OPINION: The YEP and its readers once saved the TV Harrison sports ground - but now it’s under threat again thanks to Leeds City Council - Michael Meadowcroft

In June 1928 a South Leeds headteacher, Tom Vernon Harrison, launched a campaign to buy the land on Oldfield Lane used as a sports ground since the 1850s. He was the organising secretary of the schools’ athletic competitions for the whole city and he had heard that the private owners of the land were planning to put buildings on the site.

He had to work fast and, having committed to paying the purchase price of £1,800 within a matter of months, he approached R R Whittaker, the editor of the Evening Post, who agreed to back the campaign. The paper took on the job of fundraising and not only did regular appeals appear in its columns but all the donations came to the paper and it listed every donor.

Thanks to the Evening Post’s efforts, the whole sum was raised by September 14, just four months from the launch of the appeal, and the paper carried the headline “Children’s Stadium safe at last.” The final total raised was £2,216, equivalent to £140,000 today.

At the opening ceremony the Lord Mayor of Leeds, Alderman George Ratcliffe, did the honours of formally handing over to the Elementary Schools Athletic Association the deeds of the land “which has been bought by public subscription to be preserved in perpetuity as a recreation ground for the schoolchildren of Leeds.”

Legal covenants to protect it were written into the deeds. The paper’s editor-in-chief wrote, “Anything the Yorkshire Post or the Yorkshire Evening Post have been able to do towards the acquisition of this field is fully rewarded by the satisfaction we must all feel in the success of the scheme.”

At the ceremony Tom Vernon Harrison, the original inspiration for the appeal, said that, “had it not been for the action taken, the ground would have probably been in the hands of the builders by now.” Harrison died a year later and as a tribute the ground was named “The T V Harrison Sports Ground.”

The sports ground was the home of the Leeds City boys’ football team and it was the ground where such Leeds United luminaries as Paul Madeley, Noel Whelan, Brian Deane, Alan Smith and Paul Reaney were nurtured and it became the well-known centre for school sports for the whole city.

That is until 2002 when the Leeds Schools Sports Association, the charity in charge of the ground, abandoned it, citing vandalism as the reason. Now, with supreme irony Leeds City Council proposes to build housing on the ground. The local community action group have been fighting this proposal legally and morally.

The campaign group has restored and laid out a football pitch and matches are now held again between local teams as well as being used for training and informal exercise. This land, saved from private development in 1928, by the support of this newspaper, is now under threat from the public authority.

Wortley and Leeds as a whole deserve to keep its historic sports ground.