Bill Day Oral History Recording

Bill Day Oral History Recording

Bill Day

An oral history interview with Bill Day

Michael Romyn

Kent's Sporting Memories

Interview recorded on 22 February, 2019

Michael Romyn; Bill Day

Kent's Sporting Memories

MP3 file; also available in WAV
(1:35:25)

English

Sound recording

Bill Day

Sound recording

(1:35:25)

Kent’s Sporting Memories Oral History Transcript Interviewee: Bill Day Interviewer: Michael Romyn Date: 22 February, 2019 Location: Bill Day’s home in Hythe, Kent. MR: Can you say your name, date of birth and where you were born? BD: Yes, Bill Day, William Day, but they call me Bill. Born in Dartford on the twentieth of October, 1942. MR: And your parents, where were they born? BD: They were born, they were born in Dartford, yeah, a long time before that! MR: Do you remember the year of their births? BD: Oh crumbs. Well yes, 1915, my Father, and 1917 my Mother. MR: And what did they do for a living? BD: Father was Rating and Evaluation Officer for Dartford, in that department anyhow. Mother was, did a lot of secretarial stuff in London, going to London everyday to do it. All before my time really because once I’d arrived, and my brother and sister, she hadn’t, you know, and of course the war intervened, 1939 we had the war, father went off, he did pretty well in the Royal Artillery. Was I think acting Major when he, it was Captain Day but acting Major was I think — his rank was Captain by the time he came out, and he did that in the war. And he travelled, he was in Holland and France and Germany, I’m not sure about Germany, so he got campaign medals for that sort of thing. MR: And then once the war ended… BD: Once the war ended, then he took a pub, well, he went back to his old job but I never really talked to him very much about it. I think he was restless, by then he was restless because he’d done so much travelling during the war and so many things had happened he found it difficult to settle back into the old routine I think, and he then took a pub in Hamstreet, near Ashford, Dukes Head, and they were there for ten years, so he went into the pub trade, and then became an estate agent after that. MR: Do you remember the pub at all? BD: Yes I do. I sort of grew up there really. MR: Did your Dad play sport at all? BD: Not that much because he damaged his back in the war, well he did play before the war. He played cricket, tennis a bit, I think, football, played for Dartford Boy’s when he was, well, when he was about fifteen or fourteen or something. I covered, for the Mail, I went to cover an FA Cup match for Dartford, I think they were playing Fulham or somewhere, FA Cup, and he said, ‘When you get there, just have a look at one end of the ground where the corner flag dips very low, because I used to have to take corners from there and getting the ball into the middle was a nightmare’, and he was fifteen sort of thing! And blow me, when I got there first thing was I looked and it was still there, the dip, and the ground sort of dips away, falls away. It was exactly as he said it would be, and that’s a long time in between…whether it’s still like that now I don’t know, because I haven’t been back to Dartford to watch football there. The other thing I saw in Dartford was the first run Zola Budd made, remember Zola Budd? Brought over by the Daily Mail and she ran her first race, they had to get her a certain number of races to qualify for the Olympics, obviously she was going to have no problem with the times, but she had to get the runs in, in this country. But she ran at Dartford track, which was not in the best of condition actually. MR: Did she rune bare foot? BD: Yes, that’s it, bare foot. Yes, that was her first run. And I was there for the Mail. NBC came over, CNN, all the great broadcasters of the world were there, on this little tiny athletics track. The best bit of luck I ever had was, I got there really early, cause I knew, there was a crush of, even getting a seat in the press box, you know, that kind of thing. But I got there really early and I wandered around the green house, a market garden kind of thing, right next to the track, and I saw a telephone, and I saw a man in there – nobody else in there – massive great green house kind of thing, and I said any chance I can borrow that telephone for the afternoon, hire it, and I gave him, I gave him fifty pounds then and there on the spot, and said ‘if you can keep that just for me exclusively’. So he was delighted, Saturday afternoon, he wasn’t doing much at all. Meanwhile the rest of them, NBC and all the rest of them, were having to go to a telephone box in the middle of Dartford! Before the days of mobiles and everything, it was sort of mid-eighties. MR: And this was to file the story? BD: This was to file the story – to get the news out. MR: What would you have done if one of the NBC chaps approached you asking to use the phone? BD: I probably would have let him do it. You know, I did my job to get the, it was pure luck of course, but I think I probably would, providing, I’d have to say, ‘look, don’t tell anyone else for heaven’s sake’, you know, I’m not going to be using it all the time, but I don’t want anyone else to know about it otherwise everybody will use it – it’s only about twenty-five yards from the press box! Right next door! MR: Do you know what year this was? BD: Well I think it was eighty-four, it must have been, Los Angeles Olympics was eighty-four, and she ran in that. So it must have been very early in eighty-four, I think. MR: Was she very impressive? BD: Oh yes, she did what she was supposed to do. And then of course, I think, in some respects, manhandled by it all, I don’t think she knew really what she was letting herself in for. Don’t think it was a very good enterprise on our part, because was the race she, Mary Decker, the great American runner, who tripped and fell and who was favored to win that race, accused Budd of tripping her, you know, so there were a lot of problems about it all. But I don’t think the Mail were too clever, as good as it sounded, getting her to run for Great Britain, I think it was in the end – such a frail girl, mind you tough as nails, great runner and everything, bare foot runner. It was a lovely story but I think it didn’t do her much good in some respects, I don’t think. MR: Do you know what happened to her post-running career? BD: She went back to, I’m trying to think what area she came from, no I can’t think. MR: Getting back to your parents, did your Mum play sport? BD: In her youth she did, played tennis and things, yeah. She was quite active, a sporty person, but not, I don’t think it was organised sport too much. She was very – she played tennis. And in those days there was quite a lot of that, she’d have played with my father, I think. A lot of houses had tennis courts, even then. But I’m very hazy on that, before the war, because I wasn’t around. MR: Can you describe your first memories, what it was like growing up in Dartford… BD: Well I don’t have too many memories of Dartford because we left in 1950 to go to the pub at Hamstreet, in Kent. My memories are of, my Father used to take me in his car, lovely old Austin, and a Ford, and he had a Morris, one of those very small Morris’, with lovely leather seats, the smell of the leather was magnificent, and that kind of thing, I remember that. But I don’t have too many memories – I remember being with my Grandfather, pushing him up a hill, apparently I used to wear a bowler hat. He had a bowler hat and he used to take me down to the shops, the newsagents, and I used to wear this bowler hat into the shop, provided I pushed him back up the hill and all this sort of stuff. But I don’t have too many memories – it’s odd actually because, I remember my mother being taken away, she was very ill, about 1946, an ambulance, I remember a blue light flashing outside the bedroom window where I was upstairs, and that must have been some kind of profound effect it had on me I think, because I remember that very well. She was very ill. She had gangrene and everything, poison. MR: Was she okay? BD: Yes, but for the rest of her life she had a problem. Funny these things you don’t know as much as you should probably, but you don’t always ask the questions. MR: There’s plenty of my family’s history I know nothing of. BD: No, my Father, the same with the war, I wish I’d known, asked him more than I did about it. MR: I suppose you don’t think to do so at the time. BD: Well you don’t. And the other thing, when you do think, when you get to an age when you would like to ask him, I didn’t want him ever to think that I was only asking because he was on his last legs or something, which was the real reason I never asked him really, because he wasn’t always too well at times and I just didn’t like the thought of sitting down, it would seem odd somehow. MR: What year did you move to Hamstreet? BD: 1950. MR: Where is Hamstreet? BD: Hamstreet is between Ashford and New Romney. MR: Is it a village? BD: It’s a village. MR: And what do you remember about those years? BD: Well, I grew up there, I still have, my oldest friend, Sid Gittens, still lives in the village, I’ve known him ever since we used to kick a football. We had a marvelous car park in the Dukes Head, which is still there, and we used to play football in the car park, and cricket, and quite often, you know, you’d have people go through into the bar area who used to kick the ball back to us or something because it had gone astray, or we were nearly taking their heads off with the ball, you know. In particular there was a Major, Major Jefferson-Hogg, part of the Hogg family, Quentin Hogg, he was part of that family, and he used to come over and have quite a few gin and tonics in the early evening and he’d quite often have quite a good laugh with the ball just missing him, whizzing past him. So we had a lot of fun really, climbing trees, catapults, guns, air guns, dreadful now, I’d never shoot anything that moved these days, but we used to have catapults and you know. I was at a prep school at the top of the hill, Cotton Hill, and we built a tree house in the wood, beautiful thing, I mean I do remember going in it, I don’t remember playing any part in it being built! I’ve never been any good at anything practical, but I do remember the squirrel tipping water over somebody coming up, trying to get into the thing, climbing up a tree to get into it, and the squirrel sort of tipped some water out or something and it went all over him. They were great days really, and those woods, now, they still exist, but the woods have got paths, designated paths, all beautifully cut and everything, but in those days we had hardly any pathways at all, but we knew the wood like the back of our hands. You got to know it, and it was a great place to hide if you ever wanted to get away from somebody or something, and you could walk all the way through there into Ruckinge, the next village, and get lost very easily if you didn’t know the way, but we knew the way, but as kids we did. MR: So you used to hang about with a group of friends? BD: Yeah, and we used to play football, kicked a ball about and all that sort of stuff as you do. MR: Were there sports teams at the school you went to? BD: There were, yes, well my education was ridiculous because I went to a primary school in Hamstreet and there was a football team there, and cricket team, then I went to a prep school up the hill, so it was all a confused period of time really, the prep school didn’t play much, a bit of cricket, a bit of football, but not much, so that wasn’t really, that didn’t feature much. I had a love of sport, though, I remember watching, father had a television, 1953 cup final, my first memory of - my first memory of television was 1948 when, we had a television in 1948 which really was a, that was in Dartford, and then we went to Hamstreet and in fifty-three I remember watching the FA Cup Final, Blackpool against Bolton. Matthews, Stan Matthews final it was called, and with half the village watching it as well, on a nine-inch screen, black and white! I mean now when you think of the things we’ve got now, which are fantastic viewing. MR: So everyone came round to your house? BD: Everyone came round to the pub, well it was a hotel actually, bed and breakfast, it was a hotel actually. We had great people there. MR: Everyone used to come round to the pub to watch the matches? BD: Yeah, they used to come round. Yes, and we used to go up to watch matches in Wembley and places like that. I was lucky, there was a chap in the village who was ten years older than me, and we used to do a lot together, you know, he was a great bloke, a chap called Dennis Ovendon, and he loved sport, and he was the perfect sort of bloke to, he was keen to help anybody, he used to do a bit of coaching, that kind of stuff, cricket coaching. I used to play cricket for Warehorne, which is the local village, well I say local, it was the next village to us, and I played football for Warehorne, sorry, cricket for Warehorne and football for Ruckinge, and we were, Hamstreet were sandwiched between the two villages. And I played for Warehorne from the age of thirteen, and I played for Ruckinge, we were a young group coming through, all about the same time, it was quite interesting actually because they had a very good team, we then came through, we got to the age of fifteen, sixteen, somewhere around there, and sort of came in as a group. We had a junior team then, Ruckinge, and we came from there really, and took over, and then we won the cup in 1960. The Ashford and District Junior League Cup, or whatever it was, and won that. MR: So you’re competing against other village teams in that? BD: Yes. In those days sport was thriving in the villages, cricket and football. MR: Would it be seasonal – cricket in the summer, football in the winter? BD: Yes, and a lot of lads from the village played. It’s sad, I’ve seen the destruction of cricket in particular I think in the villages, and also football actually. I think it’s the advance of the motorcar. When I played for Warehorne there was only one man in the team that had a car, Jim Munge had a car , and the rest of us we hadn’t got, so we used to, for away matches, we would be taken in an Armstrong Siddeley, I think it was, it was a hearse during the week, for funerals, they used to clear all the silver knobs out of it, take all the stuff out, and we used to clamber into it, the whole team used to get into it. And the man who took the mourners and things, and the coffin, to funerals during the week, to crematoriums and churches, he used to take his top hat off and kept his starched shirt on, white shirt, take his tie off, black tie, roll his sleeves up and act as our driver for sport at the weekends. MR: So you all crammed into it? BD: We crammed into it. The only problem with it, when we were, we were pretty young, but we always wanted to – the great, those great days, you hadn’t got a clubhouse, a cricket clubhouse particularly, in village cricket, but you’d go down the local pub, so you’d have a few drinks with the opposition down there, so we used to go down there. He of course would have to take us in the limo down to the village, and he’d wait outside, he’d never come in, and used to sort of tut and look out the window and look at his watch. MR: Why wouldn’t he come in? BD: Well drinking wasn’t his thing, you know, he was teetotal and I don’t ever remember having a word with him because he was sort of a very quiet man, and didn’t say very much to anybody, and I got the feeling that he reluctantly drove us around. Working all week and then doing this. He looked the real part, he looked the part for the funerals he went to, he really looked quite serious, and I don’t ever remember him smile – a smile never cracked his face. I’m probably doing him down, a disservice here. MR: So you got to know the lads from the other villages? BD: Yes, the inter-village rivalry was intense. Cricket matches against Bilsington. Ruckinge didn’t have a cricket team but Bilsington had a cricket team, which is the next village on from them, and they used to play Warehorne, so Bilsington, Ruckinge, Hamstreet, Warehorne, that’s how they were dotted. And so Warehorne matches against Bilsington, the rivalry was intense. MR: Would it attract a big crowd? BD: Quite a lot of people would come and watch us, yeah, and they were more or less, well Warehorne we were out of the village a bit but the landlord of our ground was Darcy Dawes who was a very important man of the village, you know, and the family still live in the village now. And he used to walk onto the ground at times and we used to stand to attention, sort of doff our caps or whatever we were wearing. Cause in those days cricket had to end before six o’clock because of church, because there were evening services and so on, so there was a time limit on matches. That, in the time that I was there, I think that changed. MR: Would you go to church after the match? BD: No, no. Well some people might have done but no, we didn’t? MR: Was the rivalry in good spirit or was there a bit of animosity? BD: There was a bit of animosity, yeah, it was intense, especially the football side, you know, Ruckinge against Bromley Green for instance, Bromley Green was another village, all packed around this area, just up the road between Hamstreet and Ashford, playing them was, especially when you were young – and Shadoxhurst, another village just around the corner – they had, I mean I used to play on the wing because I was so small, thirteen, fourteen, somewhere there, and you’d have a winger, full back, massive great bloke charging at you, an adult, and their whole purpose was to crush you. And many wet pitches, football we’re talking about, and there’d be slide tackles, they’d want to take you into touch. The only thing you’ve got going for you was you’re a bit nippy and you could miss them quite a lot, skip round them, and all these body swerves, we did all of that kind of stuff. They were intent on just getting you, but eventually of course they would get you, no matter how many times you tried to get away, you, in the end you’d get taken into touch and the bruises you got were intense. I remember the Ripley brothers – it’s difficult to word this, I better not say they were rough types. MR: Were they out to injure people? BD: No, I wouldn’t say they were out to injure people but their whole idea of football was to kill as many people as they could! Big defenders, their job is to defend, probably never went past the half way line. MR: In terms of the football kit, how did it compare now to back then? BD: Well the kit, we used to wear our own shirts I think we bought our own shirts. Then we had a period of having white shirts, which we bought I think, and then we had the green shirts, which were heavy, they were supplied by the club. But I remember if you were quite small, and they were always about four sizes too big for you, and when you stood up, you could put it in your socks if you hadn’t put it in your shorts. But cricket was even more interesting I think because you had a bag, a cricket bag, nobody had any kit really, although the younger players, we tended to have a bat of our own – a lot of the more senior ones relied on, this was after the war of course, mid-fifties I’m talking about really. They supplied the pads and the gloves, these sausage gloves, I don’t know whether you’ve seen them or not, they were like putting a sausage on your hand, you know, just to protect your fingers. There’d be nothing on the back of your hand to protect that bit of your hand, and then you used to have a strap round on elastic and you stuck your thumb in that, so that held the glove on, with the revolving thumb getting pushed on there, which pushed it on. But the protection was nil really, if you got hit on the hand you get, you know, it was quite damaging really. No helmets of course in those days, there were no helmets at all. They didn’t come in for years. MR: So you’re basically constructing your gloves before the game? BD: Well no, well you’d, when you’re going out to bat you’d make sure you got the thing on, because it took a bit of time to put the thing on, nut you’d get padded up before, obviously the other people are there, but if the wicket fell you’d need to be prepared to walk out, straight out, pads and gloves and it was all pretty, we had our own boots, I think, but in those days they were these great big boots that came over your ankles with studs and, nowadays, county cricketers, test cricketers, they’ve all got very slim lined boots that give no protection to the ankles at all really. But I mean they’re very comfortable and everything. MR: It sounds like a tight-knit community… BD: Oh, we used to have to clean sheep droppings cause the sheep were on the pitch during the week and things and we had to clear all that, cow pats and all that kind of stuff, and the ball could often get hit out the field and it landed in a cow pat, especially when I was bowling they used to hit me over the trees as a thirteen-year-old, I used to come up and bowl these leg breaks and I used to get hit over the trees a bit until I hit my length, and then I was okay, but many a six went off my bowling. But the great thing was I had a, Arthur Carman was his name, he didn’t wear batting gloves at all. He was a man of, a hard man, but he believed in me, you know, and I was a spin bowler, and there weren’t too many spin bowlers about in those days, certainly leg break bowlers there weren’t, and he would always give me time to settle down into my bowling, and then of course once I settled down and found my length I was okay. MR: Was Arthur the captain? BD: He was the captain. MR: These were junior teams, were they? BD: No this was the senior team, I got into the senior team, these are men, these are men. They used to slow down, but bowlers, if they saw a thirteen-year-old come in they would slow down. There were one or two who didn’t, and I remember one, there was a bit of cheating going on as well at times. There was a wicket keeper I can remember who would stand up to the stumps for slow bowlers and things and if you let the ball just go past you, he would just flick the off bail off, and of course the umpire, ‘how’s that?’, call it how’s that, and you knew, and the umpire would give you out obviously because the bail on the, you know – and he was a policeman would you believe! I’m not saying he, he wasn’t a Warehorne man but it was another team, I better not say it, I better not say it. MR: Was the cricket team successful? BD: Yeah, there was no league, there was no league arrangement in those days at all. We just played friendlies, as they’re called, and I hate the word friendly because many of these games we were absolutely playing flat out to win the game, and this word friendly sort of, it’s a weak word really, cause it was anything but friendly sometimes. MR: Whereas the football team there was a league? BD: There was a league, yes. The cricket league didn’t come in until, oh, about the seventies, I think. And then they tried to get it under the umbrella of the Kent league – the big Kent league that Ashford was part of. Ashford were there, they were the first winners of the Kent league, senior Kent league, in 1971, when it was launched, and we won it for the first time, we won it twice, in eighty-four as well, Ashford that was. But the villages, they then decided to hook the villages into it all and make a massive great framework of cricket for Kent, and other areas as well, being village league cricket. MR: What did your village cricket and football teammates do for a living? BD: They, there weren’t many commuters, very few, but there were people working in the villages, people working in the, there was a lot of carpentry that went on in those days, the carpenter, the village carpenter might be playing or something, or one of his staff, or one of his young apprentices or something. And there was a garage man from the garage, the local garage – every village had a garage more or less. One, I can remember, one played for the football team, John Tucker, played for Ruckinge, very fine fullback, played for Ruckinge United village team, and others played for Warehorne and things. Arthur Carman worked for the Kent County Council, I think he used to go off on a back of a lorry somewhere to work, hands like, gnarled and weather beaten, and a lot of men who were working on the land, farmers and labourers, road diggers, real village stuff it was, all kinds of types of people. There’d always be somebody who’s a bit, whose son wanted to play cricket, you know, living in a big house or something in the village, and the son who went to public school would come and play for you, that kind of thing. Very class divided, you know, in many respects. We all got on but it was, in these days everybody was, everybody’s a bit samey aren’t they, we’re all a bit the same these days – in those days there were big differences between perhaps your penniless orphan or something and your super-rich young mand whose driving his MGB about. MR: But they’d play on the same village team? BD: Yeah, they’d play on the same team. Great disparity between class. MR: That must have led to some interesting conversations? BD: Yes, there was a lot of quite rich farmers about, sons of rich farmers, I can think of one now, Mike Balcomb, he played for Brookland, you know, he always had money in his pocket – the rest of us were penniless, not that anybody particularly said anything about that, or we didn’t even think about it very much, you know, there was a lot of friendship about and you know, we all played one particular game and that was, that bonded us, brought us all together. They became your friends, and they’ve been lifetime friends, from all walks of life actually, super rich, super poor. And that’s our thing, is why sport, that’s why I’ve always enjoyed it really because my friends, I like to think, well, come from all walks of life. And I’ve maintained them over the years. MR: Where did you go after prep school? BD: Well I went to another, I went to another prep school when it moved, which was, they went to Rolvenden, small boys school, went to Rolvenden, and moved on from Hamstreet to Rolvenden, where I spent my time there, and that’s where I really came to a love of cricket really because it had a cricket pitch there that we played on, and football, and that’s where I really thought, I rather like this game, you know, cricket and football. MR: Did you play on a team at school or was it always with the village? BD: We did actually play against the village. I’ve got a memory of actually, I was quite fast in those days – one of my problems is I did my knee in at about the age of eleven, and went to see an eminent orthopedic surgeon and said, ‘Oh, it’s growing pains’, told my mother it’s growing pains, in fact it wasn’t and I had it for the rest of my life, you know, so that was my right knee, I’ve got a knee replacement now. But we played against the village and I have a memory of, it’s difficult when you go back so far, but the memory of scoring a glut of goals, almost nine goals or something I scored in this game against Rolvenden village. I’ve tried often – ‘Does anyone ever remember this match?’ and, ‘Were you a youngster in that Rolvenden team when I might have done that, you know?’, I’ve never been able to prove it really, so it’s best not to talk about it probably. But the reason I say is, I used to be a striker if you like, and I was quick, and I was never as quick after that, after the injury, so. MR: How did it happen? BD: I don’t know, I haven’t got a clue. I don’t know what it was. But it definitely, if you had any pretensions of playing professional sport, which I mean, you’re not good enough half the time anyhow, or anywhere near, but if you had any pretensions that would’ve been found out and might’ve had the job repaired, you know, but it was something I just put up with really, and probably didn’t get the attention I should have done at that time. Or give it the attention I should have done. I used to complain about it and strap it up and that’s that. MR: Did you play any sport other than cricket and football? BD: I played table tennis a lot. I was in two leagues at one time, that was when I was young. Well that was in my youth, I don’t know how much of this youth you want? Yeah, I played in the Ashford and District League and the Folkestone League at one time. That was great as well, that was good, used to go in the league and then used to enter these open tournaments, Sussex, I remember going down to Sussex and Kent Open, and the great thing about that was you play against very fine players, well eventually as you wore on, as you went on, you got knocked out by people, but you kept going if you kept going and did alright, you know, beating one after the other, but eventually you’d meet somebody who would absolutely wipe the floor with you. And I thought that, I loved that, because it’s a great leveler, I’ve never kidded myself about my ability, and that year really, I used to I hot beaten twenty-one, naught, twenty-one, naught or something, by this Piddock, he was the Kent champion I think, or something, can’t remember his Christian name now, and absolutely wiped the floor with me. And that happened in the Sussex one as well. I don’t know who beat me, but whoever it was. But you get through three or four rounds winning and then you meet somebody who could really play. MR: How did you start playing? Did you have a table at home? BD: Yeah, father in the pub had a table. It wasn’t a proper table, it wasn’t a proper table tennis table but it was the right measurements, and we actually joined the league playing on that table. Put the nets on, put a couple of nets across it and used to play. Rather confined space although it was quite a long bar you could get back a bit but there was nothing along the sides. MR: You played matches in the pub? BD: Yeah, in the pub, yeah, and three people in a team, and yeah, from about 1960 on – it must’ve been earlier than that, yeah, because they left the pub in sixty-one. Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, something like that. MR: Was there a darts board in there? BD: Darts board. MR: Pool? BD: Not pool but bar billiards, yeah, not pool in those days, bar billiards in the saloon bar. Two separate bars, public bar and saloon bar. The lads that went to the public bar tended to be, they’ve got their rough old working clothes on of course, some of them would come straight from the farm into the pub or straight off the back of a lorry or something and have a pint before going home or something. And then you used to see them sometimes with their wives with the suit, their only suit or something in the saloon bar on the Saturday night, so that used to amuse me, cause they didn’t look right in the suit, you know, they looked much better in their clothes than they did in a suit trying to look smart. MR: It must have been good fun growing up in the pub? BD: It was, yeah, it was good. Oddly enough I never drank in the pub, I didn’t drink at all, didn’t drink until I was about eighteen really. But it was a good life, yeah it was good fun. MR: What did you left school? BD: After school I joined the, well I had to learn shorthand and typing and things to get this diploma thing, NUJ thing. MR: Had you always wanted to be a reporter? BD: Yeah, that’s the other thing, yes, I always wanted to be a reporter. Well of course I had two things. I remember thinking at Wembley. I remember watching the England football team playing and the massive great crowd then, a hundred thousand in it, and I’m looking out and I remember the national anthem’s being sung and everything, and looking, and then looking up at the press box. I thought, I either want to be in that line up for the national anthem, in the England team, wearing the England shirt, or get in the press box. Well, I finished up getting in the press box, but Wembley press box was quite good actually. MR: When was the first time you went to Wembley? BD: The first time was about, hang on, probably about fifty-eight, fifty-nine, somewhere in there…the first time to cover the matches, crikey, actually, because I wasn’t doing sport when I first went into journalism I didn’t sit in the press box, but I do remember, when did I first get in the press box? Well it must have been seventy-five or something, yeah, it would’ve been 1975. And I remember writing, I used to do what you call a runner or something, maybe for the Evening Standard or something, whatever, on a Saturday, and you write that and you built it up in so many words, after ten minutes, fifteen minutes, whatever, so many words after, you know, half an hour, and then build the report up as you went along, and I remember coming out of the ground at the end of the match and seeing the bloke selling the Evening Standard with my report in it, and that’s what amazed me, the speed of the whole operation, unbelievable…but that was seventy-five. But I used to go to a lot of football before that, obviously being keen on the game, cricket as well. MR: Did you go to more regional games in Ashford or Folkestone? BD: Yeah, I used to go to Essella Park in Ashford, to watch Ashford Football Club play, and in my lunch hours I used to go up to watch Ashford Cricket Club play, cause the ground was in the town then – we moved, we moved in 1987 to a ground in Kennington, a suburb of Ashford, a much larger area, because the ground at Ball Lane, sorry, at Barrow Hill, which was where the Ashford club was, in the old days, wasn’t big enough really, we were hitting old ladies and banging the ball out of the ground, and it was becoming dangerous. MR: You started out as a reporter with the Kent Messenger? BD: Yes, with the Kent Messenger. MR: And you trained with them? BD: Yes. MR: What was that like? BD: I remember my very first day I walked in the Ashford office, well I was interviewed by two people. One of them was Ivor Warne, Ivor, he interviewed me first, and then I had to be, I was interviewed by the proprietor of the Kent Messenger group, which was H.R. Pratt Boorman, the man himself, the big man, in Maidstone. I had to go to two interviews, got through those, and then I was, with my father I had to accompany H.R. Pratt Boorman in his car, he drove us to London, where I was indentured with the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, which was at Stationers Hall. I had to press my thumb onto a Bible and all of that sort of thing, was given a Bible and a prayer book, leather-bound, which I’ve got in there, and I was apprentice to them. And it said on this parchment thing, it said: ‘You will be earning three pounds fifty a week in your first year’ or something, and it was a five-year apprenticeship, which was great anyway, pleased him, Boorman, pleased him very much. I don’t know if I was the only person to ever go through this ceremony, from the Kent Messenger, because I don’t know of anybody else who did it. And I don’t know why I did it either, but it was just a bit of luck and he happened to be very keen on all that stuff – the Worshipful Company of – and I got a parchment thing in there that, which I could show you, do you want to see it?...It was five years but you didn’t stay five years, I didn’t stay five years. The apprenticeship was great, but I don’t know if, it would be very different for engineering, I think, or something, because it’s difficult to, you can learn, but there must be a limit on, if you’re an engineer, you know, it’s a process of learning, when you’re a journalist, if you’re any good or something you learn quick I suppose, if you’re not very good maybe you don’t ever achieve what you want to achieve, so it’s very difficult to measure it. And that’s why we’re an oddball lot in some respects, and never, I often think I don’t think they think of us as a profession as such whereas the great lawyers of the country and the doctors, clergymen and things, they are the professions, accountants, but journalism I’m not sure about really, it’s a mishmash of great talents and perhaps not always great talents. MR: I suppose the cream rises to the top… BD: Yeah I suppose it does. I remember my first day at Ashford office, very first day, my boss said, ‘Can you get some copy paper?’, I haven’t got a clue, I had to ask somebody in the office what copy paper was, ‘What’s copy paper?’, ‘Oh, that’s what you write on, type on’, so, you know, I learnt something that day, I didn’t even know what copy paper was. And then I remember in about the second week or something I had to go to a job where, it was ROSPA, Royal Society of the Prevention of Accidents, that was it, road safety stuff and all of that, I wen there and covered it, covered the meeting, got back to the office and I asked the senior chap, ‘I’m not quite sure, quite a lot happened in this meeting, what, I don’t quite know how I ought to approach it, because there’s so many major items’, so he said, ‘What was the most important thing that happened?’, so I said whatever it was, he said, ‘That’s your story’, and I learnt something that day. And those sorts of things, ‘What’s this all about?’… MR: You learn on the job… BD: It was very much that. And the strange thing is, right through the years and years and years, and you begin, you know, you’ve risen up, you’ve been a news editor, you’ve done this, you’ve done that, chief reporter, all those sort of things, and I still felt I was learning, and it’s really odd because I never had the feeling, I suppose in the end you have to have the feeling of, oh I know everything about everything sort of thing, but it was only in the last five years or something or maybe ten years that I could, you know, people showing you bits of respect and things, you don’t expect to get it, you know, get respect, particularly, but you think, you know, perhaps I do know a bit more than I think I do. But I’m still sort of learning, you know, I still felt that. MR: I think that’s probably a mark of a good reporter… BD: I think that’s one of the things about being interviewed by somebody like yourself, it’s a, I’ve never really gone around telling people how wonderful I am! Well I hope I haven’t! I’ve tried not to anyhow. MR: You were based in Ashford – were you commuting from the village? BD: Yes, at that time I was. And part of my job, I couldn’t drive a car at one stage – I’ve had my license, I’m not sure. Anyhow, when I started work I couldn’t drive a car, and I used to ride a bike. I used to catch a train down to Lydd, in those days there was a branch line and it was killed by Beeching, Beeching railway cuts, Lord Beeching cut the railways in 1963 or whatever it was, and there was a - there were railway lines, branch lines that used to go round to New Romney…it was Ashford to Rye and Hastings was the main line, and there was a branch line, it used to go off round to, and I used to get the train to Hamstreet and go off round the branch line, get off at Lydd with my bike, and then I used to ride across the Romney Marsh gathering news, which was quite an operation. I used to finish up in Dymchurch and then come all the way back to, so I used to go to Lydd, Dungeness, Greatstone, New Romney, and then onto St Mary’s Bay and Dymchurch, and then all the way back to New Romney where I used to get the train home with my bike. MR: What would be your method for collecting news? BD: Well I used to visit – there were key people in every town or village or whatever it was that I’d get to know, like the vicar was quite important in those days, clergymen, local parish priest or whatever. The mayor or something, somebody who ran a major shop in the town or something and knew everything about everything. And of course a lot of this stuff you’d gather, you’d gather news, it wasn’t relating to their shop or something, but it was relating to things they’d heard or things they knew about. And because they belonged to organisations in the villages and towns, and so they’d give you all the news from that as well. And I used to visit some of the big houses. There was a big house at New Romney called The Red House, it was Littlestone actually, and Major Teichman Derville, he was there, you know, and it was all very formal. His secretary, Anne Roper, she was a historian, written lots of books, she used to let me in and I used to go visit him. Quite formidable men these men were, you know, for a cub reporter, to sort of be in their company was quite something, you know, quite formal, and, ‘Oh, have a sherry!’, you know, ‘Darling, get him a sherry, must learn to drink!’ MR: How old were you? BD: I was about eighteen. MR: So that was your patch? BD: That was the first patch I had, yes. Of course, I used to cover New Romney Council, cover Lydd Council, cover, those were the two major councils, and Hythe Council occasionally, but not so much then. But certainly New Romney, and also New Romney rural council – there was an urban council and a rural council. They were my councils. My boss used to cover Ashford Council, which was the head office there, well East Kent’s head office. That was great. I actually, in sixty-three, there was a very bad winter in 1963, it snowed for three months from New Years Eve, all sport was wiped out for weeks and weeks and weeks, it was incredible. The ‘Big Freeze’ they called it. No horseracing, nothing, you know, mainly the south east, I think. But I actually went down to cover Lydd Council with the snow coming that night – it was New Year’s Eve, and they had a council meeting, and none of the other reporters turned up. I go there and the mayor, Gordon Paine his name was, he was the mayor of Lydd for twenty-nine years, he said, ‘Right gentleman, very good of us all to be here tonight, it’s been very cold and everything, let’s have a sherry, and the only member of the press to turn up, well done, he’ll have one as well’, so we had a toast! And it was New Year’s Eve, we had a toast. That night I had got to go to a, I had then planned – strange story this one – I had a girlfriend who lived in Tenterden and I had a New Year’s Eve party at a pub in Bilsington, a pub called the White Horse to go to, I took her, to the White Horse, drove to Tenterden after this meeting with the council with the snow still coming, drove to her, picked her up, drove to Bilsington, attended the thing, took her home, I’m coming back through the Romney Marsh and find out the snow is really bad, and I turned left at Ivychurch on the Romney Marsh at about two in the morning or something in my van, I had a Kent Messenger van, which I shouldn’t really have been in because I was there to do a job, not to ferry women around! Anyway I drove into, going towards Ivychurch, and the snow’s coming up over the bonnet, and I thought, ‘Oh God, I can’t drive on’, it was coming up over the bonnet, so I then reversed, and now I realised in reversing, I had to reverse for about half a mile, I’d finished up in the ditch, I couldn’t keep it straight. I just slid off into the ditch and there’s quite deep ditches on the Romney Marsh, so I just sat there, the door was trapped, I couldn’t get out the doors because the snow’s all there, so I thought I’ve got to pray for daylight, you know, so anyhow, the next thing, I obviously went to sleep, and the next thing I knew there’s this massive noise, the van is being swept, and this road sweeper thing comes crashing past, takes the side off my van, and drives on, I thought, ‘I don’t believe it!’, and I didn’t know what the hell was happening, and there’s a bit of daylight cause the side of the van’s missing a bit. So I thought, ‘Oh God’s sake’, and I knew, cause all I’m thinking about is my boss thinking what the hell’s he going to think, I’m facing the wrong way. So this thing went on, he didn’t stop, so I got out, got a call box, phoned home, got somebody to ring the garage which I knew, and they came and towed me away, towed the van away anyhow. I meanwhile got a lift…anyhow, I had to explain, my van was facing – I’d been at Lydd Council, which is down there somewhere, I’ve gone all the way to Tenterden and over to, and I’m now coming back through the Romney Marsh and Lydd’s not that far away down there, and I’m facing the wrong way coming away from Lydd Council, I’m facing the wrong way completely, and that’s going to be reported by somebody. So anyhow I somehow got over that. I then get a phone call from my boss, H.R. Pratt Boorman, ‘Bill, I hear you’ve been, I hear you’ve been, the mayor of Lydd said something of you, he’s praised you – were you the only one there?’ and all this sort of, and I said, ‘Well I was actually - Gordon Paine he very kindly offered me a sherry’, ‘Oh well done, well done, and what about now, now what, what else has gone on? You’ve had a terrible time’, and I said, ‘Coming away from it of course, by now the snow’s really coming down and I’m off the road’, and, ‘Oh were you alright? Were you bruised?’, sort of thing, ‘No, I wasn’t bruised’, he said, ‘What did you do? You must have been cold?’ and I said, ‘Well, I got the light in the van… I said I’ve got the light in the van’, he said, ‘But what did you do?’, well, I said, ‘I actually read council minutes.’ Oh Christ! Anyhow, meanwhile I’d gone back to the office, the following day or whatever and there were great suspicions about all this…because I then had people ringing me up who had been at the party at that pub, ‘You alright? I hear you’ve been in an accident or something?’, I said, ‘Oh no, no, no, nothing much, no nothing’, I’m just trying to play it all down, ‘Nothing much’, and of course the other thing that really did me was H.R. Pratt Boorman, on his front page he’d put a piece about this intrepid reporter who brave,, courageous beyond belief! Van wrecked and all this sort of stuff, and of course by now of course I’ve told a lie, basically, and got praised for telling a lie, although the first bit was true, so it’s… MR: But you got away with it… BD: I got away with it! But, I had a load of people, ‘I think I know what went on Day’, you know, these sort of phone calls from people who by then had put it all together, ‘What on earth are you doing in the White Hart then?’ and ‘Didn’t you have a woman with you?’ and all this sort of stuff. MR: But hopefully it didn’t trickle to the top… BD: No it didn’t trickle to the top, he never knew. H.R., yes, he never knew. But oh, things like that, I veered off, what are we talking about? I had a few of those. I got the last train off the Romney Marsh, I caught the very last train after the Beeching closures, caught the last train. MR: What year was this? BD: Oh God, was it sixty-three? No. Well by then, I’ve got a feeling it was in the second stint, because he didn’t, he, I’d been to Bermuda and back by then, I went to Bermuda in sixty-four, so I went over there, and I came back to the Kent Messenger as Chief Reporter, in Maidstone, from there, from Bermuda, and I’ve got a feeling it was in that period, but I’m not one hundred per cent sure. MR: And then it seems like you jumped around a lot, Reading… BD: Reading, I was, Thompson regional newspapers were ringing London with these web offset, nowadays people don’t know what you’re talking about, the pictures, the clarity of the pictures was wonderful, it was this new system of producing a newspaper and it was, the pictures were great, better than the Evening Standard and the Evening News and the dailies because of this web offset situation, and he’d ring London, Hemel Hempstead and Reading was one, and I think there was one somewhere else, and that was great, so I went to an evening, that was an evening paper, and I progressed and I was really on hard news, all kinds of things were happening, and I finished up as Deputy News Editor there. But you want to talk about Kent don’t you? One story for instance, when Beeching ripped that line out, one of the reasons he did it was the cost, the cost of these lines all over the country, a vast network of railway lines, one of which was this branch line to New Romney. And I, and there were fourteen level crossing gates that had to be manned between Appledore and New Romney, one of them, this was a story I got, I noticed when I used to go over to the police in the mornings at Ashford that the man running the level crossing at one particular area, not far from Appledore, had, the train had gone through his gate, and I thought, ‘Christ, how many times have I read this?’, the train’s gone through his gate, the train’s gone through his gate, well it turned out to be ten times, the train had gone through his gate because he’d forgotten to open it, so I went down to see him, and it’s a thousand pounds a time, I think it was a thousand pounds a time then to replace these gates, so I went down to see him, and, ‘Oh, yeah, I know, they’re not very happy with me’, and all this sort of stuff, and I said, ‘Well, what happened?’, I said, ‘I know you’ve forgotten a few times haven’t you?’, ‘Ah well, I’m sitting on the privy’, they used to have this brick built thing next to the station platform, the privy he used to use as the toilet, and he said, ‘I was in there sitting down there and, “Oh God, I’ve done it again!” I looked out the window and I saw my gate came past on the front of this train! I said, “Oh, God’s sake!”’, and that was it, that’s before Beeching, I think it was sixty-three, Beeching. MR: I could understand once or twice, but ten times… BD: And a thousand pounds a time. That was all being handled by London, though, I think it was British Rail or whatever it was in those days. MR: So Reading, Cardiff, and then sports agency in London… BD: Hayters, yes, they were a sports agency, and I was going to go to sport because I wanted to do sport. I really, I went backwards to go forwards in a way because as I said to you, I was a news editor at twenty-nine, I was only twenty-nine when I got that job and it was a hell of a good job, it was a great selling newspaper and circulation was good and everything, but I was there for a time and played cricket down there actually, Western League, when I could play because I was news editor and actually I got Saturdays off so quite often my sporting life has been dissipated by my job, which is always, like a lot of us who write about sport, we love sport but haven’t been able to play a lot, you know, because we’ve been covering the stuff. MR: And amongst all this you got married? BD: Yeah, got married in sixty-six, yeah, three children, I mean it’s such a long time it’s difficult to know what to say to you really. But of course I’ve always maintained this local thing, I’ve always lived in the area, I’ve tended to live, apart from Cardiff and Reading and places, we’ve always lived in this Kent area, or this round the Ashford area if you like. We’ve lived in Smarden and Bethersden and Chilham, near Chilham, and Hythe, so it’s all, you know. MR: In terms of your sports reporting did you have much to do with local sport? BD: Well, when I started in journalism, Ivor Warne, who was my first boss, he used to cover football at Ashford, and I had to be his runner, you remember those running reports where you sent so many words at a certain time, he used to take me with him, this was my first year on the job, to the football matches, which I thought was great, but of course he’d write something, then I’d have to leave the press box at Ashford, hop over a fence, go up a back garden, into a house of this women who he’d got an arrangement with where he could send copy up to Fleet Street, well, yeah, up to the Sunday Express or whatever he was doing, and they used to carry local reports in those days, in the national newspapers, of local matches, well Southern League matches, Kent League matches, football. And course when, I used to get up there, and I used to look at it and I couldn’t read his writing half the time, his writing was, you know, horrible, so I used to, it helped me a bit because I used to, I used to make it up a bit, you know, make up the story a bit, based on truth one hopes, and then go back, and I never did watch the matches because by then he had another load for me to take back, so I spent my life running in and out of this women’s house, and she was very nice actually. So I learnt a bit then because I used to have to ad lib some of the stuff when I couldn’t read his writing. So that was helpful. MR: When you moved back to the area did you start playing sport again? BD: No, I was able to play. I didn’t play football, because by then, no, well of course, I played in the Western cricket, Western League, which is a cricket league for St Fagans, which is a famous old club actually. After I left they went to Lords three times to play in the village, supposed to be a village, it was hardly a village, well, it had loads of players from outside the village playing for them, and some of them played for Glamorgan and things, you know, quite a good standard, and I played for them, so I was able to play for them on Saturdays, and then I played a bit in the Kent League but not very much cause sadly I couldn’t really do it because I was doing sport and everything, so, I couldn’t do that. But I captained on Sunday, I think I said in there somewhere, Ashford first team for the, through the eighties, early seventies, right through the eighties really, I was captain, and we had all day matches, there were some great matches, really good times, you know. In those days Sunday cricket was stronger than it is now, it’s not very strong now because of the League and everything, well the League was running then but I fought like mad to keep Sunday cricket actually because it was such a good way of bringing on youngsters and things. If you give someone a bat and you’ve got enough good players around you to sort of shuffle it, give somebody a chance to bowl and bat, it was a really good way to groom people. MR: Was it similar to the village cricket you played as a youngster in respect of the community you built up, friends you made? BD: Yes, by now you’re in a town. But then you’ve got, I mean most of these people have got, didn’t live in the town particularly, they probably all lived in villages and things, well they did. It was a higher standard of cricket, and it was terrific fun though because you met some larger than life people, and your positioned as much as anybody, I mean some of the stories you could tell, you know, we played against a West Indian team from London. These Sunday matches, we had a good team at Ashford, I always lost, we only lost about one game a season half the time, you know, and this one team would be the Caribbeans that came from London, this team, and they beat us every time, I could never ever get anything on them at all. And they used to bat first, that’s what they insisted, the only arrangement we had, they insisted on batting first, and we used to go along with all this, and of course the other thing was all kinds of different people would come in, batting first and getting a hundred and all this, and I said, ‘I can’t work it out, your team, how do you work out the batting order because people are getting hundreds against us that I thought he batted eight or nine in the last match’ or the last match we played you last year or something, so they said, ‘Oh no, it’s the person who gets to the ground first!’ So these guys come down from London and they get held up in traffic a bit, anyway the first one in gets changed, goes out there and bats. And so they can all bat. And then the first defeat I had went in as captain of course, had a duty, went straight to the bar and ordered some pints of bitter, larger and everything else, took them in, ‘Oh no man, no we drink rum and coke’, so I said, ‘Oh Christ’, so took it all back, so that’s twenty quid, no wouldn’t have even been twenty quid, in those days it wasn’t, but God, four quid a pint now! So then I had to change it for rum and coke, so I got all the rum and cokes, ‘Ah man! You wonderful!’, you know, so that’s all they drank. The only white man in the team was the umpire actually. MR: Sounds like a lot of fun. BD: They were great, they were terrific fun, yeah. And they talk about racism and everything in sport but there was no racism at all, I never saw any real racism or whatever you want to call it. MR: In all your years covering sport… BD: Covering? Well, I didn’t, no, not a lot, not a lot of racism, even in cricket and things, no. And football, not aware of it, not really aware of it, although I know it exists. MR: Are you still associated with the Ashford cricket team? BD: Yeah, I’m President. Well, you know, because I’m older now, you get to a certain age, oh Christ, you better be made President sort of thing, so I’m President, I took over from somebody, I think I’ve done it for fifteen years, I can’t believe it really, somebody died about 2002… MR: And Chairman [of Ashford Cricket Club] for nine years? BD: Yeah, in two stints, yeah. When we moved the ground, we went from Ashford Barrow Hill in the middle of Ashford to Ball Lane, Kennington, which is where we shared with the hockey club, fourteen acres or more, and, so I was chairman for that move, in fact my dog is buried on that ground because she was with me all the time when, well, I say doing the work, I was up there quite a lot not necessarily to do a lot of work but, because it was technical, you know professional work a lot of it, but I thought she was always up there and, she’s a Labrador, she’s buried on the ground with my big sweater covering her, you know, my Ashford sweater, that was a sad day. MR: How old was she? BD: She was about twelve. Born in eighty-two, that was about ninety-one, ninety-two, year ten, twelve, somewhere there, twelve I think. MR: And she was always with you at the club? BD: Yeah, always at the cricket club, and hockey players would trip over her, you know, walk through the door, apologize to the dog, actually we did have a rule – we can’t have your dog in the blinking bar sort of thing, don’t bring your dogs up, and I’m not saying they did it for my purpose but I was, she was always with me, and it was one of those things, and they would trip over her and say, ‘Oh sorry’, apologize to the dog, she didn’t move, because she was knackered from all the walking around the ground and everything else she’d been doing. Used to chase the rabbits on the ground at Ball Lane, Kennington, the new ground, and chase the rabbits so I thought it fitting that she should be buried where she used to chase the rabbits really, and that’s where she is. I then became a trustee, and at a meeting, oh, about seven years or something, it’s another story really, I discovered when I met the council and the builders of houses and things because we were going to sell the ground and move over to another ground just over the main Ashford to Canterbury road, hop over that and build a new cricket ground, brand new cricket ground on the opposite side, and I realised that, somebody said, ‘Well we’ll have to have a roundabout here’, and all this sort of stuff, and I realised the roundabout would go straight through the grave of the dog, Dayna, and I didn’t say anything but it’s never happened, it’s never been done, but that’s where that roundabout will probably go. MR: Can you tell me a bit about the Lobsters of Hythe? BD: Yes, there’s also, there’s two teams I’ve been associated with – the Lobsters of Hythe and the Circus, which was run on a, George Brann ran, George Brann who played for Ashford, they’re cricketers from Folkestone and Ashford and the area around it, that’s the Circus, Circus Cavaliers, and we play matches on the Mote ground, the Mote in Maidstone, and all the great cricket grounds against oppositions, various oppositions, and finish up with a match on the sand at Camber, and the match would end when the tide came in. And I remember there was match there with John Shepherd, the Kent and West Indies player, played for many years for England, sorry for Kent in the sixties and seventies, where he would drink the cider of George Brann, he ran a farm and he always used to make some cider every year, which was absolutely lethal nectar, it was nectar actually, but it was beautiful, and Shep had a few too many on the ground, here’s this great cricketer falling apart! He drank a hell of a lot of wine, not wine, cider. MR: What was the origin of the Circus team? BD: Wandering clubs they called it. They were wandering clubs, groups of people who would come from all different clubs and things, and that was one, and the other one was the Lobsters. I can remember one big farmer who played on the sand down at Camber and he said, ‘Do you know something, Bill? I’ve played a lot of cricket in my time,’ he said, ‘I think I’m better on sand than I am on grass!’ So there’s that, and then there’s the Lobsters of course, where we used to go off to South Wales, Abergavenny was the base, in the early days they went to other places but generally we finished up in the last thirty or forty years in Abergavenny and got to know people since and for many, many, many years. Cricket at the moment is on the wane in Wales and some of the teams we used to play against, we still play down there and maintain those fixtures as much as we can against various people, and kept it going really. There’re some great youngsters, we’ve got some terrific teams, they come from Australia, they come from – players – they come over here, playing for clubs in Kent and things, join the Lobsters, or get invited to join the Lobsters because you know they’re a good cricketer. But you don’t have to be a great cricketer at all, you know, many of us have not been great cricketers. It’s just a wonderful thing that Dick Apps ran for many, many years, a great man of cricket. A legendary man of cricket really, from Hythe, he was a builder and undertaker actually, and he ran it, played for Hythe. Hythe in the old days had the England Captain there, APF Chapman, who played for Kent and England, went on the tour, the pre-bodyline tour in 1928, before the bodyline, to Australia, was captain, played for Hythe, worked for a brewery in Hythe, Mackeson’s brewery, things like that happened in those days, it was strange, you know. You could have an England captain in your midst. I never played for Hythe, I played for Ashford and am still a part of that set-up. MR: So there’s a rich heritage of cricket in this area? BD: Very, yeah. Terrific. Just a shame in a way that cricket, village cricket, isn’t as it was. And a lot of it, the League gets blamed for it quite a bit, the birth of League cricket, you’ve got to have a certain pot hunting and winning the league, it becomes essential to win and if you haven’t got much of a team they pack up a bit, sort of thing. Oh well, I think the villages, because of the advent of the car, people, they don’t stay necessarily in their village, they move around a hell of a lot more, villages aren’t quite what they used to be. Village greens don’t have the cricket on them that they used to have some of them because they’ve now moved to another ground or something. Brockham Green in Surrey was a lovely green for cricket, but they don’t play on it anymore, they play somewhere else, and there are many like that, and it’s had a struggle. It’s sad because it’s the roots of all cricket really, the village, and it’s sad that it’s gone, or going. There are not as many teams as there were. MR: Where do you see the future of village cricket? BD: Well, there’ll be fewer, I think. Though those that are strong, like Mersham, for instance, round here, they’ve done pretty well to keep going, you know, I played against them many moons ago when I was playing for Warehorne and they’re still going now, Mersham Le Hatch were another team, still plays cricket there, and there are other villages. There are some like Brookland that are amalgamated with another club. Dymchurch amalgamated with Brookland, still playing on the Brookland ground, a lovely ground. So those sorts of things have had to happen. And it’s sad really. Woodchurch is a village I don’t think has any cricket anymore. Warehorne hasn’t got any cricket anymore. Bilsington has got cricket but its, I think it will be a struggle but I’m hoping. There’re so many other sports that youngsters play now as well, that’s another thing, the competition form other sports is great. Cricket’s a long period game, takes up a sort of whole afternoon and evening and some people find it difficult to give of that time. They’d much rather do a short sport game, a game that takes less time. MR: And I suppose village life has changed too… BD: Pubs are closing down, they were always central. Some village clubs have their own bars, Mersham have got one…they’ve got a bar there, a very nice little bar, and they’ve got a couple of nice little pubs in the village, you know, but village pubs close and if you haven’t got a bar in your cricket club, you know, you were struggling a bit really. MR: Just following up with cricket on the beach with the Circus, was that a yearly thing? BD: Yes, annual thing, annual thing. It hasn’t been played for many years, well quite a lot of years anyhow. But we’ve had international cricketers down there, you know, George Brann’s Circus, it was. It still goes but it hasn’t got the power and influence it had before. We used to have a lot of cricketers, Mike Denness and Brian Luckhurst, John Shepherd, Alan Ealham and people would all play in those matches. Players from Folkestone, Jimmy Howgego, players of that type. MR: Was it one match a year? BD: It was one match a year, yeah. Right at the end of the season. It would either finish up with the tide coming in or darkness more or less, you know, it was sort of – the pitch was always quite smooth and it was quite good, you could play cricket on it. Camber sands they call it. MR: Was it competitive or more of a laugh? BD: It was a laugh And half the time you can’t stand up because you’ve got the cider in you. Quite a few people drank before the match and afterwards as well. And then of course the other influence on everything was the drink driving laws of course, which have done a lot to damage cricket in some respects. You can’t argue with the law but you can argue what it did to cricket really in many respects because it stopped a lot of the festivities after the match, which went on long into the night, and were riotous at times, you know, and terrific fun. --ENDS--