THERE'S more to former Newport councillor David Hando than politics – he spoke to WILL BAIN about his time in Uganda and his love of Newport County.

WHEN the old Newport County went out of existence in 1989 I was one of 400 enthusiasts who set up Newport County AFC to start the long climb to Football League status.

Little did we realise this would involve two periods of exile and three visits to the High Court.

County are my club because I am from Newport, and have lived here my whole life apart from three years away at university and three years in Uganda.

I went to teach in Uganda between 1964 and 1966 at Kyambogo College in Kampala after graduating from LSE (London School of Economics).

It was a fantastic experience and a beautiful country. It really showed me the value of education.

People used to walk miles out of the bush to come to school and they would turn up immaculate, they appreciated education so much. One year there was a strike by parents because their children weren’t getting enough homework, can you imagine that here?

We were only a young family when we moved out. Both myself and my wife, Mary, whom I met at St Julian’s Methodist Church, were in our mid-twenties and our two eldest sons, Steven and Laurence, were just two and one at the time. We had our third son, Julian, while we were out there.

It was just coming into the Idi Amin era and the people of that beautiful country seemed so happy, with no idea of the terror that was to come during Amin’s dictatorship.

Part of our job teaching out there was to help bring through native teachers. The young man who took over from me was called Richard Ottee. In Uganda at that time, he was from the wrong tribe, he was an intellectual and was from the north. I heard that Amin’s men came and beheaded him in front of his class in the same room I had taught in.

It was very sad to see how things went in Uganda. I loved it out there. I suppose those experiences shaped why I felt so strongly about apartheid from the outset.

It was clearly disgusting, so when Newport Rugby Club decided to tour South Africa in that era that was the end for me as a supporter of the club.

Until then I had been a big follower of both Newport rugby and County. A few of us supporters had tried to speak to the club chairman, RT Carter, about the decision.

We weren’t rabble-rousers, at the time I was the parliamentary candidate for Monmouthshire and there was also the Bishop of Monmouth, head teachers of schools, but they wouldn’t speak to us.

It meant I found myself marching to Rodney Parade alongside Peter Hain.

I remember being kettled by the police along with another couple of hundred protesters in Beresford Road.

That was the end of Newport rugby and rugby in general really for me, although I do still watch the internationals on telly. That’s when County took over.

My father used to take me to watch Lovell’s Athletic, who were the team of the sweet factory workers in Shaftesbury.

They played on Thursdays and he used to work shifts so couldn’t take me to see County until that changed and I saw my first game at Somerton Park back in the Fifties.

We tried everything to stop the club going into liquidation.

I even did a sponsored parachute jump over in Swansea which raised about £1,000, which was quite a decent sum in the Seventies.

We had been so close to promotion to Division Two at one point but then we were falling through the leagues and the club was in big financial trouble.

An American businessman called Jerry Sherman came in.

He was from Newport in Washington State, he liked to tell people.

He made a lot of promises about what he was going to do for County. He booked the players into fancy hotels and restaurants after a match and talked a lot about the glamour he was going to bring.

It turned out he was a conman and he has been jailed in the USA for seven years for fraud. That’s when the club eventually went into liquidation and a group of fans, including myself, got together and decided we needed to set up a new club.

But our status meant no-one would recognise us. The council said we were the old Newport County in disguise who owed people money and so wouldn’t give us anywhere to play, while the FAW said the opposite, saying we were a new club and therefore we had to start by playing in the parks leagues.

We ended up in Moreton-in-Marsh and then at Gloucester City, it was a long way back for the club.

Every game was effectively an away game, and even though we had 400-plus supporters follow us up to Moreton in the beginning we needed to come back to Newport. We’ve fought a lot of battles to get back here, but I think all the hard work from a lot of people, particularly someone like Chris Blight, has paid off.

I joked when we went to go and try and ground-share with Moreton to get in the Hellenic League that it ‘wasn’t Wembley but it will do”.

It made reaching Wembley itself this year for the FA Trophy final, a game we should’ve won, I think, even more special. I think the move away from Spytty Park had to happen and I think so far it has worked out well.

Everyone agrees it would be beneficial for Newport as a city if County made it to the Football League. It would be a huge boost. I hope we can make that happen.

It’s the same with a lot of things in Newport. It’s disappointing how people only look at the negatives. There are some fantastic landmarks like Tredegar House, Fourteen Locks, The Wetlands and the Transporter Bridge.

We have missed out slightly in getting World Heritage status for the bridge, Bilbao has got it, but the British bridges weren’t put forward. I hope we can piggy-back on the Buenos Aires bid and get that status, it would be another huge boost for the city I love.

County in the Football League and World Heritage status for the Transporter Bridge.

That would be nice.