The People Who Make The Club
No 1: Frank Turner, groundsman.
Years with Blackheath: a local since birth but doing this job for 13 years.
Anyone who drove past the Utilita during the summer will have been struck by the difference between Pitch 1, which looked as lush as ever, and the ones next door, which had turned beige in the heatwave. As the sun beat down on Blackheath, where a picture of All Saints’ Church surrounded by the bleakness of the common ended up on most front pages, there was one corner that remained green.
For that we should thank Frank Turner, who marks 13 years as groundsman at Well Hall next month. He was up at 5.30am most days to water the pitch as much as he could, keeping it fertilised and well nourished, and did so again in the evening.
“It would have been counterproductive to water it during the day,” he says. “It would have just baked and burnt the pitch. But we were lucky that Millwall were having their training pitches redone over the summer. Normally, I’ll share the water with them but I had it all to myself for seven days a week.”
Frank was born in Eltham, on Archery Road in a house that was demolished for the road to the back of Marks and Spencer, and has been involved with what used to be the Woolwich Polytechnic ground for almost 20 years. He played there for Askeans, when he was working as a council gardener, and then in 2013 was asked if he would succeed Paul “Ruby” Curry as the groundsman.
Blackheath’s social teams were playing at Well Hall in those days and the first XV moved there in 2016. “It was a slight challenge going from tending council parks and gardens to preparing and marking out pitches for National 1 but it was very exciting,” Frank says.
The new pitch they laid down for that first season, and have updated regularly, is sand-based and has excellent drainage, which has helped Frank to produce a much-admired surface, though he admits that some winters have been so wet he couldn’t risk putting even a mower on it, and certainly not his tractor, in case it churned the surface. “Sometimes the best thing is just to leave it,” he says.
This year he has had to create a wider pitch to meet Champ specifications. “We couldn’t move the posts so had to come out about 70cm on either side,” he says. He has also had a temperamental water cannon that needed frequent repairs. “There has been a lot of TLC put into it,” he says. His ambition is to have pop-up sprinklers installed, but says the pitch was as good as it could be for the Caldy match, all things considered.
Another development this summer was the arrival of robot line-markers. AI comes to Blackheath. “It’s good but I’m going to have to do the lines myself for at least one of the matches this season or it will feel like cheating,” he says. “Even if it’s a bit wobbly, I want to say that I have painted the lines at a Champ ground.”
Well Hall was clearly the best pitch in National 1 but Frank singles out Bishop’s Stortford’s Silver Leys as one he admired, while Plymouth Albion was his favourite away trip. “I’m sure Worcester will be the best pitch in this league,” he says. “I’m most looking forward to Cornish Pirates away, though I hear it can be boggy.” Club visit them in April.
Frank enjoys attending away matches and says he hadn’t missed one in two years until this season. When Blackheath played their first match at this level this century, he was sunning himself in Turkey rather than spending a Friday night in Nottingham.
“I bought the tickets the day after we lost away to Rosslyn Park in January,” he says. “I thought ‘well we’re not getting promoted now’…” To be fair, no one anticipated we’d be playing in this league at that point, but at least we can be confident that with Frank’s careful hands on the mower and the hose, our pitch looks as if it belongs there.
Patrick Kidd
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