Though distinguished folk are now on the case, none thus far has been able to explain why Tottenham – aka Little Ireland – became the name of a community of pit terraces at Coundon, near Bishop Auckland as well as a former Southern League football team.
However improbably via the National Library of Scotland, Ronnie Chambers forwards an 1899 map – 40 years after the last one we carried – showing the area in more detail.
It will be noted that the Coundon area had rather a lot of pubs and- fighting the good fight – a similar number of Methodist chapels. So far, however, none can suggest the etymology.
*Former Shildon FC manager Ray Gowan, long familiar around the Northern League, was particularly taken by reference to Coundon lad (and former publican) Curt Warburton, perhaps the only former NL player twice to become a British mixed martial arts champion.
Curt, who also played for West Auckland and Evenwood Town, was at Shildon when Ray arrived in December 1991 – a Warburton, it might be said, with nowt taken out.
Keen to continue playing weekend football while in five-days MMA training at the Wolfslair camp in Widnes, Curt was the epitome of all that’s said about hard but fair.
“He was the nicest, toughest player I’ve ever had in my 33 years as a football manager” says Ray. “He was so tough that opponents wouldn’t go into his area a second time, having suffered a fair challenge the first.He was very talented, very underrated. I’m amazed he wasn’t more famous in the Northern League.”
Curt, also a member of Coundon Conservative Club’s successful Sunday squad, was never sent off and booked just twice in a 13-year career. Ray’s absolutely right, great guy.
Backs shift: Jon Bratton’s painting of boys at play
*There’s more: the same blog recalled that, in 1961, Coundon village bobby Arthur Stephenson – lovely chap, later an inspector in Stockton – had been ordered to summon a group of incorrigible local lads for playing hum-dum-dum outside Ranaldi’s cafe.
Their crime? Obstructing the pavement. Their punishment? Fined ten bob apiece.
Hum-dum-dum (finger or thumb) was a slightly risky schoolboy game in which one team jumped onto the other’s bent backs. Some called it montakitty – apparently a corruption of mount-a-cuddy – while in Sheffield it was known as finger, thumb and rusty bum, in Watford (Watford?) as Jack-the knacker, in Cardiff as stagger loney and in Australia, inexplicably, as high cockalorum.
Paul Dobson, like all the best folk a former Bishop Auckland Grammar School boy, tells of a recent reunion at which former classmate Neil Hodgson – Shildon lad – had met Brian Harrison for the first time in 49 years and greeted him (as you do) with “Hum-dum-dum finger or thumb”.
Brian, it’s recalled, was the biggest lad in the year and a top class rugby man who later played for London Scottish. At Bishop Grammar they played hum-dum-dum against the wall of the prefab (“later demountable classroom”)
“If Brian was in the opposing team” says Paul, “you feared his arrival on your back.”
They must have played it at Gateshead Grammar School, too, the image above – a rather genteel looking version – a painting by Jon Bratten while he was a pupil there. “This is a worldwide game and still being played in places not exposed to the health and safety curse” someone has written.
The image below is from the Newcastle City Guides website and looks a bit more (shall we say) physical- clearly a spectator sport, too. The spinal injuries unit may have been busy lads back then.
*The original post had been headed “Spursy”, a word already in some on-line dictionaries and broadly taken to mean under-achieving. Paul Dobson, for many years editor of the multi-award winning Sunderland fanzine A love supreme, wonders if there’s a word Sunderland-y. “”If not” he adds, “it’s about time there was.”
Grass Routes 