Page 37 - 368603 LP250721 AWY AWY AWY Book (238pp A5)

Some rattles were the handiwork of skilled dads and another piece of useful woodwork that I sometimes saw was a little stool, or cracket as we called them, that a child could stand on to see over the perimeter of the pitch.
There used to be a little guy who walked around the track in front of the crowd shouting, “Pee-nuh-erts, tanner a bag!” or “Pee-nuhts as big as cocynuts!” He was a dab hand at catching coins thrown from the crowd and he provided some entertainment by his accurate lobbing of the packets of nuts up to their purchasers. The famous Roker Roar, which had stunned Spurs captain Danny Blanchflower in our F.A. Cup tie in 1961, was like a sea of noise and was like a twelfth man for us. The classic Roker cry went along the lines of, “AWY-AWY-AWY-AWY-AY-EUUURRGGH!” and I’m pleased to say that it lives on to this day.
Many people used to buy a programme in the Sixties and on the back there was a chart for checking the half-time scores. In those pre-electronic days there used to be a wooden structure very like a cricket scoreboard at the angle of the Clock Stand and the Roker End into which an employee would slot little numbered boards bearing the scores of the particular games and checking this was a ritual for many. It sounds almost antediluvian but as there were no mobiles of course back then, if you were in the main stand you could join a throng around a telephone there by means of which some official or other would pass on the final scores.
29