The 1950s

You set me thinking back to those times Barty, and how different it was then.

You mention the "football revolution" and how it began in 1953...................not in Newton Abbot it didn't. Almost a decade after The Magyars, I was playing my first football on a reclaimed bit of Decoy Clay Mines ~ clumps of almost foot high grass interspersed with sprigs of gorse poking out of itinerant pieces of turf. A massive (for us primary school kids) heavy and greasy full sized real leather ball that was akin to attempting to kick a medicine ball and a "coach" who was in reality our female teacher dressed in trilby hat, trench coat and wellies anxiously glancing at her watch throughout the singular half hour break of freedom from the class room for the week. Hell's bells, my first pair of boots were a throw back to the thirties resplendent in brown leather with wooden block toe caps and leather studs which my old man used to hammer into the soles with nails on his garden shed last! Only size 9 (child's) but weighing a ton. With equipment and facilities like that no wonder we were producing "players" who couldn't trap a bag of cement. I had to wait to get to Newton Abbot Grammar School before I got even the rudiments of proper coaching from a wonderful St Lukes College student teacher called Peter Searle who played at a very good level of football for the College in the Western League and Wycombe Wanderers and Kingstonian in the Isthmian League.

I was almost sixteen before I got the benefit of the knowledge imparted by the legendary Don Mills at Newton Spurs, Geoff Cox at Torquay United and Ralph Calland at Brixham United.

Now I see my eight year old son expertly coached at Arsenal by top level coaches from the home club as well as guest coaches from other clubs of repute like Ajax and I watch the hundreds and hundreds of local youngsters playing in the local Islington and Camden Leagues from as young as seven years old, with suitably sized footballs on sensibly scaled down pitches; great sufaces and 8-a-side (which enables plenty of space and time on the ball) with four rolling subs. I was sixteen before we could ever get near a game in the ONLY youth competition available to us as kids in the sixties...............the South Devon Minor League, played on Saturday afternoons for under seventeens.

No wonder the area hardly produced a decent pro' footballer, and no secret that the only ones who made it in the late fifties were those from the "grittier" parts of Torquay (a Euphemism for Hele Village ) under the tutelage of the Plainmoor professionals, and even that was against all the odds what with the ridiculous state of the local pitches ~ a problem that still exists to the shame of the area to this very day!.

I recall too the "guff" that my dad used to come out with that all these "Northern" teams that were coming to Plainmoor for the first times in the late fifties/early sixties were nothing short of "clogging outfits" and how ridiculous it was for them to trawl all the way down to Devon (no motorways then) to pay in front of "tiny" crowds of five or six thousand. Those were the preconceptions of the newly formed Fourth Division and the shock and horror the local populace had to endure of suddenly facing Gateshead, Halifax and Rochdale where once they had the pleasure and thrill of seeing Norwich, Southampton and Nottingham Forest run out at Plainmoor. It was as hard as it is today of giving a big welcome to the likes of Droylsden, Farsley Celtic and Histon; when not so long ago we had Sheffield Wednesday, Hull City and (had we hung on in there) could well have been looking forward to Leeds United today.

Of course those Hele Village lads would have been Barton Junior School pupils and we had old Pop Sanders and the lush turf of Windmill Hill.....

After the Walsall game there certainly was, in my mind at least, every expectation that we would go up as champions, however these hopes were dashed by an inexplicable 4-0 defeat in the following match up at Hartlepools United, who had languished at the bottom the whole season.

In some ways the climax to that season was very similar to last year in the BSP, when we managed only 13 points from the last 9 games. Had there been 3 points for a win in 1959/60 instead of 2, the run-in records would have been identical.

One game which has always stuck in my mind was the 2-2 draw against Millwall at Plainmoor on the Easter Monday. There were injuries to George Northcott, Alan Smith and Ernie Pym, so that Dennis Penford, the left back, played at centre-half and his place was taken by an inside-forward, Jimmy James.

An almost unknown youngster from the reserves, Frank Arundel, came in on the left wing. I can still remember the gasp of astonishment from the crowd when he appeared.

In those days, of course, long before the existence of squads, there were only a first XI and reserve team, so that occasional "tinkering" was done out of necessity rather than choice. A couple of years later Penford, by then in the reserves, played as an emergency centre-forward against Notts County.

And what a game to start with!

All seven goals scored by Torquay-born players.....Graham Bond (3), Ernie Pym (3) and Tommy Northcott.

How good were Bond and Pym?

Merse remembers these players elsewhere in this thread. For the record the centenary history records that Bond and Tommy Northcott signed from Hele Spurs and Ernie Pym from St Marychurch (Spurs?).

All told Bond played 142 first-team games, Pym 307, Tommy Northcott 443 and - lest we forget - George Northcott 172. Between them - including George's two goals - the quartet scored exactly 300 goals for the club (Tommy 150).

Graham Bond and George Northcott also made first team appearances for Exeter City whilst Tommy Northcott had five years away at Cardiff and Lincoln (47 league goals at the two clubs) when Cardiff were in the old Division 1 and Lincoln in Division 2.

I have a memory of my father routinely insisting that Robin Stubbs was nothing with Tommy Northcott. I'm not sure if that was a widespead view and Stubbsey certainly carried on doing the business after Tommy's last game in 1966. Northcott's final match was actually the promotion decider at Darlington played in front of 16,500. Then, like several other Torquay players of that era, he moved to Bridgwater Town. It would certainly be interesting to hear more about the manner of Tommy's departure from Plainmoor as the centenary history talks of him being "surprisingly released".