Keith Dewhurst

Flora Thompson

A literary sampler of English village life in late Victorian Oxfordshire, Lark Rise re-enacts the first day of harvest. The play is written to be performed as a promenade production with no distinction between stage and auditorium. The interest lies in the lively picture of typical country life of the period, with music and songs, with a brief flash forward to the 1914-18 war. Music is available separately on hire. Contained in a volume with Candleford.7 women, 12 men

Two Plays

Lark Rise to Candleford

In 1879, a team from the Lancashire cotton town of Darwen took on the moneyed and well-connected Remnants in the third round of the FA Cup - the game would go on to become football's first giantkilling. This book is a story of the birth of the game, covering football's development towards the game we recognise today.

The Unlikely Story of Football's First FA Cup Heroes

Underdogs

'If David Lloyd-George was the most charismatic person I ever laid eyes on, Matt Busby was the most charismatic I have known, when he was the manager of Manchester United and I was a reporter travelling with the team.' Keith Dewhurst first saw United play in 1946. Ten years later he was writing about them for the Manchester Evening Chronicle. Half a lifetime later, he looks back on a passion that helped to shaped his life. On his journey from the terraces to the press box and then on to the game's inner sanctums, Dewhurst fell in love with a club and a game. A schoolboy fan when Busby arrived at Old Trafford, he was on the terraces as great teams took shape, and there as a reporter to witness the aftermath of the club's great tragedy - the Munich air crash. He was there too on the road with Jimmy Murphy, United's assistant manager and coaching genius, as the team played on during Busby's long recovery. In Busby, he witnessed both the hero of football legend and the darker side of a master manipulator. But in Murphy, he found his hero. It was Murphy who would tutor him in football and dreams, and Busby's ambiguous nature. The friends Dewhurst made then, the players and the coaches, the lost and the saved, are with him still - in memory, if no longer in life. When You Put on a Red Shirt is Dewhurst's homage to them and to his youth, evoking with vivid brilliance a lost era, and powerfully recapturing a world which is becoming myth.

The Dreamers and their Dreams: Memories of Matt Busby, Jimmy Murphy and Manchester United

When You Put on a Red Shirt

Albion Band

A Country Tapestry

Larkrise to Candleford

Two Plays from Flora Thompson's Trilogy

Lark rise to Candleford. Adapted from the book by Flora Thompson

'Fancy! A lot of working chaps beating a lot of gentlemen!' 1879, the third round of the FA Cup. A football team from the humble Lancashire cotton town of Darwen take on Remnants - a Berkshire club of the moneyed and well-connected - and beat them. It is football's first ever giantkilling. Their reward is a quarter-final with the mighty Old Etonians. It pitches rulers against ruled, rich against poor, champions against underdogs, old tactics against new, the inventors of the game against the upstarts. It is an encounter that is seen as symbolic. And, hidden at the heart of the encounter, lies the bitterest controversy. Underdogs is a fascinating story that covers the very birth of football and its development towards the game we recognise today. Storyteller, football connoisseur and historian, Keith Dewhurst, shows how 130 years ago, at its beginning, football was already reflecting the modern game closely - money talks, cheating abounds, and victory is secured whatever the cost. 'Fascinating... The beginning of professionalism, a change in the style of playing, the end of southern amateur Oxbridge chaps dominating football... Keith has done an excellent research job in recreating the times and tensions' Spectator

Keith Dewhurst

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