 5-0. I played a blinder and was never asked again. It was probably because I was a miner, didn't talk properly."

He still wore the three lions on his blazer, though, and with proper, patriotic pride.

His cap and medals are with a niece in Chester-le-Street, flat cap and accent - when he grows excitable a bit like Bobby Thompson complaining of people greeding his Woodbines - still redolent of his roots.

There's not a week goes by, he says, without he dreams of those days, and of that final. "Fifty years," he muses, "it hardly feels like it was last week.

Published: ??/??/2004