Geoff Public
Don't Warri Be Happy
Contributor
Timespanner, a Facebook page, puts up old Archives NZ photos of Auckland. Here's Carlaw Park, 1966.
Juju
Imagine if this had been done right, boutique inner city ground, with a pup on the corner.
Apparently there was a football ground a bit closer to grafton bridge also? I had read arsenal toured and played there.
john nick
Correct.That ground was mainly soccer.Called Blandford Park.
My uncle took me to see a game there once between a local team & an English team.iirc.
Juju
The motorway obviously must of changed the area (Grafton, Upper Queen, KRD, Newton) very drastically...
There was. I went there as a little kid. It was called Blamford Park if I remember right.
Sorry JN, my computer hadn't updated and I didn't see your reply. It was a soccer ground. I was at that game too I think, huge crowd.
Newmarket Park was another good ground until it fell into the gully. Those national league games in the early-mid 70's would get 10000 spectators to watch the likes of Blockhouse Bay, Eastern Suburbs and Mt Wellington play each other. Plenty of ten pound poms back then.
john nick
Cheers mate. I seem to remember the name Finney was the pommie soccer player that my uncle took me to watch particularly
Dixpat
In Andy we (have to) trust
Contributor
Blandford Park existed until 1964 before soccer moved to Newmarket Park
When Tottenham Hotspur toured in 1976 they played a FA XI at Newmaket Park - if I recall correctly they won 5-3.
It was the start of my "love affair" with the Spurs
According to Wikipedia Blandford Park
Located in Grafton Gully, northeast of Grafton Bridge, roughly between the northern part of Whitaker Place and the Auckland Bowls Club in Grafton Mews, it was razed in the mid-1960s, and its site is now occupied by on- and off-ramps to the Auckland Central Motorway Junction
Hardyman's Yugo
john nick
Thanks HY.
Now I think about it the name Stanley Matthews comes to mind also.
I would have been about 7/8 years old when I went to the game. So about 1955 is my guess 🤔
bruce
Contributor
Excuse me while I weep with nostalgia. Fark Eric Watson, I hope the FBI put him in Rikers Island.
Blandford Park is in the pic just to the top of Stanley Street on the right. but the stands must have been removed. They moved football to Newmarket Park about this time.
I went to Blandford Park once. I couldn't understand anybody, they all tarked foony!! Great atmosphere though, Poms know how to enjoy their sport live.
Newmarket Park was a disaster. It was on a bloody cliff and the council acted surprised when it fell off!!!
Hardyman's Yugo
One from my Dads era, a great centre by all accounts
https://www.nwemail.co.uk/news/20299456.rugby-legend-phil-jackson-passes-away-australian-home/
https://www.nwemail.co.uk/news/20299456.rugby-legend-phil-jackson-passes-away-australian-home/
bruce
Contributor
I saw him play when I was a kid. Heyzeuss they had some players back then. Imagine Barrow winning the Challenge Cup now. Those wonderful days are gone.
Tim burgess
I remember Barrow in the 80s they had David Cairns, Steve Tickle, was it Ian Ball and Eddy Szymala (spelling correct) he was hard as nails and had arms like Popeye.
They use to play in packed stadiums. In those days trips to Cumbria were tough games.
bruce
Contributor
bruce
Contributor
I played against Ian Bell. He has gone now but was a genuine hard bastard
Tim burgess
Hardyman's Yugo
Eddie Szymala was your classic cult hero. There’s nothing a rugby league fan loves more than a slightly unhinged 100% striver. As you say, arms like Popeye. Amateur game was always strong in Barrow, a lot of the lads in the team that beat Widnes would have been from the Furness area or from Millom on the opposite side of the estuary.
RLin the far North west was at its strongest in the fifties, Barrow and Workington each got to the challenge cup final three times, playing each other in 1955. Workington got to two championship finals in the fifties as well and in 1958 had four playing tourists, team manager Tom Mitchell and coach Jim Brough. I grew up on all of this, despite being born in 1960 I was indoctrinated by my maternal Grandad and my Dad to the point I almost felt I knew all the players.
The first game I can honestly remember seeing was at Barrow, sat in the stand with my Grandmother watching my Grandad who was touch judge that day
Hardyman's Yugo
You've got me started now. In the days when money in sport wasn't as important (nobody had any) what got Workington on the go was a complete visionary and maverick Chairman. His obituary from 1998 reads:
IF TOM Mitchell was not the most important single figure in the world of rugby league over the last 50 years, then he was certainly the most colourful. With his Old Testament white beard and his broad-brimmed hats, he was an unmistakeable presence and, across many different facets of the game, a hugely influential one.
A Cumbrian farmer who also worked for the Ministry of Agriculture, he first became involved in the sport when he joined the board of the newly formed Workington Town. They entered the Rugby League in 1945 and, under Mitchell's expansive leadership, which included bringing in players of the calibre of Gus Risman, quickly became one of the most successful clubs in the game.
He was too energetic and charismatic a figure to be confined to his native county. He was the team manager of the 1958 Great Britain tour to Australia, which was, at the same time, the most controversial and the most successful the Lions have ever undertaken. Mitchell, always proud to be regarded as "a players' man", took their side in a series of conflicts that led to near-mutiny. All was forgiven when they came home with the Ashes and a record of just one defeat on the whole tour.
He was chairman of the Rugby League in 1961-62 and afterwards revelled in being regarded as "The Godfather" of the game. Never afraid to go out on a limb, his was the one voice raised on the Rugby League Council in support of the British Amateur Rugby League Association when it was struggling for an autonomous existence in the early 1970s and others, with more limited agendas, wanted it strangled at birth.
In his autobiography, The Memoirs and Sporting Life of Tom Mitchell, published earlier this year, he also revealed more about a fascinating and varied life outside the sport he loved.
His work for the Ministry of Agriculture took him all over the world and he recalled meetings with the likes of Nikita Khrushchev and King Farouk. When Harry Edgar, then editor of the magazine Open Rugby visited him earlier this year, Mitchell, as well as insisting on arm-wrestling his younger guest, produced a piece of pottery given to him by Picasso, whom he had met on several occasions. "We had a mutual interest in ceramics," he explained.
Mitchell could be mysterious about the precise nature of his many trips abroad. His contemporaries on the committee that selected the Cumberland county side recall phone calls from him at four in the morning from Beirut, advancing the claims of one player or another.
He was the founder president of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and twice stood, unsuccessfully, for Parliament. His other sporting achievements included climbing the Matterhorn.
But rugby league was the great enthusiasm of his life, even if he became saddened by some developments towards the end of it - not least the decline of the club he had done so much to build at Workington. Keeping the club afloat, he said, had cost the Mitchell family "three separate fortunes". As recently as last year, he bailed them out again when debts threatened to close the club.
The activity that perhaps sums him up the best is the way that he raised money for a young Workington player, John Burke, who was paralysed after breaking his neck playing for the club. Mitchell also had his estate in Malta converted for wheelchair use, so that Burke could use it whenever he wished.
Thomas Mitchell, rugby league administrator: born Workington, Cumberland 16 May 1914; married 1942 Emily Wedgwood (one son, one daughter); died Workington, Cumbria 8 September 1998.
IF TOM Mitchell was not the most important single figure in the world of rugby league over the last 50 years, then he was certainly the most colourful. With his Old Testament white beard and his broad-brimmed hats, he was an unmistakeable presence and, across many different facets of the game, a hugely influential one.
A Cumbrian farmer who also worked for the Ministry of Agriculture, he first became involved in the sport when he joined the board of the newly formed Workington Town. They entered the Rugby League in 1945 and, under Mitchell's expansive leadership, which included bringing in players of the calibre of Gus Risman, quickly became one of the most successful clubs in the game.
He was too energetic and charismatic a figure to be confined to his native county. He was the team manager of the 1958 Great Britain tour to Australia, which was, at the same time, the most controversial and the most successful the Lions have ever undertaken. Mitchell, always proud to be regarded as "a players' man", took their side in a series of conflicts that led to near-mutiny. All was forgiven when they came home with the Ashes and a record of just one defeat on the whole tour.
He was chairman of the Rugby League in 1961-62 and afterwards revelled in being regarded as "The Godfather" of the game. Never afraid to go out on a limb, his was the one voice raised on the Rugby League Council in support of the British Amateur Rugby League Association when it was struggling for an autonomous existence in the early 1970s and others, with more limited agendas, wanted it strangled at birth.
In his autobiography, The Memoirs and Sporting Life of Tom Mitchell, published earlier this year, he also revealed more about a fascinating and varied life outside the sport he loved.
His work for the Ministry of Agriculture took him all over the world and he recalled meetings with the likes of Nikita Khrushchev and King Farouk. When Harry Edgar, then editor of the magazine Open Rugby visited him earlier this year, Mitchell, as well as insisting on arm-wrestling his younger guest, produced a piece of pottery given to him by Picasso, whom he had met on several occasions. "We had a mutual interest in ceramics," he explained.
Mitchell could be mysterious about the precise nature of his many trips abroad. His contemporaries on the committee that selected the Cumberland county side recall phone calls from him at four in the morning from Beirut, advancing the claims of one player or another.
He was the founder president of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and twice stood, unsuccessfully, for Parliament. His other sporting achievements included climbing the Matterhorn.
But rugby league was the great enthusiasm of his life, even if he became saddened by some developments towards the end of it - not least the decline of the club he had done so much to build at Workington. Keeping the club afloat, he said, had cost the Mitchell family "three separate fortunes". As recently as last year, he bailed them out again when debts threatened to close the club.
The activity that perhaps sums him up the best is the way that he raised money for a young Workington player, John Burke, who was paralysed after breaking his neck playing for the club. Mitchell also had his estate in Malta converted for wheelchair use, so that Burke could use it whenever he wished.
Thomas Mitchell, rugby league administrator: born Workington, Cumberland 16 May 1914; married 1942 Emily Wedgwood (one son, one daughter); died Workington, Cumbria 8 September 1998.
