FELLOW feeling, today’s column was to have majored on a meeting of the Grumpy Old Men’s Breakfast club which gathers – doubtless querulously – around Norton-on-Tees each Wednesday. The only problem is that, having extended the invitation – “We are treated with his regard, wherever we decide to grace with our presence” – they failed totally to acknowledge its eager acceptance.

Miserable beggars.

CHARACTERISED as Lord Snooty by Private Eye, former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore is but 57 and not therefore old in the least.

Grumpy? Well, he wasn’t best pleased after a restless Saturday night in Bishop Auckland a couple of weeks ago.

March 16 marked the 150th anniversary of the death of Robert Smith Surtees, the County Durham lad reckoned – and by no means just by Charles Moore – to have been the best of the hunting novelists.

Self-styled “learned”, the RS Surtees Society talks of how his novels raucously unveil the half-forgotten country life of England between the Reform Bills – “horse dealers and minxy adventuresses compete for the lolly of lecherous earls, spanking great hill foxes outpace packs of hounds as likely to belong to a grocer as a duke.”

His most famous character was Jorrocks, a Cockney grocer of considerable coarseness who may (who knows) have helped defineOscar Wilde’s belief that hunting was the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

His first novel, written like all the rest while standing at his desk in Hamsterley Hall, near Consett, was Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities.

It was at Hamsterley Hall that the RS Surtees Society gathered with Braes of Derwent hunt to mark the sesquicentennial. Lord Snooty joined them, and thereafter at the traditional “goose and dumpling” dinner held on this occasion at Auckland Castle, now beneath the visionary wing of the admirable Jonathan Ruffer.

He enjoyed himself, as a column in The Spectator – of which Moore was also once editor – explains. “Everything was delightful, especially the wind in the whins (gorse to southerners) and the Geordie welcome.”

Finally, he laid his head in one or other of the Market Place hotels – the Queens Head and the Post Chaise – bought by Jonathan Ruffer as part of his vision for Bishop Auckland’s great renaissance. Locals may find the epilogue familiar.

“We went to bed by midnight, but the music thronged, the car horns tooted and voices echoed round the streets until four.

Dazed by lack of sleep, I took an early train south on Sunday.”

That’s when he detected an unpleasant smell and might reasonably have turned a little curmudgeonly. “Someone had been sick beneath my seat the night before.”

JONATHAN RUFFER, coincidentally, was a guest at the Bishop Auckland Constituency Labour Party dinner held last Friday night in the town hall, in the Market Place.

It was addressed by Prof Sir John Burn, the West Auckland born geneticist.

Though it’s unlikely that they dined on goose and dumpling – I forgot to ask – they, like the RS Surtees Society, turned out at about 11pm. “Everything seemed very peaceful,” reports our man with the CLP-shooter. “Mind,” he adds, “most of our lot were still inside.”

CHARLES MOORE was also taken by the portraits of former Bishops of Durham that hang in the Auckland Castle throne room. Particularly, however, he was impressed by one yet to be unveiled – of the recent shortterm incumbent, Justin Welby.

Now Archbishop of Canterbury, Welby is depicted holding his pectoral Cross of Nails, given to him when he was Dean of Coventry. “Real contemplative power,” writes Moore.

Robert Wagner’s painting was revealed last Saturday, perhaps coincidentally in the Telegraph.

The same day’s Times had almost a page on the archbishop’s daughter’s wedding (his consent having first been sought by the intending groom).

 

The Northern Echo:

‘LORD SNOOTY’: Charles Moore

His view of the portrait hasn’t been revealed. “My understanding,” says Wagner’s agent, “is that Archbishop Welby is very pleased.”

MOOCHING serendipitously, last week’s column had cause to recall J Wellington Wimpy, the Popeye character who would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. It promoted several readers to recall the wartime Vickers Wellington bomber – named after the Duke of Wellington, who took the fight to the enemy – was nicknamed the Wimpy because of a slight bulge in the middle.

Bill Bartle in Barnard Castle points out that there was even a song called Ops in a Wimpy – “Who’ll come on ops in a Wimpy with me” – to the tune of Waltzing Matilda. “It was,” adds Bill, “an aircraft whose rugged construction saved many a life.”

Designed by Sir Barnes Wallis, of Dambusting renown, they were flown from RAF Goosepool – later Middleton St George – by 419 and 420 squadrons of the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1942 and 1943, but served, says David Walsh, from the first day of the war to the last.

Darlington businessman Stan Howes’ history of Goosepool has a photograph of Wimpys with most of the outer covering burned away but which still got the crew safely back tp base.

David Thompson reckons the nickname to have been inspired by a Daily Mirror cartoon in September 1943. Barnes Wallis, he adds, later laid down plans for a supersonic aircraft that became known as Concorde.

“The man was a genius, a great Briton whose achievements, like so many before and after, we seem just not to appreciate.”

DAVID WALSH also draws attention to the obituary – almost inevitably in the Telegraph – of Paul Middleton, a Boro boy who became a monk, kicked the habit, was a highflyer in banking and commerce and for two years was chairman of the Football League.

“A blunt and sometimes volatile northerner who claimed that he’d never been qualified to do any of the things he was asked to do,” said the Telegraph.

He attended St Mary’s College in Middlesbrough, – “something of a hothouse for bright Roman Catholic boys” – before spending five years in a monastery in Devon.

Subsequent high office included the Thomas Cook travel agency – owned by the then Midland Book – and the chief executive’s position at Lloyd’s Insurance.

On his first day at Thomas Cook, discovering that staff dining facilities were segregated according to status, an aghast Middleton ate pie and chops in the lowliest canteen and then invited post room workers to his office for coffee.

David Walsh, a local politician, met him several times – chiefly in Middleton’s role as a director of the Tees Valley Urban Regeneration Company. “He was a most interesting man,” he says. Paul Middleton was 74.

...AND finally, the Black Bull at Moulton, once the North-East’s most celebrated dining pub, reopened last week after several years’ decrepitude.

It is wholly and handsomely transformed, only the outer walls remaining.

Moulton’s just off the A1, near Scotch Corner: Bull by the horns, we looked in on the third evening. Real ale, efficient and intelligent service but, oddly, no mention of the early bird menu on the flyers or from the staff until we’d had good chance to peruse the more expensive options.

It offers seven choices at £7 before 7pm and thus – no worming – represents very good value. A bit chilly, we thought, but otherwise nothing to grump about at all.