From industry to ministry

12:57pm Saturday 5th April 2008

IN the 17th Century, it's said, the notso- good folk of South Shields were so greatly disinclined to attend church that the vicar - one Patrick Watt - would drive them there with drawn sword and imprecations.

One was excommunicated for several times being found drunk on the Lord's Day, others indicted for frequent swearing - football hadn't even been invented - or for sending their servants and children to collect fishing bait while the service was taking place.

Not quite so straight or so inarguably to the point, the present vicar has had to employ rather more subtle man management skills with which to fight the good fight. None doubts that he has succeeded admirably.

Like a lot more in Darlington after the war, Ray Burr left school at 15 to follow his father to the Whessoe engineering company, summoned morning and afternoon by the timekeeper's buzzer and playing - with some distinction, it's said - for the works cricket team.

He served his time, became a quality control engineer, would doubtless have risen yet further up the production line had not the Church summoned him instead.

After regularly attending as a youngster, he'd drifted away but would walk down to St Mark's in Darlington - just down the road from the factory - to pick up the bairns from Sunday school.

"I'd stand at the back and just think there was something about it," he recalls.

"Stephen Sandham, the vicar, gently steered me towards ordination."

He became a priest in 1986, served curacies in Hartlepool and at Sherburn, became Rector of Easington Lane and for the past 12 years has been beside the sea.

Approaching his 65th birthday, he retires on May 11.

"I've no doubt that having worked in industry first has helped my ministry," he says. "I'd become a manager at Whessoe.

I was used to talking to people and to trying to solve their problems."

Cutting edge, as at least one of his more belligerent predecessors might have said?

"Well, I've never regretted it. South Shields has been a fascinating place to be."

MORNING service, with which is incorporated the weekly meeting of the Father Ray Burr Fan Club - the minutes of which gathering shortly - is held at 10am, the town and its seagulls still stirring after the clocks pulled their annual trick.

Among the congregation of 50 or so are three retired priests - Canon Neville Baker, who last year ended nearly 40 years at St Andrew's in Spennymoor, Clive Mason whose parishes included Bearpark and St John's in Darlington and Charles James, whose first curacy was at St Hilda's and who became Archdeacon of the Seychelles.

Its building said to have been supervised by St Hild herself, before her journeyings to Hartlepool and to Whitby, a church has stood on the site since 647.

This one, on which around £750,000 has recently been spent on mainly external restoration, is a Grade II listed building, extraordinarily and unusually attractive, right in the heart of town. It was extensively damaged by German bombing in 1941.

Fr Ray recalls his first visit. "It was like walking into the Tardis, it just seemed to get bigger and bigger the further I went in, but it's a very lovely place."

The back has been transformed into a visitors' centre, the chancel remains so large - and, it should be said, so beautiful - that sponsored walks might be organised around its circumference. The old pulpit ascends half way to the gods, the galleries no longer sing, the bells were brought from St Aidan's in Blackhill in 1999.

Fr Ray - Anglo-Catholic, though not of the sky-high sort - preaches about Thomas the Doubter, suggesting that he was about 2,000 years ahead of his time.

It again prompts musing - as irreverent as it is irrelevant - on why, when North- East folk say they doubt it's going to rain, they mean not that it isn't but that it is.

At the end he also "warns" the faithful that there's a pressman in their midst. If asked, he says, they can say that the vicar has been absolutely wonderful, that he should have been made a bishop or, alternatively, they can tell the truth.

Phil Grainger takes him at his word.

"Mind," he says - jocularly - "he does seem to have got on top of the drink problem."

Afterwards there's coffee and a short service in which Philip and Carole Lake, celebrating their pearl wedding anniversary, renew their marriage vows. Having and holding for 30 years appears not to have done either of them anything but good.

Jean Mulley talks of a tremendous priest with an ability to bring people together, Alma Pigott of a supportive and caring friend. "We'll come down to the church thinking we have to do such and such and find that the vicar has done it for us."

Phil says he's the sort of man who can be approached in times of trouble. "You can't always say that about vicars," he adds.

"He's a family man," adds Jean, "and it shows."

Fr Ray and his wife Maureen, married 43 years, will return to Darlington - to within earshot of the Whessoe buzzer, were it still wailing. The Church has changed, too, he supposes.

"There's a lot of hierarchy, but you don't see much of the bishops and archdeacons are few and far between, too.

I also didn't realise how different South Shields would be from Easington Lane, where the rector knew everyone.

"Here it's much more difficult because hardly anyone lives in the town centre."

It's likely that, for the first time, they'll have to share a new priest with an adjoining parish. "We'll just have to get on with it," says Jean Mulley, "but I can't suppose we'll ever be as lucky."

Editor's Choice