An FC United of Manchester founder member who travelled to Workington for last week’s game with the Reds had another reason to visit the town.
Not so much that his favourites, the league leaders, had been held 0-0 in a cracking game of football.
No, the let down had been that his search for recognition of a rugby league legend in the town had proved fruitless.
Jonathan, a co-owner of FC United of Manchester, had been a pupil at a school in Chesterfield where former Workington Town forward Cec Thompson had been a teacher.
He writes in his latest blog: “The town has a personal connection for me as one of my former teachers, Cec Thompson, not only played for the town’s rugby league team during its golden era in the 1950s – making nearly 200 appearances for Workington Town between 1953 and 1960 including a Challenge Cup Final at Wembley – but was also only the second black man to play rugby league for Great Britain.
“I wrote about Cec in one of my earliest pieces on my blog. His is a remarkable, trailblazing story of overcoming racial prejudice and illiteracy which was recounted in his 1995 autobiography Born on the Wrong Side.
“Later in life Cec graduated from Leeds University – having taught himself to read and write during his playing career – and became a teacher in Chesterfield.
“He split his time between the Derbyshire town and Workington in his later years and was granted the freedom of the borough of Allerdale in 2003.
“His story is probably unparalleled in British sport, never mind rugby league, reckoned Tony Collins of the International Centre for Sports History at De Montfort University following Cec’s death, aged 85, in 2011.
“So I went in search of signs of this local sporting icon around Workington.
“While I found plaques in the town centre commemorating Billy Ivison and Gus Risman, who were both team mates of Cec, I couldn’t find anything about Cec himself.
“Nor anything in the town’s museum.
“I found a link on the internet to the TC Thompson cleaning business he set up and ran for many years in the town and which, at one point, employed more than 600 people.
“The link suggested the company was based on the Derwent Howe Industrial Estate on the outskirts of town but having trekked out there I couldn’t find any sign of it.
“Or any evidence of it on Gladstone Street in the town which also cropped up during online searches.
“As the forecast rain swept in from the Solway Firth I headed for the bus station a little deflated.
“Perhaps it was just enough to have finally stood on the terraces of the same stadium where Theodore Cecil Thompson played for a number of years in the 1950s when Workington’s rugby league club and football club shared Borough Park.
“And to remain thankful that our paths crossed at a school in Chesterfield three decades later.”
- Do you think there should be a memorial to Cec Thompson in Workington? Let us know what you’d like to see. Email [email protected]
