Doug has spent his lifetime involved in sports – both taking part and coaching – and has been one of the leading supporters and campaigners for Wensum Sports Centre, which was threatened with closure in 2010 and is now a popular and successful community facility in Norwich.
My early sporting life
I’m Douglas Poynton, but people usually call me Doug. I was born in Norwich, although my family were from Reedham and the wider family were divided between Wales and Ireland. I’ve got fond memories of Reedham where there was a little shop and a garage owned by my uncle and his family which overlooked the marshes. There was also the family house which was known as Hill House. That’s still there, but the garage and shop have long gone.
My early years were dominated by the rivers, sailing, swimming, fishing and all the sports I could ever have a go at. My father helped run the Swan Swimming Club based at the Old Lakenham baths in Norwich, which is where I learned to swim and play water polo. Eventually my efforts led to 11 county titles and a district silver honour.
It was a lovely little pool at Lakenham. So many people enjoyed those lazy summer days. I can remember them sunbathing on the concrete there. I remember the opening of the St Augustine’s pool during the late ‘50s and swam in the North, East and South of England galas.
My second sport was badminton and I was lucky to have been coached by Mike Stevenson who was a national coach. There followed many league matches playing for a number of local teams including the YMCA and then I moved up to Aylsham in North Norfolk and also had some tournaments at the American Air Force bases. On a Tuesday night we’d play water polo at the Maddison’s Holiday Camp out on the coast. The holidaymakers there certainly enjoyed that, particularly when they had their pints of beer in their hands.
It was all great fun and the main thing to say is that really I was driven by sport, but on leaving school I was determined to follow my dream to work with my hands at traditional boat building. My family had been involved in the holiday industry with caravans and chalets owned and hired out by them in Yarmouth and Hemsby. I wanted to become involved in boats and the marine industry and have my own boatyard. I had a five year apprenticeship with C.J. Brooms in Brundall, which is one of the best boatyards on the Broads system.
It was during that period that I joined the amateur rowing and sailing club down at Whitlingham and decided to try and improve my sailing technique there. It wasn’t long before the captain of the club, a guy called Jack, took me to one side along with my friends and said, ‘Hey, we need you in the eight next Sunday. You’re going to learn to row’. So suddenly another sport arrived! The old thatched clubhouse with our own bar was based at the end of Whitlingham Lane. I was also hired to look after the boats. I must have left there around about ‘68 and sometime soon after the clubhouse burnt down. They’ve got a new rowing club now, which is also based at Whitlingham Lane. It’s a modern and thriving facility, which is now enjoyed by a lot of the local schools and universities. So that’s good.
My coaching career
Approaching the late ‘60s, my apprenticeship finished, which meant a change of direction. I had decided, given my achievements in the swimming world, that I would try turning professional as during late ‘69 my competitive career as a swimmer had come to an end. So I went back to study at night school and at Loughborough College in order to attain my coaching qualifications. My first contract was with Norwich City Education Department. I was the first pro teacher at the St Augustine’s pool in the city.
It seemed to go quite well as I was then headhunted by Norfolk County Council Education Department. They wanted me to take over a pool in North Norfolk at Aylsham where I was responsible for not just doing the teaching and the coaching and everything to do with that side of things, but also for looking after the pool itself. That was a real challenge. It seemed as though I was working seven days and seven evenings a week.
On Sunday mornings, the Disabled Swimming Club had sessions in Norwich which were run by an amazing number of people as helpers and volunteers – superb people. It was also run by my father. He was there every Sunday non-stop and when I look back at what he did I think ‘Wow, what an achievement’.
The teaching at Aylsham included lots of different little schools and it went right through the full spectrum of age groups up to high schools and night school and adult education. I also formed a competitive swimming club and they, from a small pool, were achieving way above their pay grade in terms of what they managed to do. I also had a Royal Life Saving Society group going as well. And I actually received recognition from them with an award later on. I was a Technical Area Rep with the Royal Life Saving Society and my work at Aylsham continued for 28 years with unbroken service until a fateful day when a horse riding accident caused damage to my back.
That unfortunately led to another change of direction as you have to be fully fit to carry out the sort of work that I was doing. So there was a new beginning in 1997, I realised that I had to retrain. I returned to the marine industry, but this time on the sales side, which entailed gaining qualifications to become a yacht broker.
I soon had my own business up and running with sales sites at Brundall and later in the centre of Wroxham. A fantastic period of about 10 years followed, working again with boats and the public. It was wonderful. My two sons were growing up fast, having been to university and leaving home and my wife Margaret was a district nurse and part of the community health team in Coltishall.
Retirement and a new vocation
As I approached 60, working seven days a week became progressively harder. I decided to retire and it was at that time we decided that we would move to Norwich. Then in 2007, I started to play badminton in the Wensum Sports Centre.
I discovered that the Wensum Sports Centre had been rather poorly let down in terms of its investment and unfortunately, it looked very tired. In December 2010, a notice was put up which said the County Council were going to close the sports Centre as it was costing too much money to keep it running. Well, I was absolutely furious. I’d only been here for a couple of years or so and suddenly they’re closing one of the best amenities in the city right next door to Wensum Lodge. So I thought, ‘right, this is where the fight begins’.
It was early January 2011 and I wondered how I could get involved. How could I start to get some movement to stop this from happening? They had closed it; that was it. The doors were locked and it was finished. The only thing that had been left open were the squash courts. That was by a quirk of fate as The Friends of Wensum Lodge next door were the actual ones who ran the squash courts.
I thought ‘I’ll go along to the Friends of Wensum Lodge to see what their situation is and what they’re going to do about this’. It just so happened that there was an advert in the Lodge saying that The Friends were holding their AGM. The Friends themselves were a charity so they had a properly formulated committee etc. I turned up at the meeting and there were about three or four people sitting on the top table and about six people in the room. I got talking to the chap next to me – a guy called Bill Glover – and he introduced me to his mates Roger Mason and John Jewell. They were an architect, a technician and a surveyor.
I asked them what they were doing there and they said ‘We thought we should stop this closure going through. We thought we’d come along and find out what we can do’. I said ‘I’m here for the same reason’. So 50% of the people who were in the audience were there to try and generate some interest in stopping the closure. The meeting was very short, but the chairman Peter Hoadly asked the people who turned up if anybody would be interested in joining the committee and we all stood up and said ‘Yes, we’re here. We’re going to be part of the committee’. In fact we ended up becoming trustees of Friends of Wensum Lodge. And suddenly it seemed as though yours truly was taking over the whole thing, hook, line and sinker! It gave us a tremendous base from which we could do something.
From that point we had to devise ways to get the public interested. We held were public meetings and generated quite a lot of interest from the political side of the community. Dr Ian Gibson is a name that springs to mind, I think he chaired our first public meeting at the old Lads Club at the top end of King Street. It was a packed house. Later on we had another meeting at Wensum Lodge and that one involved the then leader of the council, Cliff Jordan, and several of his officers.
It was a movement that swelled public opinion. All of a sudden I think they felt quite a draught blowing against them and I certainly made sure that I was making myself heard and known, pushing forward the case for non-closure. During that time the headline on the front of the EDP was that the Sports Centre was going to be closed and it was going to cost £475,000 to keep it open. The first thing we wanted to do was to ask why? Where did this figure come from?
That was our first foray into the fight. We were invited to County Hall to meet with a gentleman called Harold Bodmer who was head of some department and just happened to be put in front of us at the meeting. The first conversation was ‘Well, we’re not going to lease it to you. We’re not going to do any form of letting. If you want to buy it it’s going to cost you two and a half million’. So that sort of put us a bit on the back foot.
We said ‘Well hang on a minute. In that case, let’s just explore the money side of it and explain why it’s being closed. You say that it’s going to cost this and I’d like a breakdown of that money. Where’s that to be spent? We also have our own surveyor. So while we’re doing it, we’ll do a free survey to see where the problems are that you say are inherent’. Oh, long faces!
The meeting was quite short and abrupt, but we realised now exactly where the council stood and what their intention was – which was certainly to turn it into a block of flats. So following on from that, I put in a Freedom of Information request for the necessary numbers and the breakdown. And it was, well I used the word farcical because the numbers bore no resemblance to what should have been put down. It was obvious that these numbers had been cobbled together just to make a political point and a reason for closure. We didn’t even have to really debate the numbers because they just didn’t stand up. Our survey showed that the building was as sound as a pound. It needed a little bit here and there, but there was nothing that couldn’t be put right with a little investment.
So I thought the first part was trying to get some form of leverage to the County Council, but having met with some people there and getting a negative response it was a bit of a pushback. I felt that the public were with us, having had the meetings, but we did need to try to make some effort to say, ‘Well let’s get the place open again. And try to get some sport going again in order to save it’.
It was at about that time that I suddenly received a call from the County Council asking whether I would be prepared to meet with the council leader, Mr Cliff Jordan. I’d never met him and he didn’t know me, but I thought that it was a positive sign if he actually wants to meet me.
We agreed to meet at Wensum Sports Centre in the car park. It was a sunny Saturday morning and we discussed what was going on with the Centre and why it was shut. He wanted to know my thoughts on this. He’d heard that I’d like to get the place back open again. He didn’t want to appear negative, but he did paint a very black picture regarding other facilities in the county. And he did mention that there were going to be a lot of disappointed people in the county in the near future. I thought ‘This doesn’t sound very good’.
Then he turned tack and said, ‘But I’ll tell you what. If you can produce a business plan, I’ll put it in front of my Committee and we’ll discuss it and we’ll see. I can’t say fairer than that’.
So I thought I’d grab the chance. So I said, ‘Yes, I will do that. I’ll get you a business plan within 14 days and we’ll sit down again. Rather than you with your committee looking at it, we’ll come to you with the business plan and we’ll discuss it with you in County Hall’. He agreed ‘Yes, that’s fine’. He came across as a very good old Norfolk boy. He said that he had businesses in, I think it was Dereham, where he had a waste disposal business. It was some form of business which seemed to be a good project. He seemed the sort of person that I could talk to and we could do a deal.
I went away and I decided ‘Well, that’s it. I better make sure I can get a business plan drawn up and to him’. I acquired the help of my nephew, Tony, who just happened to be a qualified accountant. We sat down together and we decided that we’d make this work. And within 10 minutes, we looked at each other and said ‘We don’t need to open the Centre. We could make this work without the Centre even being open’.
It was quite amusing. Should we drop this and just open this other business? But anyway, we put the business plan together and we had the meeting arranged with Mr. Jordan and all his merry officers there at County Hall. Within a space of 10 or 15 minutes, we were being offered the keys for the place to open. And I think the actual legalistic term was ‘tenancy at will’ which rather frighteningly means that they could arrive on a Monday morning and say ‘Hey we want the keys back; you’re shut’.
We had nothing to lose. So we said ‘Yes, that’s fine. We’ll go for it’. We explained what we intended to do and how we were going to do it including getting the basics right – redecoration and stuff like that to make people realise that we’re not messing around here. We told them that it was not going to be open for just two or three months and then shut – we were in it for the long term. I think that rather surprised Mr. Jordan and all his merry men. And I think, quite honestly, they didn’t really give us a chance.
Preparing to re-open
My first phone call and foray into trying to get the place started again was to go to the people who had the money – the big money, i.e. Sport England. I had a meeting with a representative from Sport England during 2011. He just sat there and said to me ‘Doug, you will not do it. You can’t do it. There’s no way you’ll do that’.
Oh, well, that rather took the wind out of my sails. But anyway, I thought ‘Well, I’m going to prove you wrong, mister’. I didn’t hear any more from Sport England for quite some time.
The first thing to do was to try to get some remedial work going on in the Centre. How could we do it cheaply? Well, you surround yourself with volunteers for a start; people who are prepared to put themselves out, to get involved, to help with the work. It might be doing all sorts of small remedial jobs. We were lucky because suddenly out of the blue, I met a guy who was working with ex-offenders. I didn’t pry too deeply, but apparently, they were a group of guys who’ve been in, how shall I say, Her Majesty’s pleasure for some time and who’ve been let out. They come and twork on a freelance basis and all you have to do is provide the wherewithal for them and give them a price. So I thought ‘That sounds good’. So suddenly I found there were about 20 of these guys involved.
I said to them ‘Right, I want the whole place repainted. What do you want’? And they said ‘Cash’. And I said ‘Fine, let’s sort out a price and a time scale’. I think it was about a couple of weeks and it was like a plague of locusts arrived. We had the ladders, we provided the paint, we provided the brushes and the rollers and these guys came in and did the work. It was amazing, absolutely amazing. Within two weeks, the whole place was sparkling again.
I got the cash for these chaps. I said ‘Here’s your money’. Whoosh, they were gone! They even left the bikes behind and the ghetto blaster they’d been listening to all week. That was it. They did a fantastic job and what a start to our project. From there on it was a case of getting people in the right positions to do the right jobs in the right way. Sometimes it would involve getting tradespeople I knew and I’d worked with before. Sometimes they would come in and they would be working at what we would call mates rates. It was being done professionally.
We were certainly being looked at as a good option because I think anything to do with helping the centre reflected well on the businesses that were coming in to help us. So that was a very good thing. We also had, of course, help from the Committee and the people who came to those open meetings and who were prepared to do a bit. We kept this going and we managed to work towards a grand opening during 2012. It was during the early summer of 2012 that Wensum Sports Centre opened its doors again officially to the public.
The grand re-opening of Wensum Sports Centre
In the summer of 2012, and with the opening day looming, it was a case of trying to get everything sorted, activities going, groups working and playing. And what a day – a fantastic day! We were so lucky to have Lady Ralphs, the wife of Lincoln Ralphs, who was the Chief Education Officer back in the early days. Unfortunately, she was wheelchair bound, but she came along and she cut the tape for our centre. We had transformed the whole of the building. The lower part of the building had simply been a dumping ground for office furniture and educational stuff. And now it was all truly changed. We’ve got meeting rooms, we’ve got an area for a new gym, a community area and even a new reception area.
All of it was achieved within the space of basically about a year and a half – an amazing thing. All really down to the fact of the hard work and the dedication of those people who just felt strongly that this should not be closed and it was a community asset that just had to keep going. So Lady Ralphs opened it and it was an amazing day. There was a lot of enthusiasm and a feeling that we could now really go forward. It was a rolling ball that we had to keep going and keep pushing.
The big thing that faced us at that point was the roof. It did need a new roof. It was OK, but it was coming to the end of its lifespan. So we got ourselves accepted as a formal charity with a management committee so that we had a structure within which the Centre could move forward. The committee was made up of people who were voted or co-opted onto it and they were overseen by the four trustees of the charity – myself, Bill Glover, Roger Mason and John Jewell. And at that time, we decided that this format would work quite well because the trustees would have the legal clout should that be needed, while the management committee were there to make the place work. It’s fair to say that the whole business was really due to good management and the running of a good carpark. Now the trustees are the chair – me, Doug Poynton, Bill Glover, Graham Long, Leslie Graham and David Higginbottom and we remain the guiding principals in charge. The management committee exists to deal with daily management of the Centre and is made up of the trustees and those who are either voted for or co-opted at each AGM as well as the manager of the Centre. The 2025 management committee consists of the Chair, Bill Glover, myself, Graham Long, David Higginbottom, Leslie Graham, Carol Lowe, Roger Parker, Malcolm Calnicot, Mike Quantrell and the managers, Ryan and Josh, who manage the centre jointly.
Some memories over my years as a trustee
I would like to finish up with just one or two anecdotes that happened over the time I’ve been here – things that when you look back are amusing, but at the time weren’t perhaps so amusing. Right at the beginning, I remember standing in the car park with Cliff Jordan and he was saying to me about the business plan and I’m thinking ‘Well, we’re standing on it’. It’s the car park and it underpinned what we were doing; it provided a revenue stream. It was amazing and why other people didn’t see this I do not know, I cannot understand. Later on the carpark was to become the subject of another problem when we had some appropriation of funds by the company that was running it, but that all got resolved and we got our money back.
It’s fair to say that the whole Centre in the early days was run with an amazing set of people and on one occasion I can remember, on ‘Nelson’s Day’ – I think 1805 was the Battle of Trafalgar and it was celebrated every year in September or October time – we had a barbecue and there were about six or eight of us all having a good time and guess what, the heavens opened and it was one of those monsoon rainfalls that come – we see them more often now, but back then not so many. It absolutely chucked it down. We were just standing down the road at the yacht club at Whitlingham and we got a call from the Centre to say ‘The hall is flooded out. It’s more like a swimming pool’ so we all upped sticks and charged back to the Centre and we spent the next four hours pushing the water out through the doors at the end of the main hall. It had come in via the guttering, which is over the top of the hall and had been blocked by some seagull nests. So the rain had come down, the gutters couldn’t take the water and the whole of the main hall just filled up to a depth of about two or three inches. There were some amazing people on that day who got rid of it. And of course loads of other people need to mentioned, being volunteers and helping out in so many different ways. Remembering Alan David, who was an amazing person and did so much work in the hall, Roger Mason – one of the architects, Pete Lansdown and his wife Angie – she was there pushing the broom and getting the water out, Jim Anderson, Dave Evans, Maria and Tony, David Higginbottom, Carol Lowe – these people who’ve come and kept our centre alive over the past 20 odd years. It’s amazing.
A really interesting thing that happened – I was in the Centre minding my own business and thinking what a nice day it was and a man walked in with a long raincoat and trilby hat and leather briefcase and demanded to speak to me. So I sat down opposite this guy. He didn’t mention his name and he just calmly said to me ‘I want to take over your Centre’. I said ‘Excuse me, we’ve got a lease’. He said ‘Yes, I want to buy out half that lease. I’m prepared to give you £500,000 now and you can spend it how you like on the centre and in return I will take over use of the hall and everything in it during the daytime and you can have it at evening times and weekends’. I said ‘On your bike mister. I don’t know where you’re from’. He said ‘I’m from the government and I’ve come down from London today to speak to you and this is how it’s going to be’. I said ‘Sorry, but that’s not how it’s going to be’, and he promptly left. I told all the other members of the committee and the trustees what had happened and they all laughed and said ‘Who is this person’? About two weeks later he turns up again and says ‘Right, £750,000. Last offer’. I said ‘Sorry, we don’t want your money. This centre is for the public. It’s a community run thing and it’s for our community. During the day we have people in here and it’s not going to be driven by your education department from London or County Council’. And then he explained ‘We need another sports hall and if you don’t play ball we’ve got to build a new sports hall at the Hewett School’. I said ‘Best you get on with it then’. And that’s what happened. They built a brand new sports hall at the Hewett School. Had we given in we’d have no longer had people coming in from the community.
I also have to say that during the earlier years – I think it was 2013 – I was approached by Norwich City Council and they said ‘Hey Doug, you’ve been doing a really good job’. They’d had people coming in and saying we’ve done so well – meaning everybody, not just me – and they invited me to a reception at City Hall and they awarded me with the ‘Volunteer of the Year’ sponsored by a very well know Norfolk man, Roy Blower, and I had this little trophy. I think they hold that every year now so that was a nice little thing to have.
Anyway, there’s been so many things over the years that could’ve been funny or things where afterwards you think twice and think maybe I should’ve done things slightly differently. I think looking ahead we are looking for a longer future and we’ll be looking to improve things again. We’ve done the roof, we’ve put new flooring in and now we have a nice community area with a barista café which is going really well. So I see for the people of Norwich, and further afield, it’s great, come and enjoy it. Have a go, whatever your sport is!
Douglas Poynton (b. 1947) talking to WISEArchive in Norwich on 6th February 2025. © 2025 WISEArchive. All Rights Reserved
