A club legend at Harrogate Town, Jim Hague broke many a record at the club and holds the record for number of appearances at 402 and is also the clubs record goal scorer with 135 goals. The former striker, who started as a defender, still remains their youngest first-team debutant at 14.
Jim left Harrogate when he was 16 to join Bolton Wanderers as a youth player and he was such a promising talent, the legendary Nat Lofthouse spent a lot of time with him on the training pitch. After around 18 months with Bolton, he joined Leeds but failed to make the grade there and returned to his beloved Harrogate to play in the Yorkshire League. Jim has a great story about his favorite town manager (formerly pre-war Chelsea and English star John Townlaw). This will not go down well with the modern HR department. He states: "If we did something wrong in the game, he hit us. It certainly taught us a lesson.
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| Jim, front row, far left, poses for Harrogate team photo in the 1967-68 season |
Jim, Harrogate through and through, also served on the club's committee and won an FA award as groundsman of the year.
In his role as grounds man he can regularly be seen morning, noon and night in his wellington boots working away on the pitch, doing whatever is in his powers to make the surface playable. Ten minutes before the biggest game in the clubs history, against Hastings United, the referee said the game could not go ahead unless more sand treatment was done to the pitch. Jim, after all his hard work on the pitch in the days before, had been given the day off to enjoy the occasion in the stand with his grandson. However, when he heard the game could be in doubt, he jumped out of the stand; suited and booted, he got straight onto the pitch and alongside a number of players from our U17 development squad, that had been trained in the skill of replacing turf and repairing diverts by Jim himself, got to work and managed to get the pitch playable with minutes to spare.
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