BY MIKE LATHAM
HAVING been to Next and bought myself a rather stylish long coat with my birthday money, I decided to wear it for the first time at Everton.
A momentous day for the groundhopper, as I wrote in last month’s Forty20. I wanted to look the part.
Back in the day, a scruffy street urchin would dispense programmes from a sack. You’d fumble for change and most would then fold the programme to fit a pocket.
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Buying a programme was as much a part of the matchday ritual as a Bovril, a pint and, for those of a Wigan persuasion, a pie.
These days, most clubs don’t produce programmes, my own club Leigh having dispensed with them at the end of 2024.
Between us, Dave Parkinson, Mark Taylor, Alan Edge and I had compiled it on and off for the best part of 40 years.
You could work out a ratio for how many you’d sell at a game and not often be wrong. Football clubs one in three. Rugby league one in five, the ratio higher because league fans more commonly went as a family. A crowd of 6,000 and you’d sell around 1,200.
It was a formula that worked for years. Sadly, just like newspapers, the demand for printed documents has declined rapidly, the result of the dominating medium of the iPhone and culture of a throwaway society.
By the end we’d be selling less than 200 from a crowd of 8,000 at Leigh. The effort and cost of producing it is sadly not rewarded.
Happily, the RFL to their credit persist. A lavish 84-page full colour publication packed with current and historical articles and photos, and a solid A4 cover were on sale for the Second Test.
I was proud that my October article occupied pages 26 and 27. Even at my mature age there’s nothing like the thrill of opening a programme you’ve compiled or contributed towards, a feeling usually only replicated these days when the latest issue of Forty20 pops through the door.
Anyway, back to my coat. Once inside the perimeter wall at the Bramley-Moore Dock stadium, almost hidden away amidst the beer dispensers, Indian street food vendors and pizza sellers, was a young man at a kiosk selling programmes, card reader at the ready.
A small queue had formed, maybe half a dozen, compared to the 100 strong throng nearby, waiting eagerly for lager to be dispensed into a plastic beaker.
Now a connoisseur, as I like to call myself, comes prepared on such occasions and out of my new coat pocket I produced a plastic A4 wallet, ready to carefully place and preserve the programme once my £10 had gone through the card machine.
“Proper anorak you,” remarked the man behind me, showing scant respect for my sartorial elegance. “Hold on,” he continued. “You’re the man with the loft, aren’t you? I know where that will end up.”
He was right. Already the programme is carefully indexed in a folder marked ‘Ashes programmes’, the first in my collection from 1922.
If buying a programme was one ritual maintained so, sadly, was seeing our Ashes dreams disappear again.
I don’t know about you, but I just felt it was a big opportunity missed. Maybe it’s peering through the mists of time with rose coloured spectacles, but thinking back to past Ashes Tests, certain characters do stand out. Phil Lowe’s two tries at Wembley in 1973; the Dad’s Army team of 1978 that vanquished the Aussies at Odsal; the Invincible Kangaroos of 1982; more recently the likes of Adrian Morley, Stuart Fielden, Terry O’Connor, Jamie Peacock and Co going head-to-head with Willie Mason and Gorden Tallis.
Mason was sitting behind me at Everton, smartly attired, rather like myself, with a grey overcoat. Instead of Mal Meninga, Wally Lewis, Peter Sterling, Wayne Pearce and their like, I found the Kangaroos lacked real stand-out players, with one or two exceptions.
They don’t stay here long enough to get to know them. No tour games to familiarise you with the squad. Gary Slater’s superb programme article recalled Warrington’s win over the Kangaroos at Wilderspool in 1978, a game I recall clearly. Yet the current squad plays three games and then are gone.
At Everton, they gave the impression of playing within themselves, ready to punish the England side whenever they wanted. Two quick tries at the start of the second half and the game was over. For all their effort and structure, and how they matched the physicality, England’s lack of attacking invention was depressing.
And so we headed to Headingley for a dead rubber, once again. By my calculations, there have been eight of those previously in Ashes Test series in this country: in 1933, 1937, 1948, 1952, 1963, 1982, 1986 and 2003.
I looked up the definition. “A ‘dead rubber’ is a sports match in a series where the outcome of the series has already been decided. This means the match is meaningless for determining the series winner and has no impact on the final series result.” The origin of the phrase is in the card game ‘rubber bridge’ and it migrated to other sports.
Anyway as I filed the programme away, as the man behind me in the queue had predicted, I got to looking at 1937’s Third Test edition and comparing.
Saturday 18 December, seven days before Christmas, the weather cold and unwelcoming, every rugby game bar one called off in Lancashire, the final Test at the Fartown ground in Huddersfield going ahead despite overnight frost so severe the papers of the day had photos of hundreds of skaters on frozen Yeadon Dam and Keighley Tarn.
This time the ignominy was on the Kangaroos, playing for pride after defeats in the first two Tests, 5-4 at Headingley, 13-3 at Swinton.
Just 9,023 braved the elements, the receipts £1,237. It had been a troubled tour for the sixth Kangaroos, the Manchester Guardian calling them the worst Australian team ever sent to this country.
But they came within an inch of taking the Ashes home. The First Test was effectively make or break, boiling down to one opportunist try by stand-off Emlyn Jenkins for the home side, reduced to 12 men by injury for the last half-hour and with two players battling through concussion (no substitutes in those far-off days).
Just two minutes remained when Australia were awarded a penalty just inside their opponents’ half. Jack Beaton had already landed two long-range goals but inexplicably his captain, Wally Prigg, opted instead for a high tactical kick which came to nothing and the game was lost.
The first Test saw 32,000 packed inside Headingley; the second attracted over 31,000 to Station Road. England retained the Ashes, their sparkling backline with five players from Lance Todd’s Red Devils of Salford excelling.
So to Fartown, where the pitch was protected by ten tonnes of straw after a week of fog, snow and ice. Gus Risman was the only man of the 26 on duty that day who’d play in a future Ashes Test.
The Aussies, despite losing the scrums heavily to brilliant Swinton hooker Tommy Armitt, saved their best until last, scoring three tries in a 13-3 victory, the midfield link of halfbacks Fred Gilbert, Jack Reardon and centre Ross McKinnon at its heart.
This combination had been unavailable in the first two Tests due to injury. England, playing 12 men for the last half-hour after fullback Billy Belshaw was injured, were well beaten.
Whoever attended the match kept the programme in mint condition, though in the days long before the invention of plastic wallets. Despite the ice, it is immaculate 88 years later. 28 pages of tight type, a few photos and adverts. Giants of the game like Harold Wagstaff, Jim Sullivan, Jonty Parkin and Risman recalled battles of the past.
The 2025 programme featured the legend ‘Rivalry Reignited’ with the English Lion and Australian Kangaroo. Adverts inside included an energy company, a Bavarian beer, Alkaline Ionised water, “perpetual luxury” watches. The more things change the more they stay the same.
The 1937 front cover also showed the Lion and the Kangaroo but was priced at twopence, not £10. For energy there was coal merchant Douglas Clark, hero of the 1914 Rorke’s Drift Test, who operated from Hillhouse Sidings selling Haigh Moor Wallsend Cobbles and large nuts. “Hot, clean, no slack.” Fillmans were local agents for Omega watches, with the “exact time for life.”
For beer, local brewers Bentley & Shaw whose Town Ales “scores every time”. For water look no further than Inman’s XL Table Waters, who also purveyed real health drinks, fruit crushes and lemon barley water.
Other ads included one for the George Hotel, where our great game was formed in 1895. “Fifty bedrooms with hot and cold water, private sitting rooms and bathrooms. Lounge, billiard room, restaurant and grill. Meals at any hour.” The great Wagstaff kept the Royal Swan Hotel on Westgate, the “most up-to-date hotel in town.”
The sixth Kangaroos, we learned, trained on Turog, the Brown Bread of Health.
Elsewhere, the Regent Cinema in Huddersfield awaited match-goers, “the most luxurious and up to date in town with continuous nightly shows from 6pm.”
Adverts for local tradesmen: ironmongers, welders, bakers, building contractors, clothiers; hairdressers and tobacconists; wine and spirit merchants; dry cleaners (“The Man is very handsome who can look well in dirty linen!”); a chemist dispensing surgical requisites; a tripe dresser and dripping refiner; Atkinson’s Gold Medal Pork Pies; the Princess Picture House with “the latest and best in talking pictures” and its Western electric sound system.
And fittingly, in view of the status of the Test series, WH Chapman, who purveyed high quality macs and raincoats from The Rubber Stores, not the Dead Rubber Stores. “If you buy a Mac or Raincoat, look for the best. It costs very little more and pays well for the trouble.”
Chillingly, there was also a translation of the Australians’ War Cry: ‘We are a race of fighters descended from the War, Beware, beware, beware, beware, Where we fight there will be great bloodshed, Go, go, go, go, We are powerful but merciful; are you friends? Good, good. The Kangaroo is dangerous when at bay, Come on! Come on to death.’
I went to Headingley looking forward to renewing acquaintances with John Brook, who has sold programmes there since the 1970s. I remember buying a programme from him at the Third Test of 1982. In those days his familiar call of ‘Open Rugby’ was one of the sights and sounds of Headingley, the first time I encountered Harry Edgar’s groundbreaking magazine.
I took along a plastic wallet, just as I did 43 years ago. Old habits die hard.