Sid Gittens Oral History Recording

Sid Gittens Oral History Recording

Sid Gittens

An oral history interview with Sid Gittens

Michael Romyn

Kent's Sporting Memories

Interview recorded on 6 March, 2019

Sid Gittens; Linda Gittens; Michael Romyn

Kent's Sporting Memories

MP3 file; also available in WAV
(1:56:21)

English

Sound Recording

Sid Gittens

Sound Recording

(1:56:21)

Kent’s Sporting Memories Oral History Transcript
Interviewees: Sid Gittens; Linda Gittens
Interviewer: Michael Romyn
Date: 6 March, 2019
Location: Sid and Linda Gittens’ home in Hamstreet, Kent.

MR: Can you say your name, date of birth and where you were born?
SG: My name is Sidney Allen Gittens, I was born on the seventeenth of the ninth, 1944 [17 September, 1944] in Hamstreet.
MR: And your parents, where were they born?
SG: My Father was born in Shropshire, and my Mother, even though she was a Hamstreet girl, she was born in Lincolnshire, mother went back to Lincolnshire to have the baby and then returned to Hamstreet, so she was effectively Hamstreet born and bred.
MR: Do you remember the year of their births?
SG: My Dad was born in 1911, my Mother was born in 1918.
MR: What are some of your earliest memories of growing up in Hamstreet?
SG: Freedom. Playing in the woods, which is now a nature reserve, and generally playing football and cricket on the field down the road with people like Bill Day. We had our football teams and the proverbial two coats on the grass as the goalposts and yeah, that’s how it was. That was our local enjoyment. And then we progressed because between us we started a little kids team at Ruckinge, under fifteens or something or other, nothing formal, I think we just played friendlies, just so we could play as a team. And I also played at the local primary school, they had a football team and a cricket team.
MR: What was the name of the primary school?
SG: Hamstreet. Sorry, it was Orlestone County Primary School then. It is now Hamstreet Primary School. Same school, name changed.
MR: Is that where you met Bill?
SG: It could possibly have been but his parents were landlord and landlady of the local pub. They moved into the village in 1951 I believe and they came from Dartford. Our actual meeting I can’t remember
MR: But a group of you lads went around together?
SG: That’s right, yeah.
MR: Bill mentioned you’d play in the pub car park?
SG: Yeah, we used to play in the pub car park, him and me especially with a tennis ball, that’s where we honed our spectacular skills! Until I bought a plastic Frido football which were a modern innovation, and we had it for a few hours, and then somebody kicked it into the rose bush and punctured it! And I can always remember it cost me ten shillings, and I saved up for some time to buy it.
MR: So that was the end of that then.
SG: That was the end of that.
MR: Did you go and get another one?
SG: Well we had numerous attempts to repair it with bits of plastic and a soldering iron or some sort of means of heating it up but it was never very successful. So we probably had to save up again, buy another one.
MR: Were you playing against other primary schools or was it more informal than that?
SG: Yes, we played against other primary schools. Ashford teams, Ashford primary schools, yeah, that was the format really.
MR: What position did you play?
SG: Centre half for the primary school. My father told me that I gave away a penalty in the first game I played for them, and I spent the rest of the game with my hands in my pockets! We actually had pockets in our shorts in those days, bearing in mind that it was a totally different way of life in those days, hand-me-down clothes and that sort of thing, that’s how it was. None of these replica football kits and all the really good equipment. The old lace-up leather boots with leather studs which you hammered in with the three nails, that sort of thing,
MR: Very different then…
SG: Great big leather toecaps.
MR: What did your parents do for a living?
SG: My Mother was a housekeeper cum casual farm, farm work, and my Father worked for Kent County Council roads department as a travelling foreman which then graduated into a senior highway superintendent, a very grand title, which was next to the divisional surveyor. The county was split up into divisions and each division had a surveyor and so he was sort of second in command in the division he was working in.
MR: Would he work locally for the most part?
SG: Yep, yep, yep. Within spitting distance anyway.
MR: Were your parents interested in sport?
SG: My father played football. He played for Hamstreet when they had a previous team, which I can elaborate on later. Mum was never a sporty person. Mum was a housewife, as was in those days, and there was no such things as netball teams or things like that, but Dad was definitely a footballer.
MR: If your mum was interested in sport would there be anything in terms of sports’ teams or was it more limited?
SG: Very limited. Yeah. Warehorne had a – next village along – had a semi sort of private tennis club, but that was all. There was the odd privately-owned tennis courts around but there were certainly no public courts around here. Ashford being the nearest but whether or not they had them is open to conjecture, I don’t know, whether they had some on the park. They definitely had some in later years but whether they were there then I don’t know. I have my doubts.
MR: Growing up playing sport was it only cricket and football?
SG: Cricket and football really, yeah. I used to ride my bike past Tenterden Golf Club and longingly look over the fence and think, ‘Oh I’d love to play golf’, and it was perhaps another thirty or forty years before I made the grade and actually walked in there with my own set of clubs and became a member. But that was really restricted to local businessmen and people like that really. Yes, definitely it was restricted, yeah.
MR: So the majority of men in the village wouldn’t play golf – it would be too elitist?
SG: I would suggest, yes, without any shadow of a doubt, yes.
MR: The Ruckinge team – did you form that yourself or was there adult influence?
SG: We more or less made it up ourselves, yeah. There was one or two older lads, I was about, I don’t know, about eleven or twelve or something. And some of the other lads, Barry Lean (?) and Bob Lean (?), they were probably four years older than me but they were the older ones, and then there were all the inbetweeners, but yeah we made it up. We played a few games against local teams, other teams, you know, we used to ride our bikes off and go and play football. And yeah, so it was our team, yeah.
MR: That’s really nice that you set it up yourselves…
SG: And then ultimately, because we’d played together, in 1856 I believe it was, Ruckinge won the cup in the local Ashenden District League and a lot of the players packed up. And so they were reliant on us lads to take their place, and that’s why I myself, I played, I was probably thirteen when I played my first game for Ruckinge. I used to play for the school under-fourteens on the Saturday morning, come home, have a bit of lunch and then ride my bike over to Ruckinge and play Ruckinge in the afternoon, the men’s team. And we, you’ll have to tell me if I rambling, but we had to – the first season I remember playing, you’ve got a connection here, we lost I believe twelve – one to Appledore and then we beat Appledore by some ridiculous score, that was the only game we won, and that was the only game Appledore won that year. They even made the back page, or it might have even been the front page, of the News of the World on a Sunday – they were getting hammered twenty-five – nil and all that sort of thing. So that season I remember we won one game. But then three years later we’d obviously all matured a little bit and in sixty, sixty-one we won the same cup again, our new team. I was sixteen when I played. We beat a local team, Brabourne and Smeeth, two -one in the final up at the old Essella Park in Ashford, where Ashford Town used to play, and that for us felt like playing at Wembley. It was quite a nice feeling to say the least, yeah.
MR: So when you said you were thirteen playing your first game, that was for the men’s team?
SG: That was for the men’s team, yeah.
MR: What was that like, playing as a thirteen-year-old?
SG: A bit scary bearing in mind I was like a vertical bootlace! Not too much meat on me. But I was only saying to my wife the other day, when I first played football, all these grown men were very supportive of us kids, and they helped us and I’m eternally grateful to them because – and that’s helping us to grow up and what turned me into a man really. Mixing with such nice people. And being treated so nicely and it was good. I can only look back on it as a wonderful time in my life really. Because when I moved on from there when I was playing cricket I captained the team over at Warehorne, we didn’t have a team at Hamstreet, and I was captaining the team at sixteen. Whether it was the influence of mixing with these blokes, not on a regular basis, I was vice-captain. But if, obviously, if the main captain wasn’t about I used to captain the team, and they used to take notice of me. And it was absolutely marvelous, and it’s such a nice way to grow up.
MR: So you think you learnt a lot from those men?
SG: Oh I did, yeah, immensely, yeah, certain men. And I hold them in high esteem to this day. There was a chap, Jim Munge, who told me, this was the cricket team, he said, ‘Stop calling me Mr Munge will you Sid’, I said, ‘Whatever, Mr Munge.’ He said, ‘No call me Jim’ and he was about thirty, forty years older than me and he’d gone to school with Les Ames who was the old England wicket keeper, batsmen, Kent manager, you know, Kent County Cricket Club manager, and he used to turn up with his trousers tied up with his old school tie and all this sort of thing and yeah, they were good sound men to take, take your ideas from, you know, they were good people. And they used to give people like Bill and myself a chance, they used to let us bowl when we were kids really, when we were thirteen, fourteen, you know, albeit a couple of overs, but – and the same with the football team, they treated us as equals almost, which to young lads like us was so – well, you used to puff your chest out a bit didn’t you, make you feel good, yeah.
MR: Were you at secondary school at this point?
SG: Yes I was, yeah.
MR: What school was that?
SG: Ashford South Secondary School, Jemmett Road, Ashford.
MR: Did you play sport there as well?
SG: Yes, I was the captain of the under-fourteens. I went on to captain, I never captained the football under fifteens but I captained the cricket team. Incidentally I opened the batting with a chap called Alan Ealham who went onto play for Kent and captained Kent, his son played for England, Mark Ealham, and so we were very close to making it but not quite making it. And that was part and parcel of it, and that’s, that was the joy of it, yeah. And that was at the South, and while I was at the South I was chosen to play for the under-fifteen representative team which is called the Ashford and Weald school’s team, and we played in the English schools FA and that sort of thing, like all areas did in the country really. And then ultimately they ended up in the final. And then there was one just purely and simply for Kent areas which was called the Fletcher trophy I think, and so that was quite exciting, playing in that, and we used to play on grounds like Ashford Town, and once again there was good players in there. I, incidentally I was playing in goal then. The chap who had been in goal the previous year signed for Arsenal, Peter Harden, he was Kent Schools, he was at my school, at the same school that I was. He signed for Arsenal, and because of the age thing – September the first, I don’t know if you’ve come across that, if you’re under fifteen on September the first, which I was, even though my birthday was the seventeenth of September I could play for that whole year as an under-fifteen and he couldn’t because his birthday was prior to September the first – so I managed to get in, I went for a trial, got into the team, and we went to Maidstone and played against Maidstone school’s area, and they had a chap, David Sadler, who was playing for them who was twelve – are you a Manchester United supporter? He went on to play for Manchester United. I think he was the last person to play for the whole lot, England amateur, all the age levels, full international, and he played for Man United when they won the European Cup. You know, it’s a silly thing but ‘A Sadler shot was cleverly tipped round the post by Gittens who looks like a promising player’! And II ended up playing for Hamstreet and he played for Manchester United! And it just shows you how things, how people’s lives cross. I played for the area under-nineteen cricket team, Ashford area under nineteen, he was playing for Maidstone, lo and behold, he took I don’t know how many wickets and scored seventy-five runs! This bloody bloke Sadler.
MR: He played cricket as well?
SG: He played cricket as well, yeah.
MR: And he was pretty good at that?
SG: And he was pretty good at that. But obviously he chose football, went on to Manchester United.
MR: Did you know that he was good when seeing him play at twelve?
SG: Oh yeah, that’s why he was playing because we was under fifteen, and when you see the difference between a twelve-year-old and a fifteen-year-old. I’ve witnessed that with junior teams, local junior teams – that is quite a big step. And he could hold his own, he was a good player. He played for Maidstone as an amateur, they played in the old Isthmian League which was an amateur league in those days, and he was about fifteen, sixteen when he played for them so he was obviously a talented man, or talented lad, yeah.
MR: What did your teammates on Ruckinge and Warehorne do for a living?
SG: Dennis Ovenden who played in goal was insurance worker, he worked for the commercial union. Terry Lucas worked for a seed merchants, he was manager or something of a seed merchants. Ted (?) was a smallholder. Billy Bingham (?) was a carpenter, he was the captain when we won the cup. Ted Sands worked on the railway…George Apps was a bricklayer. Generally those sort of jobs, yeah.
MR: And jobs that were quite local?
SG: Yeah. Ashford. Local or Ashford. Nobody really travelled much out of that sort of area in those days. Obviously the odd one or two did, but generally speaking it was reasonably local.
MR: And would they socialize together outside of football? Would they go to the pub or go to events?
SG: Some did, some didn’t. We certainly did when we got our wings, you know! Not much money to spend but – because I was an apprentice electrician earning about two pounds a week, but yeah, we had quite a good social side of it because we’d grown together in the kids team and the nucleus, there was half a dozen of us who came from there into the men’s team, others had moved away and things and joined the army and things like that. Yeah, and we’re still friends to this day, which is nice really. We’ve got our fiftieth wedding anniversary in August and quite a few of those blokes will be at our little party we’re going to have in the pavilion down the road here. Yeah, it’s good really.
MR: Do they still live locally?
SG: Some of them do yeah.
MR: What age did you leave school?
SG: I left school at fifteen. At fifteen, yeah. I left in the summer of sixty, as I was sixteen in September, so I was very nearly sixteen. I stayed on a year to take the entrance exam to Ashford Technical College, passed the exam, and my father said, ‘I’m sorry mate, you’re going to have to go to work’, and that was as it was in those days, you know, I suspect they couldn’t afford to keep me propped up. I used to work on a farm and do various other jobs to try and earn pocket money, which I did. I’ve always been a worker – a mate of mine had a big farm, one of the bigger farms on the marsh. I used to go over there. A fourteen-year-old driving a tractor it was wonderful, wasn’t it? Thought I was king of the road! So I used to go and earn money and I was earning one and six pence an hour then, on the farm, and when I left the farm, because I was going into fulltime employment as an apprentice electrician I went down to eleven pence three farthings an hour, which is, you probably wouldn’t understand that but it’s under, it’s just a fraction under five pence an hour. There’s twelve pence in a shilling, so I got eleven pence three farthings which is eleven and three quarter pence per hour. Three quarter pence.
MR: That doesn’t seem like very much!
SG: It wasn’t. And out of that I had to pay, I had to pay seven shillings and six pence, which is thirty-seven and a half pence to go to Maidstone one day a week to college, I was on day release, sorry, one day and one evening, when I was doing the apprenticeship. Yeah, I left school, as I say, just under sixteen years of age.
MR: Did most of your friends leave at that age as well?
SG: Yeah, we never done, we didn’t do any further education at the secondary school, hence the reason for the entrance exam to the Ashford Tech College, which would’ve enabled us to do our GCEs, as they were in those days. Whereas the grammar school boys would’ve done it at school. So that enabled us to further our education, but I went into a trade anyway, so.
MR: So very few did the GCE?
SG: Yeah. Yeah, there was not than – more people didn’t do it than done it.
MR: Why did you choose to become an apprentice electrician as opposed to any other trade?
SG: Well I wanted to be a farmer really, having worked on the farm. But I saw there was no future there really unless you owned your own farm and I was not in any position to get my own land or anything like that I didn’t feel like I wanted to go and work on a farm as a farm labourer. So I was looking for alternatives. I did think about joining the army because one of our mates had gone into the army as a boy soldier, as an apprentice, I did look into that. And I thought, no, that’s not for me. Another thing I looked at was radio and television repairs – that meant going away to college and this, that and the other and I didn’t want to destroy my sporting life, which was a big part of my life, being selfish really. But I also played local table tennis to a reasonable standard and I didn’t want to lose any of that, and so I had a look around and through the, what do they call themselves now, through the employment officer, can’t think of the name now, has a special name, I got wind of Seeboard which is the local electricity supply authority wanted four electricians, four apprentices and we had to go to Folkestone which was the head office of Seeboard at that time. In sixty I sat an exam in the works canteen for four jobs, probably twenty of those were grammar school boys, so unfortunately I didn’t get one of those jobs. Strangely I saw one of the lads the other day who did, and he went on to become a lecturer at the local college. And then I come across another, through the employment chappy, a firm at Maidstone, they had a branch in Ashford, G. Wallace Electrical, and I went up on the Saturday morning for an interview and I got the job on there, so. I always had a leaning, I didn’t want to be a bricklayer or a carpenter or whatever, I wanted to do something practical, much to the, I wouldn’t say annoyance, but whatever of the headmaster, because a bit of self-promotion here, I was head boy of the school so they wanted me to go into a more academic sort of thing but it was really not for me to, I didn’t like the idea of it, I didn’t fancy going to an office everyday even though I came to that in the latter part of my working life, but I didn’t want to do that as a young bloke. And I haven’t got one ounce of regret. I chose that path, I’ve been in the electrical industry all my life as I said earlier, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it. And it’s been a good means to an end with regards to food on the plate, really.
MR: And your parents were supportive of you in that decision?
SG: At that time, a lot of the parents, certainly from the level, when I say the level of my parents just ordinary working-class people, a trade was almost the epitome of success – if you had a trade, you had a trade. That’s what my father said: ‘Get a trade, I would like you to have a trade.’ There was no cajoling or forcing or anything, nothing like that. My brother had gone into an apprenticeship with a firm called Linfields in Ashford, which was agricultural engineering, repairing tractors and things like that, so he got his trade and Dad just wanted me to have a trade and I to this day am eternally grateful, because all the time you got a trade and a tool bag full of tools you can earn a living.
MR: Did you have just the one sibling?
SG: Yes, just my brother.
MR: Was he older?
SG: He was older, four years older.
MR: Was he a sportsman as well?
SG: Vaguely. Vaguely. He did paly a few games of cricket for Warehorne but never going to be a keen sportsman.
MR: So not big shoes to fill in that respect?
SG: No, not at all, no, no. I was me, and he was him, and we still are, even though we have a healthy respect for each other and we enjoy each other’s company, so, yeah. There was no rivalry or anything.
MR: You said one of the reasons you went down that route was because of sport – it kept you bound to the community?
SG: To a degree, yeah. And the job was, even though, the very first job I went on, on August the eighth 1961, when I started work, I remember that because it was our daughter’s birthday, was Dover, which to me felt like I was going to fall off the end of the earth, even though it was only thirty mile down the road, bearing in mind there’s no M20s or anything like that, it’s purely the old A20, which everyone went down if they was going to Dover docks or anything like that. So, even looking back it was still quite an exciting part of my life. And then I was down there for a short while, that was a hospital, Buckland hospital, and then soon after that I was working at Chatham House Grammar School in Ramsgate which seemed miles away. Now we just jump in the car and drive to Margate and not, sorry that was Ramsgate, and not think any more about it. But that’s how things have moved on.
MR: Before working was your life very much orientated around the village?
SG: Yeah, like I say local sport, that’s what made it quite exciting. By playing away, in the loosest possible terms, it was an escapade, an exciting, ‘Ooh, we’re going to Charing today, ooh, we’re going to Appledore tomorrow afternoon!’, you know, that’s how it was and you were with the gang and, you play the game and you either one or you lost or, and you used to come home happy or miserable or, like we all are with sport now. Yeah, I think that’s how it was, life was far more condensed, even though we used to go to London to watch football a lot. When I say a lot, look, I can remember one, I think it was Good Friday or Easter Monday, we went up and we saw West Ham and Cardiff in the morning, Spurs and Blackburn in the afternoon and Leyton Orient and Luton in the evening. It was three or four of us went and that’s what we used to do. I used to go to Wembley. I can remember the times when I went with the school to the school [unclear], it was so exciting you know to go a fifty-mile journey up the road in a coach and then go in this Wembley where there are a hundred thousand people. It was, I couldn’t grasp, it was lovely, it was wonderful. We went to the quarter finals of the world cup in sixty-six, things like that. I used to just stand there and I was in awe, you know, wonderful.
MR: Was it hard to get tickets for that?
SG: I can’t remember how we quite done it now. I can’t remember. And I used to go to various cup finals, because you get local teams are allocated, and it still happens now. Local leagues are allocated FA Cup final tickets through the FA and that filters into [unclear] FA, and then that filters down into our local leagues. And I suspect they still do it now but it used to be on a rota or depending on how many people are interested in going and clubs used to get two tickets, and we always used to apply for them so I’d go to quite a few finals if the tickets came along, cause even though you’ve got thirty or forty blokes in a club with two teams quite often not that many would want to go to a final. Me I just wanted to go because I wanted to watch football, even though I’m an Arsenal man. Lots of people won’t go and watch unless it’s their team in the final. Well I just go for the love of football really. And I still do now, you know, I still go to Arsenal now from time to time. A mate of mine’s got a season ticket. But it was so exciting, yeah, it was wonderful.
MR: Do you remember what age you were when you first went to London to watch a football game?
SG: The first time I was about twelve or thirteen, with the secondary school because the school used to organise a trip through the school’s FA I suppose, yeah.
MR: And do you remember that vividly? Your first game?
SG: Yeah, I can do. Barry Bridges was playing, he went on and played for Chelsea. There’s a mate of mine who still lives in Ashford, Bobby Laverick, he played for Chelsea when he was a youngster, he was a schoolboy international, he came down from the northeast and he can remember Bridges and people like that at Chelsea, and he said ‘well how do you know them then?’ and I said ‘well, I can remember him playing for England Schoolboys’. I can’t remember him playing because he played in fifty-four or something, which was a bit before me. Yeah, I can remember it, all these screaming kids there and I’ve never been in such a large crowd. And I can always remember my father saying to me, because he’d been to various cup finals and things through the local club, because the club used to get the tickets way back then, and he said ‘whatever you do when you’re coming out don’t put your hands in your pockets’, And I thought: ‘What an earth is he on about?’ And I realised afterwards because you just, you’re lifted from the floor, and it’s just like a big sausage of people going out, you know. And it’s difficult to explain, I’ve tried to explain to my wife, you know, you’ve got a load of people pressing like that, it’s not quite so bad now because they’ve restricted entrances and turnstiles and things like that, but you used to come down these stairs and it was just as if you were being traveled out to the outer concourse, you know, it was a bit frightening.
MR: Is this Wembley?
SG: Yeah, Wembley, the old Wembley as we know it, yeah.
MR: Was it standing room only? Were there seats?
SG: There were seats in the grandstand, yeah, but the rest of it was all standing, which I’m still an advocate of – it’s the only way you can watch football, being an old-fashioned old person. And I believe they’ll ultimately come back to it. Having experienced what I have in recent years with all-seaters like Wembley, the new Wembley – sorry I haven’t been to the new Wembley – back in the old Wembley just before it closed, the Emirates, White Hart Lane, all of them are seated now, nobody sits anyway, and so you spend all the match jumping up and down up and down, and I think it’s a safer environment if you have them standing. As long as you’re segregated and kept apart – when I say that, not different clubs, I mean the people within the grandstand so you’ve got a barrier to stop the crushing. Because at the old Wembley it was all pushing down the front, you know. I guess this is what happened at Hillsborough, to a degree, people pushing from the back.
MR: Did you have any uncomfortable experiences?
SG: Not, no, you just had to be aware. I was never scared or anything like that.
MR: Did you go up with your Dad to watch a game?
SG: Yes, I did. The one that springs to mind is the 1964 European Cup Winners Cup, West Ham played Munich 1860. West Ham won. That was quite an experience because they were selling hot dogs, as they do, outside the ground, they don’t do it quite so much now, there used to be vendors, vendors outside, and I think they were one and six to the English people and half a crown to the Germans! I can certainly remember going with Dad then, yeah.
MR: Was it quite a friendly atmosphere between the German supporters and English supporters?
SG: Wonderful, from what I remember.
MR: That’s great that you can pick out the dates like that…
SG: I’ve got this stupid knack of doing that! Ask me what I done last Friday I won’t be able to tell you!
MR: What was the best game you saw as a youngster? Was there one that really stands out?
SG: Yeah, I can’t really remember because I can remember all that sort of stuff but I don’t remember scores and things. Probably one of the Spurs games because we used to go, even though I’m an Arsenal man we used to go to Spurs quite a bit when Danny Blanchflower and, you know, the Bill Nicholson team, you probably wouldn’t remember it but, a famous team, Cliff Jones, people like that, David White. Yeah, it was probably one of those games. I certainly remember the excitement of the West Ham game, that was good that night. And I can always remember, I was, I would’ve been about nineteen or twenty I suppose, twenty-one, bit older, and I remember we stopped down the Old Kent Road to have a pint on the way back, cause we were all in a minibus then, and the atmosphere because a London team had won, you know, yeah, it was good.
MR: And you were with your Ruckinge teammates on the bus?
SG: No, not on the bus then. This was with my father’s dart team or something or other.
MR: Why is Arsenal your team? What’s your connection there?
SG: The connection is, my grandfather was born in Woolwich. This is where this all started. He was the illegitimate son of the housekeeper to the Commandant of Woolwich Arsenal, who I believe could have been my grandfather, sorry great grandfather, because I think he was - bit of nooky with the kitchen maid. There’s no proof. As a child my grandfather was allowed to go in and out of Woolwich Arsenal, and he had frilly shirts and things, he was telling me, these are his words, and he used to take the Commandants sandwiches and what have you into lunch, and he was allowed in the gates, waved through, no security or anything like that. Obviously security wasn’t tight then what it is now but even so you couldn’t walk in and out of Woolwich Arsenal or Chatham Dockyard or any places like that back in the day. He got a bit fed up with it and he ran away and joined the army when he was fourteen, went to Ireland, they found out his age and sent him back, and he always said to me that’s when he first tasted Guinness when he was on guard duty outside the Guinness brewery in Dublin. And he had a continued love affair with it all his life! He wasn’t a drunk or anything like that but he did like a glass of Guinness. And anyway, that’s the connection with Woolwich Arsenal, and he said to me he’d watched Arsenal play on Plumstead Marshes and this that and the other before they became the Arsenal that we know now. And I’ve strangely connected onto Arsenal and I always, Arsenal’s always been my first love really. I used to get all the books I could about Arsenal when I was a kid, about Tom Whittaker, the old manager and Jack Kelsey was one of my heroes, he was the goalkeeper back in the fifties and, yeah. How do boys grab hold of these things? We do don’t we?
MR: How did you get your hands on the Arsenal books?
SG: I belonged to a book club. I suppose I used to spend my pocket money or the money I used to earn on the farm and various other jobs. And I had this book club and they were probably about half a crown a book or something like that. They were reprinted, cheapy type editions, a copy of the original. All legit I suppose but I really don’t know now, they’re probably all up in the roof.
MR: So there’s be a catalogue?
SG: Yeah, something like that.
MR: Did you go and watch more regional football like Ashford?
SG: Yeah, I’ve always followed Ashford, yeah. Not so much in recent years because they’ve been in a bit of an upheaval, but we used to follow them around. We used to go to away matches when they played at – they had a good cup run on year – they played at Watford and various places, Dagenham and Redbridge, Bognor Regis, Havant and Waterlooville, all the illustrious places! They’ve had various teams like Crystal Palace and that down here in the cup and, sorry West Ham and yeah, always followed them, yeah.
MR: Did any of your Ruckinge teammates ever get a trial for them?
SG: Yeah, me…We played in our cup final, in sixty-one, and Will Farmery (?), the then manager of Folkestone Town, no, they were Folkestone Invicta then, was watching the game, and I was only sixteen, and myself and another bloke, he spotted us and said we’ll be going down for a trial. And it was quite good really because I ended up playing down there and I would have been paid to play, the brown envelope in the boot. Not quite like that but I was getting more Folkestone – no it was Folkestone Town, it’s Folkestone Invicta now – I was getting more from them than I was from my apprentices money because I used to get ticket allowance and this allowance and that allowance which probably amounted to a couple or three quid, but I had my train fare and everything out of that, and I used to go to training on a Tuesday night and a Thursday night, I had no car at that time and I was probably working in Ramsgate, which meant going back into Ashford, catching the train down to Folkestone, walking up to the ground and training, then catching the thing back – in the end I got a bit fed up with the traveling. I was never going to make it; I wasn’t quite good enough. By then I was back playing on the field. I’d given up my goalkeeping career. Cause that was only a sideline, I preferred playing on the field really. Probably should have stuck to goalkeeping, probably would have got on better. But yeah, I had a lovely time for about a year down there, playing for their A team, and I learnt an awful lot of the pros that we used to, because at that time, pros, when they packed up for the league teams, they either went to places like South Africa or Australia, or down to the local leagues, the Southern League and that sort of thing. And you used to come across them, Tommy Scannell, who played in goal down there was an Irish International, or an ex-Irish International, so these blokes had done the business hadn’t they? They’d been about, so to a kid like me, sixteen-year-old, I wanted to learn, I was willing to learn everything in those days, and so it was good, yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
MR: So you were a semi-professional footballer for a year?
SG: No, not really, that was amateur. That was an illegal payment, in effect. Everybody knew that it was going on because the amateur teams like I said to you about David Saddler playing for Maidstone, that’s what we would class as a full-blown amateur team. And it was the brown envelope syndrome that effectively they were semi pros, but playing under the banner of, as an amateur, which then enabled them to play in the FA Cup, which culminated in the FA Cup Amateur Cup Final at Wembley. Bishop Auckland and people like that used to win it all the time. They were amateur teams supposedly not paying their players. But mine was in theory expenses, that’s how they got over that one.
MR: So Folkestone was an amateur team at that time?
SG: No, they were semi-professional, they playing in the – I think it was in the Kent League or the Southern League then, can’t remember now.
MR: So when you say the ‘A Team’ that was their amateur team?
SG: Third team. I did have one game for the reserves.
MR: That’s the second team?
SG: Yeah that’s the second team, yeah.
MR: Did you practice with the first team?
SG: Yeah, we had training, we always used to muck in and at the end of the evening we’d have a five a side or ten a side or whatever. Because I can remember one of them, there was a bloke Albert Woodoson (?), who was the proverbial brick how’s your father, legs like tree trunks, and I’m Jack the Dandy sixteen-year-old, I’m going to rule the world, and I’m going ‘do, do, do, do’ [fancy dribbling], and all of a sudden, whack! And the first thing I heard was the manager Jack Pritchard shouting, ‘That will teach you to get rid of the bloody ball!’ And so you learnt, they knew what they were – they were hardened professionals. They didn’t take any prisoners, those boys. And so for me, I absolutely loved it. Yeah, it was smashing.
MR: And you must have improved a lot I imagine?
SG: I’m sure, yeah. You don’t think you do but I must have done. But anyway I left there and I came back and Ruckinge, not that I fell out with Ruckinge, but I thought, I’m going to change. A couple of blokes had joined, who I didn’t particularly like, the way they were trying to direst the teams, so I jacked it in. And coming back to Alan Ealham, he was playing football for Mersham, which is not too far away anyway, and they were in the premier division, so I went over to Mersham and had a season there, and strangely I played left wing there. And we had really quite a good team, we had a couple of lads who played for us who had played for Ashford and Folkestone and teams like that. And then the following year we started up in Hamstreet, in sixty-six, and as I said earlier I always said that if we started down here I’d come back, and that’s what happened, and we had a rag tag and bobtail team. And we started off in the bottom division, I’d just come from the premier division! And we got ourselves sorted out in the first season, sixty-six, sixty-seven, and then we won the league the next year, we might have even won the cup as well, can’t remember now without going back into all the paperwork, and I stayed with Hamstreet until I packed up.
MR: When did you pack up?
SG: Well, unfortunately I had a bit of knee trouble and a bit of back trouble so I packed up in the mid-seventies.
MR: That’s still a good amount of time that you played for Hamstreet…
SG: About ten years, yeah. And by then I was secretary of the club, and I done that for about ten, fifteen years, and then sadly we lost our little girl a couple of months after we moved into here. Life was on hold, life, it was bad enough continuing with our ordinary life really, and we had to do that for the sake of our other daughter, and so I withdrew. Somebody else took over as secretary and I just pulled out of the club, so I had a gap, and then about five years later they said will I come back as chairman, so I went back as chairman and I was chairman for about twenty-five years I suppose, until we packed up in about 2012, somewhere around about there.
MR: The team packed up?
SG: Yeah.
MR: Why was that?
SG: Lack of people to run it. I was seventy. Bobby who had been secretary who was one of our Ruckinge boys, he and his brother are two of the boys I played with in the boys team at Ruckinge, he had been secretary for twenty-five years – he was well into his seventies, he’s four years older than me. Jacko had been one of the mainstays of the team, he used to mark the pitch out and everything, he’d been involved since we started in sixty-six, and his father was chairman when we started – he was coming up to his seventies, late sixties, and arthritis had taken over as is, and so he packed up and so more or less the whole of the committee packed up. A new group of people took over but they only lasted about two years, sadly, so we’ve got no team now.
MR: Was there still interest from players?
SG: There was still interest, there’s still interest now, yeah. The thing is these people can’t be bothered to run it. And I know we tend to be old farts probably but you’ve got to have an element of procedures running the team and an organisation because you’ve got to work within the rules of the league, or the leagues. It don’t matter what it is, cricket, football, whatever, and that’s how it is. But a lot of them try to buck the system and the players are not the players, they’re not the same as we were – life has changed, society’s changed. I know recent times I’ve had blokes phone me up at eleven or twelve o’clock on a Saturday, ‘Oh I can’t play this afternoon’, ‘Oh why’s that then?’, ‘Oh I’ve got to go shopping’. And whether it’s right or wrong – and I’ve always said that my wife God bless her has given me one hundred per cent support over the years, and she knew full well that Saturdays and Sundays, when I played Sunday football, being a selfish sod that I am, that’s how it was, and that – and I suppose it stems form the fact that, like when my father played, there was no other entertainment apart from the pub and the football team in the locality, or the cricket team. Well now that’s changed, and as I said earlier society’s changed hasn’t it? And wives and girlfriends and families, I wouldn’t say they’re more demanding but it’s a different style of a family now. It’s changed, the dynamics of the being has changed.
MR: When did you start a family? What year did you get married to Linda?
SG: We got married in sixty-nine, right in the middle of the football period! Cindy was born in seventy-two, Michelle was born in seventy-five. And so right the way through, you see, right when I was secretary and playing, so yeah, that was a fun time, we used to run the dances. Linda used to do the buffet. We used to do the bar because Linda’s parents had the Blue Anchor pub in Ruckinge. Yeah, it was an integral part of society really. That’s how it was, yeah.
MR: So there was real community around the team?
SG: Yeah, yeah…
MR: A social side as well as the football?
SG: Yeah, Linda, Linda [calls his wife, Linda]. How many dances, we used to have two or three dances a year didn’t we?
LG: Yeah, football club used to have at least a couple, didn’t they?
SG: Yeah.
LG: It was all different then wasn’t it? You wore long dresses and totally different now – you go to a dance now you where your jeans don’t they?
SG: There was no such thing as a disco. We always used to have a group…
LG: There were local ones from Ashford, weren’t they? But they were good.
SG: Yeah, from this area, yeah. Folkestone or Ashford or whatever. And the proverbial buffet, didn’t we?
LG: Crikey, yeah. We used to do the bars at times. My parents had a pub so we used to do the bars.
MR: So there was a clubhouse?
SG: No, there was a village hall.
LG: It was more of a social, people…
SG: Everybody turned out, we used to have a full house every time.
LG: It was, people don’t socialize like that anymore do they, not locally. Well the football club’s not anymore is it? And even the last few years there was no social side, they played football and cleared off. You didn’t arrange a dance or a car treasure hunt or anything. It was just, they played football. But everybody knew everybody didn’t they? All friendly.
SG: We replicated that. Just as an aside, for my seventieth birthday, we were discussing what we were going to do – we replicated that, we had a group that played sixties music, we done a buffet, so that it was almost like Saturday nights used to be when we were youngsters. It went down a storm really. Mind you everyone was the same age as us. But that’s how it was, yeah. It was a social event – everybody looked forward to those football club dances. In a funny sort of way it’s quite a big, a big thing because we played football in the afternoon, we…
LG: And there was the fundraiser as well.
SG: Yeah, to keep the club going. So it was good, yeah.
MR: And people from the village would come out for it?
SG: Yeah, lots of people would do, yeah.
MR: On game day would Linda come and watch you play?
SG: No. She hated it!
LG: I used to wash all the shirts mind you!
SG: Clear off! I think she came along a couple of times.
LG: Yeah.
SG: And trying to talk to me while I was playing!
LG: I used to wash all the mucky filthy shirts and socks and shorts and that was my – used to arrange the dances, didn’t we? And take the phone calls when people couldn’t play.
SG: I did say earlier on that you gave me a hundred per cent support!
LG: I didn’t hear that bit.
SG: So that’s how it was, really, yeah.
MR: When did you notice that kind of change?
SG: It was a gradual decline really. It got to the point where blokes only wanted to play football and clear off. Whereas we were a bit more than that. And I think it was a general attitude of society. In recent times they just come along, turn up, you have a hell of a job to screw the match fees out of them. Our blokes there was the odd one or two tight arses but generally speaking they coughed up, or if they didn’t pay this week they paid next week. Because you’ve got to pay haven’t you, whether you like it or not you can’t have everything for free, you know, the kit to buy, balls to buy, all that sort of stuff. And then, I think all that gradually drifted and drifted and standards have dropped and, I only hear things said and I, there’s not that general keenness. You know, we were club people, or the nucleus of us were, obviously there were ones who drifted in and out and played for us one year and then played for somebody else the next year, you’ve always had that sort of element. But we were, I wouldn’t say we were a hundred per cent local, but we were seventy-five per cent I suppose, some came from Ashford, old school pals and people like that. But when they come and play for Hamstreet, they play for Hamstreet. And they were good club people, so that reflected in the dances and things like that. They always used to turn up with their partners and mums and dads or whatever they, was going on, you know, and yeah, it was good.
MR: Did you become chair in 1980?
SG: Late eighties, perhaps around ninety, yeah.
MR: Did it still have that social aspect then?
SG: Oh yeah, it was still working pretty well then, yeah.
MR: So only more recently?
SG: Yeah, in the last ten, fifteen, twenty years, yeah, it’s gradually sort of dwindled.
MR: The period from sixty-seven to seventy-five, was that the pinnacle?
SG: I think so. We quite often sat in the pub chewing the cud. We quite often said, ‘We’ve had the best years’, I’m not going down the route of saying we’re a privileged generation, because we’ve had to work bloody hard, like everybody else should be working hard. You don’t get something for nothing in this world, do you? As id with this house – hard work. Lots of other people have done it, I’m not saying we’re special or anything like that. And with these football clubs, if you don’t work hard at it, they just, they’re no good – you’ve got to put effort into it and these people don’t put effort into it. When I was secretary, I used to spend – I had a young family, I used to go out two or three nights chasing players and doing this. I was on the Local League Council which is the league committee for the leagues we were in. I was on the Ashford Charity Cup Committee, Weald of Kent Charity Cup Committee, because I always felt if you’re on the inside, you stand half a chance of having your four penny worth. Not that I wanted to be controversial or anything like that, and you can assist with the organisation as I am still vice chairman of the Weald of Kent Charity Cup. How long we will continue, I don’t know, because the number of teams that enter into it is dwindling. And we had a bit of a body blow a couple of years ago when the Kent Amateur League decided that their clubs could only enter two cup competitions, and when we looked into it they run two cup competitions, and they’re not going to release their teams to play our Weald of Kent so we’ve effectively lost the senior section of the Weald of Kent, which was the, well, was our top competition, there’s no doubt about that, and it was quite a good competition. And now we’ve only got the junior section but how long that’s going to run I don’t know because we’re having to go as far afield as Margate – there was a mileage restriction at one time but we’ve had to forgo that now to keep the competition going, so we cover more or less all Kent. And that shows a sign of the times. And when I first started playing, or when we, I was going to say when I first started playing for Hamstreet – when we started in 1966, because the team had folded in fifty-three, fifty-four, and we restarted it in sixty-six, there were sixty odd teams in the Ashford District League. Well now that is down to, probably eight. And at that time the Maidstone League had twelve divisions. I think they’re down to one division now. And possibly that, I’m not sure how long that’s going to last.
MR: And it’s because the village clubs are closing?
SG: Yeah, well and the town clubs, and the company – you know, like up at Maidstone, they’re used to be Aylesford Paper Mills, well there’s probably three or four teams that came out of there, the different companies that were in there, they had their own company team. But it’s just the general demise of local football. They play junior football but they don’t go on to play senior football. They disappear somewhere in between junior and senior. I think that’s where a major problem is. They suddenly find golf. They suddenly find something else. They’ve got a lot more choices than we ever had – we had football, cricket, and when it was dark we played table tennis and darts. We were restricted to a degree, but now they’ve got so many more chances. The sport – I would have loved the Stour Centre or something in Ashford to be there when I was a kid. We had to go to Folkestone Barracks, Folkestone Army, Barracks, there so-called indoor cricket school, which was in an old cavalry stables. Freezing cold, but we could play cricket in the winter and that was absolutely wonderful. But now they, most of these places have indoor nets and, so that, and now I think also, going back to where I was talking about people just turning up, playing and going – a lot of people like the instant appeal of five-a-side. We go up to our daughters and we come down the A- whatever it is, A316 past Twickenham and all that lot and there’s two or three big courts where people are playing football in at half past nine at night. Well we never had those facilities. So these lads can go and play their football, put the kit in their bag and go home, and it’s all over and done with in an hour, hour and a half, and I think that’s had a bearing on it. So I think football’s in a state of change as we know it, overall.
MR: It sounds as if it’s become less of a tradition and more something you fit in…
SG: Yeah.
MR: It’s quite sad.
SG: It is really. And cricket is the same. I reigned over the demise of our local cricket club, Warehorne, as chairman, and that was the same – the lack of keenness and commitment. And I get it, I understand it – people have got mortgages to pay and this, that and the other. We had the same thing – somehow or another we had to work around it, because it’s quite a commitment. It wasn’t always received around these parts – I’m going at half past twelve, I won’t be back until nine or ten o’clock tonight – which is a long old chunk out of the weekend isn’t it? You know, if we was playing a Kent Village League game up at Dartford or somewhere and by the time we’ve travelled and played and had a couple of beers afterwards and come back again, it’s, it is those sort of hours. So the cricket club went the same way. And it is that time, or that demand on people’s time I think that’s created a lot of the problems, which it is a shame.
MR: When did the cricket club close?
SG: About 2000.
MR: And when did you stop playing for them?
SG: I stopped around the same time I started building this, around mid-eighties. But I still remained as chairman but I was tied up here, because this suddenly became the main thing in my life. You’ve just got to put the time into it, and I couldn’t be up there playing cricket and not here, really. Well for my own reasons anyway. Not just other people’s reasons.
MR: But you still kept a link with the club?
SG: Oh yeah, I was still an integral part of it because it had been a big part of my life from nineteen – mid fifties, fifty-four I used to go up there scoring when I was about ten, you know, doing the scorebook and everything. And that’s when, if they were short I used to, they used to stand one of us on the boundary, probably hadn’t got a clue what was going on. So yeah, that was all part and parcel of it, yeah.
MR: What age did you start playing for the men’s team?
SG: Well I was pretty young there! I could give you a definitive date if I went back through the scorebooks, I was only about twelve when I first started playing for them. Yeah, cause I was quite a tall sort of bloke. I used to turn up week in week out like Bill did, with his boots, and if they were short, ‘You can play today then’, and like I say they used to park us on the boundary and protect us, they didn’t want to take a kid home with big black eyes! ‘Oh sorry he’s got hit with a cricket ball!’ So yeah, and they were good, they were good people, yeah.
MR: Was there a good social side to the cricket as well?
SG: Yeah, especially after the game. Not so much through the week or anything like that. Yeah, it was a good group, yeah. And we always used to, that’s what I enjoyed about the local aspect of it because I’ve said to Linda time and time again, I’ve made friendships with people I played cricket and football against and they’re long lasting. We might not see each other for two years then suddenly you bump into them and it’s like a long-lost friend – it’s things that you treasure, or in my tiny little mind I do. I think it’s wonderful, and they’re long lasting friendships and you can reminisce and ‘What about so and so’, and some of them go deeper than that, and closer than that. But you do make an awful lot of friends, and you can’t buy that can you? That’s wonderful.
MR: How did you start playing table tennis?
SG: We stumbled across that one. Bill lived in the Duke’s head, as I said, and he probably told you, and we played table tennis at the youth club, so his dad was always a bit forward-thinking, it was totally inappropriate really but the saloon bar, as it was, the other side, had partitions so you could close it off and it wasn’t wide enough but it was sufficient, and so he bought a table, and we ended up, we had a team over there. Ovvie, the old boy who played in goal, the insurance bloke for Ruckinge, his father was the cobbler on the other side of the road, and he was the cobbler, you know, sat there with his glasses like that and leather thing and all that business – he played, I played, Bill played, and then a couple or three other people, and we entered the league and it all stemmed from there. And then that packed up and went off and played up in Ashford, and one or two up there, and that was, once again that was strong, that’s not as strong now as what it was. I’m not involved in it and haven’t been for years but you can see how it’s sort of tailed off, the involvement, the number of teams and that sort of thing.
MR: Was there a youth club in Hamstreet?
SG: Yes.
MR: I assume it’s no longer open?
SG: No longer open, no. It started off, there’s a hall up the street that’s now an old people’s home, or a home for mentally handicapped people I think now, that was the old church hall, and the vicar ran it with a committee. Me, Joe Bloggs, I was chairman of the bloody youth club when I was about fifteen, sixteen. Yeah, the vicar used to run it. And then when the Victory Hall opened, that’s the village hall, round this side of the village, opened in 1960, sixty-one, we moved from there down to there, and we had the youth club over there for a good number of years, I can’t remember when it packed up and then various ones have opened since then and closed and opened and closed, as is, things happens don’t they?
MR: Apart from table tennis what sort of things would you do at the youth club?
SG: Darts, cards, all those sort of things. The old-fashioned sort of games. Sounds a bit corny now, but probably snakes and ladders on the table if somebody wanted to have a go, stuff like that I suppose.
MR: Good fun then?
SG: Yeah, yeah, we used to have a load of kids come out from Ashford – it must have been offering something or they wouldn’t have come would they? It was a means, because their school friends were here, you know, we all knew each other I suppose. It was a much, areas were much smaller weren’t they, tighter. People knew, people knew people, you know I used to know loads of people in Ashford. I worked in Ashford, I went to school in Ashford, I played football and cricket in Ashford, I played table tennis in Ashford. You do get to know a lot of people by moving around in that locality, so it’s, there is a benefit to staying in the same place. But on the other hand you’ve got to try and be not to parochial, which you can slip into that if you’re not too careful. I was on the parish council for fifteen to twenty years and then, soon after we lost our little girl it all got a bit politicised and political, and I hate mainstream politics in local government, I think it’s almost obscene. We’re not interested in that, we’re interested in whether that lamppost is working. I know it’s very mundane and boring, or ‘Did you get your dustbin emptied?’, or ‘Did somebody’s dog crap on the pavement?’ or whatever, and it all got politicised and so I walked away from it and I didn’t want to be a part of it, because on the back of what happened down the road, the new road was opened, that’s theory, because this was a nightmare through here, with all the lorries and everything. That was what caused the death of our little girl. A lorry crashed into them down the bottom of the village. They were waiting to go to a netball match with the girl guides and two of them were killed. That was our little girl and another little girl, and so it all got very emotive and in some instances over the top and political people popped their heads up above the parapet, so you’ve got to try and keep it all in its context, but I’m back on the bloody parish council now! They were short on numbers and they asked me if I’d go back, yeah.
MR: Has it changed since you were last there?
SG: Different ideas, yeah. I think it’s quite good, yeah. New people, new people in the village because there’s a movement of people. And going back to when we started our football club in sixty-six, or not our football club but the re-birth of the football club – the estate down the bottom of the village where there’s about sixty or seventy houses, which seemed like a massive development in those days, suddenly there was an influx of these new people into the village. I wouldn’t say it doubled in size or anything like that but there were one or two other estates built in the village around about that time so the numbers have gone up, so there were a lot of new people and people were meeting in the pub and it was all spawned from that. And that football club assisted to bring people together because there was an element of, and I hate it, I’ll embrace anything and anybody, the local, ‘Well we don’t like bloody newcomers, do we?’ But that football club, our football club helped to bring us together. Old farts like me who’d been here all my life and then these other young blokes who’d moved in with their wives, and it did, it brought the village together.
MR: When was this estate built?
SG: That was early sixties, along with some of the others. And that’s the power of sport isn’t it?
MR: So you became friends with some of the people off the new estate through football?
SG: Yeah, still friends now. Yeah. And like I say it was through football. And then one or two joined the cricket club over at Warehorne, because our cricket club, when I say our cricket club, Hamstreet cricket club packed up in 1939, they used to have a club down here, or a team down here, and then they packed up and generally speaking people sort of – Warehorne wasn’t big enough to feed a whole team so people from Hamstreet used to play up there, some people, so that was a mixture up there. It was a lovely club, yeah, really nice club. And sport keeps ticking over doesn’t it.
MR: Is there any discussion on the parish council to start something up?
SG: Well, when I was on the parish council we had the field down the road, Pound Lees, and we leased it at that time off the old East Ashford Rural District Council which is now an amalgamation and is, as one, the Ashford Borough Council, so we leased that off them for about corn rent, I can’t remember if it was a ninety-nine year lease or a nine hundred and ninety-nine year lease, and at that time the parish council decided we needed to enhance the facilities so we had a little piece of pavilion built down there, changing rooms with a view to building on the end of it. Well that never materialized. And in the meantime a new organisation started which was called the HDSLA which is Hamstreet and District Sports and Leisure Association, that was a vehicle formed form the parish council with representatives from all the other sports clubs and leisure clubs and what have you in the village to form the committee, to enable them to claim grant money, because the parish council are not in a position to be able to claim grant money, so that was a vehicle to operate as a sub-committee of the parish council. They, over the years I’ve been an integral part of that, from the start of it until recent years I’ve packed up and let the younger generation get stuck in – for a longtime my brother and myself kept it going really, mowing the football field and that sort of thing, we had an old tractor and mower, but over the years, and then a few years ago they built a pavilion down there which is a lovely building with a bar and this, that, and the other, function room, so that has enabled the village to move on really. We’ve got, I was involved in that part of it, we’ve got a multipurpose games area down there with floodlights, so for a village we’re pretty well, pretty well catered for really. And that being a multipurpose you can play, there’s two tennis courts on there, five-a-side football, netball, so you’ve covered all aspects of the population really. Old people can play on there, young people can play on there, so it’s a marvelous facility, and that is run by the sports and leisure association as their own autonomous body I suppose – is that the right word? And they raise their funds, they organise this, they take, they obviously take profit from the bar and that sort of thing, and the parish council tries to support them where possible. And so yeah, from the point of view of that, we’re quite well off.
MR: And it’s quite well used?
SG: Yeah, yeah. They now, because we haven’t got our own football team, they rent it out on a Sunday to Market Hotel, one of the better known Sunday football teams from Ashford, and Ashford FC play there on a Saturday, and they’ve got, they were playing somewhere else but they decided they’d like to come here as soon as they found out the pitch was available. And they’ve got two or three junior teams as well, so that augurs well for the future, and I think some of the younger village kids have got involved with it as well now. Playing for them. So it’s getting well used, yeah.
MR: There’s still football being played here even if there isn’t a Hamstreet team…
SG: There’s still football being played, yeah. Woodchurch come over and use the multipurpose thing for training and what have you one night a week. Appledore youngsters come over and use it one night a week I think or for an hour or two, so yeah, quite a few people use it, yeah.
MR: Is there a netball team that uses it?
SG: No, not at the moment, no. And they changed the concept of netball, because we did have a netball team here, but then the Ashford Netball League, I think they got lottery grant money and this, that and the other – they were playing at Ball Lane where Ashford Cricket Club used to be and the hockey club used to be, but they got a load of money and they’ve got a court, I think they call Courtside, up on Stanhope in Ashford where they play all the league matches there, the netball league, which isn’t a bad idea I suppose because then the umpires and everything are there and they play it on one night a week or two nights a week or something. I know there are one or two people that do play netball in the village for Ashford teams but who they are, who they play for, I don’t know. We certainly haven’t got an active team here. I don’t think we have. There might be a fun team. There was some talk of that, I don’t know whether that’s going on, I don’t know.
MR: Can you tell me a bit more about playing cricket indoors at Folkestone Barracks?
SG: That was a means of us getting a bit of practice in in the winter. So we all used to climb into an old taxi, a 1930 something Armstrong Siddeley or some such thing because I’m talking about very early sixties now, and we used to go off to Folkestone Barracks, and it was a huge setup down there, not quite so much now, a lot of it’s been closed and squashed down. And on the top of Risborough Lane there was an old cavalry stables which was obviously a long building where all these horses used to stand in their own little things – they’d all been stripped out, a line of Asphalt or something had been stuck in down the middle and fluorescent lights hung up there and there was some netting put up, and that was an indoor cricket school, which, once again, to us countryfolk it was, it was sheer heaven! There were none of these sports centres or anything around. Schools didn’t even have inside cricket facilities. They have now, we’ve used some of them over the years but that was as good as it got. And it was wonderful, we used to go off down there and have, I don’t know how long we’d rent it or had it for, whether it was an hour, two hours, whatever, people used to, people turning either their arm over or having a tonk with the bat. And the only nets I’d ever been in was at St Lawrence of Canterbury, you know, county ground, because I used to go over there for coaching. I went over there and Doug Wright used to take coaching and I was over there with the AKCC which was the Association of Kent Cricket Clubs, they sponsored me. And Alan used to come, Alan Ealham, the chap who I said was Kent Captain, and those and the others, we used to go over and for me to play indoors like that well, it was a wonderful experience, especially knowing that the county players and all the test match players had been in here. And old DVP Wright who used to coach us he was an ex-England leg-spinner, he held the record for wickets and all that sort of thing. It was hero worship almost!
MR: Was the barracks a bit more basic than that set-up?
SG: Considerably more basic, yeah!
MR: So you went down with your friends when the weather was poor?
SG: No, no, it was organised by the club. Yeah, we had to pay, the club had to pay, so we obviously chipped our two bob in or whatever it was. It was organised, I’m not quite sure – I think that was through the AKCC, which once again is the Association of Kent Cricket Clubs, which is like a cooperative thing really, and that is split into areas throughout the county. I’ve got an old book in there, I’ve got all sorts of things if you ever need information. So that was, yeah, that was our winter training. We used to go down about January, February time, freezing cold!
MR: Was it still a functioning barracks?
SG: The barracks were, yeah. Yeah, strangely, about two years after that, three years after that, we, when I see we, G. Wallace, who I worked for, we obtained the term contract for all the army establishment, or military establishments from sort of Hastings through to Ramsgate, electrical maintenance, we had a stalls in Folkestone so I actually worked there for a number of years as a young electrician. And I used to look at the old building and think that’s where we used to trundle up and down bloody frozen to the marrow! But yeah, it was all part and parcel of it, wasn’t it? Moving from the stone ages to the Tudor times! It was a bit longer before we got to present time.
MR: You said there was no indoor cricket facilities at school. Was there a sports hall or a gymnasium?
SG: We had a gymnasium with the standard wall bars and ropes, which I’m sure you’ve seen. They used to pull them out. I can’t even recollect laying that matting down and having a bit of cricket indoors, I’m sure we didn’t, not at school.
MR: Did you have to do gymnastics?
SG: Yeah.
MR: Dd you like it?
SG: Yeah, anything like that. The only thing I didn’t like was cross country. It’s a better idea to stop in the pub really! But we had no pubs on route! Yeah, that was the only thing, but we had, I certainly loved anything like that. Athletics. I wouldn’t say I was the greatest athlete in the world but I used to have a go. Long jump, high jump, all that sort of stuff. Loved it.
MR: Was there a school sports day?
SG: Yes.
MR: What do you remember about those?
SG: Throwing the javelin, throwing the cricket ball. Relay races, all that sort of thing, yeah. Yeah all the usual sort of stuff. I can’t, I’ve often thought about it, I can’t see how they crammed it all into one afternoon, it was quite a lot of things going on, wasn’t there? You had cricket balls whizzing about and javelins. It’s a wonder nobody got killed! I can remember there was the hundred meters, sorry, yeah, hundred yards, two-twenty yards, four-forty yards, eight-eighty yards, we never done a mile. I suppose that was deemed too far, probably killed half the contestants that would have done because we were so unfit I suppose. Yeah, there was that, throwing the cricket ball, hop skip and a jump - triple jump as it is now - long jump, high jump, javelin, discus. Very big on discus. That’s another thing, wonder that didn’t kill anybody, wouldn’t it? There was no such thing as nets in those days, we didn’t have any nets up. People do it spinning round, that’s what happened to that Peter Harding who went to Arsenal, the goalkeeper I was telling you about. He sadly broke his leg in the summer before he went to Arsenal as a youngster, and they found he’s got a bit of a bone problem. He did eventually go to Arsenal but he never quite made it, he ended up at Aldershot or somewhere.
MR: Because of the injury?
SG: Yeah, they found he’d got a bit of a bone problem, I don’t know what it was.
MR: Was swimming an option at school?
SG: Thank Christ it wasn’t. Yes, we used to go swimming. In our last year we used to go down to the local baths in Ashford, which was open air, and it was cold! I can remember one time we came out and we was all purple. God it was bloody cold! And that was our only swimming, yeah. It was very limited. And we had a walk down there, it was about, I don’t know, a mile away, mile and a half away. So that was very restricted really. That’s why a lot of us country folk can’t swim. Because the lack of facility when we were kids really. If we went, we could go down to the canal and swim in the canal if we wanted to – there weren’t too many sulphates in there then as what it is now, but no, it was fairly restrictive.
MR: Was it a boys school or was it mixed?
SG: There were two schools like that. Boys, girls. With a path thing up the middle. We had our own playing field, they had there own playing field. So that was the south boys, that was the south girls. So effectively boys only.
MR: So sporting activities were separate?
SG: Yeah.
MR: You didn’t meet your wife through playing football in Ruckinge?
SG: No, they came along in sixty-six, and I’d already left Ruckinge and I was playing at Hamstreet. That was the first year we started down here. And they, Linda’s parents were landlord and landlady of the Blue Anchor. We found most of the landlords and landladies were supportive of us local teams, all of them were really around here, which is good. I guess we had twenty blokes in – it’s good business really isn’t it?
MR: Were there pub teams?
SG: No, not as such, but in about 1970, early seventies, we did start a team from Linda’s mum and dad’s pub. How it came about I don’t know but we were the Jaffas, I don’t know how that name came about. Purely a social, social team. Probably because we managed to purloin these orange coloured shirts from somewhere I suppose, I don’t know. But I thought we bought them ourselves anyway because there’s no money. Anyway that came form Linda’s mum and dad’s pub really, the Jaffas, and that was a right old mixture because by then we’ve got two teams running down at Hamstreet. We’d got people like myself and two or three others who were premier division players and premier team footballers and what have you, and then we’ve got players who played for other teams, and then we’ve got two or three lads who couldn’t even get into our reserves down here. It was just a fun team. And somehow or another it clicked. We actually played over at Warehorne – we couldn’t play down here, we played over at Warehorne, and we had a few years, we weren’t quite good enough for the premier division but we were too good for the first division so we used to win the first division, get promoted, get hammered the next year, come back down again, win the premier division, sorry win the first division, go back up into the premier division, and it was a bit like that. But we were purely and simply a fun team.
MR: So you were still playing for Hamstreet at the same time?
SG: Yeah, yeah. And it was good. We had a lot of good times.
MR: What’s the origin of ‘Jaffas’?
SG: I really don’t know. As I say it emanated from Linda’s mum and Dad’s pub.
MR: How is that spelt?
SG: As in Jaffa Cakes. Jaffa oranges. I wonder why it was called the Jaffas? I had nothing to do with the setting up of it or anything I just, because I was secretary and everything down there I just though I’m gonna leave well alone, keep out of it, and I just tipped up and played whenever they wanted me, you know? But we had a lot of fun. That, ultimately, became Hamstreet Sunday, because in about early eighties or sometime Jaffas was struggling a bit and our – no that must have been mid-eighties – I can’t think of his name now, he took over from me as secretary, well he had been running Spartan Football Club or something in Ashford, and they were struggling, and by then he was secretary of Hamstreet Football Club, so he brought Spartans down, and they amalgamated with Jaffas, and it became Hamstreet Sunday. So we did have a, for a good number of years we had a Sunday team as well down here. So we was running a first team and a reserves on a Saturday, and then a Sunday team, just one Sunday team, but for a few years we had two Sunday teams, so we had four teams here for a while. Plus early days we had a kids team as well, an under fifteens or something, which me and another bloke used to run. But I thought it was a bit mean really, I’d been playing Saturday afternoons, Sunday morning and then taking the kids out on a Sunday afternoon and I’ve got two daughters. Bit unreasonable really! So I only done that for about a year. But that didn’t last very long, the kids team, anyway. But I think that’s about all.
MR: But overall some very good memories of playing sport then?
SG: Yeah. Oh, it’s been a fun time, yeah. And going back to the cricket, I, blowing my own trumpet again, I along with Bill and one or two of these other people like Alan Ealham, coming back to this Ames I was talking about, Les Ames, his nephew Frankie played with us, we all played for the under nineteen AKCC team, and we had a jolly good cricket team then. I was probably the only one who didn’t go to Ashford, I should have gone to Ashford to play really because cricket, strangely, cricket was my first love. Like I say I was captain of the school team and I played a reasonable standard, a pretty good standard, had the coaching over at Canterbury and played in this under nineteen team and, you know, there was a bunch of god cricketers about then. Yeah, once again it was a joy to play with them really. And they all stayed with Ashford and I stayed down here because probably from a social point of view it was purely and simply financial. I couldn’t afford to go to Ashford. I didn’t feel inside me that I could afford to go to Ashford because people up there were Hobbs Parker, the estate agent, people who owned the market. Old Frank Hobbs, he was the governor, and he used to turn up in his Rolls Royce while me, I’m an apprentice electrician, I haven’t got two ha’pennies to rub together, and I just couldn’t, I couldn’t be comfortable with the fact that I’m going over there playing cricket. I couldn’t do it, I’d struggle to pay my way, you know. And even though Alan Ealham’s Dad kept going on at me to go over there, I just didn’t feel comfortable.
MR: The fact that he had a lot of money put you off?
SG: Well, from that side of it, yeah. I like to be on a level footing with everybody, and I couldn’t see myself going over there and being a little working-class boy. Inverted snobbery I suppose, I don’t know. I just wouldn’t have been comfortable with it anyway. Alan’s grandad used to finance him, not so much his dad but his grandad, and you needed a bit of that. And Bill, Bill admitted to me the other day, because he went over to Ashford, and he kept on to me about going over there – he admitted to me only just recently that his dad financed him to go over there. Because on a, he was a junior reporter at the time, he was earning peanuts wasn’t he? And you just couldn’t afford it. Some people were prepared to go and sit in the corner and keep taking their drinks and doing this and doing that, but if I couldn’t pay my way I wouldn’t have felt comfortable. So I do think that’s a restriction, because in later years I played cricket with a, we put a team together, we used to do a lot of work in Batchelors foods, Batchelors soups, Batchelors peas, over at Ashford, and they kept on about, they had a cricket team, and they kept on about us versus the contractors, putting a team together, well we actually put quite a good team together, and we played them one afternoon, and this lad Keith Robinson, he hadn’t played cricket for ten years, and he smashed seventy or eight runs all over the place and we didn’t realise at the time he’s got a broken arm – he didn’t know, he’d fallen off a scaffold and broken his arm – he smashed this ball about all over the place and said he could remember – you could see he’d got it, he was a natural, and by then he was perhaps forty by then – and he was saying he went for a trial with Kent, and he was the only one there in black trousers, because his mum and dad couldn’t afford anything else. He lived up at Green Street Green, up Swanley way, almost metropolitan Kent, and all these sort of tales you hear. Another one of our players, he went for a trial at Kent, same day as Alan Knott did, and he said he’d got no chance, he hadn’t got the proper gloves, you know, it all gets a bit crazy doesn’t it. And so over the years an awful lot of talent, and I guess in every sport has gone, or missed out, because, and perhaps the sports have missed out, I don’t know, because that sort of attitude, which is now ironed out a bit. Which is good to see. If you’ve got a bit of talent now, if you don’t make it, it’s down to you now, I think.
MR: When you said you didn’t feel like you could go, was it the travelling, equipment, a membership you had to pay?
SG: Everything. When I played for the under nineteen team, this dear old Mr Munge, the bloke with the tie round his trousers, he was our secretary and everything, he said: ‘You take my bat’, because I didn’t even own my own bat at that time – I was trying to buy tools, they were much more important to me than a cricket bat. I had to buy my own tools by the time I was seventeen or something or other, certain rules in the apprenticeship you know, and he lent me a bat, he lent me a pair of pads, and I went over there and all these other boys, they’d all got their own kit. So it put m eon the back foot a bit really, which, and it can make you feel a bit, I don’t think inferior, inferior’s the wrong word, but certainly, certainly not put you in the right frame of mind to be within that group. And I’ve always had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about it, perhaps it’s me, I don’t know. I’ll mix with anybody, I’ll talk to anybody, and I’ll join in and I’ll work to the rules, and I’m happy to do so. But yeah, I just, I just kept away from it because of that reason.
MR: And did they give an attitude of you’re not welcome?
SG: Not the blokes in that team, no. I think it was in here, yeah. Obviously some other people would feel differently about it but, yeah. Our daughter lives in Chiswick now, she lives in a million pound house and all this sort of stuff. We live in a nice house but I lived in a two up, two down up the end of the road, with a toilet down the bottom of the garden. My mum and dad had nothing. We were never in debt, we never owed money, we were decent people like thousands and thousands of other people are. Millions of people. The backbone of society really, isn’t it? But they couldn’t afford, they had, I’d stretched their budget anyway because when I was playing at school I used to play cricket on a Saturday morning, there’s all these train fares – I never came home on the school bus because I was always doing something at school. So of course they were paying fare, I was paying fare I was going off working on the farm in between times and this is what I try to say to our daughter and her bloke, yeah, our daughter: we had nothing, we literally had nothing. So for my dad, I can remember the first, what I would consider decent pair of football boots I had for Christmas. These kids nowadays wouldn’t be bloody seen in them. And I was absolutely thrilled to bits. They had these great big leather studs in them and things like that. And when I had a pair of cricket boots and cricket trousers my Mum knitted me a jumper and all this sort of thing, and then I see all these blokes they turn up with bags and bats and this, that and the other and it just shows you how societies moved on. So I think going back in those days there’s an awful lot of, I’m not just saying me, but there was an awful lot of good cricketers who didn’t move on because, on to the next level, because of that sort of reason. Football’s slightly different, well completely different really, but cricket was a little bit elitist, which was a shame really.
MR: At a village level or higher up?
SG: Higher up, yeah. Yeah, because village level the clubs supply the bats, the pads, the this, that and the other. Obviously personal attire like boxes and things like that you – there were club boxes there, in the days of the clap you wouldn’t put one of those on! But that’s how it was, people wouldn’t think twice about using a club box. Me being a fussy old bugger I’d buy me own! But yeah, all those things come into play don’t they?
MR: Because cricket equipment’s pretty pricey, and there’s a lot of it.
SG: Certainly was then, yeah. I remember I went and bought these – I asked the blokes what’s the best pair of boots you can have? And there’s a sports outfitter in Ashford, bearing in mind everything was squashed down in those days, you couldn’t go into, well for arguments’ sake I remember going into, when we went on one of our football trips we went into Selfridges and I bought a Viktor Barna table tennis bat, it was sponge, because sponge table tennis bats were illegal for a long time, when they came back in I bought a sponge bat and thought pheww, cat’s whiskers, and I bought that in the sports department in Selfridges. But we didn’t have anything like that down here, we had Wrights, strangely it was tied up with DVP Wrights who was a cricket coach. And they done everything, football boots, cricket kit, rugby kit, all that sort of stuff, and it was like an Aladdin’s cave to a bloke like me. And I used to go in there and sort it out and I can remember coming out with these something hide, cowhide football boots, not canvas boots or anything, and I saved up and got them, and yeah, that’s how it was. It’s almost like the land of plenty now, nobody goes without anything do they? And I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, good luck to them, I’d love to be in that position, I’d love to jump in my car and go up to the sports centre, you know, the local Stour Centre, play indoor cricket, indoor football. I would have loved all of that. But it’s generational a lot of it.
MR: Perhaps this generation will look back enviously at the camaraderie of village sport?
SG: Precisely. The joy I’ve extracted from that, and a lot of my mates have when I get talking to them. As I said earlier, you can’t replace that. That was wonderful. We did have good times. Even the silly things like going to the Leas Cliff Hall in Folkestone, walking in there, we changed over from Ted Heath and his band and Eric Delaney and people like that, they were dance bands, to the pop group sort of thing. And I remember waking into the Leas Cliff Hall at Folkestone and the stairs, you drop down to the main dance floor, so it’s a bit like one of these Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers type things, you know, you’re appearing at the top of the stairs – never did get any applause though! And Lulu was on, when she was fifteen singing ‘Shout’, and then another time it was the Mojos, and this was the new era of the amplifier – I’ve never heard so much sound in all my life, and we were part of that, we were part of the chip over from the old fashioned sort of music to the modern music. We were part of it from the old-fashioned football to the new style of football, to the new this and that with cricket, we’ve seen all the changes, through the cricket with T20, ODIs and stuff like that. I remember going to the Gillette stuff at Canterbury with Linda’s father. Having sat through two or three days of county cricket, boring old mundane county cricket as it was then, to this new fifty overs format, or fifty-five overs, Gillette Cup, it was like a dream come true. It was a proper day out. It started that day, it finished that day. So we’ve been part of all that change within sport and the modernization of it, if we like to call it that, so we, yeah, Baby boomers, we have been privileged, from that point of view, the way I see it.


--ENDS--