Serving the Teesside Business Community | 33
Harry Pearson: The Business Buzz
Teesside-born author Harry Pearson is a former sports columnist for the Guardian. He’s
a former travel feature writer for Conde Naste Traveller and Contributing Editor of GQ,
and has written six books, including The Far Corner: A Hazy Dribble Through North-East
Football which was runner-up in the 1995 Sports Book of the Year awards.
In an exclusive new column for Tees Business, Harry recalls how his father
introduced an inter-departmental football league as a team-building exercise at a
large Teesside steelworks...
Welding Bay D v Accounts –
how football brought steelworks
staff together
M
Football can bring
people together and it
can drive them apart.
Brian Clough - once of the ICI works team,
Billingham Synthonia.
y father was a manager in a large
Teesside steelworks. Once a
new personnel manager arrived
from the South. He came armed
with all sorts of theories about bonding and
team-building. His first and perhaps most
brilliant idea was to facilitate links between
different skill bases by organising an interdepartmental football league.
The inaugural match was Welding Bay D v
Accounts. The game was abandoned midway
through the second half, by which time
several accountants had been hospitalised,
most of them by a tall and spindly apprentice
from Eston who was known to one and all as
The Praying Mantis.
The following day my father went to seek
some explanation for the bloodshed.
“What was all that about, then?” he asked
the welding foremen.
“I don’t rightly know,” the foreman said. “But
I’ll tell you what - I bet it’s the last time they
ever mess up our over-time payments”.
Twenty-five years have passed and still the
very mention of this incident is enough to
keep my father smiling for 48 hours.
Football can bring people together and
it can drive them apart. The game, as you
will doubtless have heard more than one TV
pundit say over the years, is a great leveller.
Which is a good thing, unless you happen to
be the one who is getting levelled.
In recent years there’s been an upsurge
in interest amongst human resource
departments in football as a team-building
exercise with firms that organise one-day
five-a-side competitions for companies
springing up all over the place.
It’s not just popular amongst what you
might think of as traditional football industries
either. My literary agent plays five-a-side in
a London league made up exclusively of the
employees of publishing houses. He reports
that while the tackling is not very fierce, the
insults are always grammatically correct.
Though this may all be presented as newfangled by some personnel departments, it’s
actually singularly old-fashioned, as anyone
with a passing knowledge of the history of
the British game will recognise.
After all, the world’s biggest club,
Manchester United, started life as a team
for Newton Heath railwaymen, Arsenal was
once a squad of munitions workers and one
of the English game’s greatest managers,
Brian Clough, started out at what had
once been the ICI works team, Billingham
Synthonia.
Traditional paternalism meant that many
larger companies funded sports and social
facilities for their employees. At other times,
trade unions organised and paid for sports
facilities.Most former coalmining areas are
still littered with amateur teams with the
letters CW (Colliery Welfare) or CA (Colliery
Association) attached to their name, and
a glance through the Non-League Football
Yearbook throws up dozens of teams playing
at higher non-league level that bear the
names of well-known brands such as Castrol,
Shell and Stork.
Teesside’s famous knock-out competition,
the Ellis Cup, which is either the third or
fourth oldest football competition (there’s a
minor dispute with the Northern League over
who got there first) always featured works
teams – including big steel companies like
Dorman Long, while the Teesside League
was at one time dominated by teams from
Head Wrightson, Acklam Steel Works and
the like. Indeed some of them have – sadly
– outlived the works that spawned them.
Synthonia still play in the Northern League.
Most workplace teams play in lunchtime
five-a-side leagues against loosely organised
bands of mates with names like Surreal
Madrid or Borussia Munchinsausages, but
the attractions of the works football league
are manifold. Not least, the fact that because
they are representing their company the
players tend to behave themselves.
That, at least, may be the general rule. My
father’s experience means I remain a little
sceptical.