10: He was known as Burnley Dave
There have been, still are, and will continue to be many Burnley Daves. This one was from Skipton, moved to Bradford and sadly died in January 2010. He possessed a claret and blue scarf. And it is the old scarf that prompts this tale, for the scarf was precious and one of his proudest possessions.
Because he couldn’t drive he didn’t get to many Burnley games from Bradford and was in fact very much an armchair supporter. He used to sit at home on a Saturday listening to football with a Walkman plugged into his ear and he would wear a Burnley shirt with the old P3 Computer logo on it. He did in fact watch Bradford City sometimes, and was always there when Burnley were in town. Armchair based he might have been, but Burnley was his first love and passion, the scarf the symbol of that love.
Dave was born shortly after his parents moved from Bradford to Skipton in 1955 and his parents were prominent people in the town. His father was once Mayor of Skipton and his mother was a magistrate. Dave and his parents loved each other dearly and he too, like them, was a diehard socialist. However he didn’t really fit into his parents’ mould. His main interests were women, smoking, beer, and Burnley Football Club. Nothing much changed for the rest of his life. I guess there are lots of blokes like that.
Skipton was then a hotbed of Burnley support; it still is a claret town basically but support has perhaps diminished over the years since the 60s and 70s. He was only 5 when Burnley won the title in 1960 but grew to appreciate the great side of 65/66 and then the Team of the Seventies.
He was a bright lad and went to Grammar School but chose not to go to University; instead he joined the Inland Revenue and was posted to Bradford. Bus trips to from Skipton to Turf Moor ended and regular attendance faded. But he still had the scarf that signified his unending support for the Clarets. It’s an old scarf, hand knitted, woollen and it is most likely that it was his mother who knitted it. Many years ago mothers used to do that kind of thing lovingly for their sons if they were football mad, or knit garish sweaters if they were not, sitting by the fireside listening to the radio whilst fathers would sit and read the newspaper. Maybe she also knitted socks for her husband or even a cardigan. This was before television, and the comfortably-off family with dad smoking his pipe, sitting together in the living room in the evenings was the happy norm, or so the pictures in the history books suggest.
Dave married at a young age but didn’t wear the scarf to his wedding. That would have been frowned on and would most likely have annoyed his new wife. His wife was an officer in the Civil Service and they moved into a swish house in Wibsey a suburb of Bradford. Astonishingly his wife walked out on him after just 3 weeks leaving him with an unaffordable mortgage. But, he was always clever with money and dragged out the sale of the house until its value had risen and made him a tidy profit. That was 1-0 to Dave. Maybe his wife had said it’s the scarf or me, although that’s highly unlikely. But you never know.
For a wife to walk out on a husband after just three weeks is highly unusual even in today’s whacky world but back then was unheard of; wives back then were dutiful and obedient; there to be seen and not heard. (Just watch that old black and white film Brief Encounters.) Maybe his new bride by now after just three weeks was upset by the scarf seeing it as a symbol that he perhaps loved Burnley more than her.
That reminds me of the couple I knew who divorced bitterly with the wife proclaiming angrily, “You love Burnley more than me.”
And he (another Dave) was quick to reply, “Darling I love Blackburn Rovers more than you.”
Dave, with the scarf, moved into a back to back property that was his home for the rest of his life. At first he attacked the upgrading of the house with missionary zeal including new kitchen cabinets. He wasn’t sure where to fit them so stood them on the floor under a thin chipboard top. Twenty years later they were still there.
He and his great friend Hywel met in the early 80s and each with a broken marriage enjoyed having a good time in the pubs and clubs of Bradford and had many a scrape with the ladies, having many a successful tryst and getting into all kinds of bother with jealous boyfriends and husbands.
Armed with the gift of the gab and a new job, now a Chartered Surveyor, Dave had a fine reputation as a valuer but knew he was too much of a maverick to ever become a manager. By day he was a serious and diligent hard worker, in the evenings he was devoted to having a drink, a good time and lots of laughs. Maybe he wore the claret scarf to work when he travelled to London. Unlikely perhaps, but you never know.
At age 52 he took early retirement and was always at any game involving Burnley at Bradford City. In retirement he took up two hobbies, turning round the fortunes of Wibsey WMC and betting on the gee gees. He was better at the first than at the second. He loved sport and his small house was often filled with friends watching the Super Bowl or World Snooker.
For several years he had an Old English sheepdog, Bonnie, and used to comb her and save the hair hoping to have it all spun into yarn to make him a jumper. Bonnie died sometime in the early 90s before he had enough. He couldn’t contemplate throwing the clippings away and the great bag of Bonnie’s hair was still there in the house when Dave died.
In 2008 when his mother died his own end was not too far away. He developed an aggressive throat cancer, in next to no time struggled to speak and eventually had to be fed via a drip. He poured vodka into the drip because the burps tasted better he wrote, unable to speak. He died within 18 months.
Shortly before he died his friend Hywel made the journey to Burnley struggling in the thick snow to buy him a new shirt. The staff were just packing up but went out of their way to get the shirt but alas it was too late to get Dave’s name on the back. He loved the shirt and he was cremated with it in his coffin.
There were several games involving Burnley at Bradford in the 80s and 90s and Burnley Dave would always be there but the two memorable ones took place in September 2002 and March 2004 with Dave probably too ill by then to attend the latter. It was the one where Brian Jensen made so many world-class saves that Bryan Robson was shaking his head at the undeserved 2-1 Burnley win that eased relegation fears.
But it was the one in 2002 that had Burnley Dave and the rest of us who witnessed it absolutely open-mouthed. It’s all there in It’s Burnley Not Barcelona, that weird and wonderful season when scores of 6 and 7 were not uncommon, unfortunately the goals slamming into the Burnley net. Entertaining it may have been (for away fans) but grey hair in Burnley grew in direct proportion to the number of goals conceded.
I dug out an old copy off the shelf and re-read the account of that 2002 fixture when Stan was manager and the club lurched along with Stan and Barry Kilby trying to resurrect it from years of dross and penury.
‘The facts are these. On Saturday the sun is shining, the sky is blue; the ground is colourful and bright. Two sets of bedecked supporters are in good voice and there is a fine spectacle in prospect. We draw 2-2 which on the surface seems a good away result and we watch the game from the privileged comfort of a warm, food laden, drink filled Bradford City supporter’s corporate private box.
Bradford score first, first half did we have a shot? Two Bradford players are sent off. The crowd is incensed. We score two and lead 2-1. In front of us sit the non-playing Branch, Weller, Armstrong and Payton.
“You’re not playing then?” I ask which has to be the dumbest question of all time as they sit there in suits. I tell them I once taught Dean West.
“Ah that tight buggar from Yorkshire,” one of them replies. Another says, as the conversation hiccups and stutters, that a couple of days earlier the club was close to administration.
We began with the traditional hoofer style and got nowhere giving away the by now customary sloppy goal to give ourselves a challenge. The second half changes as the artists come on Alan Moore and Robbie Blake and we play football. Blake transforms things and Bradford are handily reduced to 9 men .It became a game we were on the way to comfortably winning 2-1 but then disgrace, embarrassment, derision set in roughly with about 15 minutes to go and every Burnley supporter left that ground baffled by what we did at the end. Burnley elected to play showboat keepball in their own half with the inevitable slip that gave the ball away and off Bradford go and score with 5 seconds left on the clock. We threw away the chance of three gift points by spurning the chance to play the ball in their half and going for a third goal.
David Clark wrote: Clarets preference to showboat, play ridiculous keepball patterns and try to run the clock down led to their downfall snatching a draw from the jaws of victory. Totally unprofessional over the last 15 minutes in their conduct rather than putting the game well and truly beyond a depleted and dead-on-its-feet Bradford side left many Clarets in states of bewilderment and embarrassment. Amateurish tactics allowed 9-man Bradford to equalise in the dying seconds.
You don’t need to ask what the Bradford websites say… everything damning that you would expect about the nasty, cheating, physical Burnley.
If you were there you might remember that one man was sent off for leaving Papadopoulos in a heap on the floor but this was seen as diving by all home fans. The other was sent off when a Bradford elbow gave Dean West a fat lip. But no the Bradford folk said, it was the ball that did it not an elbow. When the final whistle went you’d have thought Bradford had won the FA Cup their fans went so wild. Burnley fans slunk away including me and Mrs T. At least though, we were full of top-notch chicken, salad and moussaka.
I like to think of Burnley Dave sat in the sunshine that day, there in the Burnley end rather than his usual home-end seat and wearing his claret scarf. Much as he might have come to support Bradford there is some truth in the notion that you never forget your first girlfriend so that his loyalty to Burnley always came first.
The controversy raged on during the following Monday with the Bradford manager fuming at Burnley’s alleged antics that saw two of his players sent off and Stan Ternent responding by telling him his comments were slanderous. Nicky Law duly apologised after Stan’s broadside. What he didn’t know was what we had come to learn, that dear old Dimi had legs like Bambi on ice, and was always falling all over the place. He could fall three feet outside the penalty area but somehow land in it just like the great Harry Potts used to do.
Say what you like but that was one eventful season. Predictions were impossible; you never knew how many cricket score games you would see. A gallows sense of humour was essential so that you could laugh at things like someone from Bradford who wrote: ‘Burnley is a bit like Keighley but minus the sophistication and culture.’
As people sorted out Dave’s house and belongings the scarf was found and lovingly gathered by his executor Hywel and his trusted friend of so many years. It was one of the first things he took home as a memento of a deep friendship. He knew so many people in and around Wibsey who all knew him as Burnley Dave and the Crematorium was packed to overflowing. Hywel visits his grave in Skipton to this day and still chats to him and sheds a tear. It’s what we do. Perhaps he chatted one day and reminisced about the time they went to the re-opening of a pub and there was a Hawaiian theme. Two 14-stone barmaids were dressed in grass skirts, but the landlord bizarrely was dressed as a French onion seller.
Hywel kept the warm and comfortable scarf until very recently but then decided that it should at last be passed to another true Burnley fan. It was thus handed to James Brunskill whom Hywel knows, and if at Burnley you see a bloke wearing a claret and blue banded scarf that clearly belongs to a long gone decade when things were made of wool and hand- knitted; and players like Ralph Coates and Andy Lochhead graced the Turf, then that will probably be the scarf and if it is, that will be James Brunskill its new custodian, wrapped inside its warm and comforting embrace.
I don’t know about you, but the scarf I treasure the most dates back to 1972, machine made and striped lengthways in the college-scarf style, and I still wear it. Its age gives it special meaning. It has seen an FA Cup semi-final, Wembley twice, relegations, promotions, triumphs, drama and near disasters like the Orient game. It has been to Austria, Scotland, Ireland and all four corners of England where Burnley have played. I have a dozen scarves in the drawer but it’s this old one with its frayed ends that fits me like a glove and feels exactly right.
We had two of these old scarves, one each, but flying one from the car window back from a game one day, when the window was carelessly wound down out flew the scarf and was last seen crushed under the wheels of an articulated truck a hundred yards behind us. The word upsetting is inadequate. I knew in that instant exactly how a small child feels when they lose a favourite Teddy Bear.
We probably all have something Burnley related, something precious that we value so much. Burnley Dave’s scarf, old, woolly and made with a mother’s love; is now somewhere near its 60th year. How can you put a price on such things?