Chris Snuggs: Where did the Old Woolverstonians go after leaving Clapham Common?
Louis Parperis: The OWs moved to play behind The Rising Sun pub on Greenford Road, just up the road on the opposite side to Sudbury Hill tube station, sometime in the early 1970s. In about 1977/78, we were approached by Ealing Teachers who didn't have a ground but had a fabulous clubhouse adjacent to the tube station and merged with them, but that became the writing on the wall for both of us and I think the club folded in the mid-80s as the OW contingent aged, moved away or found they had less in common with the ETs. The council played its part, too, by selling off the playing fields to a developer to build a load of mediocre housing. As for the ET clubhouse, the greedy bastards sold that off to David Lloyd Lloyd Clubs, completing the deprivation of communal amenities in the process. The area now looks like just any other suburban ghetto with betting shops and hairdressers a-plenty and nowhere for increasingly obese kids to let off steam or have some fun.
PS Re Tony Meager: Sadly, Tony has left the field of play. John Morri, Johnny Martin, Dave Dibbin and I attended his funeral on 29 December, 2014, at Chipping Sodbury. He was an LNS boy who was instrumental in getting OW rugby off the ground and sustaining it, and turned Dursley into a very competitive team when he moved to the West country, with the help of a stroppy prop forward that everyone thought was a Maori because they'd misheard the surname of Morri! |
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