| Personal information | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Full name | Thompson Noble Kirkham [1] | ||
| Date of birth | 10 December 1901 [2] | ||
| Place of birth | Felling, County Durham, England | ||
| Date of death | q1 1986 (aged 84) | ||
| Place of death | Gateshead, England | ||
| Playing position | Outside right | ||
| Senior career* | |||
| Years | Team | Apps | (Gls) |
| 1923–1924 | Darlington | 19 | (0) |
| * Senior club appearances and goals counted for the domestic league only | |||
Thompson Noble Kirkham (10 December 1901 – q1 1986) was an English footballer who played as an outside right in the Football League for Darlington.
Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played with a spherical ball between two teams of eleven players. It is played by 250 million players in over 200 countries and dependencies, making it the world's most popular sport. The game is played on a rectangular field called a pitch with a goal at each end. The object of the game is to score by moving the ball beyond the goal line into the opposing goal.
Darlington Football Club is an English football club based in Darlington, County Durham. They are members of the National League North, the sixth tier of English football, and play at Blackwell Meadows.
Kirkham was the third child of Thomas Gallon Kirkham, a lighterman, and his wife Elizabeth Jane. He was born in Felling, County Durham, where the family were living at the time of the 1911 Census. [1] Described as a local lad, Kirkham had displaced Harry Hall from the outside-right position for Darlington by December 1923, [3] and finished the season, and his Football League career, with 19 appearances in the Third Division North and one goal. [4] His death was registered in early 1986 in Gateshead. [2]
A lighterman is a worker who operates a lighter, a type of flat-bottomed barge, which may be powered or unpowered. In the latter case it is today usually moved by a powered tug. The term is particularly associated with the highly skilled men who operated the unpowered lighters moved by oar and water currents in the Port of London.
Felling is an eastern suburb of Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, England. The town was formed when three villages coalesced in the 19th century. Historically part of County Durham, the town was subsumed into the metropolitan borough of Gateshead in 1974. It lies on the B1426 Sunderland Road and the A184 Felling bypass, less than 1 mile (1.6 km) east of Gateshead town centre, 1 mile (1.6 km) south east of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and 10 miles north west of the City of Sunderland. In 2011, Felling had a population of 8,908.
County Durham is a county in North East England. The county town is Durham, a cathedral city. The largest settlement is Darlington, closely followed by Hartlepool and Stockton-on-Tees. It borders Tyne and Wear to the north east, Northumberland to the north, Cumbria to the west and North Yorkshire to the south. The county's historic boundaries stretch between the rivers Tyne and Tees, thus including places such as Gateshead, Jarrow, South Shields and Sunderland.
