Recently, a club member drew our attention to the book, 'Britain's Lost Cricket Grounds'which features Littletown CC. The book was written in 2011, four years after the club had folded and at the time, there was no prospect of cricket ever being played on the ground again.

We contacted the author, Chris Arnot, who was delighted to discover that at least one of his lost grounds had risen from the ashes and he also granted us permission to replicate his work below.

We'd like to extend our thanks to Chris and his publisher, Aurum Press Ltd for allowing us to do this

Littletown is not a town at all. It’s not even village. Rather it’s a hamlet of fifty four houses, five miles east of Durham on a road to nowhere in particular. The local colliery closed in 1914 and the pub in more recent years. There is a village green but not much else. No shop, no school, no phone box. No cricket ground either since 2007, when pretty well the last focus of community activity was put out to grass after 120 years.

The Church Commissioners, who own the land, wanted to increase the lease and up the rent. “The club didn’t have the membership or the funds,” says Marion Allport, parish councillor and secretary of the residents’ association. “By that time, they relied on outsiders to keep the team going.Back in the fifties, it was very much a local side.” Among them was one Johnny Goodchild, who went on to play football for Sunderland, scoring twenty-one goals in forty-four games. He was a useful cricketer too, making the Littletown team at fourteen and Durham County seconds by the time he was twenty.

Not long after Goodchild scored a hat trick against Leeds in his last game for Sunderland in 1961, Ron Young was preparing to play his first cricket match for the pit village of South Hetton. Now sixty-five and working for the Durham Cricket Board, he remembers making epic journeys to play Littletown when it was a ‘thriving and successful’ club. The distance was negligible but the trip involved catching three buses with his youthful team-mates, all lugging bulging cricket bags. “We couldn’t afford to hire a coach,” Ron remembers, “And one of the few blokes with a car in our village owned a pop factory and liked to have a couple of beers on the way to the game. My old man was his drinking mate and the only one he gave a lift to.

When we got off the last bus, we had to go round the back of some old mining terraces where there were open fields. The cricket ground was one of them. The outfield was bit up and down but the wicket was OK. I remember scoring some runs on it anyway. We went to the pub afterwards. If you were with the second team, as I was in those days, we could only run to halves – or “gills” as we call them up here – before catching the first of our buses home.”

The pub, known at different times as the Duke of York, the Ramblers’ Rest and the Mystic Manor, supplied the teams with teas. Although some effort had been made to upgrade the 100-year-old, brick-built pavilion, it couldn’t run to catering facilities.

In Ron’s day, the Littletown team still included a fair number of miners who travelled to pits in neighbouring villages. “I can remember a bloke called Dave Higgins who bowled lovely away swingers and who could hit the ball really hard. He never wore batting gloves.”

Another useful player was Mark Nelson, who scored 10,000 runs in 400 games for Littletown. “From around 1986, a lot of players of the same age came in and we fielded 2 sides every week,” he told the Northern Echo after the Church Commissioners had tolled the death knell. “The flip side was that we all grew old together. We knew we had a limited shelf life. Players were getting injured or going off with their families and there were no youngsters. The village was too small and there was no one to recruit.”

Mark went on to play for Washington, but looked back fondly on the days when he walked out to bat much closer to home. “They were a great set of lads and a lovely club. It’s been a cricket field all this time and it’ll be terrible to see long grass in Littletown."

But long grass there is, four years on. Attempts by the Durham Cricket Board to find another team that could afford the new lease came to nothing. “The last time I looked,” says cricket development manager Greame Weeks, “it was over two foot tall.”

Put out to long grass indeed.

You can purchase a copy of Chris' book here

Littletown Cricket Club - Est 2012

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