This is a picture taken at Ayresome Park in 1927. It was taken in the season George Camsell scored 59 goals. Personally, I think he looks like he just wants to get on and score some more!! The picture includes my grandad, Bob Galloway, who is the tall gentleman, with the white shirt and light peaked cap, in the crowd directly behind W. Tirrell (4th player from the left). He was from Stockton, mostly the Tilery area. Most of the men will have served in WW1, just as Bob did, (he served in the Kings Own Scottish Borderers) I still find it fascinating to look at everyone wearing a cap and dressed up to the nines. The players look as tough as the crowd, not the thoroughbred legs of today’s players.
Photograph and details courtesy of Ian Harris.
Picture Stockton Archive 
One guy is missing from the team as there are only ten players in the photo. Ups silly me he must have taken the photo!
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My father, Trevor Jones could well have been at this match as a 10-11 year old with his father, Everett Jones. In his family history ‘The Story of My Family’, dad reported that ‘on Boxing Day 1926, in a record crowd of over 44,000 to see a vital game against Manchester City, I was one of some hundreds of children who were forced on to the pitch when the barriers collapsed at one end of the ground. There were a number of casualties; and although one tended to look back on the incident with a fair amount of boyish boasting, it was frightening when it happened’. On the plus side, dad recalled the lasting memory of Cammell and Pease in full flight during that record breaking season.
I recall visiting Ayersome Park a few times with dad when we were staying at Saltburn in the 1960s. My abiding memory was of parking our large Ford Zephyr in one of the side streets close to the ground and immediately being ‘invited’ to contribute some coins to the local children ‘to look after our car whilst we were at the match’. As our car looked very out of place on its own in a row of terraced houses, we paid up and our car was still there with its wheels on when we returned, although needless to say, the children had long since gone! .
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