In my ear and in my eye: Martin Haworth on Penny Lane
Martin Haworth, half of one of the very best teams in the Northern League’s 135-year history, has died. He was 63.
Martin was secretary of the hugely successful Northern League Club from its launch by Sir Bobby Robson at Tow Law in 1999 to its closure in 2016 when I retired as league chairman.
Denise, his wife, was chiefly responsible for initiating, developing and maintaining the league website, though their roles often overlapped – frequently into the early hours of the morning. They were as inseparable as they were indispensable, hugely regarded and insistent upon working without thought even of a few bob in expenses.
On top of all that, they attended around 100 matches a season, insisted upon paying at the gate and on buying great fistfuls of raffle tickets, further to help the host club.
The final edition of the league magazine, in 2016, carried a tribute: “Martin has been magnificent, incredibly patient, undeniably sacrificial and a gifted writer, too.”
He was urbane, quietly spoken, ever courteous – one of those rare people who never had a bad word for anyone and about whom it is impossible to have imagined a bad word.
On one unforgettable occasion, they’d taken me back to the station after a game at Morpeth, in time to catch the 10 30pm train to Darlington. It became clear that the last train was seriously delayed. Rather than leave me on a cold platform on a mid-Northumberland night, Martin and Denise insisted upon taking me back to their house where they served coffee and tracked the train on their computer.
The 10 30pm finally arrived at 5am – and after a sleepless night, Martin ran me to the station.
The couple met at Sunderland Poly (as then it was) in 1983. Both were studying computer science at a time when, as Northern Conquest oberved in 2013, most people probably still thought that a computer was someone who travelled to work on an overcrowded train.
Such the absence of technological trickery, he had to ring to ask her out from a vandalised call box. “There wasn’t a pane of glass in it and traffic was roaring past” he once recalled. “It took three or four goes before I even heard her answer.”
He was a Bury boy and Manchester City season ticket holder. She still carried a torch for Sunderland.
They married in October 1989 on the day that City lost 4-0 to the Arsenal, moving sufficiently close to the old Newcastle Blue Star ground near the airport to persuade them to try Northern League football. They loved it – and the Northern League loved them.
When the Bue Star management team of Tony Harrison and Billy Cruddas moved to Durham City, Martin and Denise followed them, Martn becoming City’s award winning programme editor from 1996-99 before being persuaded to take on the Northern League Club role.
Under Martin’s tireless guidance it attracted more than 500 members worldwide, part of the appeal the club magazine called Northern Wisdom which Martin not only compiled but, usually with Denise’s help, printed, collated, folded, stapled, shoved into envelopes and humped off to the post.
Partly its appeal was statistical, partly Martin’s ever-incisive editorials and his season-long predictions competition. Many compared Wisdom favourably to the league magazine. When the Club folded, several thousand pounds in surplus funds were shared among league members.
Martin worked for many years on IT-related (and therefore inexplicable) stuff at Newcastle Civic Centre. Denise held a similar role with Virgin Money, formerly Northern Rock. Both made the extra mile seem like a walk out the back.
When Covid encouraged such things, both opted to work from home in Morpeth and continued to do so. Other interests, always together, included cycling, railways and visiting Scotland – relatively close to home.
We lunched with Denise today, she as kind as ever but still at a time when it’s pretty hard to know what to say. The final edition of the league magazine, back in 2016, may have the last word for now: “The Northern League Club was unique, but so was Martin Haworth.”
*Martin’s funeral will be at 1 15pm on Thursday April 4 at the Northumberland Woodland Burial site, NE65 9QJ, just off the A1 about eight miles north of Morpeth. A reception will follow at the nearby Northumberland Arms, NE65 9EE. Dress smart casual, all welcome.
*David Cumberworth, a former Workington FC director, Grass Routes reader and occasional correspondent, has also died. He was 84.
Born in Workington, Dave was a miner before becoming a globe trotting engineer and worked for a while for the European Space Agency, reflecting a lifelong interest in space travel.
Though he’d long lived in Eaglescliffe, near Stockton, he joined the Reds board in 2013 and is thought to have been a generous financial backer. He was also a big supporter of the blog, particularly in the unlikely event of criticism being aimed at the FA.
One of his last appearances, however, was in a piece devoted to Maconochie’s World Famous Rations, the header “Stew of a kind” – but that’s another story.
*Yesterday’s blog noted former England central defender Gary Pallister’s forthcoming appearance at a “sportsmans’s dinner”, prompting a splendid story from much travelled former Northern League manager Ray Gowan.
When his family lived in Norton-on-Tees, Ray’s son Richard answered the phone one Sunday afternoon, turned to his dad and said there was “some clown” on the phone claiming to be Alex Ferguson.
“This IS Alex Ferguson” said the caller, and so it was.
The two men had become acquainted when Ray, then manager of Brandon United, had been involved in the sale of Paul Dalton to Manchester United. “You live in Norton, don’t you?” said the legendary Scot. Ray confirmed that he did.
“Gary Pallister lives in Norton, too, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, he does” said Ray, and confirmed he knew the address.
“Then would you mind knocking on his door and asking him whether, if I made a bid for him, he’d be interested in joining Manchester United?”
Pallister was then with Middlesbrough, managed by Bruce Rioch. Rioch, it’s reckoned, was reluctant to talk to fellow managers (and probably not least on Sunday afternoons.)
“I carried out his bidding” Ray recalls. “The rest is history.”
*Phil Lambelle points out that the upcoming “sportsmans’s dinner” isn’t at the Dovecote Arts Centre, as we’d supposed, but at the Dovecot – a bar in Middlesbrough. A clue, adds Phil, may be in their website. They offer “a selection of gin’s.”
Grass Routes 