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REMEMBERING STUART ASHBY
KING OF
THE COLLECTORS
John Barnett pays an affectionate tribute to Stuart Ashby, who died last year.
S
tuart was a Sussex member, following them home and away for many years, as well as a season ticket holder at Brighton & Hove Albion and Southend United. That may sound enough for most people, but not Stuart. Becoming a member of football’s ‘92 Club’ was meat and drink to him. When it came to collecting or “ticking off” things he went big. Really big. For those that don’t know, Stuart sat at the Cromwell Road end of Hove and may have even been known to some of you as ‘bag man’, a reference to the carrier bags he hauled around, full of things to be signed. At some point he set out to watch every county play each other in a Championship match, home and away, 306 different permutations if you were wondering. And he was strict. He had to see a ball bowled, so any washouts meant a return visit. What might have set Stuart off on this journey and certainly help shape it - was benefit brochures. Every season, Stuart would buy the brochure for every county’s beneficiary, take a photo of the beneficiary holding it and get the photo signed.
I recall one tale from May 2005 when Sussex were playing a four-day game at Trent Bridge. Lancashire’s beneficiary was Gary Yates and - with photograph already secured – he heard that Yates wasn’t too far away playing against Nottinghamshire seconds. He wasn’t, but had Stuart known in advance he could have achieved the full brochure/ photo/signature set by the end of April! When centrally contracted players only made rare appearances for their counties getting any beneficiaries photographed proved more difficult, so much so that Stuart had to wait until October one year to capture Michael Vaughan after he gate-crashed a dinner. The following year he pinned down Andrew Flintoff in the members’ room at Old Trafford. Stuart collected autographs and took a lot of photographs. That was easy, so Stuart challenged himself. If there were any cricketing father and sons or brothers on the same ground they had to be snapped. The Stewarts, Butchers and Sidebottoms plus, of course, the Lenhams and Wells were all captured. And if they transcended multiple sports, even better. Or how about homonymy in the form of Matt Wood of Somerset and Matthew Wood of Yorkshire? Was there ever a more satisfying pairing for Stuart than when Sussex played Essex and lined up Phil Salt and Michael Pepper? Then there were what became known as the squad photos, that was a picture of the friends that Stuart sat with, often taken after a sneaky incursion onto the edge of the outfield. His finest achievement, which he tied in with cricket and football watching, was his bid to visit every one of the 14,000 pubs in CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide, 1984 edition. Holidays so he could tick off a few more pubs became the norm in Stuart’s life. Hectic itineraries would be put together and he slowly ticked them off using a mixture of public transport, hitch-hiking or lifts from his great mate Peter Dean. A mix of pub signs, local landmarks, signposts and railway stations were photographed as evidence and in July 2005 he was joined by many of his friends when he ticked off the final pub, the Lamb in Pagham. Earlier that year he’d taken in a Championship game at Trent Bridge, two one-
