By 1982, Witham had signed Martin Bawden and Ian Graham from Colne as well as promoting Robin Lang, men’s singles semi finalist at the age of 17 in 1979 (and eventually winner in 1983). With the addition of Andrew Wadling, Neil Sweeting and father Mark, they kept the title on their shelf for the next four years.
Colne found life difficult for a bit – they set a record one year by calling on 15 players to complete their fixtures – and it was Rayne A who stepped up to challenge.
Rayne had been formed in 1976 and after two seasons in the second division, made their way up to the first where they have been ever since. They had flirted with relegation in 1981 before finishing in mid-table. Then in the close season former Herts player Terry Pleasance and ex-Cornwall player John Leith joined the club and transformed them into a top team. For the next two years, they, Dean Andrews, Paul Whybrow and Ian Whiteside – a trio who had come together in 1979 and were to stay together until Whybrow retired in 2002 – offered Witham their only serious challenge.
Then Michael Shorten and Mark Bannister joined Leith and Pleasance and although they finished second in their first season they finally rose to the summit in 1985.
It was only to be for one season, however, as Witham, with the addition of Mike Childs, Darren Jones and Martin Speight, rose to the top again.
It is a season that will be remembered sadly as Robin Lang’s last before he was hit by ME and had to give up the game completely. His loss, together with that of Speight and Childs, meant that Witham faced the defence of their title with unusually slender resources.
Wood, Jones and Bawden were a pretty regular threesome that season but they were outgunned by the new-look Colne A of Steve Kerns, Nick Mills and Fred Evans who began a new period of Colne domination by taking the first of five consecutive titles.
To be accurate, that was the team that represented Colne in most of their matches, but for the encounters with Witham they turned to Paul Stephens in the first and Chris Knight in the second, both playing their only game of the season.
Neither was needed for the next four seasons when John Andrews joined and they swept all before them, including both halves of the season when the league split into mini-sections in 1988 and 1989.
Witham A had evolved into a pretty unlikely looking team of Peter Munch, Martyn Lang, Pip French and Jon Batchford, with Derek Wood down in the B team. But Chris Jacob had signed during the 1991 season and when he persuaded Julie Askem to join him the following season, Wood stepped back up to the A team to produce a formidable trio that took the title back from Colne for two years.
Richard Jennings meanwhile had been improving the fortunes of the Bocking United Services Club. An also ran for many years, they put together a promotion-winning team of Jennings, Ian Morrison and Hud Hoste in 1991, then augmented it one by one over the next three seasons until it turned into a championship-winning team. Peter Hayden joined in 1992, Ian Hayden in 1993, when they were runners-up to Witham, and the picture was completed in 1994 when Terry Dowsett’s name was added to the roster. He had not played in the league for some years after his title-winning years at Colne but now joined his two brothers-in-law – he had married their sister Kim – and helped them stamp their class on the division.
The trio won it for three years before once Colne again picked up the baton. The first of three more titles in 1997 was something of an old-fashioned Colne effort, fielding a total of ten players during the season with only Steve Kerns and Paul Davison, junior boys’ singles winner from 1991 to 1994, playing more than half the matches.
Graham Farmer was a more regular member of the squad the following season when they also called on former Clacton champion Dave Birkett and Cambridge’s Kevin Gray. Kerns, Birkett and Farmer were the basic trio in 1999 when they were also assisted by Bury St Edmunds’ Paul Cicchelli, a player knocking on the England top 100.
The league then entered a period of flux as the title changed hands for four successive years. Or at least, the name on the trophy changed, but the BNCA team that won the title in 2000 had not only moved en bloc from Colne but had kept all their peripheral players and added others. Kerns, Farmer, Birkett, Steve Elmes and Simon Woods were the mainstays (11, 9,8,7,6 matches respectively) with additional appearances from Cicchelli and Chris Jacob plus reserves Matthew Staines, Lucy Wang and Mark Palmer.
That proved to be a one-off and of those names, only Wang remained at Notley the following season. Palmer went off to university but most of the others made their way to the newly formed Netts (North Essex Table Tennis School) club at Gosfield School.
They spent a year maturing (Staines was only 14 and Lee Daines a year older at the start of the 2000-01 season) while Rayne stepped back for the second title in their history 16 years after the first. They enjoyed the services of former Essex No.1 Steve Dettmar for a few seasons, during which he won four consecutive men’s singles titles. In 2001 he, Ian Whiteside and Steve Elmes were joined by Dowsett who became one of the few players (the first?) to win the title with three different clubs.
Rayne’s reign lasted only one year as both Dowsett and Dettmar left the following year allowing both for Netts – essentially Kerns, Farmer and Davison – to take over.
