TUMBLE: Made in Chelsea star joins fight to buy back the Workies

The campaign to buy back Tumble’s Workies has found an unlikely recruit: Made in Chelsea and I’m a Celebrity star Sam Thompson.

Thompson has recorded a video urging support for Save the Workies, the group racing to put the Great Mountain Workingmen’s Club into village hands before it goes under the hammer on 10 September.

“A lot of you probably don’t know who I am, but I would love for us to save Tumble Workies,” he says in the clip. “It’s been created by the coal miners.”

“I’m not even Welsh, I’m English, but for me it’s a bit of heritage. You never want to get rid of heritage.”

He ends by pledging to donate himself.

The campaign is leaning into the absurdity of it all. “Save the Workies has reached Chelsea!” it posted alongside the video, adding that if Thompson is supporting it, “and he has no clue where Tumble is”, “surely you can”.

Thompson, a former I’m a Celebrity winner who starred in Made in Chelsea alongside his sister Louise, knows campaign founder Scott Flear through her, Flear told BBC Wales.

Flear, who grew up in the village, told the broadcaster his grandfather worked down the mines and his mother is a cleaner at the club, where his family still go.

“He told me he would love to help but didn’t think Welsh people would know who he was,” Flear said. “We’re just building momentum every day.”

£2 a month, and the clock running to 10 September

The Workies poured its last pints on 19 July. The freehold is now up for auction with a £200,000 guide price, and the club has said a private buyer may already be in negotiations.

Save the Workies wants the village to buy it instead, through pledges starting at £2 a month. The target is £2,500 a month by 1 September, and it is all or nothing: fall short and every payment is refunded.

The pledges don’t buy the building. They prove to lenders that Tumble is behind a new Community Benefit Society, which could borrow up to £300,000 from the Welsh Government-funded Community Asset Loan Fund if the paperwork clears in time.

The club was built in 1893 by the miners of the Great Mountain, directly opposite the pit gates. The colliery closed in 1962; the club outlasted it by 64 years.

Wales still has no community right to buy, so nothing in law gives the village first refusal. The campaign has to win the race the hard way.

The pledge deadline is 1 September. The auction is nine days later. The village has until then to prove it wants its club back. Chelsea, it turns out, already does.