How well do you know Darren Alway?

If you’ve attended a Titans home game since the pandemic, particularly if you’ve been to the pre-match carvery meal upstairs, you could be forgiven for thinking you know Darren Always. Darren is the humorous and upbeat Master of Ceremonies who skilfully navigates everyone through their feed, the speeches and then out pitch side where his is the voice that comes across the public address system announcing the scorers and the state of the game. He is the sort of fellow who everyone considers a friend. He greets you with a handshake and a smile, establishing eye contact as he welcomes you by name. It sounds a simple thing but these are courtesies that are fading from modern society and it really is a skill to work a room like Darren does.

But do you actually know him? Even if you reckon you do, read on. I can guarantee there will be one or two surprising revelations.

As I drove to Chelston to meet him at his workplace, G&L Consultancy, it occurred to me that I didn’t even know what his rugby pedigree was. He didn’t feature in Horse Drawn Brake to Hyde Park, the comprehensive history of Taunton RFC so I imagined he had played his rugby elsewhere. He’s quite a slight chap. Perhaps a whippy winger, I thought. Or maybe a scrum half, the sort who darts through gaps.

We meet in mid-morning. Well, what everyone would usually term mid-morning. Darren has been in since 6am. G&L Consultancy deals with all aspects of asbestos removal and the reason Darren starts so early is that he is the Operations Manager, so he needs to be there to dish out paperwork to his staff before they head off to conduct asbestos surveys, air tests, removal jobs and the like. Laboratory analysis and training also take place at Chelston and the managers of both sections report to Darren.

“Generally,” he says, “The busiest time of day for me is between 6am and 9am. Then I relax into my office day.” It’s a full day too, ending only at 4.30pm. Darren explains that trick of the trade, “If you don’t get out of here by a quarter to five, you’ll be sitting at Chelston roundabout for at least half an hour.”

Born in Taunton, Darren will be turning forty this year. He’s never left. “I’ve lived here all my life. Staplegrove Primary School followed by Ladymeade Community School.”

After school he did an apprenticeship with an electrical company. He is a qualified electrician but he has been with G&L since 2007 and has worked his way up from trainee level when he was an air tester, to being one of a select few in the country allowed to use the letters COCA after their name. It stands for Certificate of Competence in the industry of Asbestos and is that industry’s top qualification. “It’s very special to me,” he confesses, before we chuckle over the idea that the title bestowed on the leading lights of the industry is a mark, not of their excellence, but of their competence.

“Apart from being forced in a school PE lesson,” he admits, “I’ve never played rugby in my life.” The sport didn’t even interest him in his younger years. The focus in his family was in cart-racing. Three generations of Always – grandfather Frank, father Steve and both Darren and his brother Mark –have competed at a decent level of the sport across the South-West. Their home club, which the family has been involved with since its foundation, is at Dunkeswell and hosts monthly meetings. Darren raced for a few years but now helps out in the role of timekeeper, sitting with a laptop in the time keeping hut, making sure that the clock runs smoothly.

Golf has also been a distraction for Darren since his teenage years. He and his golfing partner recently won the Arthur Green Pairs Championship at Vivary. The name Darren Always features on quite a few of the competition boards in the clubhouse there. His best golfing memory is when, at the age of 16, he scored a hole-in-one on the 9^th hole at Vivary Park. It came in the club’s inaugural open. “I couldn’t hit the ball properly for three holes after that as I was shaking so much.”

Ironically he was playing with his uncle Martin who told him that the classy thing to do was, in the style of professionals, to throw the lucky ball in the pond. So, impressionable young Darren did just that. Then, at the club’s end of season dinner, he was presented with a trophy which had a scoop designed for the ball to sit in!

I comment that it was ideal to do it at an age when he was too young to go into the bar and shout a round. “I did – illegally – buy two pints,” he reveals, “For people who demanded them. But other than that I pretty much got away with it.”

He has reached the decision to take a step back from golf though. “Of all my extras,” he says, “I want the rugby club to be the permanent one. I love it. Rugby is all day Saturday, golf all day Sunday. Something had to give so I’ve decided to take a break from golf so that I can do some family stuff on a Sunday.”

Darren has been married to Bev for 13 years. She also works at G&L Consultancy. The story goes that they married on 1^st May so that they could always have a Bank Holiday for their anniversary but the truth, he admits is, “It meant that we could get married, have a two week honeymoon and I wouldn’t have to miss a cart race meeting at Nigel Mansell’s place.” His stepson Connor is 21 and is a helicopter engineer in the Royal Navy at Yeovilton (“We’re super proud of him,” he beams). Darren’s parents stand next to his PA booth at every Titans home game. “They love it, never having been rugby folk until I got into it.”

The introduction to rugby came when Connor began to play at Taunton in the Under 13s. Not only did Darren take him along to training sessions but they began watching the Titans as well. Then, at another completely different event, Darren was hosting and Jack Matthews (then President of TRFC) happened to be there and seized the opportunity to ask whether Darren would be interested in taking on the job of Match Day PA. “I did,” says Darren, “And I absolutely love it.”

This interview is supposed to be about Darren but he’s forever bringing other people into the picture and paying tribute to them. “I want to show a lot of gratitude,” he says, “To the late Steve Budd for the investment in the new PA system which has made a huge difference to the quality of sound we can produce.” All of this comes out in his explanation of the fact that he has never played a game of rugby in his life.

Darren used to frequent the Staplegrove Inn, which has recently become a hole in the ground. The landlord had a cheap karaoke set but Darren earned enough plaudits with his singing that he was encouraged to put on a show in front of family, friends, regulars and random punters. “That got me into the swing of holding a microphone and talking to people,” he explains. It wasn’t his performance debut, mind you. Between the ages of 8 and 16 he took to the stage annually in the Taunton Scout and Guide Gang Show. “We were on at the Brewhouse; singing, dancing, telling jokes, that sort of stuff.”

Small wonder then that he gained the confidence to stand in front of an audience. He bought his own music equipment, performing as a solo singer and also as a Michael Bublé tribute act at a variety of pubs and clubs around town. One such gig was at Vivary Park Golf Club and that was where Jack Matthews took the chance to enlist his obvious talents.

Surely, we’ve unearthed a surprising revelation for most of you by now. Michael Bublé Tribute Act for heaven’s sake!

Darren had been announcing the game over the tannoy for three seasons before the Covid-19 interruption. It’s only since the pandemic that he has also taken on duties hosting the pre-match lunches too but that is no small achievement given that he sometimes has a room of nearly three hundred hungry diners to work with. “It took three years and a pandemic before they’d even let me inside,” he jokes.

Not only has he been allowed inside but he is taking leadership within TRFC. On the club committee Darren has the title of matchday co-ordinator. It’s a role that brings him into contact with probably more people than anyone else. Typically, he’s at the club from 10am, setting up his own PA equipment for the lunch speeches. He then heads downstairs to have a coffee with Titans team manager, Steve Frost. They then set the changing rooms up together.

“I know it sounds silly,” he declares, “But I love doing that. Putting the shirts up, folding the shorts, getting the socks how they should be. Making it look as professional as possible. “With Frosty’s military background, if I don’t set everything up perfectly, he comes around after me and changes it all.”

By that stage the ground staff have cut, rolled and white-lined the pitch so Darren takes out the flags and the post-protectors. Next he sets up the scoreboard. Usually, by that time, it’s gone midday and he heads back inside to change and get ready for lunch. The lunch service and the match is what everyone knows him for but it takes some skill to know when the room is ready for speeches. There’s more to it, of course. He has to be aware of who the match sponsors are and whether there are any interesting guests attending and pay appropriate respects. On special occasions such as the Armed Forces Day or when there’s the annual auction for Children’s Hospice South-West his role amps up. It takes a special character to run a successful auction in a busy lunch room where the bar obscures some of the diners from view, no matter where in the room you stand.

Post-match Darren has to pack everything up. So he might not be finished until 5.30pm. That’s quite some shift for a volunteer.

I wonder whether he is in charge of the playlist that comes over the PA system pre-match and when players score tries. The answer is that he is for everything except the Titans’ song that they run out of the tunnel to. “That’s their choice – Thunderstruck by AC/DC – and it’s been their choice for a number of years. I always give them the choice but they’ve always wanted to stick with it.”

Darren urges me to invite suggestions from fans for snippets he can have cued up ready to play when a try is scored. He has a bank of a dozen tunes that he uses – 8 to 12 seconds of a popular tune is the requirement– but, because he knows they can become quite repetitive, he’d love some new ones that the fans want to hear.

We talk for a while longer and everything underlines what a positive and giving person Darren is. Recalling when Connor started in the junior section, he talked about match days and how the flags and post protectors needed to be set up and so he started doing it. It then became known that Darren would do that, so they had to start setting off for Hyde Park half an hour earlier, not so that Connor could get ready for his game but so that Darren could tackle his tasks. “It’s just the sort of person I am,” he says. “My missus will ask ‘Why do you have to over-involve yourself but I see a job that needs to be done so I jump in and do it and end up creating a role for myself.”

“There’s a huge array of volunteers down at Taunton Rugby Club and I’m proud to be a part of it. Genuinely. I’m not saying this because it’s going to be written up and will sound mushy but I wake up on a match day and I’m honestly looking forward to my cup of coffee with Frosty. I can’t wait.”

I like to unearth a gem of unusual information about my victims when I conduct these interviews. Darren resists. OK, we got the Bublé confession out of him but I’m looking for something else. Then he tells me that in addition to the nine year-old family dog Winnie they have a budgie. The budgie is called Mick. Darren wanted to call it Michael but it turned out to be a girl so it had to be Michaela. Mick for short. “Mick’s not a very entertaining budgie. I think it’s funny to give animals and birds human names though.”

He talks passionately about many aspects of the rugby club. He’s thinking about how the club can look after itself and build its future. It strikes me that he’s a very good bloke to have on the committee. On that note, final words to Darren…

“Now I feel like I’m part of the furniture at TRFC – and I love it.”

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