THE FINAL STORY: HOW MY WIFE’S HILL CLIMB GOT THE FALMOUTH NEWS OUT

As ever, the whole world (sort of) was able to watch, live, every moment, every emotion, every analytical replay, of last night’s Euro football final. Everything, absolutely everything, was instant, for all to see, with all the full reports and comments following not far behind after it was finished.

Once upon a time, there was another “football final.” That was the name of the Saturday evening edition of the Plymouth-based Evening Herald newspaper.

 

Its arrival, at around eight o’clock on a Saturday night, would be eagerly awaited by a crowd of 40 or 50 football fans in Falmouth town centre.

 

The newspaper was packed full of football results and early reports from matches nationally and locally.  Much of its content – a good three hours after the final whistles had blown - was the first its followers knew about their teams’ performances that day.

 

As well as my day job as Falmouth Packet staff reporter around that time – late 1960s/early ‘70s – I was also a hungry freelancer.

 

Among others, I would supply the Football Final with a 150-word half-time report on every Falmouth Town home match and then the result.

 

No instant laptop e-links, no mobiles, in those days, of course.  So how did I do it?  Well, as the game was under way, I would be furiously jotting down shorthand notes for my “full” match report in the following week’s Packet.

 

But towards the end of that first half, I would also be writing out – on another page of my notebook and in legible (I hoped) longhand – that half-time report.

 

The moment the ref blew for the break, I would rip out that page and hand it to Janet, my long-suffering wife.  

 

She would then leave the ground, rush up the hill to the nearest public phone kiosk, in Kergilliack Road, and dictate my report to an Evening Herald copy-taker in Plymouth. Then I’d do the same with the result when the 90 minutes were up. 

 

Came the day when the club took a giant technological leap forward and (fanfare) installed a land-line phone on the ground!

 

So Janet no longer had to dash up that hill to the kiosk.

 

But the breakthrough wasn’t without its downside.

 

Another of my freelance outlets was the Sunday Independent (alas, as with the Football Final, now sadly no more). 

 

For them (are you reading this, John Collings?), I would supply a 200-word match report. That would have to be in by six o’clock, latest. 

 

So, especially when a match had seriously over-run, rather than driving home and writing and phoning my report over from there, I would do it all while I was still at Bickland Park. All the more appropriate if I had to check a few things first and maybe get some after-match quotes.

 

But as for that “downside” . . . 

 

The new phone was located in the corridor at the rear of the main grandstand and players’ dressing rooms complex.

 

And because it was a more reflective match report, as opposed to the blow-by-blow nature of the half-term offering, there were times when – perish the thought – my beloved Town had played badly, maybe even LOST!

 

I had to tell it like it was, of course, and yes, there would be times when members of the Falmouth team on the receiving end of my verbal barrage would walk right by me just as I was filing my copy and spelling it all out.

 

With sick-as-a-parrot emotions still running high, or rather low, it was not unusual for me to be told, mid-filing: “Don’t talk ****ing rubbish, Mike.” 

 

I even once had Richard Gray, Town’s all-time most successful manager, complain:  “I thought you were supposed to be on our side, Mike.”

 

So you can see there were times when I was sorely tempted to risk missing the deadline and reverting to my old routine - by escaping up the hill back to that kiosk!

THE LITTLE-KNOWN REASON WHY ‘UNCLE BILL’ WANTED TO TEACH SO MANY TO SWIM

A plaque on Falmouth’s Custom House Quay reads: “Remembering the local people who gave their support to Falmouth Swimming Club.  None more so than William ‘Uncle Bill’ Boulton, who taught a generation of local children to swim from these steps.”

 

For “that generation,” read hundreds of enthusiastic and appreciative youngsters in the 1960s and ‘70s.

 

Uncle Bill, who died in 1978, was one of the waterfront’s best-known characters. 

 

But what was not well-known about him was precisely why he was so motivated to spend so much time passing on his own expertise to so many others.

 

I’ll wager that few if any of those he taught to swim realised that he was a survivor of one of the darkest episodes in Royal Naval history.

 

He was serving on the battlecruiser HMS Repulse when it, along with the battleship HMS Prince of Wales, was sunk by Japanese torpedoes and bombs off the east coast of Malaya during the Second World War. 

 

The vessels had no effective air cover and around 1,200 men were lost. 

 

For such a scale of loss, remarkably little has been recorded about the event – and you will certainly find nothing relating to Uncle Bill’s involvement.

 

There is reference to what became known as “the naval battle of Malaya” in the BBC’s WW2 People’s War archive, with Commander R V Ward, another survivor, lamenting the fact that “no-one seems to have heard of the awful event of 10 December 1941.”

 

He recalled how everyone on the Repulse and Prince of Wales lost all their possessions and how those who remained alive had to swim in shark-infested waters for 90 minutes before being rescued by other naval vessels.

 

Bill Boulton was a real-life uncle to Falmouth GP Dr Rob Jones, who told me this week: “Like so many of his generation, he just did not want to talk about his wartime experiences; certainly he kept very quiet about the sinking and its aftermath.

 

“To the extent that he did talk about it, he always said that he would never have survived that ordeal in the sea if he had not already learnt to swim – and that was why he was so keen to teach others.

 

“I was one of those youngsters who he taught to swim from those quay steps. I was just 12 when he died. People still remember him and speak very fondly of him; he was a very charismatic man.”

 

He added: “My uncle was one of a large number of men from Cornwall and Devon who served on those ships in the war and who went down with them or spent so long in the sea awaiting rescue.”

 

Twenty-odd years later, Uncle Bill was part of the regular summer evening scene at Falmouth’s Custom House Quay basin, where large crowds were thrilled by open-air entertainment including swimming galas and water polo matches, complete with superb running commentaries by Monty Banks with his megaphone on the diving raft.

The plaque dedicated to Uncle Bill was officially unveiled in 2017 at a ceremony involving John Murray - whose parents Pearl and Paddy (a county champion) were heavily involved in running the swimming club – and John Kent, who succeeded Bill and was also part of the successful water polo team at that time.