From the match programme:-
" "Chick" Mogford's Testimonial Fund Programme."
"Do you remember him? Of course you must do. How many times you must have seen this small, sparse figure get quickly off the mark from the touch line and, armed with sponge and bottle, literally sprint on to the field to attend an injured Newport player? Yes, it's "Chick" Mogford, trainer and attendant to the Newport Rugby team since 1919, who has just retired, in his 72nd year, from his official duties with the Newport Athletic Club. And this is "Chick's" programme. The whole of the proceeds are going to a Testimonial Fund which has been opened by the Athletic Club for his benefit - a fund which, it is hoped, will ensure a measure of comfort and happiness for "Chick" and his wife in well-earned retirement."
"We're not going to say a lot about "Chick." We could do because we were closely associated with him in Newport Rugby for over a dozen years. But we know he wouldn't wish it. Everything he has done has been wholeheartedly in the Club's interest. He wants no praise for it. To him it has been "all in the day's work" - dutifully done and with special attachment, perhaps, to the game of Rugby and the hundreds of Rugby men who have come under his influence."
" "Chick" has been guide, friend and mentor to a long succession of Newport Rugby teams. He has been a personality in the Newport Club, the character of which one meets only once in a lifetime. Our supporters, to whom he is known by the thousand, will join us in wishing him a long and happy retirement from the Club he served and position he graced so well."
"In the cause of his Testimonial Fund we are charging 3d. for to-day's programme, and if you will also contribute "a little something" to the collection at half-time we shall give "Chick" a bumper day."
"ROLES REVERSED."
"It is an all Scottish day to-day, and as the Newport Club has produced a Scottish International forward - and an extremely good one too - we have handed over to Neil McPherson to "play the overture" to the Watsonian's visit which he does rather nicely, we think - almost on the bag-pipes! - in "A Peep in My Diary" on page 6." [ see http://www.historyofnewport.co.uk/players/players.php?id=000185 ]
"And so, rather incensed perhaps, at being unusually relieved of this very pleasant privilege - although the welcome to his "clan" is altogether a more admirable effort than we could have made of it - we are entering into the holiday spirit and really reversing our respective roles by ourselves taking "a peep in our diaries" to recall memories of our own Scottish Internationa! - Neil McPherson."
"Although, oftentimes, we write quite "airily" about players and events 50 years and more ago, may we admit quite humbly that our actual personal memories of Newport Rugby only go back slightly before Jack Wetter's invincible season of 1922-3, and what a season of memories that was! And it was just at the very end of that season that, rightly or wrongly, Neil McPherson became the central hero in our then schoolboy minds. It was, we believe, Newport's last home game of the invincible season, and of certainty it was against Bristol. Like all the final games of that year, the match was of extreme tensity, and with the second half well advanced there was no score on either side. Huddled and forlorn small figures against the rails at the cricket field end, we were definitely nervous as Bristol continually threatened that precious record. And then there was a line-out somewhere between the Bristol 25 and the goal line at the gymnasium end. Neil McPherson took the ball cleanly from the throw-in, and breaking away on his own made such a ferocious dash for the line that no power on earth could seemingly stop him. Certainly Bristol couldn't, and he hurled himself over the line - right under the score-board if we remember rightly - to give Newport victory by a solitary try."
"The whole point of this is that it was a schoolboy memory; we were right at the other end of the field; and it might not have been Neil McPherson at all who made that wonderful dash. And if it wasn't, then Neil McPherson has falsely been parading as a hero in those schoolboy minds of 25 years ago. But it was good enough for us. We could easily confirm it, of course. But why should we? He was a grand forward and - well - a good enough hero for any boy."