Supporter Liaison Officer Paul Bastard introduces us to today’s TUFC Community Champion, Colin Friend…
For the past 52 years anyone approaching Torquay United’s Plainmoor ground from the Gulls’ Lodge on matchdays will have encountered a familiar scene. There at the entrance to the lane will be a cheery, wiry figure clutching a swathe of programmes and spreading bonhomie as he greets his customers. Today’s Community Champion is Colin Friend, still sprightly and young-looking at 70.
Paigntonian Colin, ex Hayes Road and Paignton School, had initially been introduced as a tacker to Plainmoor by his maternal grandfather Fred before, in his teens, starting to run the old programme shop on Homelands Lane with his pal Dave Hepworth. A couple of years later, though, he took over the programme-seller beat where the lane meets Warbro Road and there he has remained ever since, with scarcely a day off through illness, even continuing to sell programmes when suffering from a broken wrist. It is also local folklore that, on bank holidays and days when there was no public transport, Colin would walk all the way from Paignton to Plainmoor to fulfil his programme-selling duties.
Colin says that the best part of his job is the rapport he has with away fans who debouch from their coach mere yards away from his station on the corner. He reports no trouble whatsoever over his long tenure – testimony, of course, to Colin’s equable nature and a motto which has served him so well down the years: “Treat them as you would like to be treated.” When pressed, Colin does admit that some Exeter City fans may have challenged his good humour the most but his matchday relationships have only brought him good memories, including with the local police with whom he says he can always have “a good laugh”. He also values his relationship with the TUFC players in the Gulls’ Lodge whom he alerted, last season, to a basking traffic warden in the vicinity by banging on the Lodge window!
Loyalty is, incontrovertibly, a watchword for Colin for his working life revolved around working at a Paignton paint shop for 32 years and at the old Mermaid pub (now The Hyde Dendy) on Paignton seafront for over 20 years. Now retired he can dedicate himself to his pastimes including turning out for the past 5 years in the local walking football league playing as a “lethal” striker for Stroke City, sponsored by Bettesworth’s for the past few seasons – a move much appreciated by the many former stroke victims in the team.
Colin currently has a bit of a dicky knee but, otherwise, shows no sign of slowing down nor of giving up his post any time soon. From noon on a Saturday matchday there Colin will always be, importantly now sporting a blue baseball cap in honour of his great pal and TUFC ticket-holder, Gary, who is dangerously ill with brain cancer. More than a half-century of loyalty and dedication: that is the measure of our community champion Colin, the friendly programme-seller.
