coracles are circular vessels<\/a> that use a single oar to steer and paddle.<\/p>\n“I can go abroad and we mention about football and where we’re from\u2026 and everyone has heard of granddad – so it just goes to show it was a unique job that he actually did,” said his granddaughter, Wendy Thorne.<\/p>\n
“What we think would be lovely is a statue of some kind, either at the football ground or somewhere by the river, just to keep a fitting tribute of him and keep his memory alive.<\/p>\n
“We really think he’s a legend, and he deserves to be remembered in that way.”<\/p>\n
Ms Thorne said her grandfather was about 72 when he gave up the job, and used to get paid about 50p per ball.<\/p>\n
“He loved it, it was his way of getting in to watch the match as well,” she told the BBC.<\/p>\n
“He’s legendary for doing it.<\/p>\n
“Even on my granddad’s headstone, he’s actually got the picture of the coracle on there.”<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, his memory is still being kept alive in other ways.<\/p>\n
The Coracle Pub in Shrewsbury has a photograph of him on a wall inside. On Saturday, The Coracle Society will hold a race in the Severn in Mr Davies’ name.<\/p>\n
“It’ll bring it all back… when granddad was on the river,” said Ms Thorne.<\/p>\n
“There’s going to be some fun, there’s going to be some laughs, because there’s going to be a lot of people probably going in the river.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The family of a man who used to retrieve stray footballs from the River Severn in a coracle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92979,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-92978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92978\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}