Jackie Blackburn

Continuing our new series of looking at Rovers’ fullbacks, we turn our attention this week to the 1940s which was, just as the previous decade had been, a time of real struggle for the club. The country was in the grip of a World War and to ease the problems of player availability due to military call ups the RFL introduced a "guest" system whereby a professionally registered player could turn out for another club at short notice with his own club’s permission. Our great centre Walt Tennant for instance once played a game for St. Helens. Rovers occasionally used Castleford’s full-back Norman Guest as a guest. I suppose the modern equivalent of that would be Rovers signing a player called Jamie Dual-Registration, but that seems unlikely.

1939 Jackie Blackburn

Just before the war, a promising youngster by the name of Jack Blackburn had been tried out, and his eye-catching skills marked him out as a future star. However, like so many others, his progress was blocked by an army call up. Therefore, Featherstone’s first choice full-back up to 1943 was Walt Parkin, who played a total of 140 games for the club between 1938 and 1946 and kicked 41 goals. This was a very useful return for a solid footballer like Parkin, playing in a losing team that didn’t score a lot of points. Former favourite from the 1930s Billy Stott came back from Oldham and filled in for a few games at full back as a guest player. Next to try his luck after Parkin was Larry Hossack who played a total of 55 games, although some of those games were as a three-quarter.

After Hossack, Cyril Pawson made his mark, playing 81 games in which he kicked 56 goals. As the war came to an end, another promising local lad Irving Barraclough came through. He was the latest in a long line of Barracloughs who had made their way into the Rovers first team. He played 57 games and kicked 80 goals. As an example of the struggle Rovers had at this time, Barraclough actually finished as the club’s leading goal kicker in 1944/45 with a grand total of 13 goals! Once the war was over, Jack Blackburn came back into the reckoning. He had made a slow recovery from an injury sustained playing union for the RAF, but enjoyed a run at full-back in 1947/8. Jack made a total of 139 games for the club stretched over 14 years before finally retiring around the time of Rovers’ first ever Wembley. Towards the end of the decade Tommy Townsend took over at full-back. He proved to be a more than useful goal-kicker landing 76 in the 45 games he played, and was the club’s leading points scorer two years running in 1949 and 1950.

Townsend’s successor proved to be the daddy of them all in the goal-kicking department. After this long series of locally produced full-backs ended, the club went to Hull and signed a legend in January 1950.

George Johnson Jr.

The 1930s were a period of real struggle for the Rovers. The retirement of stalwart Sid Denton in 1932 left a hole in the fabric of the team. Throughout the following decade no player managed to make a strong and lasting impact at full-back in the way that Denton had, as the club constantly battled against a difficult financial situation.

1932 George Johnson
    

The fact that no-one came to call the number one shirt his own for more than a couple of seasons was not a reflection of the junior talent the club produced. It was simply that the club’s policy of ‘sell to survive’  meant that any useful player who established himself had a market price, and sooner or later, the club was forced to cash in. A prime example of this was today’s featured full-back. Although he was the son of Rovers’ founding father and club president, George Johnson junior had to battle his way into the team the same as any other player. He was a useful goal kicker and solid defender who had a good ability to read a game. With the retirement of Denton he was first choice full-back for a couple of years before switching to stand-off to accommodate Ben Lockwood. Johnson was sold to Hunslet in 1935 after playing 108 games.   

In Lockwood, Rovers had found an able replacement and he accomplished the then rare feat of playing in every single game in a season (1934/5), the first time a full-back had done that. His 55 goals that year may seem modest by today’s standards, but was in fact a club record at the time, beating any season’s best by the previous record holder Jim Denton. When Lockwood was sold, Tommy Dennis took over and made 86 appearances for the club. Then Jack Pollitt had some success, playing 75 games over two seasons before the second world war broke out. All clubs were obviously disrupted at that time, as players were called up for military service, and the strict registration rules were relaxed to allow clubs to put out a team more easily. After many years of unrelenting lack of success, the start of the war brought Featherstone their first ever piece of silverware when the won the 1940 Yorkshire Cup final against Wakefield at Odsal. Full-back that day in the absence of Pollitt and emerging youngster Walt Parkin was Jack Haley. He only played nine games for the club in his whole career, but was in the right place at the right time to pick up a winner’s medal. Or he would have done if it hadn’t been for the war. The Yorkshire County committee decided not to award medals, and the players received a canteen of cutlery instead. Club chairman Abraham Bullock was reported to have dipped into his pocket at a later date to make sure the players finally got a medal as a keepsake of the event.

Sid Denton

1921 Sid Denton

When Rovers played their first ever senior match in August 1921 at Bradford the fullback was Charlie Smith. There’s no record of how well he played, but within a couple of weeks the club were already trying out other players in that role. Bowen, Green, Burridge, and Gill all received chances in what turned out to be a problem position for the league’s new boys. Eventually the experienced Billy Seymour, who had started the season as first choice centre, moved to full-back and covered the slot ably. Given the wide variety of players tried, it seems odd that a young lad who played all that debut season on the wing without ever being given a go emerged the following year as first choice full-back. Not only did Sid Denton nail the number one shirt as his own, he kept it too, for a full decade.

Sid and his brother Jim Denton were mainstays of the Rovers’ back-line throughout the twenties and early thirties. Sid had made his Featherstone debut when the club was still playing in the junior leagues in 1919. He was an integral part of that all-conquering side that was so successful that the Northern Union had little option but to promote them to the senior league in 1921. Sid went on to make a massive total of 349 first-team games, but even that figure was dwarfed by his brother’s consistency, Jim played a record 440 games for Featherstone.

The role of full-back was in some ways very different to nowadays, but in other ways certain things haven’t changed. Linking up into the line on attack was not really a feature of full-back play in the twenties, hence Sid’s total of just 28 tries in those 349 matches. He was, of course, very capable on defence, which was often a lonely job standing as the last line between the opposition and the try line. He was adept at fielding all kinds of kicks,  and his safe handling was a must in the days of unlimited tackles. Full-backs in those days would often be involved in kicking duels, vying for field position by immediately kicking the ball back over the head of the opposition full-back after catching it. Sid Denton held his own against the best of the day.

His finest hour was in 1928 when Featherstone qualified for the Top 4 Championship playoffs after finishing third in the league. Holding a slender lead against Leeds in the semi-final at Headingley, Denton intercepted a pass in his own 25, raced to half-way, chipped over his opposite number, hacked the ball ahead and dived on it for a famous score which helped Rovers to a stunning 15-12 success and their first ever Championship final. Sid Denton also represented Rovers at full-back in their first ever Yorkshire Cup final that same year. He eventually retired in 1932.

Match Programme: Featherstone Rovers v Barrow 1967

Pride of place in any fan’s collection purely for sentimental reasons would have to go to the Wembley programmes from our Challenge Cup final successes, reminders of some of our happiest days. In reality, for a collector these programmes are always easy to come by because so many were printed, and therefore cheap to buy. Here we look at the 1967 final when we played today’s opponents Barrow.

The cover design is identical to other finals from 1964 to 1968 and for a shilling (5p) you get a twenty page souvenir produced by the Rugby Football League, although six pages are given to advertising, so in the modern sense, the reading material is a bit thin. The front page of the Cup final issue from that era always had a picture of the Queen on the inside cover. Just for good measure in 1967 we’ve got a portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh too. Of course, her Majesty actually turned out for this final, one of only two finals she’s ever been to. Once she found out Rovers had beaten Leeds in the semi, I’m sure she couldn’t resist the opportunity to meet Mal Dixon and the rest of the lads.

Inside are the Rovers pen pictures, and another peculiarity of the age was the way that players were given their formal full names in their profiles. Hence, Rovers team included Kenneth Greatorex, Michael Smith, Leslie Tonks and Arnold Morgan. However, Jim Thompson and Tom Smales didn’t get the same treatment.
The Featherstone Rovers profile includes the usual praise of our club being a team of local lads full of pride and passion who are always prepared to give youth their chance. One point that irks is the constant references to Rovers as the ‘Colliers’. Now there can be no doubting the long-standing and strong connection between the club and the coal-mining industry, but I’ve never heard any fan of ours ever actually refer to the club as the ‘Colliers’; I always saw it as a nickname imposed from outside.

There’s no ‘shipbuilder’ references in the Barrow article, but their star players are on their Sunday best too; Edward Tees, William Burgess and Gerald Smith.

Towards the back pages a small ad pointed out that the Cup final was Southerners’ only annual opportunity to watch RL, but that in 1967 they could get a second helping as Great Britain were to take on Australia at the White City Stadium in November. You could get tickets for 10 shillings (50p). In the event the international drew a respectable crowd of 17,445, but it was to be some time before London became anything other than solely the Cup final venue for RL fans.

Peter Fox: The Players’ coach by Graham Williams and Peter Lush

This book was published in 2008, and it is perhaps surprising that it took so long for the Peter Fox story to find its way into print. Peter was of course one of our finest ever coaches and he had a huge impact on the club in two separate spells. When he was in charge from 1971 to 1974 he took Rovers to Wembley twice and to consistently high league positions. He came back in 1987 and stayed four more years, winning promotion and establishing Rovers once again among the elite of the game. His total of 304 games in charge remains a record. This very readable book covers those two spells and the rest of his colourful career as well.

The book is set out in chronological fashion and so part one covers Peter’s childhood in Sharlston and his playing days as a loose-forward at Featherstone, then Batley, among other clubs. The authors managed to dig out a number of rare old photos of Peter in his playing days.

Part two covers Fox’s coaching career and it was in this sphere that he triumphed. He took his first coaching steps with the Black Horse amateur team in the Wakefield District Sunday League, but his first professional appointment was when he beat Tommy Smales and Harry Poole to the Rovers coaching job in January 1971 and the rest, as they say, was history. After such success, it was a shock when he was allowed to leave in the summer of 1974. All aspects of the club including recruitment and team selection at that stage was done by committee. Peter wanted more of a say, and a power struggle saw him lose out and he quit. Looking back, although Rovers went on to win a Championship in 1977 and reached a couple more Cup semi-finals in 1976 and 1978, I firmly believe it was a huge mistake to let Fox leave, a move which was also against the wishes of Chairman John Jepson. Who knows how far the club could have gone had Peter stayed.

As it was, he built a championship winning side at Bradford, made with Featherstone players like Jimmy Thompson and Keith Bridges. He ran Australia close in an Ashes series, but failed to get the 1979 tour job. He also had a high profile spell at Leeds before coming back to Rovers in 1987. The one black mark on his contribution to Featherstone was the manner of his departure to Bradford in 1991, but there can be no doubt that he was a major influence on our club and on the whole sport with his forward thinking tactics and his legendary man management skills. Thankfully this book does justice to his achievements.

Match Programme: Featherstone Rovers v Widnes 1986

Today’s featured programme from the 1985/86 season is one of my favourite covers, the combination of the right colours (French navy blue and white) and eye-catching lettering make it a classy-looking design. It also has an artist’s impression of what would become the Rovers’ main stand, still a few months away from completion.

It’s obvious that the producers have put a lot of thought and attention into this self-titled “official match brochure” priced at 40p and containing 32 pages. It is part of the golden age of Featherstone programme printing, having improved in quality and content over a number of years during the early 1980s. Indeed, in the annual competition to judge the best club production in the league, organised by “Programme World”, the Rovers issue of 1985/86 narrowly pipped Wigan for the top prize. This reflected great credit on editor Terry Mullaney and his production team, and was reward for a number of years hard work.

Inside, there is plenty to keep the reader occupied. Coach George Pieniazek appealed to the fans to keep the faith during our difficult run-in towards avoiding relegation. Apologies were offered for the delay of the construction of the new main stand, but we were promised it would be worth the wait. As it was our last home match of the season, the “John Jepson Trophy” for player of the year was set to be awarded on the pitch before the match (deservedly won that year by Paul Lyman). There  was a feature on Rovers latest signing, youngster Neil Kelly (future Widnes coach). Ray Handscombe was pleased with the progress of his Colts team, despite having lost their recent Cup Semi-final to Wigan. Reserve team coach Dave Busfield outlined a number of his players who were knocking on the door for first team selection, including Richard Marsh, Brian Kellett and Tim Slatter.

A quick look at the Widnes team pen pictures reminded me just how many brothers Widnes had in their team at that time, including the Hulmes, the O’Neills, the Ruanes and of course the Mylers.
Resident columnist Ian Clayton has an oddly prescient piece, lambasting recent newspaper reports of the creation of a Super League in rugby league (this was April 1986 remember). His mock-horror predictions of possible future changes to the game don’t look funny in retrospect, as some of those far-fetched plans actually came to fruition almost a decade later.

The game itself was a very good one with Rovers, having struggled for most of the season to string some good form together, putting up a brave show against a powerful Widnes side. Rovers gave a debut to Kelly off the bench, and Widnes included at centre former Featherstone favourite John Gilbert, replacing youngster Andy Currier (Rovers future record signing).

Match Programme: Featherstone Rovers v Wakefield 1976

When a player completes ten years service with the same club he is granted a benefit season which is marked in various ways. Fund-raising events are held, and often a brochure is produced. As the type of club that has inspired a lot of loyalty down the years, Rovers have seen plenty of benefit years. In recent seasons Danny Evans and Stuart Dickens have put out nice souvenir publications. Previously, the club committee often chose a particular home match in a season as the benefit game for a player, and also dedicated the match programme to the purpose. In the 80s both Mick Gibbins and John Marsden had their benefit brochure printed as a home league programme, though Steve Quinn and Peter Smith both decided to produce a separate brochure in their testimonial seasons. One of the earliest examples of the benefit-brochure-as-a-match-programme was the home fixture versus Huddersfield in May 1963 which doubled up as Jackie Fennell’s testimonial souvenir.

Today’s featured programme is a neat little publication from Good Friday in April 1976 for the Wakefield match, celebrating ten years service to the Rovers’ first team of Vince Farrar. It cost 10p and the cover is one of those classic Rovers photos, Vince at full stretch diving through the Bradford defence for a try at Wembley. Great photo, great try. Inside, the format is very similar to a typical home programme of that season, so the reading content was thin. After the team lists and the adverts, there are just four pages to do justice to Vince’s career. Tributes came from Joe Humphreys of the Daily Mirror and Jack Bentley of the Daily Express. Humpreys  highlighted what a talented clubman Vince was, and a real coach-pleaser. Bentley compared Vince to Brian McTigue and pointed out that he should have been on the 1974 tour instead of playing club rugby for Cronulla. Both reporters remarked on how he had been a little unlucky to have missed out on full International honours. He had been selected as sub. against the 1971 New Zealand tourists, but didn’t get on, and wasn’t selected again. This was something he rectified later in his career, when he finally played for Great Britain v Australia in 1978 after having left Rovers for Hull FC.

Although he was being rewarded for ten years service, Vince was still only 29 and had a few good seasons left in him yet. Irvin Saxton’s page gave a rundown of Vince’s career, which at that stage spanned 253 games. I was surprised to find that Vince had played 86 games at prop, 85 at hooker, 56 at loose forward, 8 at second row and 18 off the bench. He had also gained five county caps for Yorkshire.

A New History of Featherstone Rugby by Ian Clayton & Ian Daley

Printed in 1994, some ten years after the original “100 Years of Featherstone Rugby” appeared, this revised volume featured much better production values than the first. Although a lot of the text remained the same, most of the photographs were new, and the intervening ten years of rugby are also dealt with, albeit rather briefly. The statistical section at the back of the book is updated and reorganised, with some, though far from all, of the errors of the 1984 book rectified.

    The front cover is a team photo of Rovers 1910 Junior Yorkshire Cup winning team from the days before Rovers were admitted to join the RFL. It is this period of the club’s history which is the major focus of the book. Clayton begins his narrative with the formation of the Rugby Football Union in 1871, and this new code of football arrived in the nascent mining village of Featherstone in 1884 when the Featherstone & Purston United Cricket Club decided to have a go at rugby. The first proper rugby club was formed in 1889 and had its base at the New Inn, and they called themselves Featherstone Trinity. Soon another side emerged called Featherstone Red Star. Trinity became Featherstone RUFC and then in 1898 the club members took a vote about switching over the Northern Union. This vote was carried by 44 to 20 and that summer Rugby League as it was later to become was born in Featherstone. Their first ever game under Northern Union rules ended with a 10-8 win over Wakefield.

Clayton’s book goes on to plot how that early club Featherstone NUFC packed up in 1902 allowing Featherstone Rovers to be formed by George Johnson, based at the Railway Hotel. Rovers weren’t the last side to be set up in the village, as they had to see off competition from Purston White Horse (based at The Junction Hotel) and another team called Featherstone (set up by the landlord of the Featherstone Hotel) before being firmly established as the town’s rugby league team.

    Having covered the early days of the club in some detail, the rest of the club’s history is skipped over quickly, in the words of the author himself,  “in the belief that the later years are for future historians to look at”. Given that sixteen years have passed and a lot more rugby has been played since the publication of this book, perhaps the time has come for the definitive history of Featherstone Rovers to be written.

Match Programme: Featherstone Rovers v Swinton 1928

So far in this series we’ve looked at Rovers programmes from different decades from the 1950s to the 1990s, all very interesting to read and part of Featherstone’s rich history, but none of them likely to make you rich if you happen to come across a copy somewhere. As you delve further back in time, programmes become much rarer and much more sought after. Anything printed pre World War Two inevitably fetches a very good price with some old rugby league programmes now changing hands for £1,000 or more, a figure unheard of until very recently in the collecting community. Featherstone Rovers programmes are particularly hard to find as our pre-war attendances were lower than other clubs and so the print run was also low. So, have a root around in your granddad’s attic and see if you can come up with a valuable souvenir or two.

As far as rare programmes go, today’s featured edition is a very good example, being both hard to get and also of very special significance to Featherstone Rovers. Though it would be hard to tell from a quick look at the cover, this is in fact a copy of the match programme for our 1928 Championship final against Swinton. It looks like a regular home programme of the Oldham club, because the final was played at Watersheddings and the host club, rather than the RFL, was responsible for printing. They made a good job of it though, putting together a sixteen page issue which was a decent read in an age when match programmes tended to be much thinner, perhaps just two folded sheets. The cover price of 2d may seem ridiculously cheap to us, but was probably double the normal price in 1928.

Inside, the lead article pays credit both to Swinton, who were on course for a historic “All Four Cups” season, and also to Featherstone for reaching the Championship final in just their seventh season as a senior club. Inevitably the focus on Rovers highlighted the financial hardships the club had to consistently overcome to put out a competitive team. It was noted that every single Rovers player had been signed by the club for the minimum signing-on fee of £10 at a time when other clubs could afford to pay £100 or more.

Just to show how little things change in the world of rugby league, there’s also an article questioning the playoff system, which was then a top four straight knockout; Rovers (3rd)  had beaten Leeds (2nd) in the semi-final. The suggestion was that the side finishing top at the end of the regular season should be champions. It’s a debate that still rumbles on 80 odd years later!

*Many thanks to Stephen Parker for the scan of this programme.

Rugby League: Back o’ t’ Wall by Graham Chalkley

 Recently we looked at the autobiography of Don Fox, who was born and bred in Sharlston. Until you read this book it’s difficult to believe just how many other top rugby league stars came from the same place. The story of rugby league in Sharlston is an incredible one, and this well-researched book by former player Graham Chalkley does justice to its proud record of player production. Chalkley plots the history of the Sharlston Rovers club, starting from the earliest days of organised rugby in the 1880s and 1890s. In those days Sharlston had as rivals other local teams such as Streethouse, Outwood, Normanton and later of course near neighbours Featherstone Rovers. The accounts of some of those early matches make fascinating reading. It’s clear that there was no love lost between these fiercely competitive local rivals, and after one game Rovers president and founder Councillor George Johnson took a swipe at Sharlston’s rough play tactics in his post-match speech. When Sharlston threatened to cancel the following fixture with a large crowd already assembled, Mr. Johnson was obliged to apologise before the game could take place.

Featherstone Rovers left the junior leagues in 1921, but Sharlston have continued there to this day in a run broken only by a short time in the fifties when they had no open-age side. As a club, their major achievements were twice winning the Yorkshire Cup, as well as famous victories over professional teams in the Challenge Cup, against Workington (in 1946) and Dewsbury (in 2004). The book was published in 2006 which coincided with one of the club’s most successful periods in terms of silverware. As an interesting history of a successful amateur club, the book is very thorough.

However, what makes the Sharlston club special, and what makes this book a remarkable read is the astonishing number of top quality players have been produced by a village with a population of just under 2,500 people. Given its geographical location, the main beneficiaries of this production line have been Featherstone Rovers and Wakefield Trinity. Two of the original nine members of the Rugby League Hall of Fame, Jonty Parkin and Neil Fox, started at Sharlston. As did Lance Todd trophy winners Carl Dooler and Don Fox, as well as England internationals Herbert Goodfellow (Wakefield) and Joe Mullaney (Featherstone), not forgetting Great Britain and Featherstone coach Peter Fox. The long list goes on to include Rovers favourites such as Tommy Smales, Vaughan Thomas, Steve Hankin, and more recently Martin Pearson and Steve Dooler. There are so many Doolers and Lingards who played the games professionally it’s hard to keep count. All in all, this book is a cracking read for local rugby league fans.
   

Match Programme: Featherstone Rovers v Hull KR and York, 1997

In the course of a normal season, a club playing say fifteen home fixtures will produce fifteen match programmes and life for the programme collector is very easy. Occasionally along comes a postponed or re-arranged fixture to complicate matters. Perhaps the club will just re-hash the programme printed for the original date, perhaps not. Sometimes a game takes place at relatively short notice and there is no time to print a programme, so the supporters receive only a typed team-sheet. Towards the end of the 1997 season Rovers tried something different, and decided to print one programme that would cover two home fixtures. It was a novel idea, implemented I suspect as a cost-cutting measure, and was not something which caught on because the club never did it again. This publication, called “Going Forward”,  therefore has a certain rarity value.

The two games in question were against Hull K.R. and York and both games were part of the Divisional Premiership which ran after the end of that league season. In the group stages each club played eight matches, Rovers lost the first of these two fixtures to Hull K.R. 20-30 on the Wednesday night, but then thumped York 70-12 on the Sunday. We eventually qualified for the quarter-finals at the expense of Hull K.R, and faced Huddersfield. It was not a format that had captured the imagination of the fans, but Huddersfield took it seriously as, after beating us, they went on to win it, which in turn bizarrely earned them a Super League spot when Paris St. Germain went bankrupt. The crazy world of rugby league.

The programme itself is A5 size and cost £1.50. It has 32 pages with full colour pictures from both sets of opponents; Damien Ball of York and the evergreen Stanley Gene of Hull KR. Head coach Steve Sims has his say, there’s an interesting interview with Matt Lambert on his globetrotting rugby career, and another with winger Paul Gleadhill. For those of us who enjoy a good moan about the match officials there is a curious piece from Chris Westwood on the infamous Aussie referee of the early 1960s D’Arcy Lawler. An all round good read in fact.

During 2009 and 2010 a number of Co-operative Championship clubs discontinued producing match programmes in favour of a generic league-wide magazine called “Game On”. Introduced largely as a cost-cutting measure, it was an interesting solution to the problem of declining sales. But it never caught on, and to be honest, this lifelong traditional club programme fan was not sad at its demise.

Don Fox: Rugby League Legend by Ron Bailey

Whilst it is quite common to see recently retired players publishing their autobiographies, as far as rugby league is concerned this is a relatively new phenomenon. Until the late 1990s very few stars of our game had their memoirs printed. Hence the market now for retrospective studies of the game’s former greats. Ron Bailey followed up his trilogy of history books on Featherstone Rovers by choosing Don Fox to be the subject of his fourth book. Undoubtedly one of the greatest players our club has ever produced, Don Fox signed for Featherstone Rovers in 1953 and served the club with distinction before leaving for Wakefield in September 1965. He stopped playing in 1970, but it wasn’t until 2007 that his story was finally put down in print. Ron Bailey was in an ideal position to write this book, having been closely involved with the Rovers as club secretary whilst Fox was starring in the first team.

We are given a short introduction on life in Sharlston and its close association with rugby league. Don’s childhood neighbour was the great Joe Mullaney and there is a touching tribute to his halfback partner from Joe, a man who surely deserves a biography of his own. Don was the second of Tom Fox’s three rugby playing sons, and the story begins in earnest once he had signed for Featherstone.

Don Fox’s professional life is divided into five chapters, the longest  three of which cover his time with Featherstone. This of course was a golden period for Featherstone rugby, and Don’s career highlights included lifting the Yorkshire Cup, representing Great Britain and beating Australia. The text is filled out with a lot of photos, many of them team groups. Considering the length and profile of his career there are precious few good action shots of Don   Fox that survive to date. There is coverage of his time at Wakefield when he made the unusual transition from scrum half to prop forward. Inevitably the 1968 Cup final features, when Don won the Lance Todd trophy but was remembered for all the wrong reasons.  

Oddly, there are separate chapters on Don’s famous brothers Peter and Neil. This is fair enough in some respects as their careers often coincided (they once all played in the same game, Wakefield v Batley in 1965), but both Peter and Neil have their own books anyway, making these sections slightly redundant. After the infamous 68 final, the rest of Don’s career, his coaching experience and the rest of his life are very quickly summarised in just three pages. I felt like that I would’ve liked to have found out more about that period of his life.

On the whole, as a dip into Rovers’ rich past and looking at the life of one of our favourite sons, this book offers a lot of pleasurable memories.

Match Programme: Featherstone Rovers v Warrington, 1974

The sport of Rugby League is full of competitions and cups which never really took off. This programme is from the short-lived Captain Morgan Trophy, which was a funny old competition introduced into an already crowded fixture list. As you can see from the front cover of the match programme it had an impressive looking trophy. Played in a straight knockout format, Featherstone and Warrington made it through to the first (and last as it turned out) final. It took place on a Saturday afternoon in January at Salford, and the programme would have cost you 10p for a twenty page issue. After the line ups, pen pictures including players’ occupations, and other statistics, there was not much left to read. There was a full page portrait of a young looking Queen Elizabeth II if that’s your type of thing. There’s also a spectacular action shot of an airborne Paul Coventry diving in for a try in Rovers’ semi-final versus Workington. Checking out the team photo, no less five of the Rovers team sport impressive moustaches (Hartley, Smith, Box, Ken Kellett and Nash) whereas Barry Hollis goes for the full beard and Cyril Kellett still has those trademark sideburns. Hirsute days indeed.

In the potted club history of Rovers there are a number of inaccuracies (Rovers listed as having been formed in 1898 rather than 1902), reflecting the fact that in those days the early history of many RL clubs was hazy. It wasn’t until the 1980s that a new generation of historians did better research into the roots of the game. On the RFL’s information page, among news about referee’s courses and coaching clinics was an offer for 1974 Challenge Cup final tickets (standing room only) at the princely sum of £1.00. Of course, knowing that the same two teams who were playing the Captain Morgan Trophy Final were going to appear a few months later at Wembley would have won you a bob or two at the local bookies.

For the record, the Trophy final was a dour game, Warrington winning 4-0 with two penalty goals from Derek Whitehead. The tournament was then dropped from the fixture list. Perhaps that imposing trophy is still on the sideboard at Warrington over 40 years later.

There and Back by Iestyn Harris

By the time he arrived at Featherstone, Iestyn Harris had already achieved world stardom in both Rugby League and Rugby Union, and had already written his autobiography. Most players wait until they retire before putting together their memoirs, but Harris had packed enough into his playing career by the time he was 29 to justify this book. Therefore, his successful spell as Featherstone Rovers’ stand-off last season doesn’t mention, so that will have to wait for an updated edition. This volume is largely concerned with his youthful days at Warrington, and then his big money transfer to Leeds. Then of course he switched to Union, and about a third of the book covers his days playing kick and clap for Cardiff and Wales. The book wraps up with his return to Bradford, from where he signed for Rovers.

So, as a read, is it any good? Yeah, it’s not bad actually. The first thing I was surprised to read about was the strength and depth of his Welsh roots. Having been born and bred in Oldham, albeit with a convincing sounding Welsh name, I’d assumed his qualification for the national side to be based around some long forgotten ancestral connection, but Norman Harris, Iestyn’s granddad had played for Ebbw Vale and Newbridge before going North and signing for Oldham, then Leigh and Rochdale. So although Saddleworth Rangers can take credit for Harris’s development as an RL star, he is undeniably of solid Welsh stock.

A feature of the book is Iestyn’s explanations and justifications of each of his transfers, all of which had a faint whiff of controversy about them, or in the case of his move to Bradford, an awful stink. He had to ‘stay away’ to get his move from Wire to Leeds courtesy of a huge transfer fee, and his cross-code move involved the usual cloak and dagger stuff. The tug of war between Leeds and Bradford over his return to League ended up in the courts, but Iestyn doesn’t go too deeply into that.

Every sports autobiography is always accompanied by the obligatory collection of photos, the professional shots and the family snaps. Iestyn’s wedding portraits are of a significantly higher quality given that his wedding was covered by ‘Hello’ magazine as a result of his celebrity status.

At 240 pages in my paperback edition it’s an easy enough read in a day, although as an incorrigible statistician I would have preferred the facts and figures of his career as an end-note. Perhaps in a future edition he’ll entertain us with the story of how he finished off his playing career in the best possible style at Post Office Road.

Match Programme: Featherstone Rovers v France, 1982

This weekend we welcome Pia to our world famous stadium for the first time ever. It is only in the past few seasons that matches against French opposition have become more commonplace. This programme is from our first encounter with  a French team.

 

One of the interesting things about collecting rugby league memorabilia is that it’s not always the programme from the biggest fixture which turns into a valuable item. Cup final publications and reminders of big games do have sentimental value, but a match attended by 80,000 people at Wembley will have enough copies produced to never become rare.

On the other hand, there is today’s example. Not only was this printed for a relatively obscure fixture played before a low crowd, but also it’s a single sheet issue, notorious for getting thrown away and forgotten about instead of kept and cherished. Rovers are better than most clubs at doing their utmost to ensure that every home fixture is marked with an official match programme. Sometimes, in the case of fixtures rearranged at very short notice, it’s just not possible to get an issue together. This has only happened around 20 times in the last 50 years, so single sheet issues are rare and highly collectable.

So, on a wet and windy Friday evening in September the French national team were over in England for some warm up fixtures before their international matches against Great Britain, and Rovers were one of three clubs who provided them with opposition. The club took advantage of the opportunity to forward the proceeds from the game to the Mick Gibbins’ benefit fund. Despite its plain and simple cover, this team-sheet managed to make an unfortunate mistake with the apostrophe in Mick’s name.

Despite its friendly status, Rovers had a pretty strong team out, no fewer than nine of whom would go on to win the Cup at Wembley a few months later. The French too had a fair share of well known names, including winger Patrick Solal who later signed for Hull and redoubtable back-rower Jean-Jacques Cologni. Scrum-half was Ivan Greseque, father of recent Rovers’ player Maxime.

In the event, the game failed to rise above the difficult conditions and France won a dour encounter 13-5.