ABOUT

Family history: Stix was born in Leeds in 1951, the son of Harry and Edna Lockwood – Harry was a tram conductor when Stix was born and Edna worked in the tailoring industry. He is the youngest of their children and has an older sister, Beryl. He is a lifelong Leeds United fan.

His charity work started when he was just 11 years of age when he began travelling all over the country along with his sister, doing charity concerts as the drummer with the ‘Skyliners Concert Party’. He had a varied job history before he officially started working at LUFC including working for The Gas Board as a fitter, an electrician, he worked in a foundry and as a professional drummer (at the age of 15 he was the youngest drummer in Yorkshire working in Clubland – hence his nickname, Stix). He married his wife Anne in 1974 and is Dad to Dawn, Arron and Shauna, and Grandad to six granddaughters and two grandsons ranging between the ages of 12 and 24. They are a close-knit family, all live locally to one another and are all massive Leeds United fans.

He officially took up paid employment with LUFC on 01/09/2004, although his involvement with the club spans over 63 years when as a young boy of 8 years of age, he became part of the ground staff under the great Don Revie. He described this involvement in an interview with The Football League in 2009 in a series they ran on ‘Unsung Heroes’ where he said “The pitch used to be horrendous. During the bad weather, the club asked for volunteers to go to Elland Road to help make it playable. I went down to offer my services. The club had these big 45-gallon oil drums that we would stand on four bricks, set them alight and place them around the pitch in various places to help thaw it out. Then we’d put straw down to stop it freezing again through the night so that it would ready for tomorrow’s game. To be honest it looked like a farmer’s field and after some games it would be like a mud bath. But I loved being involved and never looked back”. And with that, his enduring love for the club had begun. Stix went on to add “we were allowed to stay for the game and were given hot soup at half-time”. Later, he put his name down again to do voluntary work. He was taken on to answer the telephones, take messages and anything else that needed doing – and he did this for some years, covering the Community, Commercial, Lottery and Retail Departments – before eventually being offered the paid role of Community Liaison in September 2004, which involved him being the link between the club, the fans and the wider football community. This subsequently morphed and mushroomed into the role he was asked to undertake in 2012 as The Player’s Liaison Officer, which incorporated the many and varied charity and community requests that came into the Club on a daily basis, as well as other duties including (but not limited to) him being the single point of contact within the club for organising official signed merchandise, matchday collections, research re club history and past players, the player’s fan mail and general day to day assistance & support to the players. In addition, his matchday duties were wide-ranging and included assisting with sponsors, mascots, supporters, players and VIP visitors on the day, as well as his legendary Official Matchday Stadium History Tour, entertaining 50 to 60 people at a time, some of whom had attended the tour on numerous occasions because as they said, each tour was different.

Much of his work was carried out outside the hours of what would be considered the ‘standard’ working day – his work phone is never turned off, because his love and commitment to our club is second to none.

The number of charities, organisations and individuals/families that Stix helped in his role is literally unquantifiable but doubtless will be in their thousands – examples include Martin House Hospice, Candlelighters, St Gemma’s Hospice, St George’s Crypt, The Salvation Army, The Myfanwy Townsend Melanoma Research Fund (after the death of Leeds United Physio Bruce Craven to the disease), Spread Joy with Abi and Robert Hiscoe, who raised money for the NHS during COVID. He also helped and supported Leeds United Supporters groups and clubs such as Marching Out Together, the Leeds United Disabled Organisation (LUDO), as well as numerous overseas supporter’s clubs – particularly those in Scandinavia, Ireland and Malta, to name just some of them.

In his role he maintained a vital link between LUFC and those in the Local, National and International Community who are disadvantaged, vulnerable, ill (some very seriously so) and recovering, and their families – and fostered links that bring long-remembered experiences of joy and comfort to people who find themselves in the most heart-breaking and devastating of situations. He arranged visits to hospitals (including an annual Christmas visit to poorly children), as well as many other often unpublicised visits to the local Community where he accompanied the players who attended too. In addition, he accompanied players on school visits and so whilst a lot of his work was around supporting those in need, difficulty, grief, there was also an element of helping to inspire the next generation by making their local footballing heroes accessible to them within the Community. Even during the pandemic he continued to do the best he could to help and support those who needed it, within the restrictions. He was also tireless in maintaining and promoting that sense of the ‘LUFC Family’, which can be either comforting, uplifting or motivating depending on the individual circumstances of those he dealt with, and he genuinely had no concept of how important the work he did was, and just what it meant to the people who contacted him, sometimes in the most difficult moments of their lives.

In his role, Stix fostered and maintained long-standing links with the Armed Forces including The Parachute Regiment, The Yorkshire Regiment, The Royal Dragoon Guards, The Royal British Legion, Help for Heroes and HMS Ark Royal (as the adopted ship of the City of Leeds before being decommissioned, and an association of such standing that saw him invited on board her), and after that with HMS Audacious (the current adopted vessel of the City of Leeds). He also arranged for military personnel to attend matches, including high-ranking officers and those who had been injured in service –  he also arranged for the latter to attend Thorp Arch to meet the players, to give them a lift mentally and emotionally as their recovery progressed, and he was in regular contact with the two military hospitals, Headley Court and Selly Oak. He also arranged for cards and messages of support to be sent to personnel serving all over the world and also for them to be featured in the matchday programme – HMS Ark Royal sporting crew members were even supplied with the club’s official kits to wear, as they played different sports and football matches around the world, in our colours, and hopefully HMS Audacious will be the next participants to follow on with this tradition. In addition to all this, he planned, co-ordinated and oversaw the annual Military Day at Elland Road on the closest home game fixture to Remembrance Day – this was a massive event which took a huge amount of dedicated preparation, time and work involving club staff and numerous members of service personnel and is something that he always took enormous pride in. He also co-ordinated the allocation and distribution of the embellished ‘Poppy Shirts’ worn by the team during the Military Day match to charities/organisations/military recipients, who were then able to auction them to raise much needed funds, as well as matchday collections for charities linked to the Armed Forces, again to help them in raising vital funds to go towards supporting their work.

Also, he co-ordinated the teams seasonal used kits, which were greatly received by Catterick Military Garrison, so they could be put to the best use and distributed at home and abroad.