Stoke Manager - Tom Mather
Permission for the next series of the Stoke Managers caches has been kindly provided by Staffordshire Wildlife Trust. Each cache will continue the Stoke Mangers theme, while also letting you know about one of the inhabitants that may live in these woods. The trust is a great organization that does lots of great work up and down the county, all carried out by funding from the public. If you wish to put something back into the local environment, click on the following link and make a small donation. http://www.staffs-wildlife.org.uk/donate
Badger Meles meles
Large black and white fur covered mammal, with strippy black and white face, up to 1.2m long. Badgers live in large families in burrows, called a sett. These look like rabbit holes, but are much larger. Active sets can be identified by the outside of the sett been littered with old bedding material such as hay, and nearby latrines marked by there droppings. They feed on a variety of things such as small mammels, eggs, earthworms and other bugs, fruit and tree roots. Badgers are exelent diggers and they use there powerful front paws for digging setts and looking for food. Largely nocturnal badgers can move at nearly 20mph and are rarely seen during the day, early evening is the best time to see them, when they come out looking for food. They are actually the main predator for the hedgehog.
Please post in your log if you see one of these animals during your caching adventure.
Tom Mather
Oct 1923 – June 1935
G525 W222 D122 L179
Mather was in charge a total of 12 years at the club, initially got off to a bad start and the club were relegated to the third divison, for the first time in (1926),only to win the third (1927) and second division titles (1932) on their way back up to the first division, where he comfortably kept them, before moving up north to manage Newcastle United. Mather was best known for giving debuts to Freddie Steele and Stanley Matthews, who later went on to have fantastic careers at Stoke.