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Long lost amateur clubs


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there were teams like duke of york, jolly miller/kettlethorpe hotel, castle, walnut, donny transport. think its like 70's/early 80's. got info from my father in law.

Kettlethorpe merged with crigg all blacks about 4 seasons ago but due to some internal wrangling I believe they are now going to go solo again. I think a few players from walnut ended up at crigg as well.

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London Colonials were still til about 2000

The Colonials' final season was 98/99 - the last season of winter competition in London/South. They finished top of Division One, with Storm second, but only four teams finished the season.  

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The Colonials' final season was 98/99 - the last season of winter competition in London/South. They finished top of Division One, with Storm second, but only four teams finished the season.

That was it, Skolars A and Metropolitan Police were the other 2 IIRC
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Kettlethorpe merged with crigg all blacks about 4 seasons ago but due to some internal wrangling I believe they are now going to go solo again. I think a few players from walnut ended up at crigg as well.

yeah they did, i played for kettlethorpe for about 4 years before they merged. chairman of crigg has left and i think its him who is trying to get kettlethorpe back up. those were the best times i have had playing. was some cracking lads playing for kettlethorpe. chris chester coached them for a time.

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  • 3 weeks later...

First what a great thread..

 

I saw a few mentions of Aylesbury Bears RLFC and thought I'd comment.

 

ABRLFC was set up by a rugby league fan by the name of Alan Haines who worked for the council. He had some good connections and managed some funding from AVDC, well supported by his boss. I'd just moved to Oxford from Wakefield after 3 years playing in warrington at Uni for North Cheshire College and looked to play somewhere.

 

The set up was advertised in one of the RL magazines (Open RL I think). I think this was the end of 1994- beginning of 1995.

 

First session was a rag tag affair but we needed to pick a team and work a plan as we had a first game planned against Basingstoke (Beasts?). Believe it or not, our first training session was run by Dave Ellis (of Rugby Union fame now..France et al). He was fantastic as a few of the boys had never touched a ball!

 

Somehow I was nominated captain &scrum half as I was one of the few who knew how to play. We had a good couple of years playing the likes of Cambridge Eagles, Reading Raiders, United Services, Uxbridge, Tiddington (RAF) both in challenge cup pre qualifiers, East London, Swindon Bulldogs...the latter featuring on local TV as it was set up as a Bucks/Berks Cup Final. I remember we won as I scored and got sent off by one Alan Haines (yep, from our team) for questioning a decision...happy days.

 

We had some good players, a few prison officers, one welsh guy names Steve who was high energy but sadly had an eplieptic fit inour first game and so took a back step,  a guy called Andy Morgan who had played for Oxford Uni RL (or Cambridge), Joel Sidney who came later but was a top player, some youngsters (btw I was only 21 but we had some 15 & 16 years olds), Trevor Haines (Alan's son was a solid RU fly half and goal kicker), Lee Sheridan (also 16 or 17 at the time, now I believe he still plays rugby in Laos), Winston Shand - a flyer who's 15 year old son, Gary eventually played for us and went to trial with London Broncos.......we struggled to pick up new players though.

 

One strange moment was a joint training session with Aylesbury RU club. Their captain, (Dodwell?) a nice guy but classic union public school - we had the media and he tried to talk about how we may share players and one or two of us may make their 3rd or 4th team (hilarious!). I remember the training session as we were 5x fitter than their boys!

 

I remember injuring my medial ligaments badly against Uxbridge, a decent services team, and don't think I played again as it took 6 months to fix and by this time the club deteriorated...

 

I still have many of our 'programmes' in a box and a few Aylesbury newspaper clippings, after moving countries 5 times this is quite special. thanks for the memories.

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East Lancashire  who were formed in 1980 by myslef. We played on a decent pitch at Gt Harwood.

 

We had a fairly successful set of friendlies that year winning over half of them. We then entered the league in 81/2 the same year as Parkside did who went on to be Premier Division NWC, we lost every game and called it a day at a meeting in the close season (we did fulfil every fixture).

 

One of the guys that came on board to help was Bradford fan and we actually held a Dennis Trotter benefit night in our after match venue Cloggers Gt Harwood. A coach load of Bradford fans came over for the night.

 

 

The real success in terms of sustainability was the follow up club 2 of us set that up around 1988 IIRC named Accrington ARLFC (As I felt we had lost out with the generic East Lancs named being non specific and therefore didn't attract new lads from the town) that morphed into Blackburn for a year or two and back to Accrington.  The club being taken onwards by others for the vast majority of time including stalwart and Oldham scene legend Kevin O'Rourke. 

 

 

Later East Lancashire's were Swinton's Summer Conference offshoot who played at Darwen FC.

 

In recent years a 3 of us set up East Lancashire Vikings and played out of Colne & Nelson RU for a couple of seasons in the Summer comp.

 

Probably around 95% of all the players the above teams had overall were new to the game.

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Accrington joined the NWCL for the 1988/89 season. I used to play against them for the Staff of Life ARLFC. Still have some programmes concerning Accrington. East Lancashire joined the NWCL division 5 for the 1981/82 season, along with Parkside who finished 8th of 16 teams. East Lancs finished bottom and resigned from the league. They failed to fulfil 16 of their fixtures and lost the other 14. Home - Bolton 2-13, Greater Manchester Police 21-49, Halton Simms Cross 'A' 2-47, Norley Hall 2-19. Away - Beech Hill 0-57, Farnworth Ring 'o' Bells 'A' 3-49, Golborne Parkside 2-52, Greater Manchester Police 5-30, Halton Simms Cross 'A' 0-50, Langworthy 'B' 0-20, Leigh Miners Welfare 'B' 8-46, Thatto Heath 'A' 3-23, Wigan St. Judes 0-54, Woolston Rovers 'B' 0-54. Wigan St. Judes also joined the NWCL as a new club that season and went on to win the title. They now play in the NCL premier division.

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  • 1 month later...

I have tons of info, club histories, league tables, results etc etc.

 

Celtic Rooster and others

 

I am interested in amateur rugby during the 1970s.

 

I wish to obtain league tables from the inaugural seasons of the North West Counties, Pennine, Yorkshire and West Yorkshire Sunday leagues and scans (pdf if possible) of the amateur pages from the 1973-74 and 1974-75 editions of the John Player Rugby League Yearbook.

 

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

Thank you

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The inaugural Pennine league tables (1974-75) were printed in the League Express last week in the Pennine League section. I have the Pennine League tables from every division except one - Can't remember which one right now. I have the North West Counties League tables for every season except the first - 1974-75. The league started out that season as the Warrington & District League but changed to the NWCL at Christmas. I have a lot of results from that season and have the league tables with a few games still to play but I have not been able to find the final league tables. I have most of the other league tables that you are looking for as well detmot but as a Luddite, I am not very good with these computer thingies! A lot of my info is only in printed form anyhow. Probably easier for me to photo copy it all and post it to you.

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I'm going to work soon bowes (Nights) but I will do it soon as I can. Do you want Pennine and NWCL? I can tell you, without looking that the first team to drop out of the NWCL after that first season was a team called Fiat, who I guess, were based in Warrington.

Yes please that would be interesting.

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Here are the league positions in the North West Counties League a few weeks before the end of the 1974/75 season. I will put the Pennine league on later.

Division 1 1/ Pilkingtons Recs 2/ Widnes St. Maries 3/ Halton Simms Cross 4/ Wigan St. Patricks 5/ Crosfields 6/ Leigh Miners Welfare 7/ Latchford Albion 8/ Blackbrook 9/ United Glass Blowers (UGB) 10/ Langworthy.

Division 2 1/ Woolston Rovers 2/ St. Helens B 3/ Tetleys 4/ Folly Lane 5/ Kirkby Rangers 6/ Richmonds Gas 7/ Thames Board Mills (TBM) 8/ Salford B

Division 3 1/ Bold Miners 2/ Salford Juniors 3/ Widnes B 4/ Rylands 5/ Leigh Miners Welfare A 6/ Widnes RNA 7/ ICI Thornton 8/ Blackbrook A 9/ Pilkingtons Recs A 10/ Fiat 11/ Church Street Labour Club.

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Interesting a league with that spread started the season as the Warrington and District League. Kirkby is interesting though guess they had a local pro side in Huyton. A noticeable difference is no clubs between Wigan and Barrow (unless any of those works teams were)

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ICI Thornton (Blackpool ish). Huyton Hornets and Kirkby Rangers were in the NWCL at the same time for a little while. Leigh Miners Welfare played in the Warrington & District League from their inception in 1966.

 

They were certainly there when we, Formby ARLFC joined division 4 of the league in 1981. This was the same year and division that Thatto Heath began. ICI and Hyton were in div 4, Kirkby in div 2. Games against ICI and Hyton were, shall we say, interesting to say the least. Hyton used to field a predominantly different side home and away because of the curfews imposed on many of their squad by the police.  :fie:

"it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it."

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Yeah a Leigh and District League would have been a big ask, though guessing Wigan, St Helens and possibly Widnes probably had one at one point. The Manchester League I think had just merged into the Warrington and District League at this point. It's interesting to see that some pro clubs entered third teams in the amateur league in those days

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The Colonials' final season was 98/99 - the last season of winter competition in London/South. They finished top of Division One, with Storm second, but only four teams finished the season.  

Think I played against the Colonials around this time in the National cup , remember lots of planes flying overhead .

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Here are the league positions in the North West Counties League a few weeks before the end of the 1974/75 season. I will put the Pennine league on later.

Division 1 1/ Pilkingtons Recs 2/ Widnes St. Maries 3/ Halton Simms Cross 4/ Wigan St. Patricks 5/ Crosfields 6/ Leigh Miners Welfare 7/ Latchford Albion 8/ Blackbrook 9/ United Glass Blowers (UGB) 10/ Langworthy.

Division 2 1/ Woolston Rovers 2/ St. Helens B 3/ Tetleys 4/ Folly Lane 5/ Kirkby Rangers 6/ Richmonds Gas 7/ Thames Board Mills (TBM) 8/ Salford B

Division 3 1/ Bold Miners 2/ Salford Juniors 3/ Widnes B 4/ Rylands 5/ Leigh Miners Welfare A 6/ Widnes RNA 7/ ICI Thornton 8/ Blackbrook A 9/ Pilkingtons Recs A 10/ Fiat 11/ Church Street Labour Club.

I've recently got hold of a copy of the 74/75 RL stats book - I'll see what details it has on this.

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United Glass Blowers are now Eccleston Lions apparently. All the other works teams appear to be Warrington based but may be wrong

 

Indeed. Warrington had three works teams, Thames Board, Rylands and Crossfields. Thames Board were a paper mill, Rylands a wire works and Crossfields a soap works (they are still known locally as "the soap"). Rylands and Crossfields are still going strongly. 

"it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it."

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