Kasher delivery: Joe of that ilk
It’ll be 40 years come Saturday since Shildon Wagon Works – Shildon Shops thereabouts – formally closed, throwing 2,500 men onto the dole and permanently queering the old town’s pitch.
A reunion was originally planned for this lunchtime at the Railway Institute. I turn up, discover that they’ve put it back to next Sunday and that quite a few others have similarly been caught out.
The bar lads are recalling those dark days, nonetheless. “The Shops should never have shut” says one.
“Politics” says another. “Maggie Thatcher” adds a third.
Another recalls there’s a statue of the former Prime Minister – the Iron Lady cast in bronze – in Grantham, her home town, pretty much outside the local Wetherspoons.
“It’s probably why we never got a Wetherspoons in Shildon” adds one of the lads and round here that’s what we call lateral thinking.
*Among those who put in a shift at the Shops, as a recent blog noted, was former One O’clock Show singer George Romaines.
Among those who toiled alongside him, as George’s biography noted, were Dickie Downs – the only Shildon footballer to win full England honours – and Jack Kasher, who was in Bishop Auckland’s losing Amateur Cup final side of 1915, joined the 5th DLI, survived the trenches and helped Bishops lift the cup in 1921.
He was born in that part of Coundon, a former pit village near Bishop, known – and identified on old maps – as Tottenham. None has ever been able to explain how it came by that North London name – a chance, perhaps, for a blog reader really to win his spurs.
*Then there was Joe Kasher. Though the surname’s unusual – once said to derive from a French cheese – he and Jack were apparently not closely related.
Born in Willington in 1896, Joe was down the pit at 14, played Northern League football for Willington and Crook Town, heard that a Middlesbrough scout wanted to talk to him and hid because his ambition was to represent Sunderland.
He got his wish, making 90 first team appearances in a side which usually included the great Charlie Buchan. “Charlie had more brains in his little finger than the rest of us put together” Joe once told me.
He joined Stoke City for £1,500, played also for Carlisle United and for Accrington Stanley, became landlord of the Peel Park Hotel – next to Stanley’s ground – took the Three Tuns in Coundon and retired to live with a niece in Acklam, Middlesbrough, where he still enjoyed a daily drink in the Grenadier.
“Only from 12 to 2, mind” he insisted.
Thought to have been the Football League’s oldest surviving player, proof of all that’s said about a little of what you fancy, he was a few days short of his 98th birthday when he died in January 1992.
*Yesterday’s blog talked affectionately of Tommy Banks, himself England’s oldest international when he died earlier this month. Little more has been learned, the search inadvertently directed towards Tony Banks, MP for West Ham and sports minister in the Labour government of the late 1990s.
Scotland, he rather coincidentally once told the House, were the West Ham United of international football – “they never quite live up to their potential.”
In September 1997 I’d written inviting him to be guest speaker at the following May’s Northern League annual dinner, a letter at once acknowledged by his office. “You should hear very soon” they said.
Six months passed. Chivvied from within, his office finally wrote again. The minister, they said, would be “delighted” to attend. A couple of weeks later they changed their mind, citing a constituency surgery.
We paid £750 for Johnny Giles instead. He was memorably, unforgettably, awful.
*Returned from a week in Devon, yesterday’s blog enthused greatly about a classic pub called the Grampus, on the coast near Ilfracombe. A grampus, we added, was both a killer whale and the name of a Japanese football team.
Incredulously, several readers wonder how we’d overlooked that a former Grampus manager was a certain Arsene Wenger, prior going on to yet greater things with the Arsenal.
“Fancy you of all people not knowing that” marvels Tow Law Town secretary Steve Moralee in a 5pm phone call, though there’s another reason for his brio.
At tea time on this most wonderfully sunny Sunday, the temperature in Tow Law is 25 degrees.
Grass Routes 