Sports & Recreation Clubs
“
You don’t get bored. It’s nice to do a rugby pitch one day and then go and mark out a football pitch the next, or a running track
The Bumbles - yellow and black stripes, unsurprisingly - take on ASSO Christo Rugby
Pesticides ... it sticks with you. You’ve got the qualifications for the rest of your life.” Then, when the pinch came into the local
councils, and Bradford’s grounds maintenance was awarded to Glendale’s, despite being hand-picked to go with his old manager as part of a small skilled workforce to Bingley, Mark opted for redundancy. He then used that money for machinery to set up on his own. Mark works sixteen hours a week at
Bradford & Bingley Sports Club: “I played rugby here anyway, and the opportunity to work here just opened up.” He also does work for other rugby, cricket and football clubs, as well as landscaping and general gardening. “It’s good to have a bit of variation",” he tells me, “you don’t get bored. It’s nice to do a rugby pitch one day and then go and mark out a football pitch the next, or a running track.”
The river Aire is prone to flooding
To help them out is really nice. All the Bumbles know me. Sometimes I’m their friend, or just the grumpy groundsman. They all come and see me
” Warning sign being ignored to good effect 50 I PC OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2015
A one-man-band, Mark does everything, with the help of his trusted sidekick Jake, a beautifully bright collie that follows him everywhere. “He's too clever for his own good is Jake. If he’s bored, he drops his ball or stick on the white line, so I’ve got to throw it. He’s been here since a puppy, and he
thinks he owns the place.” Jake is also the best Canada goose scarer that the club has. When the river Aire, which dissects the land, rises the geese tend to wander and leave a mess on the pitches, and the club members don’t like it. Unfortunately, the river does a lot more than bring the geese to the pitches. It also has a nasty habit of flooding. Last year alone, the pitches were flooded ten times, diagonally across from the dugouts, about 2- 3ft deep. “If I’m watching the weather, I know within twelve hours,” Mark tells me. “I have got up in the middle of the night before, got out of bed, and taken all the tractors and machinery to higher ground.” Back in 2000, the entire place got flooded, and the bar was shut down for a year due to everything being six inches under. “All you could see was silver, right across. When that went down, it was carnage. The local sewage works in Keighley burst their banks. There were big logs and banks of sediment to clear. I had to get all that off, then lime them all to neutralise human effluent. Everything was just ruined.” But, as Mark says, “it’s just one of those ongoing things. It’s the place we are, right next to a river.” At least, he says, they
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