David Emery: He made us feel a million dollars

By Stuart Hammonds, First News Editor of The Non-League Paper

I CAN still remember the moment when David Emery entered my life. He changed it completely, and for the better, as he did so many through these very pages.

A dummy copy of The Non-League Paper was on a table in the clubhouse at Arnold Town, where I was playing as a 21-year-old centre-half back home in Nottingham.

A note from the editor-in-chief of this new paper, which was about to launch, asked for budding reporters to get in touch. CV sent off, I was soon heading to London for an interview and then invited to stay for the launch party, where I met David for the first time.

What struck me was how this guy who was respected as one of the country’s finest sports writers, who had reported on Olympic Games and World Championships, World Cups and European Cup finals, could show so much interest in how I’d been doing in the Northern Counties East League Premier Division.

But he was like that, Mr E. Made you feel a million dollars even if your true value was a ten pound note in a brown envelope.

Fourteen years of constant encouragement and complete trust later, I was proud to be made editor of his football titles. What an honour to be leading both The NLP and Football League Paper, still under his charge as founding editor, but given free rein to run them as I saw fit.

He did this with so many of us who couldn’t come close to the standard he’d set in Fleet Street, but like the Non-League footballers he wanted to champion and whose profile he raised through this brilliant platform, Mr E taught us and cajoled us to work in his way and climb the pyramid.

Others went off to join nationals as top level football writers, editors and some to form their own agencies. Eventually, after 16 years, I left to join Luton Town, a club he was fond of having reported at Kenilworth Road many times during the Hatters’ top-flight heyday under David Pleat.

I’d been fortunate to make good contacts there over the five years that Luton were our biggest ever club on The NLP, and he sent me off with his blessing to head up the media team at the by then-League Two side. “They’re good people there, Stu, and they’re a club on the up,” I remember him saying as I nervously broke the news to him.

We kept in touch, on one occasion David calling me to book accreditation for a photographer himself. He might have been the Boss Man, but he didn’t mind doing whatever needed doing to get his papers on the newsstands on a Sunday morning.

A week before he passed, he’d have been watching as our Hatters team – managed by former Telford boss Rob Edwards and containing several players to whom he’d given profile in The NLP as youngsters – won the Championship play-off final at Wembley, making history as the first club to go from the top division, down to Non-League and back again.

After a working life spent almost entirely in Non-League, it’ll be my first taste of the Premier League, so I can say without doubt that this great man certainly changed my life when I picked up that first NLP back at Gedling Road 23 years ago.

And I know he’ll have been proud, just as he was of all of his ‘Babes’.

Rest in peace Mr E, and thank you. Your legacy will live on in so many of us, not least your family who have picked up the baton and will continue to run your race. My love and thoughts are with them all.