Nights at the Golden Lion - Frodsham
Cricket
1971 the last time the reprobates played together at Boughton Hall Cricket Club.
J P H Campey, A H Coleman, A J Robinson, J P Birchall.
November can be a cheerless month and, for cricketers, sunny summer Saturdays seem a long way away. If you can’t play cricket, though, you can always talk about it. So it was, in the autumn of 1966, that three friends, fellow members of Boughton Hall Cricket Club, took to meeting on Monday evenings at the Golden Lion in Frodsham, for a beer and a natter. The choice of venue was determined by geographical considerations. Alan Robinson, late of Manchester University, was living and working in St Helens. Alan Coleman, even later of Manchester University, was working in Chester, but living in Hawarden, while JPB, recently married, was living in Helsby, so Frodsham was a convenient half-way house. Of the two pleasant pubs facing each other at Frodsham traffic lights, The Golden Lion usually, though not always, got the vote ahead of The Bear’s Paw.
Even then, (a year before the breathalyser came into use), it wasn’t a good idea to drink a skinful before driving home, so the evenings usually consisted of a couple of leisurely jars and a lot of chat, much of it about Boughton Hall. For JPB, a local lad, Boughton Hall was just ‘The Club’ and presumably what most good cricket clubs were like, but for the two Alans, who had known Clubs in the outside world, BH was somewhat anachronistic. True, the 1st XI played to a good standard in The Liverpool Competition, though the glory days of the 20’s and 30’s were long gone. The 2nd XI, however, with an average age around 40, was rarely competitive. There was no Sunday cricket, and no junior cricket. Players were recruited to the club either by word of mouth, or direct from King’s School. Coleman, in particular, found the lack of youth cricket rather shocking. His former club, Loughborough Carillon, was, it must be said, unusual in not simply encouraging young players, but actually existing purely for their benefit, with an upper age limit in the low 20’s. Anyway, all three of us agreed that Boughton Hall could do with an injection of youth.
The first problem to address was the lack of decent nets at the club. In 1966 the practice area was at the top of a slope in the outfield, near a field of kale. As the surface was not fit to bat on, mats had to be laid, so half of each session was taken up with erecting the net and pinning down the mat – the other half with wondering if it was worth the trouble. Clearly a new location was needed. Coleman, a Town Planner, working at County Hall, acquired a largescale map of Boughton Hall, from which it could be demonstrated that just enough room existed near the canal, beyond the Nomads’ main football pitch, for a semipermanent net area to be created. Before the start of the 1967 season, the ‘Golden Lion 3’ had convinced the Boughton Hall hierarchy of the viability of the move, and the detested mats were consigned to history.
The next part of the development process was to recruit junior members. This proved relatively easy. Far from resisting change, the older generation of players was highly supportive, none more so than Club President Frank Hack, who, with the two Alans, and Ron Fleet, became a coach at regular Friday night junior nets. Where was JPB? I forget, but recently-married status probably had something to do with it!
The last part of the Golden Lion jigsaw was to bring regular Sunday cricket back to the Club. Here JPB’s King’s School connection was key.
Chester Crossbatters had been formed in the late in 1959 as a nomadic Sunday team for the Old Boys of King’s School. JPB and John Reidford introduced the two Alans to Phil Campey, the organiser and driving force behind the Crossbatters. An invitation to play for Crossbatters followed. Phil became a regular at The Golden Lion on winter Monday nights, and, in due course, The Crossbatters became the Boughton Hall Sunday XI. The name still featured as a ‘social eleven’ at the club in 2014.
Business
Monday night discussions ranged widely beyond cricket. Birchall and Robinson were embarking on careers in management with companies with much in common and the origins and development of two remarkable consumer-oriented companies were a regular topic.
St Helens, where Alan worked, was where Beecham Group had its origins. In 1842, Thomas Beecham, a ‘grocer and herbalist’ and part-time inventor, began to sell a laxative pill, initially in the local markets, but progressively much further afield. Son Joseph, who took the reins in 1881, was a marketing genius, and grew the business so that its many brands of patent medicines became renowned nationally and internationally. As often happens, the third generation was more interested in spending money than making it, and the principal contribution to the business attributed to Joseph’s son Thomas was the ditty ‘Hark the Herald Angels sing, Beecham’s Pills are just the thing…’. After young Thomas left, to concentrate on his music, Beecham Group expanded apace. Henry Lazell (1903-82), who joined the toothpaste company, Macleans, as an office boy, spotted the potential of a glucose drink called Lucozade, invented by W W Hunter, a chemist in Newcastle. Lazell made money by buying Lucozade shares ‘short’, which could have seen him jailed for embezzlement, had things gone wrong. Instead, he rose rapidly and, after Beechams had bought both Lucozade and Macleans, became MD of Beecham Group. Lazell subsequently ‘bet’ the profits from Lucozade on basic pharmaceutical research, hitting the jackpot with penicillin G within 6 months. AJR recalled being allocated a cellar in the St Helens factory, to convert into a records archive in readiness for Medicines Act implementation in 1972. A fascinating couple of months followed, clearing out the existing contents, which included Company minute books, and pay-ledgers from the 1920’s and advertising films of the same vintage. Magic - and a crime to throw them away. History thrown in the skip!
JPB’s employers, Unilever, also owed much to another grocer and marketing genius from the North West (and, strangely, to another inventor from the North East).
William Hesketh Lever (1851 – 1925) was a grocer renowned for pure Sunlight Soap, and he opened the Lever Brothers’ factory at Port Sunlight in 1888. The activities of the ‘First Lord’ were not confined to soap, and he enjoyed African adventures as the company grew.
In 1961, Unilever bought an intriguing company making bleach, again in the North East of England, (AJR’s home ground!) William Handley (1901 –1975) made a fortune from Domestos. He purchased ‘waste’ hypochlorite from ICI, put it in bottles and flogged it to housewives who poured it down the drains and brought the bottles back to Wilfred to be refilled. What a product - and it ‘kills all known germs dead’!
Coleman’s stories of business were very different, but no less interesting. After a short period working in County Hall, he was transferred to work with planning consultants in Liverpool, and from there progressed to working with Merseyside Transport. His reports of the trials and tribulations of working with numpties and bureaucrats in the public sector enlivened many an evening. One story concerned improving security in the bus depots at a time of frequent nighttime breakins. Coleman suggested taperecording CCTV for each depot. One of his colleagues dismissed this on the grounds that they would still have to employ staff to watch the recordings, so might as well employ them to watch the depots in the first place. Coleman pointed out that they wouldn't actually have to watch all the recordings - only those where something had happened!
One fascinating evening I do recall in the Golden Lion ... I had been deputed to entertain a guy called John Summerville, from Beechams Horsham, who was at St Helens for a week prior to an overseas posting. John was a school friend of Jim Clarke, the racing driver, and had a host of stories about him and his driving exploits ... he really could read a car number plate at 200 yards!
Clarke had let John sit in his F1 car once and bet him a fiver he couldn't drive it away. John duly stalled it and lost the bet. Apparently (in those days), you had to let the clutch in very quickly, or the engine stalled.
As time went by, Monday evening sessions at The Golden Lion became intermittent. Coleman and Robinson moved to Sefton Park Liverpool in 1968. JPB moved to Lagos in 1972 – and it is a long commute from there. Recently the nets at Boughton Hall were moved again – at enormous expense – to a reclaimed area of ground in ‘Lowes’ corner’ by the canal bridge. Stand on that bridge on a Friday evening in June, seeing hundreds of small boys in white, learning to play the great game, and reflect that it all stemmed from three friends studying a ground plan in Frodsham 49 years ago.
PS Alan Robinson left Beechams in 1974, marrying Sandra andenjoying a career with Paterson Zochonis which, amongst other things, gave him an appreciation of the joys and exasperations of working in West Africa, well known to JPB. Alan & Sandra had a lovely Carol. JPB’s lovely Carole is her God mother.
Alan Coleman continued to plan Liverpool and died far too young in 1994.
Phil Campey our social secretary died in 2008.
Both were well worth remembering.
Alan & jpb are still drinking and remembering in 2015!