Balanced but precariously so, given her grip on the curved Georgian architecture of the pub from which she has climbed through a first-floor window, a Geordie lass, most likely, has the best ledge in the street as Newcastle United’s FA Cup winners roll unhurriedly through the crowds below.
She dare not return the wave of star player Jackie Milburn and captain Joe Harvey on board the first of three buses, for fear of an unceremonious date with the pavements of Grey Street. Her friend is more audacious, raising an arm in salute of the Cup heroes, adopting the wide-legged stance of a heavyweight boxer to safeguard against the fall.
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In the shadow of the 134ft-high Grey’s Monument – built in 1838 in honour of Northumberland-born Prime Minister Charles Grey – and all around the buses provided by the aptly named United Automobile Services, there are necks tilted, children on shoulders, wooden rattles and black-and-white scarves in the fullest of swings. The overcoats are unseasonal and a weather report records ‘overcast’, but the mood is evidently radiant.
This is Monday May 5, 1952, and shortly before 7pm. Forty-eight hours earlier, and 300 miles south at Wembley, Newcastle had lifted what would be the second of three FA Cups in five years. There were 100,000 in attendance to see Chilean forward George Robledo score the only goal versus Arsenal. Here, at the beating heart of Newcastle’s city centre, there are a quarter of a million happy souls, so goes the headline on the front page of the following morning’s Journal and North Mail – ‘250,000 Halt City in Great Welcome’.
Come this Tuesday, should Eddie Howe and his team end the club’s 68-year wait for a domestic trophy in Sunday’s Carabao Cup final, there could well be that number and more for a victory parade on these same, fabled and fabulous streets. It is with good reason Prime Minister William Gladstone labelled Grey Street this country’s finest. The passage of time may have eroded masonry, but not charm.
Newcastle face Man United in the Carabao Cup final on Sunday at Wembley in what is their first cup final in a generation – the club has said if they win an open top bus parade will be held
Sportsmail looked back on the parade after Newcastle won the FA Cup all the way back in 1952
Back then, more than 250,000 fans celebrated with their heroes in Newcastle city centre
I returned to the exact spot from where our photograph was taken this week. The stone ledge upon which our heroine clambered is still there, no more than one foot deep. So, too, is the groove into which she dug her fingernails. Who was she?
At Newcastle’s Central Library, I find in the archives the words of a lady named only as Eliza. ‘My husband worked in the bank in Grey Street, and we stood in the bank looking out at Joe Harvey and the team holding the Cup.’ To the top right of the picture, there is that bank, Lloyds, which it remains today. Maybe Eliza is in shot?
Further research reveals that the pub above which the women are perched is The Grapes Vaults, now a block of HSBC cash machines. But not only were those ladies brave in edging through the Victorian sash window, they were bold in walking through the front door in the first place. The pub was the last ‘men only’ bar in Newcastle before its closure in the 80s. They never did install a women’s toilet.
Next door is Mawson, Swan & Morgan. The iconic stationary store traded for more than 100 years before closing in 1986. It is now upmarket clothes outlet End.
A friend suggests I speak to a gentleman named Bob Richardson. He is 92 years old and lived in Newcastle in the 50s. I call a landline and, when he answers, I explain the scene of our picture.
‘I remember that day,’ he begins. ’I was 21 and a commerce student at Newcastle University. You see the stationary store, I used to buy my pads, pencils and textbooks in there.
‘But I couldn’t afford Wembley. I left the university library and waited for the parade at Haymarket. I remember the exuberance of the crowd. We were just coming out of the war years. There was a feeling that football was exciting, it brought real camaraderie.
‘I stood in the same spot a few months earlier when George VI died. The whole city seemed to come out and pay their respects. The cup parade was the same, only a far happier occasion.’
Bob, born in County Durham, had met Geordie girl June the year before. They remain married to this day. But those years also marked the start of his love affair with Newcastle United. He will, remarkably, be at Wembley on Sunday.
The buses, interestingly, were not ‘open top’, and explains why three were needed. Rather, the ‘Bristol’ model had a sunroof with a platform assembled inside for players to stand on.
As they journeyed through town and up to St James’ Park, where 45,000 fans and a brass band waited, they passed another young couple on Barrack Road. My wife’s grandmother, Joan Caddle, stood amid the crowds outside Newcastle Brewery.
‘I only remember it as 1952 because we got married that summer and Jackie and I were courting when we went to see the Cup come home,’ says Joan, now 90 and widowed. ‘I never was a football fan, but I recall that moment so clearly. The bus coming past, the excitement.’
Back at the library, The Journal makes for fascinating reading. Their reporter was on the bus.
‘On Grey Street, all of Newcastle seems to be running after us,’ he writes. ‘The Cup has changed hands and now local idol Tommy Walker has it. Every few seconds he bends over the side and allows fans to touch it. One man has three children on his shoulders, one on top of the other. All are waving frantically, and he can barely keep his feet. The ticker tape is like snow, and the waving like a thousand weddings all in one. Frank Brennan blows kisses to the crowd. Tommy Walker stumbles and falls, but he’s unhurt.’
Supporters squeezed around Grey’s Monument, and clung to ledges and every vantage point
The buses, interestingly, were not ‘open top’, and that explains why three were needed. Rather, the ‘Bristol’ model had a sunroof with a platform assembled inside for players to stand on
Pictured: Wives of the Newcastle team relax in their London hotel ahead of the FA Cup final
That same day’s edition of the Evening Chronicle – the rival newspaper and published later – does not carry the parade on its front page. I worked there 50 years later and the mantra remained the same, ‘If The Journal had it first, find something different’. And there is the alternative, the story of a nine-year-old boy ‘feared abducted in last night’s crowds watching the homecoming’. Thankfully, William Douglas was found ‘crying in a ditch’ after becoming lost. He had a ‘black-and-white favour on the lapel of his overcoat’.
In the classifieds, competing cinemas – Ritz, Olympia, Coliseum – advertise a rerun of ‘The Cup Final’. At the Theatre Royal, next door to Lloyds Bank, a performance of ‘The Gang Show’ paid tribute to Newcastle’s players just one hour after the buses had passed by its majestic Pantheon-styled frontage. In other news, and tucked away, skipper Harvey will appear as a prosecution witness in a £350 Cup Final ticket-fraud hearing later that week.
Meanwhile, back on modern-day Grey Street, shoppers hurry in and out of the Metro station where the old road once ran. There will be no hurrying around here if Newcastle’s victory bus passes by on Tuesday. It will be a standstill, quite literally.
You can only hope, if not still among us somewhere, that our heroine on the ledge is watching on from an even greater vantage.