We were on our way to the Challenge Cup final of 1961. My brother John and I had managed to get a couple of tickets to the match and a lift with the Morgan’s Pop Factory down the road from where we lived in Ashton in Makerfield. Now the constituency of our Prime Minister. Never thought I’d ever be able to write that.
John was a massive fan of Wigan Rugby, as we called it ( none of these silly extra names required for our team in those days and no adverts on their bums either ), which we thought was probably the best team in the country, bar none. He was such a fan that he cut out pictures and reports from the papers and stuck them in a book. It was an exercise book from our grammar school which he had ‘liberated’ for better use.
With the recent ennoblement of Billy Boston, probably the greatest rugby league player we’ve had, and his more recent sad death at 93, the memories of those days came flooding back. We were used to challenge cup finals in Wigan, we were regulars, but this one was the only one we got to go and watch. We regularly watched the team at Central Park from the ‘Hen Pen’ (that’s where all the kids could watch a match in exchange for a threepenny bit). Even as youngsters, we thought it all a bit odd to travel all the way down to Wembley to watch our team.We did not have to think much about the travel arrangements as the Morgan’s Pop Factory bus was taking us and bringing us back. We squeezed onto the bus, climbing over the crates of beer lined up down the central aisle of the vehicle, with a few extra on the back seats.
We stopped, we think, at a pub near Coventry for a break in the journey. One of the group went over to the entrance and, mystifyingly, asked, ” Do yer speak English?” in a thick Lancashire accent that made English sound like a foreign language. They were unwilling to serve us, so we travelled on….
So we’d been driven down 300 miles to watch our team play their biggest rivals from just 8 miles away: Saints ( St Helens ). The weather was blazing sunshine throughout, and Wigan lost! As we left to come home, the popsters on the bus were singing and shouting defiantly: ” No fear, back next year!”
Just the other day, I got my hands on that scrapbook; it’s a work of art! A celebration of a day in the sunshine at Wembley, watching our heroes playing and losing heroically. It must have been a bit of a blow for John as he’d collected all the cuttings of the team going through the rounds to get to this final. The idea that they might lose never entered our heads. In the spirit of fairness, he did put in the shock defeat reports into his scrapbook too.
Some of the most striking images from then are the fine drawings of four of the Wigan stars, which would have been cut out of the Lancashire Evening Post. Sir Billy, Eric Ashton, who was the team captain, Brian McTigue our giant prop forward and one of the hardest men in Rugby League. Although the league was professional and these players were paid, they all had jobs too. Mc Tigre was a miner; Eric Ashton, a native of St Helens, the team that beat us, worked for a glass factory in the town. Sir Billy was put down as a groundsman at the Wigan Ground but I suspect, as probably the highest paid player of the team, he probably did not do much grass cutting.
A giant prop forward who seemed able to walk through several men in a tackle.
Fred was Wigan’s South African goal kicker: Mister Reliable
Eric was a superb centre in the squad and captained the side. In normal muddy league games, he was generally the only one to come off at full time almost as clean as he went on. He was a very close personal friend of Sir Billy.
I’d love to know if these drawings still exist; if they do, they should have pride of place in the Wigan Museum and Art Gallery. Boydell and Ford are the names of the artists; does anyone know anything bout them?
Last but not least, here’s a cutting of the entire team, oddly without Ashton, McTigue and Griffiths at its centre. This has the bonus of autographs. I wonder how he got those?
