Sporting Bygones: Magical memories flood back thumbing through the pages of a lifelong passion

Collecting programmes from matches, tournaments, race-meetings, the whole panoply of sporting events, is something that stays with us for a lifetime, bringing hours of fun as the heroes and villains of years ago come back to life on sombre winter nights.

There are large cardboard boxes of them in the loft, drawers jammed with more recent memorabilia all over the house and the plan – some day – is to go through the entire stock, put them in some sort of order and maybe have them valued. That process will take some time.

But not among the catalogue will be some of the first of the collection and they would be perhaps the most sought-after of all.

An uncle in London was a keen follower of speedway during the early Fifties when the sport was at its most popular, regularly filling Wembley for the World Championship contested by riders like Jack Biggs, Jack Young, Freddie Williams, Peter Craven and the family's favourite, the Errol Flynn look-alike Squire Francis "Split" Waterman of Harringay Racers.

Programmes from five successive world finals were the centrepiece of the boy's collection but there were other gems, like the visit of the "Busby Babes" – including Duncan Edwards and Tommy Taylor – to Huddersfield Town in 1956 and the programme from Goodison Park in September, 1949 when Johnny Carey led the Republic of Ireland to a 2-0 victory over England, their first home defeat at the hands of a country outside the Home Championship, four years before Hungary triumphed at Wembley.

Unfortunately, they were all to go the same way, into the dustbin one April morning when Mother decided a spring clean of the house was overdue and any "rubbish" could be thrown away.

That setback brought a few tears but it also sparked a determination that, no matter what happened in the future, the programme collection would be ring-fenced and so it has remained.

In those far-off days it could not be imagined that working life would be spent watching sport and that the collection would grow beyond boyhood dreams but the evidence is there, the bulk of it made up of the programme from every match covered in 25 years of reporting on rugby union in Yorkshire and further afield for the Yorkshire Post.

That involves virtually every England game at Twickenham over that period, the majority of their away fixtures in the Five Nations' Championship and – carefully wrapped and stored – the programmes from all the matches played on the 1994 tour of South Africa, a rugby man's dream trip.

It includes programmes from Yorkshire Schools' and Colts' matches, which gave us an early glance of talented boys who would make a mark on the game, several from the later stages of the Yorkshire Shield and Silver Trophy competitions in which some of the region's smaller clubs played for serious silverware and many from the Yorkshire Cup itself.

That was always a highlight of the year, coming with Spring and the change to British Summer Time. There would be up to three nights a week travelling round Yorkshire, watching some of the great and many of the not-so-great playing the game for all their worth, culminating in the final at Clarence Field, Cross Green or Scatcherd Lane.

There are also – increasingly glossy and inevitably far more expensive (we even had to pay for some) – programmes from Ryder Cups and Open Championships to football matches at all levels; from Grand Nationals and every day of Royal Ascot at York to rugby league Challenge Cup finals and Super League deciders; from Test match scorecards to Toronto Maple Leafs mixing ice hockey and brawling.

It is from rugby league that the jewel in the collection comes, better even than that from the 1995 Rugby World Cup final in South Africa, played before the newly-elected President Mandela and an expectant Rainbow Nation.

The programme from that momentous match – which is as thick as a book and twice as heavy – was passed on by the friend fortunate enough to be at Ellis Park that day when the promise was "A Golden Day in the Golden City" cost 30 rand.

Compare that to the six old pence (2.5p today) which was the going price for the programme on May 8, 1937 for what was described on the front page as the "Final tie of the Rugby League Challenge Cup competition at the Empire Stadium Wembley".

It was the Coronation Year of their Majesties King George VI and Queen Elizabeth and it was the only time (thus far) that Keighley had reached the final.

Their opponents were Widnes and the match, which ended in a disappointing defeat 18-5 for the Yorkshire club, was still the topic of earnest conversation in the town 30 years later.

Among the 47,699 at Wembley that day were a young couple who would later become mother-and-father-in-law; they had the good sense to keep their souvenir of the day.