A shared netty and a royal rug

9:21am Thursday 22nd November 2007

Eric and Peggy Henderson shared the Queen's diamond wedding week, and though their circumstances have been somewhat different, the couple have been very happy in their own little palace

IN what has become national diamond wedding week, we have been to Marske - Marske-by-thesulky- Sea - to visit the happy couple.

Eric Henderson's a year younger than the Duke, his wife Peggy three months junior to the Queen.

Eric's an old friend, Peggy an occasional acquaintance. Their house is a little palace, though it wasn't that way back in 1947.

They married two days after the royals - "I always said I'd do it when I earned £5 a week," recalls Eric - moved into a oneup- one-down in Consett and were glad to have it.

There was one door - "a back door,"

says Peggy - a tap, a bucket and a netty out the back which they shared with the folk next door.

There was also woodworm. "I was a bit puzzled at first, I thought someone had been playing darts," says Eric.

"We only got it because we knew someone and we were very grateful," says Peggy. "Otherwise we'd have had to live in, like everyone else."

They'd met at a party during the war - "She was an attractive girl; I let it be known that I'd like to take her out," says Eric - married at Consett Methodist Church, held the reception in the hall above the Co-op, can't remember what was on the menu but suppose that it wasn't partridge, which is what they had at Buckingham Palace.

Peggy had designed her own dress, had it made by a friend, was given - as was the young Princess Elizabeth - an extra 200 clothing coupons for the purpose.

Presents were necessarily a bit rationed, too, though the Palace sent a rug which had in turn been a gift to the princess from a foreign potentate.

The governor of Queensland sent 500 cases of tinned pineapple, but they must have gone somewhere else; Mahatma Gandhi personally wove a lace tray cover, which horrified Queen Mary because she thought it was his loin cloth.

At first the Consett newlyweds wouldn't even stand on the rug, eventually it wore out. They still have the card, somewhere.

Unlike the royal wedding, the marriage of Peggy Walton and Eric Henderson failed to make so much as a paragraph in the following Monday's Northern Echo - itself strictly rationed to four pages - though we did report that 10,000 had waited outside Romsey Abbey for a glimpse of Philip and Elizabeth.

Neither envies the royal couple, though both acknowledge their importance.

"People were very excited about their wedding," says Eric. "She was a very attractive young lady and he, if you like, was a handsome prince.

"Britain had come through a very hard time and wanted something to celebrate.

The significance wasn't lost on people.

They became an indicator of stability and that's why we're the envy of the world, certainly among all the republics."

Eric was a Consett iron works manager, transferred to Teesside in 1974 - "I was beginning to see the writing on the wall for Consett" - was a Northern League referee and, at 37, both the youngest-ever president of the Football League Referees' and Linesman's Association and the first who was still a linesman.

The Northern League, ever generous, paid him ten and sixpence a match on top of that managerial fiver. When he lowered his flag he became chairman of Consett FC, a churchwarden and a founder of Consett Round Table.

Both were also musical. It might be said that they've been making sweet music together ever since though for the purpose of the photograph, Peggy is playing nothing whatsoever and Eric's singing "Rhubarb".

He sang with three male voice choirs and became chairman of Leadgate Gleemen, still in cheery good voice and long conducted by a lady. Peggy, a talented artist, wasn't just young Eric's leading lady but shared the role in several operatic societies, too.

It's getting on 40 years since I reported a wedding anniversary and thus reassuring to know that the advice to the young 'uns has changed little. Paraphrased, it's about not letting the sun go down on a quarrel.

The monarch upon whose realms the sun was said never to set at all has doubtless benefited from the same advice. Bless 'em all.

The Old Boys who never made it home

WE'D asked Eric Henderson to fish out a photograph of himself in football refereeing days. He found a 1949 shot, black-clad and buoyant, of Willington's 4-2 win over West Auckland in the Northern League Cup final.

The goal scorer is Willington centrehalf Lez Rawe and the extraordinary thing about that is that Lez isn't just alive and indomitable but wrote here just last week.

A former pupil, teacher and deputy head at King James I school in Bishop Auckland - the grammar school, as was - he's concerned about the furore over what's become known as the Laurel Building, though Stan Laurel barely had time to carve his name on the desk lid before his father packed him off elsewhere.

Lez, now 88, recalls that 49 grammar school old boys failed to return from the First World War and 63 from the second.

The Old Boys' association formed after World War II raised funds for a memorial, a building at the end of the gym converted into a "memorial pavilion"

and a stone erected bearing the names of the fallen.

When the pavilion was destroyed by arsonists, the stone tablet and a plaque from the Laurel Building - Lez calls it the Old Building - were transferred to what is now King James I Community College, across the field.

When finally the vandalised Old Building is restored, for whatever purpose, he believes it should be renamed the Old Boys Memorial Building - and the stone and plaque found a home there.

Awarded the MBE, recently retired after 54 years as a Methodist local preacher, playing tennis until a couple of years back, Lez is also contemplating a book of memories - "happy, good, indifferent, amusing or graphic" - of the Old Building.

He's at 37 Newlands Avenue, Bishop Auckland, Co Durham DL14 6AJ and would love to hear from former pupils.

YET another example of the smallness and serendipity of the world.

Last week's column mentioned both the passing of Frank Willis, a longserving scout leader and enthusiastic walker from Spennymoor, and that I'd be opening the flower festival at St Elizabeth's church in Woodham - Newton Aycliffe - last Friday evening. There seemed no connection.

While the floral fantasia unfolded, however, Ian Johnson was in the community centre next door announcing the winner of the Frank Willis trophy for photography in the Bishop Auckland scout district.

It was won by ten-year-old Haydn Satwick, from Newton Aycliffe. The following evening he won the Durham County scouts photography competition, too.

With thanks to Ian Johnson, the Bishop Auckland district commissioner, here's a copy of Haydn's winning entry - said in the citation to show the three sides of the dream of the chap at the back. With a name like that, he probably should be able to compose a picture, of course.

A woman with flower power

THE flower festival was unequivocally magnificent, a breathtaking example of the art attributed chiefly to Kathleen Edmensen and her group of budding arrangers.

Kathleen's 77, looks much younger, and among much else is church warden of St Aidan's in Chilton. "The group said they couldn't do it; I told them that of course they could," she said.

Others are less reserved. "Kathleen's incredible, involved in so much and seemingly never running out of energy,"

says a friend.

The festival marked the 800th anniversary of the birth of St Elizabeth of Hungary and the 21st anniversary of the dedication of the church.

Folk just stood, enthralled. "Beautiful, beautiful," they said. It sure as sunflowers wasn't a reference to the opener.

.and yet, and yet. At a do in Durham the previous evening I'd been approached by Mary Hawgood, a former mayor of the city. "You're an awful lot better looking than you are in that photograph on top of the columns," she said. Perhaps they'll give me a new one for Christmas.

WHEN Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac lunched at The County in Aycliffe Village, you couldn't stir for pollisses (and, perhaps, the odd and doubtless bold gendarme, an' all.) Last week, we hear, Blair and friends - Olympians like Steve Cram and Jamie Cracknell - were back among the County set, following the launch of the ex- Prime Minister's North-East sports foundation.

This time, says our man on the next table, there were just a couple of policemen at the end of the road. This time, too, he no longer had exclusive use of the much-acclaimed restaurant.

"We wanted to book for 12.30 but were told there was another party and asked if we could make it 12," says our man.

"We didn't mind, we got first use of the chip pan."

What he doesn't know, of course, is who picked up the tab - but since Tony Blair has recently reportedly been paid £240,000 for a speech in China, it was doubtless he.

The evils of tea drinking

ALITTLE brew-up, we told three weeks ago of the black-clad Isaac Holden, who roamed on foot the hills around Allendale selling tea - the Rington's man of his day.

Holden died 150 years ago this month, the little exhibition in his memory organised by Roger Morris, who lives in Washington but delights in the part of the north Pennines around the Durham/Northumberland border. "The first time I went I was just blown away," says Roger - physically and figuratively, quite likely. He hopes to produce something "more substantial" on the tea man.

Though Holden was a devout Methodist, Ian Andrew - a Methodist local preacher from Lanchester - points out that John Wesley would rail against the evils of tea drinking, blaming his own "paralytic disability" on it.

In a tract written in 1748 he called for complete abstinence, claiming that tea caused numerous disorders, "particularly of a nervous kind".

His own problem, he added, had cleared up since he stopped.

Later in life, however, Wesley returned to the cup that cheers.

"I suspect," says Ian, "that the price of tea had come down."

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