Bone Kickers

Read this link first:

http://www.thisnorthernsoul.co.uk/index … -the-rugby

I read this account a while back and meant to comment but never got round to it.

It’s a great story and truly shocking that the rugby would do such a thing, however, it’s not entirely accurate.

Mr Johnny Bogroll is somebody I don’t know, however I must have met him. What I do know however is, he was very young at the time, and his account may have been clouded by the years.

The reason I’m confident of this is, as a twenty year old university student, I worked for my uncle’s firm during holidays, and one of these jobs was driving a dumper truck during the building of the car park at the back of the old ‘River Caves’ in Central Park, and I was standing a couple of yards away when the bucket of the digger pulled up the first skull.

Now, this is where my account and Mr Bogroll’s differ. Mr Bogroll recalls speaking to one of the ‘builders’. The lads I worked with were decent enough, but by Christ, they were dim. He may well have spoken to one of them, and he may well have been told that Wigan RL had instructed them on what to do with the bones. Unfortunately however, that was not the case. Basically, the lads working there were told this so they’d do it. They were all Wigan or Leigh rugby fans and if the rugby told them to do it, they would. The instructions actually came from my (now late) uncle.

The skeletons had been found, investigated by the police, and studied by a group from Manchester University’s Archaeology Department before the kids and newspapers appeared on the scene. Wigan RL had found out about the human remains by chance, as one of the groundsmen had walked around the corner shortly they’d been found. It was the RL club who informed the police. My uncle was all set for ordering us to dig a hole and burying them before anyone found out – which is what happened with subsequent finds of ‘odd’ bones, unbeknown to the rugby club.

The discovery of bags of bones in Mr Bogroll’s account may have been fact – I don’t recall any bags being filled to be honest – however, they would have been filled on the instruction of the JCB driver (by far the most skilled and worldly wise amongst a group of Barmfurlong and Abram’s finest) as in his words over the years, he’d seen ‘more bones than a Platt Waz prozzie’.

And why this lack of ceremony for the discovered bodies? We had a deadline to meet and the discovery of bones closed the site down for two days. It was costing money.

So, there you go. Sometimes your prejudices towards the rugby can be misguided.

Insular and deluded they may be at times, but uncaring bone-kickers they are not.