One of my friends had two brothers and one Saturday they asked me to go to the match. My Mum said to my Dad ‘Nancy wants to go to Fartown. What do you think?’ And my Dad said, ’Let her go. When she’s been once she won’t want to go again.’ That was in 1948, and I’ve been going ever since. We got to know some people around where we stood at Fartown, and I’m still friends with some of them, right back from 1948.
There used to be huge queues of trolleybuses in St George’s Square just ferrying people to the match and back. It was fourpence from Golcar down to Huddersfield, tuppence on the trolley, sixpence to go in, and tuppence for a programme, so it was one and sixpence altogether, which would be 7½p today.
After the war not many people had a car and the petrol was rationed so we went to away games on the train. The train was so long with supporters it wouldn’t fit into Golcar Station.
A man who ran one of the coaches suggested we put up for the Supporters’ Club committee. Two of us, Elsie Shaw and myself, put up. There was a real furore. It was an all-male preserve in those days. They’d never had any women, but we got on. Eventually quite a few women got on the committee.
There weren’t a lot of facilities and we decided we ought to have a tea hut so the men said: ‘What are you going to do about it?’ We said: ‘We’ll show you and the girls dug the foundations out. We got wet and cut and bruised. It really was hard work, but we did it.’
The hut was next to the scoreboard and the ladies’ loo. The ladies had to pay a penny to go to the loo but when we went decimal the club didn’t alter the slots. So we had a blue bag with five shillings worth of pennies. During the match if we saw ladies walking up we used to lean over the counter and, in a loud whisper, ask ‘Are you going to the toilet?’ and if they said ‘Yes,’ we said ‘You’ll have to come for a penny.’ After the match the groundsman used to empty the slots and bring us the pennies back. We recycled this five shillings-worth of old pennies for months before they took the slots away.
Nancy Beaumont
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Memory added on February 19, 2013
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