One of the staunchest followers of Huddersfield Giants has died.

Nancy Beaumont had been a fan of the club since the 1940s and was still a regular at games.

Huddersfield Giants made her a life member in 2013 in honour of her decades of work and support. She joined an elite band comprising Mick Murphy, Billy Thompson, Neil Shuttleworth and Ida Rothery as Life Members.

Miss Beaumont, who was 84 and lived in Golcar, was for years the driving force behind the highly successful Senior Giants group and worked for 26 years in the club’s lottery office. She also helped build the old tea hut at the former Fartown ground.

Long-time Giants fan Trevor Kaye said: “She was a member of the supporters committee which was instrumental in building the new supporters club and which was later extended to accommodate a players lounge for the sole use of the players after each game.

“Nancy was a member of the committee during the life time of the supporters club with one of her main duties being the running of the weekly lottery, which in those days had a membership of over 20,000 each paying one shilling per week in old money.

“She was also involved in all fund raising activities, player testimonials and organised coaches to away matches and even during the dark days of the late 1970s and the 1980s she was always there to lend a hand to whatever was required and when the club finally departed Fartown she formed the Senior Giants in an effort to keep supporters in touch with the club”

Her love of the game took her to Australia (four times), New Zealand (twice), Ireland and France.

Nancy herself contributed to a project detailing the sport’s heritage in Huddersfield.

She said: “One of my friends had two brothers and one Saturday they asked me to go to the match. My Mum said to my Dad ‘Nancy wants to go to Fartown. What do you think?’ And my Dad said, ’Let her go. When she’s been once she won’t want to go again.’ That was in 1948, and I’ve been going ever since. We got to know some people around where we stood at Fartown, and I’m still friends with some of them, right back from 1948.

“There used to be huge queues of trolleybuses in St George’s Square just ferrying people to the match and back. It was fourpence from Golcar down to Huddersfield, tuppence on the trolley, sixpence to go in, and tuppence for a programme, so it was one and sixpence altogether, which would be 7½p today.

There weren’t a lot of facilities and we decided we ought to have a tea hut so the men said: ‘What are you going to do about it?’ We said: ‘We’ll show you and the girls dug the foundations out. We got wet and cut and bruised. It really was hard work, but we did it.”

There was a minute’s silence for Nancy at the Giants v Catalan Dragons game.