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The day I bumped into Geoff Capes — literally

By PAT PRENTICE

As tributes pour in for the late strongman Geoff Capes, memories are stirred of when he was not quite such a nice guy. In his younger Lincolnshire days he gained quite a reputation for laying out coppers and rolling over parked Land Rovers.


On one occasion, during a Holbeach United football match, he and his mates decided to repeatedly kick a ball on to the pitch to disrupt play. When the ref eventually confiscated the offending article, Big Geoff strolled over, picked him up and threw him away, before hoisting aloft the two opposing centre forwards and knocking their heads together.


The story ‘Big Geoff wants his ball back’ played well in the national papers as well as the local ones. Big Geoff was not amused and was soon thundering up the stairs of The Lincolnshire Free Press, bent on obliterating the reporter involved: me.


Malcolm Scott, the beefy and brave chief reporter, refused to be cowed, and talked him out of marmalising me. Had the strongboy realised I had made a small fortune from my linage payments, he might have been less forgiving.


I bumped into Capes again a few months later when the brakes on my newly-acquired beaten-up MG Midget faded at a notorious accident blackspot. I sideswiped a speeding car, which bounced and rolled into a deep dyke. As my radiator hissed, I ran to the bank and stared down at a figure scrambling up and issuing expletive-laden deadly threats.


Thinking I was about to be attacked, I warned the irate figure that if he came any nearer I would smack him to the bottom of the drain again.

Er... But he kept coming and as he pulled open his jacket to check for wounds, out rolled a muscle bigger than me.


He must have been in shock, because he suddenly paused, meekly apologised, and slumped by the roadside to wait for the blue lights, which in those far-off days, quickly arrived.


By the time they did, Big Geoff was beginning to growl again and a sympathetic police sergeant decided that I should ride in his car to the hospital while Geoff took the ambulance on his own.


Luckily, neither of us was badly hurt.


When the summons arrived, I pleaded guilty to driving without due care and attention and was fined. My soon-to-be wife duly reported that "Prentice was given time to pay."


Another fellow Fenman — Peter Caney, Late of Peters Point, Sutton Bridge — took mischievous delight years afterwards in noting that in his retirement, Capes took to breeding budgerigars.


Geoffrey Lewis Capes, shot putter and strongman, born 23 August 1949; died 23 October 2024 aged 75


25 October 2024