Muff's Millennium Memories

Memories

MOST people associate former Examiner chief sportswriter PETER MUFF with horse racing and crown green bowling Even taking lovely ladies out to lunch for one of his long-running feature series But it wasn't always like that as Peter reported in his article first published on Wednesday 29 December 1999.

I WROTE my very first story for the Examiner just 50 years ago next month I say story, that's a slight exaggeration its like calling a street lamp Blackpool Tower It was a paragraph about a chip pan fire in Marsden .Well when you're young and wet behind ears you've got to start somewhere haven't you? I've written a thousand words since that and most of have appeared on the sports pages.

Back in 1950 I was what they called a "district man'' in the news room an endangered species today not an extinct one There were three of us on the paper. One covered Holme Valley another pottered about Brighouse Elland and Mirfield and I was what they called their Colne Valley man The car-owning democracy hadn't arrived in those days and I seemed to spend much of the day in contemplation on a No 40 trolley bus on Marsden route. Life was a real mish-mash of reporting.

The bread-and-butter routine had me knocking on vicars' doors to who had been speaking presiding expressing thanks and playing the piano at what where and when and heaven help you if you missed the name of the pianist out of the resulting paragraph. I covered the monthly council meeting did the daily police and fire calls reported inquests listened to the reminiscences of golden wedding couples and produced cliched accounts of local dramatic society shows which would make today's Examiner theatre critic Val Javin snort with derision. I

also met the political mighty people like Lady Violet Bonham Carter, Hugh Gaitskell, Barbara Castle, Manny Shinwell and Bessie Braddock. In days before TV press conferences and handouts they turned up at annual fetes and mill-yard lunchtime election rallies and pushed my rusty shorthand to the limit One thing that no-one liked was attending funerals to collect the names of mourners as they filed into church There were times when funerals came like the proverbial London buses three at a time and you felt as though you were working for Funeral Director's Gazette was all a legacy.

I suppose of the old newspaper adage that names made news and the then chief reporter was principal disciple of it In .my more depressed moments used to wonder what he would come up with next The Burgess List perhaps? I could just see the headline Down Your Way or Up Your Alley Next week: Mona Street Slaithwaite And everyone (so his theory went) would rush out to buy a copy the paper to see their names in print.

Horse and cart days up the Colne Valley, Slaithwaite cricketers used to take their tackle to away matches by this now old-fashioned mode of transport and young Peter Muff is pictured in the driving seat they take Manchester Road at a gallop news. Snow stories up Standedge were almost a hardy annual in winter There was no M62 in those days Manchester Road through the Colne Valley was the main trunk road between Huddersfield and Manchester and along with the road over Buckstones it inevitably got blocked when the snow came down in blizzards. Drivers and passengers had often to abandon their cars and be put up at local hostelries always made a story and a picture and it sometimes had its amusing side. A husband would ring up later to see if there had been anything in the paper about it and a photograph would be a bonus He wanted it for proof to his wife that he really had been snowed up and not been playing away for the night!

It wasn't exactly journalism in fast lane but 1 look back on those very early Examiner days with a touch of nostalgia and affection And stretch my imagination to the full I do wonder what might have happened if I'd kept on knocking at those vicars' doors up Valley. Was there an unseen hazard for the district men? My Holme Valley counterpart became a vicar himself and his successor became a lay preacher Good Lord! I have missed all the fun I've had out of horse racing might never have patted Red Rum on the nose before he won his Grand Nationals might have come instead of under Holy Orders Starter's. Now there's a Thought for Today!