The football results wireless rota lasted for almost two years. We would turn up at a designated
prefab, fill our glasses with orange squash (being back those innocent pre-cider days!), prepare a stack of pieces of toast and marmalade, and wait for the results to come on at five o'clock.
All of us were active members of the Prefab Philosophy Club. We soon noticed that the deliberations we were having over language, truth and logic began to spill over into our football discussions. People started asking questions like "Why should someone who supports Bristol Rovers have a claim to moral superiority over someone who supports Bristol City?") The brief encounters with the likes of Plato, Kant and Spinoza made us realise how perilously close we had come to getting over-obsessed -maybe even fixated - with sport. After all, kicking a ball around and/or watching other people kicking a ball around is just one small slice of life. Say this to some people and they look at you as if you have lost all control over your senses! But after the first ten fixtures of the 1958-59 football season had been played we found ourselves viewing the game in a completely new light. A mellow sensibility began to permeate our five o'clock football results listening experience.
Having a Philosophy Club in the prefabs created quite a stir. If it had been set up a few hundred yards further up the road in one of the plush council houses occupied by civil servants from the Admiralty no one would have noticed. It would have had a "dog bites man!" level of news interest. Socrates seminars in the prefabs, in contrast, created quite a stir. A few weeks after the Prefab Philosophy Club came into being the Bath & Wilting Chronicle was reporting that the number of people asking to be re-housed further away from the prefabs had fallen while the number who wanted to move into the prefabs had increased! Members of the Stanton-Bullingdon-Smith family who live in an Admiralty civil service house in Camelot Green (it is the one which has a terrapin - a freshwater turtle - in the back garden) doubled up with laughter when they heard the Philosophy Club news. It was only after they overheard the Pearce and Chapman sisters saying how impressed they had been with our Aristotle seminar that the turtle-like smirks began to vanish from their faces.
A quarter of an hour before the football results were broadcast there would be an impromptu quiz. We divided into two teams - the Newtin Road prefabs against the Woodhedge Road prefabs - and the utterly impartial Diane Pearce would be in the chair. She insisted from the start that no questions on either football or philosophy would be allowed. Quiz questions were
never easy, but one of the toughest ones was this one: "Which language was spoken in seventh century Edinburgh?" It was 'Tubby' Lard's hard luck to have to answer it (although if he had bothered to turn up at the Philosophy Club's Aristotle seminar he would have known that the Welsh-speaking Goddodin tribe had been living in Edinburgh at this time). Even though every single one of his favourite football clubs won by a margin of at least three goals 'Tubby' stayed in a sulky mood for the rest of the evening.
In the early days of the wireless rota there would be complete silence while the results from the Football League's first division, second division, and third division 'north' and 'south' were being broadcast. This iron-willed restraint ended as soon as the Scottish scores came in and a
club with a name like Falkirk hit the airwaves. Everyone would start yapping away. Some people would try and calm their nerves by going into the kitchen and refilling their glasses of orange squash, others would head for the bathroom and make all kinds of off-putting noises. There was one notorious occasion when 'Tubby' Lard started shouting out "Who the heck are Stenhousemuir!" and did an imitation Scottish jig around the sitting-room. What an insult this was to the valiant club which had won the Scottish Qualifying Cup in 1902!
Perhaps the dismal level of football maturity which existed on our prefab estate in the 'pre-Cannonball' days is not all that surprising when you remember that the nearest any of our group had ever been to Scotland was Wolverhampton. Scotland, like the past, felt like a foreign country. So who could have guessed that in the hey-day of the wireless rota it would be the results from the Scottish League that would be the fulcrum, the climax, the grand finale of the entire Saturday afternoon results listening experience! Gary Bollard - the dark horse who went on to become a future Vice-President of the Prefab History Society - put it this way in an interview he gave to the sports editor of the Bath & Wilting Chronicle and Herald: "Just as the results of wars fought in Scotland have often made or broken the British state, so the results of football matches in Scotland can make or break the morale of the football cognoscenti of this prefab (e)State."
During the dark pre-'Cannonball' days the evocative allure of Scottish football club names was something which completely passed us by. Leave out the Shakespearean Hotspurs of Tottenham and you are hard-pressedto find any English clubs which come anywhere near to rivalling the resonance of Hibernian or Hamilton Academicals. The Football League likes noting better than a prosaic sounding encounter between the likes of Southend and Preston North End. When a new club was set up in a northern steel-making city the founding committee was so stumped for a club name that all it managed to come up with was the day of the week when the matches were to be played. "At least it was a Wednesday and not a Monday!" says 'Tubby' Lard. Up in Scotland you will not find any Aberdeen Thursdays or Dundee Tuesdays. Instead of the engine-clanging sound of a Northampton Town playing Southampton Town you will hear a Partick Thistle brushing against the Heart of Midlothian!
The moment the 'Cannonball' era dawned in Twiverton there was a headlong rush to choose a club from Scotland to follow. If Diane Pearce, the quiz chairman, had not calmed everyone down it would have been like a scene from a horror movie. Most of the new devotees of Scottish football grabbed hold of one of the big glamour teams based in Glasgow and Edinburgh. 'Tubby' Lard went out of his way to try to make some amends for his earlier conduct by becoming a paid-up member of the Stenhousemuir supporters' club. In prefab number twenty-four we came within a whisker of putting our aluminium-walled weight behind Raith Rovers. The name just rolls off the lips. But we had second thoughts after realising that our affiliation with the Rovers of Bristol meant this would be a Rovers too far. When we finally decided to follow Queen of the South we were accused of jumping on their trophy-laden bandwagon as the club had been top of the second division in 1951. In fact it was the club's name which clinched our decision. This was as close as we were ever going to get to the Queen of Sheba F.C.
After the 'Cannonball' hit the prefabs there would not be so much as a murmur, let alone a noise-filled visit to the bathroom, when the results from the Scottish League were broadcast. The 'Cannonball' came like a meteorite out of the northern night sky. You could see why the Prefab Philosophy Club was soon organizing special conferences on the extraordinary role that chance can play in life. It is only when you take a retrospective look at the past that there seems to have been anything 'inevitable' or 'pre-determined' about this football genius turning up at Twerton Park and prompting us all to think again about the results from the Scottish League.
The odds against Charlie 'Cannonball' Fleming signing up for a non-league outfit like Bath City were formidable. This fellow, after all, had been a Scottish international! And if the former East Fife and Sunderland player had not put on one of our local club's black and white striped shirts then none of us would have given a second thought to the Scottish League. What an ambassador for his country this fellow was! Who else would ever score fifty goals a season for Bath City! No wonder we all went quiet when the Scottish League results were broadcast. The distant land in the north might be filled with other 'Cannonballs' as well! The football novices on our prefab estate had never seen the likes of Charlie 'Cannonball' Fleming before, and they knew for sure they would never see his like again.