It was just the Westminter Bank Sports Ground in the 1950s when I was growing up in Thornton Heath, long before the merger with the National Provincial in 1970 which created the NatWest banking giant.
Our family spent many happy weekends in Norbury watching my dad play cricket and enjoying the fantastic facilities which many companies provided for their employees in those more benevolent days.
Thwarted fast bowler: former Surrey and England seamer Peter Loader loathed the flat pitches at Norbury
These childhood experiences helped to kindle my lifelong love of sport, as they probably did for millions in the post-war period. It was so close to the Second World War, in fact, that one of my earliest memories of Norbury was finding a discarded gas mask behind one of the old wooden pavilions.
It was an enormous playing area, as I remember it. At least four full-sized cricket grounds in the summer and dozens of football and rugby pitches in the winter. Not to mention the hockey pitches, tennis courts and bowling greens.
Cricket was the main draw for the Bennett family. The first team pitch was an absolute belter, if batting was your speciality. A random memory was of my father telling me that Peter Loader, the intimidating Surrey pace bowler, was playing at Norbury and after a couple of overs chucked the ball away in disgust saying he was “never going to take any wickets on that”.
I never really knew what Peter Loader, who won 13 caps for England, was doing playing at the Westminster Bank Sports Ground, although his obituaries from 2011 say he was a local boy, from Wallington, who played club cricket for Beddington, so maybe that was it.
Thanks to Richard Hoare and the Geograph website, I also discovered that the Westminster Bank ground served as Surrey’s Second XI ground for a while. It adds: “The square immediately in front of the pavilion was probably one of the flattest tracks anywhere in the country, courtesy of the Second World War. The reason being it was laid on a former gun emplacement which was six foot down and drained very quickly.”
Seen better days: after almost a century of cricket and football at the NatWest Sports Ground, it has been disused for almost 20 years, the pitches and courts left in a sorry state
The ground had also been used during the First World War to provide basic training to volunteers, including on a rifle range. Another wartime connection is the memorial on the pavilion wall with names of members of the club who gave their lives in conflict. How to commemorate the ground’s wartime history is something apparently being considered by developers who want to build a housing estate on the sports ground.
The Westminster Bank Sports Ground and other magnificent sports grounds, of which there were many in Croydon and across south London, played an important part in the social life of the nation.
The Game of The People website believes it was an attempt by employers to spread the Corinthian spirit of amateur sport: “If you flew across South London, Kent and Surrey in the mid-1970s, you would have looked down on acres of sports grounds comprising rugby, football and hockey pitches.
“Many of these grounds, with their excellent facilities and perpetual odour of horse liniment, were owned by banks, insurance companies and old boy networks… it was not quite the paternal hand of Cadbury’s or Port Sunlight, but NatWest and other banks made an effort to encourage the right type of bank employees.”
Times change and the evermore demanding nature of work and family life meant that employees simply could not spare the time at weekends to play at the bank sports grounds. I suppose their gradual demise was that they were also seen as a cost, rather than a profit centre.
Several years ago, I made a trip down memory lane to Turle Road when there was a five-a-side football centre there. The rest of the ground was a sad travesty of what it used to be, overgrown and unloved.
The redevelopment plans currently with the planners of Merton, Croydon and Lambeth councils seem to include a significant restoration of sports facilities at the old bank sports ground. Let’s hope so, because as banks and other big employers speed down the road of job reduction, especially with AI, we are all going to need something to do and somewhere to do it.
Read more: Plans submitted for 288 homes on Norbury sports ground
Previous articles by Neil Bennett:
- Lanfranc in appeal to restore memorial to victims of air crash
- How Stormzy’s football dream is becoming a Mayfield reality
- Surrey makes new pitch for cricket at Croydon sports grounds
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