Torquay United v Crewe Alexandra.06/03/63.

This was the last of six consecutive home matches in the worst winter during my lifetime, and a disappointing result given our dominance of the game. Having said that, Frankie Lord took both his goals very slickly and Alan Smith was at sea all afternoon against his pace.

Note the current owner of Wigan Athletic playing at right back. As was often the case in those days, when medical techniques were fairly primitive, Dave Whelan was never the same player after breaking his leg in the 1960 FA Cup Final.

My own records tell me that this game was in the middle of a run of nine games with an unchanged team, except for one match when Ernie Pym was injured. No worries about opposition tactics, condition of pitches or niggling hamstrings in those days !!

Stewart, you never cease to amaze me with the detail of your recollections. Absolutely incredible.

It was the winter of the big freeze. Thick snow for three months, I think, in Torquay but far worse up North. We did not play an away game between December 21 and March 9 due to the weather.

Stewart might be able to tell us about the conditions at Plainmoor for those home games. I imagine that they played on frozen pitches that nobody would think of playing on nowadays.

edit - see Stewart has beaten me to it and confirmed my suspicions.

This was indeed a period of huge enjoyment and I only now recall a couple or so incidents; but for a ten year old this was a magic winter ~ football or no football.

I can remember deciding to embark on some sort of "Polar Expedition" one weekend morning and set off for Coffinswell via Aller Brake using the little lane that borders what is now Mike Bateson's farm. Towing my home made toboggan behind me (I guess we had all made these "wheeless" versions of soapbox karts with the help of our dad's by then) my abiding memory is of giving up somewhere down that lane from the Milber Woods end, encased on either side by high banks and hedges and the snow literally waist deep and impossible to penetrate any further.

I can recall another day when my brother and I were walking in Milber Pinewalk and annoying our mum by throwing sticks up into the tree to start avalanches over her head. It all went well until you know who went a bit too far with the size of the branch being thrown and a ruddy great bomabardment of the white stuff descended on her head knocking her over coughing and spluttering.

My mum's final falling out with "Winter Sports" came when we were toboganning together on "Wolborough Steps" (the steep, ridged meadow behind Mackrell's Almshouses) and she decided she would have a go herself and jumped on my prize sledge hurtling down the steep gradient until we realised she was totally out of control before smashing through a fence and hedge at the bottom and disappearing from site.

By the time we had descended to the bottom, and peered through the hedge she had struggled to her feet and was holding two complete halves of my now split assunder sledge and was sporting a cut face from the barbed wire she had crashed through and a bloody nose....................laugh? The snow turned yellow beneath our feet!