Window shopping

10:41am Saturday 14th June 2008

The column attends the dedication service of a stained glass window in memory of Father Noel Burt in Ingleton.

A VERY splendid stained glass window was dedicated last Sunday in memory of the Reverend Noel Burt - a man, all agreed, of many splendours, too. In a way that was only part of it, however. It was a window on a swiftly changing world, a remembrance of the way things were.

Those were the days, and not so very long ago, when every two-stump village had its own vicar and most of the vicars could call on the services of at least one curate, lest the strain prove too great for them.

Father Burt - born on Christmas Day and for that reason neither the first Noel nor by any means the last - had latterly been vicar of Ingleton, a place of perhaps 700 souls a few miles west of Darlington, and of the altogether smaller parish of Denton - where once there'd been separate vicar, separate cure, separate curate.

The column had first attended St John's at Ingleton in 1994, the Rt Rev Michael Turnbull's first Sunday service after his contentious consecration the previous day as Bishop of Durham. (The tabloids, it may be recalled, had heard bones rattling in his cupboard.) Since he was an avowed cricket fan, we'd asked if he'd yet joined Durham County. The bishop smiled. "Well as you know," he said, "I've had one or two things on my mind of late."

Exactly a year later, the excellent Bishop Michael also presided at the last service at the church of St Mary the Virgin, Denton, a hamlet where public facilities had hitherto comprised a church and a phone box. The average congregation could uncomfortably have been accommodated in the latter.

In 1890, when the parish had a population of 150, there'd been a vicar and full-time curate. "I think I could just about have coped with being full-time curate of Denton," said Bishop Michael.

There were also prayers that night for Noel Burt, seriously ill after major heart surgery while on holiday in America. He died ten years later, aged 83.

HE was born in Lancashire, trained at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, joined the Burma regiment and served with the Gurkhas though, especially in later life, it was something about which he spoke little.

His first curacy was in York where, on the Minster steps, he met Barbara, who became his wife of 53 years. He later worked in Scarborough and in the Yorkshire Wolds, followed by ten years in Scotland before returning south, to Ingleton, in 1976.

"The church in Scotland was different,"

says his widow. "If you died suddenly up there you had nothing, you were penniless."

Ingleton had greatly taken to him. "He was a traditionalist, conservative with a small c and probably a big C as well,"

recalls Robin Pease, one of the churchwardens.

"Old fashioned in the nicest possible way."

The new vicar was also prepared to meet them in the middle of the Anglican road, though he veered towards higher things. "He certainly enjoyed his smells and bells," says Mr Pease.

"Very likeable, always anxious to help others," remembers Gwen Gamage, the other warden. "He was a bit of a character, really, liked to do things his own way."

In the diocese of Durham he'd also met David Hinge, himself recently arrived as vicar of Etherley, near Bishop Auckland.

Their wives, coincidentally, were both midwives at Bishop Auckland hospital.

All four became firm friends.

It was Canon Hinge, now 78 and retired to Ingleton, who'd had the idea of the window, created by York-based stained glass artist Sep Waugh, in the chancel of St John's.

"I didn't even have to launch an appeal,"

says Canon Hinge. "People just heard about it and the cheques started arriving. It was a measure of the regard in which Noel was held."

These days, the priest-in-charge of Ingleton also has responsibility for the larger villages of Evenwood and Staindrop, where he lives. Canon Hinge's successor at Etherley has five parishes.

"How can they do the same job? They can't," says Canon Hinge answering his own question. "Being a parish priest is about knowing your people, about visiting the sick, about always being there.

With all due respect to them, they can't do the same job."

The sin black line will become evermore stretched. "I think," says Canon Hinge, "that that's appalling."

THE church is well filled, the service led by Canon Hinge and accompanied by Norman Scurr, who'll be 98 in September and has been organist at Ingleton (and Denton) for nigh-on 60 years.

"My eyesight's still fine, but I'm having a bit trouble with one of my ears,"

he says.

We sit beneath Ingleton school's multicoloured Promises Banner. "I promise to take care on the road, to care for all animals, to be helpful, to respect the village and keep it tidy."

Canon Hinge explains the symbolism of the window - the crests of the Burma Regiment and of Fr Burt's Oxford college, the impression of Burmese jungle and Remembrance poppy, the grapes and the wheat and, in the centre, an image of the Elizabethan communion cup once given to Denton church.

"The holy eucharist and its careful celebration was the focal point of his life as a priest," he says. "Noel was good fun but always essentially a priest. Apart from holidays, I never saw him without his clerical collar."

The service is attended by Mrs Burt - "absolutely thrilled to bits with the window, so grateful to David" - by members of her family and by Sep Waugh himself, still in demand despite unsuccessful attempts at retirement.

Afterwards in the village hall, there's a spread that might have fed all Ingleton.

"It's one of the Church of England's little miracles, they just keep appearing,"

says Canon Hinge, and who knows what might appear next.

Editor's Choice