Brian was part of the famous hole-in-floor Press gang

THEY laid Brian Batty to rest amid the tranquility of the Wiltshire countryside the other day, his passing at the age of 85 ending another link to a time when just about every town and city throughout the country had its very own Saturday night football edition.

In the world before new technology, The Pink ‘un’s, the Buffs and the Green ‘un’s reigned supreme, a weekly miracle of hot metal providing a voracious public with their first news of the day’s football and rugby results. As the Daily Mail’s Rugby League man for more than 30 years, Batty knew the landscape as well as anyone.

In delivering the eulogy, his best journalistic friend, John Robinson of

The People, told a revealing story of how Featherstone Rovers coped with the demand for the late Saturday editions when there weren’t enough telephones to go around in the claustrophobic confines of what passed for the Press box at Post Office Road.

“They cut a hole in the floor,’’ Robinson said. “A bag was passed around collecting the running ‘copy’ written by reporters without phones for the various papers around the north. That bag would be dropped through the hole to a boy waiting below on a bicycle.

“He would then ride off to various pubs and other places in the locality where people would be waiting to phone the reports through, making sure, as far as possible, that the right reports got to the right papers.

“Brian did himself, his paper and his family proud. As a regular on Great Britain tours to Australia and New Zealand, he became almost as famous as the players he wrote about.’’

One of them, Jim Mills, formerly of Halifax, Wales and Great Britain, paid fitting tribute to Batty, describing him as belonging ‘to a golden era when every national newspaper had its own Rugby League man. And Brian was one of the best’.