Getting the heave-ho was a game changer

Reporter: Martyn Torr
Date published: 14 April 2015


Martyn meets Martyn, part two

WORKING as a cub reporter at Oldham Press Agency in the mid 1960s was certainly not one of the highlights of Martyn Torr’s less-than-stellar journalistic journey.

But there were some stellar compensations. One was to attend Oldham Athletic matches every other Saturday (the other Saturdays he was at Watersheddings covering rugby). For a lad of 16, life didn’t get much better.

It was a glamorous time for the impressionable Martyn - who spent his weekdays painting the front door at 6 Waterloo Street, polishing the brass plaque, and on one memorable occasion unblocking the sink.

When he wasn’t doing these cub-journalist apprenticeship tasks he would spend hours filing copy to the nationals in Manchester — endlessly reading stories brought in by Jim Austin, Alan Mettrick and Clive Entwistle — to idiosyncratic and sometimes supercilious copytakers. These were the days before fax machines and way, way before emails.

He learned a great deal though never got to write a great deal, and it was a crushing blow when he was told he had to leave. Tom Brennand and Roy Bottomley, the agency’s founders who were spending more and more time on their TV work, wanted to bring in a new young tyro they had earmarked for greatness, so Martyn was out.

“I was devastated, but looking back it was the best thing that happened to me. Undeterred, Martyn wrote to every local paper in Greater Manchester and was interviewed by Gerald Andrew, the proprietor and DCN Jones, the editor, of the Ashton Reporter Group of Newspapers.

“I was given a job as a young reporter and turned up on Monday morning for my first day only to be asked ‘What are you doing here?’”

Martyn managed to point out he had been given a job the previous week, but everyone involved had forgotten to tell him the post was with the High Peak Reporter — one of 14 titles in the group — and the job was in Whaley Bridge, near Buxton!

“It might as well have been Timbuktu. I had never heard of Derbyshire, let alone Whaley Bridge, and I was given a week off to find lodgings.”

Martyn went home and his mum Irene vetoed the plan. But father Alf was convinced it would be the making of the boy so the family set off in the family car to find Whaley Bridge.

With assistance from John Clark, who was leaving the paper - hence the vacancy - Martyn was ensconced with an Irish spinster over a wet-fish shop facing Whaley railway station. A new life began.

“Mum and dad bought me a portable Smith Corona typewriter for £4 from the Chronicle miscellaneous sales (I still have it) and I was packed off to work with a suitcase of five pairs of white socks, five sets of underwear and five white shirts.”

This life continued for 12 months, until Martyn was transferred to the Stalybridge Reporter office, which meant he could again live at the family chip shop home in Huddersfield Road.

And so began the enduring love affair between Martyn and Stalybridge Celtic.

All the while he had been in Whaley he had travelled home at weekends, watching Latics on Saturdays and playing for Medlock Vale on Sundays, helping to form the Oldham Sunday League.

“It all changed when I was sent to cover Celtic, then in the Cheshire League. While I was going to such glamorous places as Sandbach Ramblers, Winsford United and Witton Albion, all my pals were travelling on a Barlow’s coach to Boothferry Park, Gay Meadow and Loftus Road.”

The gang all met up on Saturday evenings and Martyn would avidly listen to tales of the trips.

Martyn became woven into the fabric of Celtic: “It’s difficult not to, when you are travelling home and away on the team coach and going to training sessions on Tuesdays for quotes from the manager.”

So Martyn has been a fixture at Bower Fold for 49 years. In that time he has been a director, company secretary, match secretary, stadium announcer, physio (for three weeks), commercial manager and on one memorable occasion bus driver.

“We had our own coach, provided by the chairman Ray Connor, and a driver named Charlie. One night we were losing at Alfreton so Charlie decided he had seen enough and went home, but he did leave behind the coach keys.

“Guess who got volunteered to drive the bus?”

Martyn covered the club for the paper for 22 years, and when he left the newspaper in 1987 to join Inside Publications in Prince Street, Oldham, he was asked to continue writing match reports - which he did for another 23 years, until last season - though under the name Martin James (my full name is Martyn James Torr), so that byline appeared until the end of the season in May.

“The editor rang me one day and told me that readers had been calling and writing, saying they didn’t like the way the new guy reported on Celtic and asking when Martyn Torr was coming back!”

And so it was as Martyn Torr that he reported on the club for a further lifetime, or so it seemed. He is still involved to this day, nominally the club secretary without any executive or non-executive duties but he helps produce the matchday programme and works at home games in executive lounge and directors’ lounge as a matchday host. He attends all the games, home and away - except of course when Martyn is on holiday. And there have been quite of a few of those, many press trips to places like China, India, Dubai and many American cities, as well as virtually every country in Europe.

All in the interests of reporting on behalf of Chronicle readers. “The sacrifices I have made,” he sighs: “These research trips are hard work, but no-one believes me.” He has travelled the world too on holidays, often reporting on some of these.

Martyn’s enduring love affair with sport led to membership at The Village squash club in Hyde, which led to a visit to Burgau on the Portuguese Algarve coast in 1987.

“Three lads needed a fourth to make up the numbers. We played against Burgau and have been every year since, never missing. Two of us have been on every single trip. We don’t play squash anymore, which is a shame, but many of the lads play lots of golf and some of us play tennis.”

Ten years ago Martyn invested in his own apartment in the village, a few miles west of Praia da Luz, made infamous by the Maddie McCann disappearance. He now spends more and more time with the ex-pat community there.

“It’s a wonderful part of the world and the people are special. It’s like going home. The village has a T-shirt with the logo ‘Burgau — a drinking village with a fishing problem’.

Maybe that’s why I fit in.”