Tuesday Family Club gathering momentum

06/06/2024

Club News

THE Family Club rugby league meetings at the Fox and Pine on Tuesday lunch times are gathering momentum. They took a huge leap forward when Oldham RLFC vice-president John Chadwick addressed a lively gathering of rugby folk at the town-centre hostelry, concentrating on the great Roughyeds side of the fifties and his own memories of Watersheddings, growing up as a boy.

Now in the twilight of his lifelong interest in and support for. the club, this former club secretary, director and chairman captivated his audience with stories, some of them never previously told, of life up there on the hill when streams of buses, in a long line, would roll up Ripponden Road on match days, taking thousands of Oldham people to Watersheddings, writes ROGER HALSTEAD.

“There will never be another ground like it, " said John. “It was unique in terms of atmosphere and as a boy in the fifties it was a magical place to go. I was star-struck all right. We had a brilliantly-exciting team, winning the Lancashire Cup three years on the run and the biggest prize of all, the Rugby League Championship, at Odsal in 1957. Who can ever forget that great day in the club’s history ?

“We are really blessed now to play at Boundary Park and to use the Joe Royle stand with its smart, modern facilities, bars, boxes, hospitality halls etc. Without facilities like that these days it’s no good. Back then it was a different world. Even at home we didn’t have central heating and fitted carpets. We certainly didn’t have smart phones, ipads, laptops and the like. You move with the times.”

Born in Shaw, but now living on the Fylde coast, John travels regularly to Oldham and is very much part of the managerial set-up. He is not a director as such, but as a close friend and an advisor to chairman Bill Quinn, and as a man steeped in the history of the club whom Mike Ford was adamant he wanted to be involved, John is very much an insider and regarded by most fans as far more than that.

He had with him the late John Etty’s career scrapbook in which there were loads of cuttings from the Oldham Evening Chronicle in the days when WD was the paper’s rugby league reporter.

No longer with us now, like the great players with whom he rubbed shoulders, Bill went on to become news editor of the Sunday People, living in the Channel Islands — not bad eh for a lad off Fitton Hill who was secretary of the old Lowermoor club when he answered a Chronicle advert for a rugby league reporter.

His only writing experience at the time was in sending Lowermoor reports into the Chronicle and telling its readers how good a certain Johnnie Noon was, but the then sports editor Harry Hirst gave him the job and the rest, as they say, is history.

I digress though. This was John Chadwick’s event — and his stories fascinated those present which included well-known Watersheddings personalities like John Watkins, he of the magic sponge, and the former prop Terry Ogden, who made his name at Oldham before transferring to Salford, for whom he played at Wembley back in the day.

Terry, like John, could tell a tale or two about former Salford and Oldham coach Griff Jenkins.

Some years later, young lads like Brian Clarke and Peter Sutcliffe were hitting the headlines as young cricketers in the CLL –— Clarke for Werneth, Sutcliffe for Crompton. Both were rugby league fans too — Peter as a supporter, Brian as a scrum-half who was signed by Oldham. Where was Crazy Horse, though? With his Shaw comrades, like Peter and John there, I expected ‘Crazy’ to be a shoe-in.

It was that sort of nostalgic event. We all recalled our younger days when even the pie and peas tasted better.

Thanks for the memory, John! It was great.

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