Remembering Stuart Ashby

KING OF THE COLLECTORS

John Barnett pays an affectionate tribute to Stuart Ashby, who died last year.

Stuart 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-

STUART LIFTS THE C&G TROPHY AFTER SUSSEX BEAT LANCASHIRE AT LORD’S IN 2006

day matches at Headingley and Chester-le-Street before getting a ferry to the Shetland Isles to visit another hostelry.

Stuart also scored the match in front of him and would enter the batsman’s score cumulatively, so 1 4 1 1 1 4 would be written as 1 5 6 7 8 12. Naturally, with so much going on around him, he wasn’t always entirely in synch with the official scorers. I’m not sure which sounded better – Stuart calling out “10 overs, 3 maidens, 3 for 39” just before the PA announcer confirmed “10 overs, 2 maidens, 2 for 35”. Sometimes the PA man got in first, and one of his friends would mischievously enquire ‘and what did you make it Stuart?’

Facebook gave Stuart the opportunity to share his treasure trove of photos, and sometimes he’d have three threads going on at once: what he had done recently, a trail through relatively recent history and some golden oldies from even further back. He was up to January 2004 with his Facebook memories when the country went into lockdown in March 2020, so at least Sussex’s first Championship success was covered. Perhaps it was meant to be that Stuart didn’t get much further than 2010, when we won our last trophy.

Stuart never did anything by halves, except the quantity of beer he would order in each pub. Any more would threaten his often-complex itinerary. Many of you will have your own memories, but what we can agree on is that there never will be another Stuart Ashby, the absolute daddy of collectors and “ticker-offers.” He’s probably at the front of the queue waiting to get into the great pavilion in the sky, armed with camera and scorebook. And, of course, the pavilion bar will be in CAMRA.