Lime and sawdust days of grassroots football
As the World Cup gets under way, with its highly paid stars strutting their stuff on the global stage in top-class stadiums, far away is another world of grass roots football.
And we're turning back the clock with this picture with memories of one Shropshire football side, Stirchley United FC.
The official photo, taken outside the Rose and Crown pub in the village on June 23, 1956, after they won the Wellington League Cup in the 1955/56 season, was loaned by Mrs Bess Edwards, of Shifnal, whose late father Sam Harris was one of the players and who kept a diary for 40 years. Sam is on the far right at the back.
He and wife Dorothy farmed at Sunnymede Farm, Naird, near Shifnal, until retiring to Victoria Road, Shifnal, in 1972.
"The only player I know who is definitely still with us is my cousin Jim Harris, in the middle of the middle row. He lives in Fellows Close, Little Dawley, and is now 82," said Mrs Edwards.
Mrs Edwards said Stirchley United flourished during the 1950s and her father was keenly involved between 1954 and 1961.
"He joined the committee in May 1955 and performed various tasks, such as fetching sawdust from Kemberton Mill and Kemberton Pit and marking out the home pitch - it was on the brook field behind the white houses - with either sawdust and creosote or sawdust and lime on Friday afternoons and, or, Saturday mornings before a home match.
"He also transported some of the players, meeting them from the bus from Sheriffhales, in Shifnal, and taking and fetching them to Stirchley.
"The club played in the Wellington League, and highlights of the year, after the last matches of the season, were the dinners, both the league dinner held at the Forest Glen pavilion, which was usually at the beginning of June, and Stirchley FC's own supper, held in Stirchley Church Room at the top of the village later in June or early July.
"My father used to transport extra trestle tables from the Methodist Chapel in Finger Lane and the crockery and cutlery borrowed for the local supper from Brown's cafe in Dawley High Street.
"In 1961, the last season in which he was involved, the crockery and so on was borrowed from Brittains in Wellington."
Committee meetings of the club were held on Tuesday evenings in the Rose and Crown pub in Stirchley.
Another regular feature of the club's life was the annual Christmas draw, which took place at the pub, for which Sam usually contributed a bird.
Sam's diaries record among other things some of the club's results during his time, as well as giving mentions to other aspects, including the football dinner at the Forest Glen on June 11, 1955, when the "Donnington bus moved off and left me in a predicament."
Dorothy died in 1977 and Sam in 1987.
