Sport
The fan - Hunter Davies confesses a soft spot
Published 13 March 2006
Wainwright was cheering Blackburn on from the fells last Sunday
We all have teams we vaguely follow from a distance, often for pretty dopey reasons. I have a soft spot for Blackburn Rovers, though naturally I went along to watch them at Spurs last Sunday hoping they'd get stuffed. They have been creeping up the table recently, threatening Spurs's chance of Europe, which is a fat chance anyway.
As a boy, I liked the Rovers blue-and-white-chequered shirts, most distinctive. The comic papers used to print a page of football strips from every team in England and Scotland, which I would cut out and memorise. Ah, simple pleasures.
I also like them because of Alfred Wainwright, whom I always thought of as a genius. No, he didn't play for them, or anyone else, though he sounds like a pre-war, no-nonsense centre-half.
A Wainwright, as he preferred to be known, was born in Blackburn in 1907 in a two-up, two-down terraced house surrounded by the cotton mills. He left school at 13 and became an office boy at the town hall. After many years of night-school slog, he managed to qualify as an accountant. In 1941, he achieved his lifetime's ambition and moved to Lakeland,
eventually becoming borough treasurer of Kendal.
His claim to greatness is his Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells. Over 13 years, in his spare time, he climbed 214 Lakeland fells, getting to each on foot or by public transport, as he couldn't drive, then he wrote up his notes in little home-made books. They were miniature works of art, in that he drew everything by hand, the words and the illustrations.
In 1955, he began publishing them, originally at his own expense, exactly as he had written and drawn them, without an ounce of printer's type. By 1985, despite not a penny being spent on advertising, publicity or promotion, they had sold one million copies. Nor did he do any literary lunches, appearances or signing sessions. If he'd been starting today, no publisher would accept him.
Wainwright loved the fells, loved animals more than humans, and always preferred to be on his own in Lakeland - and yet he also loved football, especially his beloved Rovers.
In 1939, while still living in Blackburn, he helped found Blackburn Rovers Supporters' Club, becoming treasurer, later secretary and chairman. In June 1940, he organised a coach trip from Blackburn to Wembley, where Rovers were to play West Ham in the wartime Cup final (Rovers got beaten 1-0).
After he had moved to Kendal, he still used to come down on the train to cheer Rovers on. Though not with his wife, Ruth, despite the fact that she also came from Blackburn, and enjoyed football. Their marriage, after only a few years, had become a sham, but as a local government official, he felt he had to keep up appearances.
It could be argued that his passion for the fells was partly an escape from a sad marriage. Perhaps football was another form of escape. A lot of us might identify with that, at least those who use it as a release from real life.
Sometimes his wife, unbeknown to him, would catch the same train to Blackburn, making sure she was in a different compartment. She stood in another part of the ground, leaving before the end to get an early train back before he returned. Such pathos.
Wainwright died in 1991, by which time his eyesight had faded, but he still tuned in to Sports Report every Saturday at five to catch the results. He never lived, alas, to see Rovers win the Premiership in 1995.
But I'm sure he was watching the game last Sunday from somewhere above Haystacks. This is a fell near Buttermere where his ashes were scattered, at his own request. "Should you get a bit of grit in your boots as you are crossing Haystacks in the years to come," so he wrote in 1966, "please treat it with respect. It might be me."
And I bet he was well pissed off, as were Mark Hughes and the Rovers players. They dominated the second half and could easily have had a draw, but Spurs got the winner - in one fell swoop . . .
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