When all this is over I’ll find something useful to do with my time!
HIS full name was David Newhams Charles Jones but few people knew that. In the office he was called David or Dai. But it was as DCN Jones — the byline that appeared on thousands of match reports — that he was universally known.
If they have ghosts at Hurst Cross he’s bound to be among them. He covered the exploits of Ashton United for more than 60 years and he remembered them all: Dixie Dean, Stuart Diamond, the Halifax FA Cup tie, and like so many Robins fans of a certain age he had a fixation with Bernard Joseph “Barney” Daniels.
I shouldn’t really use the word “fan” with regard to a professional journalist, but although generations of Ashton directors might have struggled to believe it as he bent their ears, he really did love the club.
When I became Reporter Group sports editor, way back in 1987, he was constantly pushing Ashton’s case.
They made a useful start to the 1987-88 season and he took to describing them as “easily Tameside’s most successful club”, even though they were in the North West Counties League. That led to trouble with the blue half of town.
Thirty-odd years ago I didn’t realise how intense the rivalry was between the two Ashton clubs, especially as Curzon had made it into the new NPL first division and the Robins hadn’t. But more of that later.
My phone rang, it was Mr Curzon himself, Harry Twamley, and I was in for my first sports editor blasting. It didn’t help that at that point the Nash match reporter was a truly useless journalist. And I’ve known a few.
Harry ranted that his club weren’t getting the coverage they deserved. As a Northern Premier League outfit they were playing football at a more senior level than their neighbours. He finished off with: “DCN Jones sees everything through red specs. It’s about time there was someone at your paper wearing blue specs.”
The fact was, I was out of my depth. I’d only been a sub-editor for a few months before I was “promoted”. Rather getting the new job because I deserved it, I got it because I was just about the only person on the staff with any interest in sport.
When it came to writing, subbing and laying out five pages a week — and within a three-day period — I was struggling badly. The group editor grumbled and shouted rather than encouraged, the photographers refused to help, and for the first month or so I was dealing with typewritten sheets of paper. My focus was on meeting deadlines, not dealing with DCN Jones’s eccentricities, but I couldn’t tell Harry that. In any case, I couldn’t have got a word in as he gave me both barrels.
Another of DCN’s bandwagons concerned the match ads that used to go on the inside back page. Some weeks we’d have quite a stack. He got it into his head that Ashton were always bottom of the pile and it wasn’t fair, as though being on top was some sort of advantage. It was untrue, and we showed him, but that didn’t stop him complaining.
He also told me that I should do back-page leads in rotation, giving prominence to a different club every week, irrespective of what might be happening in terms of cups, promotion, relegation or big matches.
However, his biggest beef was with the North West Counties League, and specifically its chairman, Eric Hinchliffe. This fixation, which lasted to the end of his life, stemmed from Ashton United’s failure to be accepted as founder-members of the NPL first division in 1987. What made it worse was that Curzon’s application was successful.
The Robins were one of many clubs wanting to make the step up to the new structure. To apply they had to resign from the North West Counties League. They did so only to be rejected because their Hurst Cross home was considered sub-standard. Naturally they went back to the NWCL, to be rejected on the same grounds. Hurst Cross wasn’t good enough for them either, even though it had been a few months previously.
DCN was absolutely livid. For some time it looked like Ashton would be left in no-man’s land without a league to play in. Fortunately, Tameside Council came to the rescue and built a new stand to replace the old pre-war wooden one and the Robins were back in business.
Whether Eric Hinchliffe, a Stalybridge man, really had a vendetta against Ashton United I have no idea, but DCN certainly believed he did. As far as he was concerned, Eric was punishing his beloved Robins for daring to have ambition. He never forgave and he never forgot.
Years later, in the midst of a match report, he’d suddenly stop recounting events on the field and start to lay into Eric Hinchliffe for almost destroying his club.
I have to confess that in my early days I used to dread DCN coming into the office with his reports because he’d always complain that I was doing something wrong — usually that I wasn’t giving Ashton the prominence they deserved.
It quickly got to the point that I’d see him through the window and disappear into the gents, circulation or the dark room, wait for him to pass, and then leg it to the shop and stay out till he’d gone. But as time passed we became good friends. I think we both won each other’s respect and he was very pleased with my coverage of Ashton’s quadruple in 1992.
DCN was a proud Welshman. He moved north from Carmarthen around 1929 and was still writing almost 70 years later. He was Reporter Group editor from 1952 to 74. The story went, and I’m sure it was apocryphal, that John Middlehurst died at his desk. DCN didn’t notice and was filling in his pools coupon, completely oblivious. When the truth finally dawned, governing director was so impressed that DCN had kept his head in a crisis that he immediately promoted him.
What probably happened was that DCN was the most senior journalist. That’s the way it used to work.
Another thing DCN never came to terms with was shirt-numbers and positions. It was by no means uncommon for him to criticise a number-11 for straying into midfield instead of sticking to his rightful place on the left wing.
Sadly, DCN’s skills began to desert him at the end. The quality of his reports declined and I used to wonder how I could gently ease him out without upsetting him. Fortunately, he made the decision for me.
Mike Cummings, an Ashton director, eased the blow by nominating DCN for a gong. I was pleased to write a letter of support and in 1996 he was awarded an MBE for services to journalism. Returning from his visit to Buckingham Palace he described the 63-year-old Queen as a super girl.
There’s another tale here. I heard that Tom Pendry, the Stalybridge and Hyde MP, saw the list and assumed David CN Jones was the same as David W Jones who’s still at the Reporter, now filling DCN’s former role as company fossil, and rang to congratulate. Jonesy told me he knew he hadn’t won an honour but I reckon he was crushed.
Look back through old Reporters and Dai Jones’s byline is everywhere “by DCN Jones”. The things he must have seen. The Ashton United games he must have watched.
When he died at the grand age of 89, at the start of 1999, he’d outlived his contemporaries so there were few of us at his funeral service at Ashton’s Albion Church.
But I’m convinced his lumbering tread can still be heard at Hurst Cross at the dead of night. If anyone deserved to have his ashes buried beneath the centre spot it was him.
Ashton United was his life.