Farming stock keep Wharfedale solvent
UNLIKE many of his team-mates, John Spencer didn’t farm the local land but his connections to Wharfedale Rugby Union Football Club are just as deep-rooted.
Spencer, a lawyer by profession, is the third generation of his family to be brought up and live in the sister villages of Grassington and Threshfield, home to the National Two North club that sits in an idyllic spot of the Yorkshire Dales once described by BBC presenter John Inverdale as a “sporting nirvana”.
His father and uncle played first team rugby for ‘The Green Machine’ as they are known in northern rugby circles, and Spencer himself made his debut as a 16-year-old Sedburgh pupil.
“It was against Skipton would you believe; they were our strongest local rivals at the time. I got a nasty dead-leg in the game but apart from that it went well, and we won,” he recalls.
In his prime, Spencer played his club rugby for Headingley and won 14 caps for England and toured with the Lions as well as being a threetime Cambridge Blue, captaining the side in his final year in 1969.
However, the green, green grass of the Dales has always been where his heart is and, when he could no longer play for the first XV as his career wound down, Spencer dropped down to the seconds, then the thirds and so on, until his knees begged him to stop.
“A lot of the lads I played with are still involved with the club,” he says. “They always say that Wharfedale is a much easier club to join than it is to leave. Not many move on to other clubs.
“Take the Harrison family, they have a very strong connection. The current fixture secretary Michael Harrison was director of rugby and captain for many, many years and his father was president for 18 years. His brother Jimmy Harrison, who played for Yorkshire and Warwickshire and sadly died prematurely, set up our mini and junior section, one of the first in the country.
“I went to the Wharfedale Agricultural Show the other day and of the 12 people sitting down for lunch
in the tent I was in, all of them were farmers and all of them were Wharfedale supporters. Rugby is a theme that runs through everyone’s lives around here.”
Spencer need only look out of the window of his house for a daily reminder of rugby’s omnipresence around his area, where the volunteering ethic is alive and well.
“Part of my garden adjoins the training pitch, if I look out of the window, I can see both pitches, that one and the first XV pitch.
“Sometimes we’re sat here, and we think, let’s put an hour in at the club.
“Just because you’ve been to other places doesn’t mean you cannot creosote a fence. I was out the following week doing the yellow lines in the car park and me and my wife cleaned down the area where people put their feet up against the bar; you just do these things.”
Making do and mend is philosophy that has served Wharfedale well over the years and allowed them to remain a vibrant club when other, less well-managed clubs have fallen by the wayside.
“We are unique, I think it’s the character of the Dalesman, the farmer,” says Spencer. “I think they have saved us, because farmers don’t believe in hire purchase and, being a big feature in our club, they’ve never allowed us to spend money we haven’t got. When you look at Bury and Bolton, you learn your lessons.”
That said, Wharfedale have not just been idling along in the backwaters of English rugby. For 20 consecutive seasons up until their relegation to level four in 2016, they played in National League One.
“The guys that play here have always been gritty and very good in times of adversity, there’s a lot of family and community engagement that keeps us strong and we never take a backward step against the opposition.
“We can spring some surprises; we’ve beaten the likes of Leeds and Exeter on their way up and we beat Rotherham to promotion one year.
“In my time, I can remember a season, I think it was 1965, when we got to the semi-final of the Yorkshire Cup when it was a big competition.
“Those were times when we played above our station, but the character of the people won the day, and a lot of those characters still come and watch us every week.”
With practically half this year’s National Colts-winning team made up of sons of former players, it seems that the club’s family feel, whether through birth or not, is safe for years to come.
“When you are on the field and you put your arm around a teammate here, you mean it, it is a lifetime’s friendship and that is found throughout the club,” Spencer points out.
Anyone that sticks their head above the parapet, quickly gets “the corners knocked off them”, according to the 72-year-old, who is well-suited to the grounded approach of those around him.
“I said to my wife, did you ever think in your wildest dreams that the young lad from the Yorkshire Dales would become manager of the Lions and president of the Barbarians and she said to me, ‘John, you never feature in my wildest dreams!’. That put me in my place.”
And that place is definitely Threshfield.
“When you are on the field and you put your arm around a team-mate here, you mean it”