On Tuesday, Selby Town have the chance to win the West Riding County Cup for the first time since 1949. JOE RICHARDSON meets the D-Day veteran who helped them 69 years ago....

“PEOPLE ask ‘what was it like?’

“I say ‘just imagine you’re 18 years old. Never been on a beach, never been on a ship before. Nowadays, you go on holiday for the first time across the Channel or to Spain and for you, going on that trip is an adventure. You’re all excited.

“That’s how I felt on D-Day – all excited. Just like a boy scouts’ outing to me.

“Until the next day, when it got serious and you realised what had happened.

“If you got through it, you were lucky. I think I was very lucky.”

Now 92, Ken Cooke still lives in York as one of the city’s last three remaining Normandy veterans.

He was drafted into the army at the earliest opportunity in 1944 as an under-prepared 18-year-old – a landmark moment that could be traced back to him not taking an apprenticeship at a local ordnance factory.

However, on demob, when he returned to his home on Alma Terrace, that decision also allowed Ken to resume work at Rowntree’s factory and playing for their football team.

Towards the end of the 1940s, while working in the gum department packaging Fruit Pastilles, Polo Mints and Smarties, he was offered the chance to play for the Yorkshire League side Selby Town.

An outside left who modelled himself on Arsenal’s Cliff Bastin, Ken formed part of the Robins team that won the West Riding County Cup against Goole Town in the 1948/49 season – the last time Selby won the competition.

This coming Tuesday, Selby will have the chance to emulate this success for the first time in 69 years when they meet cup holders Farsley Celtic.

Ken was no stranger to success by the time he lined up against Goole, having already played every game for York City reserves in the 1946/47 Yorkshire League Cup that City eventually won 4-0 at Boothferry Park against Leeds ‘A’.

He recalls: “I sometimes worked nights at Rowntrees – finest firm in England to work for at the time – and I used to go straight from work on a morning and do a couple of hours running round the pitch with Sid Storey, Alf Patrick, Matt Patrick and Jimmy Rudd.

“They called it training in them days… we ran round the pitch two or three times then went in the dressing room!”

Ken laughed incredulously as he describes his League Cup final: “I get onto the bus, get to Hull and in the dressing room, start getting ready and Tommy Lockie, the manager, says ‘you’re not playing today’ – something to do with the chairman’s nephew!

“They won the cup and they only had 11 medals. I didn’t get one. They had the nerve the following Monday to send me a card saying I was picked for the next match.”

He politely declined.

But it was playing for Rowntree’s that gave him the chance to make Selby Town history.

He explained: “One of the Selby Town scouts came to watch one of our games and he talked to me and said ‘do you fancy going over to Selby and having a try-out?’

“I did nearly a season with them – that was the year we won the cup.

“The old Recreation Ground (Selby's former ground) was a poor old, rubbish pitch. We played Halifax Town in the FA Cup one game and it had been snowing. The ball used to go a few yards and it grew about a foot!

“The final was at Goole because they didn’t have a neutral ground then. We drew 1-1 there.

“We came back to Selby with the trophy at the side of the driver in the bus at the front and everybody was thinking we’d won it!

“We played them a couple of weeks after and we beat them 2-0. It was a tight game.

“It was just an ordinary match to us, we didn’t realise – we saw the trophy on the side as we went on the pitch, but we just got on with the game.

“We got presented with the trophy then we went for a lunch at the local pub in Selby.”

And so, next week, Christian Fox’s current crop of Selby Town players travel to the West Riding FA’s Leeds headquarters to see if they can write their name in the history books alongside Ken Cooke’s cohort.