No room at the inn (From The Northern Echo)

No room at the inn

10:48am Thursday 3rd December 2009

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EVEN in the familiar belief that small is beautiful, the Rat Race Alehouse may be downsizing things a bit.

Britain’s smallest pub, opened last week, has the approximate floor area of a domestic garage. Its six small tables cost 99p, the lot, on eBay.

That it is on Hartlepool railway station, one of the most singularly desolate places in the kingdom, makes its arrival yet more improbable, and more remarkable.

Yet it is utterly wonderful. Truly this is beauty and the beastly.

The Ratty, as it may never be known, has been launched in the former station newsagency by Peter Morgan, a former IT bod at the Newcastle Building Society and, crucially, a life member of the Campaign for Real Ale.

There’s no bar and no food, save for crisps slung in nets from the ceiling because, quite literally, there is no room at the inn. The beer’s stored in a partitioned area in which two can barely pass.

The notice initially advising BYOB may be translated as “Bring your own bait”, the restricted opening hours begin at 12.02, because that’s when the train gets there.

Peter, who lives in Trimdon Station, was at the CAMRA annual meeting in April when someone gave a talk about what probably will be termed micro-pubs.

“First he spoke about all the things that a pub didn’t need – television, juke box, fruit machines, lager – and then about the two things they did, beer and a toilet,” recalls Pete.

We shall return to the toilets in a moment: the arrangements are a little unusual.

He knew he faced redundancy.

Within two hours he was convinced not just to develop a pub of his own but to look at the pint-sized possibilities of his station in life – the echoing, half-abandoned, thoroughly lugubrious place from which once he’d commuted.

That’s when things began not to run to timetable, the length of the red tape in no way commensurate with the scale of the operation.

Just when he thought he was there, the Friends of Hartlepool Station – Hartlepool station has friends?

– formally objected on the last possible day.

“They said they feared loss of amenity for station users,” says Peter. “It had been empty for six years, how much loss of amenity was that? It was a way of bringing people into the station, not the opposite.

“Within five minutes of my meeting them, I think they were sold on the idea. Within 20, they wanted to hold their meetings in my pub.”

He was raised near Stalybridge, between Huddersfield and Manchester, where the much-blessed eastbound platform is home to the most magnificent station pub in Christendom.

It would be impractical, Peter supposes, to aspire to be a scaled-back Stalybridge. The Rat Race, from which he got out to get in, is visionary, nonetheless.

There are dominoes and cards. He contemplates a dart board but for fear of flying objects would be wiser not to. There’s a newspaper rack, books which may freely be read or bought for a small donation to the Donkey Sanctuary.

There’s a cosiness, a conviviality and, most of all, there’s a blackboard with an ever-changing selection of perfectly-kept real ales for around £2.20 a pint.

Opening times are from 12.02 (aforesaid) to 14.15 – we’re keeping to timetable here – and from approximately 16.00 to 20.00. On police insistence, the place closes four hours either side of Hartlepool United matches.

MOST of the time they can use the station toilets, since we’re reminded about that.

When they close and the station becomes otherwise unmanned, Peter holds the key to the disabled facilities.

It was early Saturday evening, maybe ten in and thus half-full. Tiny timorous, maybe, but can so small an ambition be sustained?

“If I get this many all the time it’ll be viable,” says Peter. “I’m not out to make millions, just to pay the mortgage.”

In all these years of joining the reluctant ghosts who haunt that starling station, it was the first time that ever I’d hoped a train would be late or, better yet, not bother turning up at all.

It was perversely punctual – but for Hartlepool, a quite glorious departure, nonetheless.

Rap on the knuckles

WHEN 77-year-old poet Daphne Clarke joined the kids in a districtwide talent contest, her chances might have been supposed slim to anorexic. That’s before the judges heard the Obesity Rap.

Obesity, obesity, we’ve all got obesity

Obesity, obesity, we’re all too fat.

See it in the children

See it in the grans

See it in the mothers and the babies in their prams.

Herself now dubbed the Rap Granny, Daphne finished second among 38 entrants in Richmondshire’s Got Talent. The first and third had auditioned for The X Factor on the morning of the finals.

“I don’t think I’m quite what The X Factor is looking for,” says Daphne.

“I’m not the world’s best poet by any stretch of the imagination but Obesity Rap really caught the imagination. Everyone was joining in.

“There was a boy band called Velvet Cushion or something and we formed a little mutual appreciation society. It was rather sweet.”

Living proof that not everyone’s got obesity, she lives in Richmond with her husband, Peter, the retired town clerk, and is a pillar of both United Reformed and Methodist churches.

The Obesity Rap was written in her head in the few minutes it took to walk from the town centre to her home.

“There were just so many people in the market place stuffing their faces – kids with burgers and chips, adults with those huge chocolate muffins.

“It just made me despair. The poem was written very quickly, but I’d never thought of myself as a rapper.”

We chat in her lounge, with panoramic views over the North Yorkshire town. Daphne – a performance poet, she says – offers tea but prudently keeps the lid on the biscuit barrel.

The poem – a sort of ethical rap on the knuckles – was one of several from her new book Kaleidoscope Soup that she performed in the competition and was her choice for the final. She’s also a regular at the Georgian Theatre’s Poets and Pints evenings, though sticking strictly to the former.

“I did all but one from memory, had to go around the house chanting them. It’s quite hard to remember everything when you get to 77.

“I don’t think people were quite expecting a rapping grandmother, but we all had great fun. It was a lovely experience.”

Gran design, there’s a serious message to it all – wrapped up in the last verse:

Obesity, obesity, we’ve all got obesity

Obesity, obesity we’re all too fat

Half the world is starving

Half is over-fed

Millions of children have no food to go to bed.

Obesity, obesity, we’ve all got obesity

It’s a deeply moral issue when we’re all too fat.

■ Kaleidoscope Soup, a lively mix of seriousness, spirituality and fun costs £4.50 (plus 80p postage) from Daphne Clarke, 56 Frenchgate, Richmond, North Yorkshire, DL10 7AG. Telephone 01748-822651.

The Lee way

ON a bright but bitter-cold morning, in the church that he loved on the onein- seven hill above Shotley Bridge, a funeral service for the Reverend Harry Lee was held at some godly hour on Tuesday.

Harry was 78, a true pastor and a faithful friend, not least to these columns and to this venerable newspaper.

“Visits to his home were frequently enlivened as he read approvingly from your column and got similarly amused, exasperated or infuriated with the latest Church coverage from The Times,” recalled Martin Jackson, vicar of what officially is St Cuthbert’s, Benfieldside – though it was Harry himself who’d set many a rabbit away.

How else might we have pondered why South Shields folk are known as Sand Dancers – something to do with Wilson, Keppell and Betty, Harry surmised – or where the phrase “hard as hummer” might have come from, or why the church clock at Holy Trinity, Darlington, should twice have been stopped by snow, on both occasions on Midsummer Day.

How else, indeed, might we have wondered about the words of Colonel Bogie, or the “slightly expurgated” version that Harry taught his grandchildren?

He was a Billingham lad, one of five Stockton Grammar School contemporaries who became Anglican priests. David Jones, another of them, died a few weeks ago. He had been vicar of Staindrop.

Harry’s first curacy, 54 years ago, was in the dockland parish of St Ignatius, Sunderland. “It was absolutely fascinating, like something out of a Dickens novel,” he supposed – but not the sort of place, perhaps, to take a 1950s bride.

Instead he married Averil, whom he’d met in the last year of primary school, after moving as curate to St John’s, Nevilles Cross. She was to become the last head of Aldbrough St John village school, near Richmond.

Thereafter, Harry was vicar of Medomsley, near Consett, of Holy Trinity in Darlington and of Brompton, Northallerton, before retiring in 1990 to Shotley Bridge, on the palatinate side of the Durham/Northumberland border.

Harry was unassuming, self-effacing, like an 8am Holy Communion happily unsung. The Lee way was persuasive, not abrasive. “I don’t believe you can scold people into virtue, it doesn’t work,” he observed.

In Benfieldside parish, said his friend Paul Heathernton, he “lived, worshipped, counselled, served and generally brought good cheer”.

At Darlington, he’d also acquired a much-loved vicarage cat, called Danny. Soon they all became cat lovers. “We’re a family of ailurophiles,”

said Harry, ever mischievous, “and I bet you thought we were C of E.”

Two years ago, we recorded, he’d particularly been delighted at the ordination in Essex of John Chandler, Shildon lad and “long lost” cousin.

John supposes himself to have been not so much long lost as never imagined. “If Harry’s letter had been a Tom and Jerry cartoon, a big red boxing glove would have hit me as I opened the envelope,” he said.

Both were great-great-great grandchildren of Thomas Stone's of the near-vanished village of Harwood-in-Teesdale. The Reverend John Best, formerly of Leasingthorne, near Bishop Auckland, was of the same stock.

To mark his cousin’s ordination, Harry gave him a book about Durham Cathedral – and a copy of a John North column about steaming through Shildon tunnel. Sensitivity forbade asking which he preferred.

HARRY, lovely Harry, had asked – insisted, perhaps – that his funeral be simple, unfussy and from the 1662 Prayer Book. He had also chosen the hymns – The Lord’s My Shepherd, There is a Green Hill, How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds.

He hated, Mr Jackson told Tuesday’s congregation, the “horrible”

way in which funeral services have become personalised and the “terrible”

music which accompanies them.

Since there were also to be no eulogies – there didn’t need to be – Mr Jackson recalled the time that Harry, among St Cuthbert’s congregation, heckled Michael Turnbull, then the Bishop of Durham, in the middle of a sermon.

“I heard this voice and wondered where it was coming from,” said Harry. “Then I realised that it was me.”

Afterwards, we adjourned to the church hall across the road, where it was whispered that Averil has now cancelled the subscription to the Times. The Northern Echo, of course, remains part of the daily office.

Though it was still just 10.15am, we raised a glass of sherry – not any old sherry, Harry only drank Croft Original – in his most affectionate memory. That was Harry Lee, original and best.

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