Tales from a Sporting Life: Memories of a Mersey Man Who Made His Mark

When Percy Youd was born in Frodsham in 1879, the Manchester Ship Canal was soon to be excavated like a raw gash across the nearby marshes. He grew up to be a naughty boy who 'wagged off' school at Overton, played practical jokes and was banned from his corrugated iron church for ringing its bell with stones shot from his catapult. From an early age, natural ability and a marksman's eye singled him out as an outstanding shot with anything from a muzzle-loader to a 12-bore shotgun. His quarry included game in the Cheshire hills and wildfowl on the Mersey estuary. He was a fearless fist-fighter and an excellent athlete, setting a record for the gruelling Helsby Hill Race (he trained on sherry) - among many other sporting achievements. Percy's first job in 1893 was at the Helsby cable works and in 1902 he moved to its sister factory at Prescot as a foreman. A few years later the company asked him to take on the tenancy of the Imperial Hotel on the edge of the 'Wire Works' complex and he turned it into a popular and well-known sporting venue. He later moved to Birkenhead and Ellesmere Port where he was a keen member of the Conservative Club and set up in business as an auctioneer. He led many shooting parties and his marksmanship was often the subject of betting. He organised a 100,000-name petition to try to save his Chinese friend, convicted murderer Lock Ah Tam, from the gallows and claimed friendship with Selwyn Lloyd who was MP for the Wirral and eventually became Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary and Speaker of the House of Commons. In old age Percy wrote some of his memories down in a 22,000-word unpunctuated "lump" of vividly descriptive prose which was discovered after his death - including the script of the Frodsham 'soul-caking' play. This book contains the gently edited text of Percy's manuscript on the right-hand pages, while the left-hand pages are devoted to background information in the form of family portraits, old photographs and postcards, corresponding modern views, press cuttings and explanatory text. There is also an account by his daughter Phyllis (aged 88 years when the book was published) of her childhood with him in Birkenhead lodgings during the 1920s after he abducted her from his estranged wife. Their landlady had a crystal ball and never gave the girl a proper meal. "Tales from a Sporting Life" paints a portrait of an extraordinary man in a vanished "macho" world. Kind collaborators in the project include the Cheshire Record Office, Knowsley Museum Service, Frodsham and District History Group and the Manchester Ship Canal Company. To assist genealogists and local historians the book has been comprehensively indexed. The index can be consulted on-line, so that you can see if there is mention of a person, place or event of interest to you.

About the Author :
Percy Youd, author of the main part of this book, was an unwilling scholar who spent a great deal of time 'wagging off' school in the 1880s. He left school at 13 and went to work in the local factory. However, this book shows that he was bright, extremely observant, had an excellent turn of phrase and was probably an excellent raconteur. We only wish he had been at school on the days when they taught punctuation... His major talent was sport: football, athletics, fist-fighting, bowls, billiards and shooting. He was a man's man and lived happily in a masculine world of betting, bowling and wildfowling, but his family life was sad when he became estranged from his wife and children. His death was front-page news in his local newspaper. The book was launched on May 16th, 2003 at Castle Park, Frodsham, which was a couple of weeks after Phyllis's 89th birthday. The second part of the book chronicles her experiences living with Percy in digs in Birkenhead and afterwards with her mother in Helsby. Many of the photographs in this section of the book come from her own collection.