Can you identify football stars of old?
STARS CAME OUT ... but who else played in this 'old timers' game?
I’M not confident enough about football matters to speculate what the modern equivalent of this picture would be.
But to have some of the country’s top former professional players all together in one place, to take on a side of amateurs -– that would be a ticket seller and a half, still, surely?
But the problem is – the names of barely half these chaps are known. Can Cookson Country readers help to identify the others?
The appeal comes from the re-formed Harton and Westoe CW football club in Shields, which is putting together a memorabilia wall at its base at Harton Welfare.
They’ve a few photographs, but names have gone astray over the years.
This is a particularly impressive picture they’d like your help with.
It’s thought to have been taken in the early 1950s, at a match on the old welfare ground behind Green Lane, where the houses at Biddick Hall are now.
It was an annual fixture, held on Good Friday, and organised by George Lillycrop, who played professionally for Barnsley and Bolton. Considered one of the finest centre-forwards of his day, he later played for South Shields, and ended as a popular licensee in the town, running the old Walpole Inn, where he died in 1962.
In 1948 he launched what became a memorable series of ‘old-timer’ matches, bringing back soccer stars of the past to play against Harton and Westoe CW – hence the presence on this picture of the likes of ex-Sunderland, Everton and England player Warney Cresswell.
The early games were played at Green Lane, and later at Horsley Hill, raising hundreds of pounds for the Harton and Westoe Aged Miners’ Christmas Fund. Of the players and others here, here are the ones who are known: Geordie Docherty, Derek Gibson, Joe White, Ronnie (?) Mapson, Jackie Carmichael, Warney Cresswell, Ronnie Harrison, Len Dunns, Hughie Gallagher, John Gibson, a J Gibson, Walter Fry, Jimmy Strike, Ronnie Armstrong, Billy Rowntree, Paddy Kane, George Lillycrop and George Strathmore.
If you can put names to other faces, give club chairman Bob Gray a ring on 0191 537 1482 or 0772 2224 693.
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