The club would like to thank SMR Projects Managing Director Mike Finch for his support and welcome him and his guests to tomorrow’s game against Bishops Cleeve. Among his guests tomorrow will be his Dad, Jim Finch and Uncle Mick Walters both of whom have had involvement with Banbury United in the past. Mike has kindly sent us some interesting information relating to their past involvement with the club.

“Jim was manager at Compton Buildings during Cyril Kyme’s tenure at Banbury. Cyril owned Compton at the time and regularly got employees to do various jobs for the club in and around the ground and stadium. One day Jim and his foreman Arthur Cleaver were asked to attend the stadium and help in the removal of the old railway huts (used for changing rooms) to make way for the new clubhouse (which is still standing), so using oxy acetylene torches they proceeded to cut up the old huts into smaller pieces to make them more manageable to manoeuvre out of the way. During this process they noticed an old pipe running through some of the huts and enquired what it might be, and were told it was just a water pipe, so need to worry. Upon completion of the cutting up and moving the old huts out of the way, they found it was a gas pipe and realised that they had just had a lucky escape! Around this time Tony Jacques and Roger Darvell were both playing for Banbury and working at Compton Buildings, Tony in the Industrial Buildings division of the business and Roger in the stores department, and I can remember both of them playing along with Tony Foster and those pyjama shorts!!

Mick Walters played for both Coventry City and Bradford City as a professional. At Coventry he played with Peter Taylor who later went on to Middlesbrough where he teamed up with a certain Brian Clough. Mick remained in touch with Peter as he was his mentor when Mick was first at Coventry, so when Peter got his first managerial position at Burton Albion, Mick was asked to play for them and spent two seasons there. After Mick finished his career at Rugby Town, he was asked by Brian Stone to help Mick Kearns with the Banbury Youth team, with the remit of working out which players were good enough to play for the first team, as the club were strapped for cash and could not afford any loan players from the likes of Oxford United. During this time he came across quite a few players who were able to make the grade, but a couple of players who stood out were none other than Ronnie Johnson (whatever happened to him?) and Phil Lines (an absolute legend!!) Mick also organised a few games against Nottingham Forest for the Banbury Youth players, this was when Cloughie and Taylor were in charge.”

The photo shows those railway carriages where the clubhouse now stands. These were put there for the club’s first season of senior football (1934/35) and remained until the mid-1960s.