Watcombe Rangers 1954 Team Photo restoration

[Dave]

Watcombe Rangers 1954 Team Photo restoration


The following post was written on the May 19th 2009

Apart from working full time, I also have a big pile of work I do for mainly family and friends. That work is restoring old photos etc of family members or lost friends. I do not charge anyone for doing the work, I just love being creative and enjoy seeing their faces when I hand over the new pictures.

Being out on the road all day I seldom get to hear about the lives of my fellow work mates and two bosses at Toolfix, but when I went there to work I did learn that my boss Steve Crooks father was very unwell and in the end had to be moved into the secure unit at Torbay hospital.

It was very sad and as you would expect caused so much pain to all the family as they watched this great man slowly get worse and in the end pass away.

You may know Steve's brother as he was once on the books for Torquay United. I don't think he played any first team, games for them, but I think he did get onto the bench a few times. I saw him play in a cup final a few years ago for Upton and Mark Loram also played that day scoring four goals and aged around 40 years old, I was there as Ant was playing for the other team.

Anyway a few weeks ago my boss brought in a photo frame that contained a newspaper cutting, he had gone to the house of a friend and it was on the sideboard. The cutting was a photo of the Watcombe team of 1954 and Steve's dad was one of the players in the picture.

The friend was also a son of another player in the same photo. Steve wanted to know If I could try and improve the picture and do two A4 size photos, one for him and one for his mum as they have no pictures of him around this time in his life.

I did have a go but there is not much you can do with just a newspaper cutting and I asked if he had contacted the Herald Express to see if they would let him have the photo so I could work from that one.

The Herald Express were not very helpful I'm afraid, yes it was not their photo and had been sent in by a reader but they said they would see what they could do, but in the end did nothing.

I set to work to try and find the man who sent in the picture and with Carols help and a phone book I got lucky and made contact with the mans son. He was house sitting for his father who was on holiday.

I told him the story and he said he was sure his dad would want to help and to give him a ring after Sunday. I waited until this evening and phoned the gentleman and boy did I have a great interesting chat with him.

No matter how old you are its always great to chat with anyone who has lived that bit longer and he was soon telling me all sorts of things about Steve's dad and times back them playing football. I learned that Steve's dad was a boxer as was some other players and they boxed at the Apollo in Torquay.

Steve has told me his dad was always going to the fair to box the fairground boxers, mind you in those days they were real fights and not the staged ones I always remembered when I was young. You stood there waiting for some one to challenge the fairground boxer, but it was always some air force or army person and you could often see the marks on their faces from fights they had been in earlier in the evening.

Back to the story then, well he is delighted to help and as luck would have it I'm in the South Hams tomorrow morning, he lives in Chillington and I'm calling into see him and collect the photo so I can scan it on to my PC.

The paper cutting that was given to me

[/url

The original photo that was lent to me by Reg Chapple

The picture fully restored

Below is the story of the day I retuned to Reg his original photo and a copy of the restored one

This post was written on May 27th 2009

I’m sure many of you have experienced that feeling you get when you have just been with someone famous, or were at some event in history that left you feeling you had just had a magical moment.

That is how I felt today as I drove along Slapton Sands on my way to Dartmouth after just leaving the home of Mr Chapple, I would expect it was the same feeling that tufc01, Jon and Barton Downs felt as they left to go home on the Legends night.

Yet Reg Chapple is unlikely to be asked to take part in any legend night, have people turn up just to listen to what would be no more than his memories, but I now feel that all people over a certain age should all be called legends, because they will all have a lifetimes stories to tell.

I wish I could have spent more time with Reg Chapple a man who is best described as a Merse, only 20 plus years older, a man who could recall such detail and names from the past, mind you as is so often the case, he could not remember my name from last week.

I only wish I could remember all he told me today, but there were so many different things he talked about.
Every since I was able to talk I earned the nickname yapper. I have so many times been asked what it would take to shut me up for five minutes, some said in jest, others in a more hurtful way, but I have now found there is a way to keep me quite.

Put me in a room with a 79 year old man who wants to share his memories and I will just sit and listen as the man takes me back to his young days and talks of times I have only read about before. There was a moment that was moving and that was because as he looked at the new photo I had made for him, he picked out all the players one by one and then touched the other two apart from him that were still alive.

He paused for a while and I felt he was thinking that soon his time would also come and I really did feel those thoughts coming off him so strongly and it made me think about a part of death I hade never thought about before.

Before I explain that I will just talk about a few things Reg shared with me, he said that back then all TUFC players never earned much money and there was no way they could ever afford to buy houses etc. Most were put up in lodgings out at Watcombe in such well know roads as East Pafford Avenue, a street Reg himself grew up in.

He went on to say that if you wanted to find any player in their spare time, you only had to go to the Bondi Club, in Factory Row, this club was a snooker club that had 18 tables in it, does anyone remember this club?

If they were not there they would have been in the other snooker club nearby, this one only had eight tables and was above Burtons Mens wear Clothes Shop on the corner on Lower Union Lane right opposite Market Street.

He talked about the expense of going to TUFC back then and is was the case you just about put enough money to get in and see the game and so buying such things as programmes were out of the question, would be great to find out just how many programmes were sold at games back then.


He also talked about the day St Marychurch church was bombed and 26 children and teachers were killed on May 30 1943, Reg would have been just thirteen years old. It was such a beautiful Sunday morning on that fateful day and Reg thought it was too good a day to be sat in the church.

He decided to go alone to Watcombe beach and on his way he bumped into his friend who was on the way to the church. Reg persuaded him to go to the beach with him and his friend agreed. If that young boy had not come across Reg on his way to the church we may well have been no 27 on the death list.

Reg also talked about the Petitor racecourse, but he felt a little troubled due to an article about the racecourse that was in the HE a few weeks ago. It claimed the course was closed around 1942, yet Reg believes this can’t be the case, unless his mind is playing tricks on him.

In 1945 Reg worked as a telegram boy(who remembers them?) and in his mind he is sure we went often to the track to pick up and deliver bets, I think Barton will have to check it out to put Reg’s mind at rest.

It was time to leave as I only went to return his photo he had kindly lent me and as I shook his hand my mind took me to King George playing field and I saw in my head this mans hands making a great save that had his team mates jumping with joy, then I saw him pick the ball out of the back of the net, well you can’t save them all can you.

Would there have been much difference for Reg playing at King George’s field back then? Well the ball would have been different as were the boots, but I bet if you did not look down to the road and see all the modern cars on the road, you might just find that things really are much the same today as they were back them as regards playing in a football team.

I do feel very honoured to have been able to spend a small amount of time today with Reg and wish him so many more years’ life to come for him and his dear wife and as I got to Dartmouth I had that thought about death I had never had before.It was that when anyone dies its not just the person who is lost and missed, it’s the person’s memory that also dies and is lost forever.