PEGASUS AND KEN SHEARWOOD

Ken Shearwood is another gentleman football who has influenced the development of the game. Like Ebenezer Cobb Morley, Shearwood was an innovator around Association Football and he inspired many thousands of young footballers when he taught at Lancing College, a soccer playing independent school, on the Sussex coast. I was lucky enough to meet Ken on many occasions when our school teams played their annual matches. He was a legendary schoolmaster who taught a variety of subjects, most comfortably History and English.

Born in 1921 in Derbyshire, he was educated at Shrewsbury School and by the time he started his university career at Liverpool, reading Architecture, the war started and he joined the Royal Navy and saw action especially in the Mediterranean; he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
His post war employment involved a Cornish lugger moored in Mevagissey and fishing. Feeling that this was not going to be lucrative, he applied to Cambridge and Oxford Universities and influenced by his all round ability, Brasenose College gave him a place to read History.

After war, along with Harold Thompson, an Oxford don, he helped form Pegasus, an amateur football team, made up purely from Oxbridge footballers who were still at the universities or had left the previous season (the one year law).
Shearwood was pivotal as a centre-half and central to the club's administration. This team of young students shook the amateur world of football, playing in the FA Amateur Cup for 5 seasons and winning it in 1951 (beating the powerful Bishop Auckland 2-1) and 1953 (beating Harwich and Parkestone 6-0). Both games attracted 100,000 spectators at Wembley. The club continued to entertain in cup competitions through to 1963 when their supply of new blood, Oxbridge graduates, found other clubs to join, particularly the Corinthian Casuals. So Pegasus "had flown".
Ken, a sturdy centre-half,  getting the "elbow"; he gave as good as he got!
The FA were generous in encouraging this "experiment" especially since Pegasus did not play in a league, but the Association supplied coaches to organise the team and these included Arthur Rowe (of Spurs fame), Joe Mercer, Malcolm Allison and Vick Buckingham (below) also of Spurs.

Having left Oxford, as captain of the soccer team and a member of the cricket team, he moonlighted as a travelling salesman selling gentleman's clothing and then joined Lancing College in 1952.

As a teacher he was inspiring and his commitment to the school was full on, running the football for 22 years, master in charge of cricket for 6 years and a boarding housemaster from 1958-1975. I met Ken in 1974, just as I started working at local rivals, Charterhouse. He was always interested in the Charterhouse fixture and indeed took time to watch my son play in various inter-school matches when we made the trip south.

Ken retired at 65 years old, continuing as the College registrar for ten years. He would have been the first contact that young children and parents would have as they sought to apply to Lancing for an education, a five year commitment and usually not a very cheap! "He inspired confidence in prospective parents and pupils" at an important time of their education.

He wrote several books, "Pegasus", the one that I have been most interested in, an autobiography "Hardly a Scholar" and "Whistle the Wind", a narrative of his time in Cornwall's fishing industry!

Ken died on July 5th 2018 at 96 years old. Nice man!