James Macgregor Marriott.
Posted: 14 May 2013, 12:31
When my Dad died last year, aged 95, I said I would write about his life on this site. Whilst I have numerous resources to go at, I have still not got round to it. However this forum will give me an opportunity to write some little snippets.
At the moment we are busy renovating the family home, in order to sell it. We have recently cleared our all the remaining boxes of ornaments, ephemera and such. My dad was an avid Burnley F.C. fan and had numerous newspaper cuttings,programmes, tickets, videos etc. indeed some of his archive material has been used in the many books recently written about the club, and his name appears in the credits. This formed the bulk of the boxes in the garage.
My sister is also an avid fan so my Dad left all this wonderful historical stuff to her. Jane collected the boxes last week and with the help of one of my brothers, also a keen fan, she is starting to catalogue things. However in these boxes are all sorts of other cuttings. One is a photo taken of my Dad in 1960, presenting a darts prize in his capacity as an area manager for Vaux breweries. He is the man in the middle, denoted by the fact that he is shaking hands with players on both sides of him. Dad was a mere 43 years of age!
Let me tell you a little story about the darts championship. It was held yearly and the cups duly presented and engraved, then resided in a cabinet in my Dad's office. Now my Dad wore false teeth. As we had a close family friend who was a dentist, Dad had a number of pairs of teeth. Don't ask me why, but I think he found false teeth uncomfortable and would swap around the ones he wore. He had his favourites, one pair of which he kept in the office so if he had an important event or meeting he could freshen up with a clean pair of teeth. One year this spare pair went missing. He searched high and low and as they were his favourite pair he was most disgruntled about the loss.
Roll on to the annual darts presentation the same year. Speeches were made and the cups presented whereupon one of the winners was heard to say, "Are these yours Mr Marriott?" , and promptly produced the full set of gleaming gnashers from the depths of the cup. How they got there we will never know.
My dads life is full of little anecdotes like that.
The FA Cup is topical this week, perhaps sometime I will tell you the story of the brewery sports day that fell on the same day as the FA Cup. I think it was about 1967.
At the moment we are busy renovating the family home, in order to sell it. We have recently cleared our all the remaining boxes of ornaments, ephemera and such. My dad was an avid Burnley F.C. fan and had numerous newspaper cuttings,programmes, tickets, videos etc. indeed some of his archive material has been used in the many books recently written about the club, and his name appears in the credits. This formed the bulk of the boxes in the garage.
My sister is also an avid fan so my Dad left all this wonderful historical stuff to her. Jane collected the boxes last week and with the help of one of my brothers, also a keen fan, she is starting to catalogue things. However in these boxes are all sorts of other cuttings. One is a photo taken of my Dad in 1960, presenting a darts prize in his capacity as an area manager for Vaux breweries. He is the man in the middle, denoted by the fact that he is shaking hands with players on both sides of him. Dad was a mere 43 years of age!
Let me tell you a little story about the darts championship. It was held yearly and the cups duly presented and engraved, then resided in a cabinet in my Dad's office. Now my Dad wore false teeth. As we had a close family friend who was a dentist, Dad had a number of pairs of teeth. Don't ask me why, but I think he found false teeth uncomfortable and would swap around the ones he wore. He had his favourites, one pair of which he kept in the office so if he had an important event or meeting he could freshen up with a clean pair of teeth. One year this spare pair went missing. He searched high and low and as they were his favourite pair he was most disgruntled about the loss.
Roll on to the annual darts presentation the same year. Speeches were made and the cups presented whereupon one of the winners was heard to say, "Are these yours Mr Marriott?" , and promptly produced the full set of gleaming gnashers from the depths of the cup. How they got there we will never know.
My dads life is full of little anecdotes like that.
The FA Cup is topical this week, perhaps sometime I will tell you the story of the brewery sports day that fell on the same day as the FA Cup. I think it was about 1967.