NORMAN CORNISH, decorated painter, was again remembered last week when a lounge hung with his work opened at the Ramside Hall Hotel, near Durham. The North-East still hasn’t heard the last of him.

A Cornish trail is mooted around his native Spennymoor, Beamish Museum is building a replica of his long-demolished family home in Bishops Close Street as part of its new town – new old town – while an exhibition is planned based on the 269 sketch books discovered after Norman died last August.

“He’d probably have been quite embarrassed,” said John, his son. “Dad wasn’t bothered about fame or money. All he wanted to do was paint.”

The 14 Cornish originals are owned by Ramside Estates chairman John Adamson, an enthusiasm sparked when his father – the late and lovely Mike Adamson – gave him a Cornish for Christmas.

Since then he’s toured exhibitions and auctions to build up his private gallery, many of the paintings themselves depicting licensed premises.

“My dad always said he was going to work down the pub,” said John Cornish. “I’m not sure that’s how my mum always put it.”

The famous picture of Berriman’s fish and chip wagon – “Chips 4d and 6d,” says the sign outside – now hangs, appropriately, above a hotel fireplace. The van itself awaits TLC at Beamish.

John Cornish suspects that memories of it might be rose-tinted. “My dad’s biographer said that the Berriman boys worked a three-shift system – one frying, one serving and one down the pub. The one who was serving probably had a fag hanging from his mouth, anyway. They were good fish and chips, though.”

Norman’s daughter Ann is herself a retired art teacher. John insists that he failed to inherit creativity. “I think I was at the back of the queue. I’m good with my hands, but not painting.”

John Adamson still hopes to add to his collection. “Everything about Norman Cornish’s work just talks of County Durham. We’re always keen to support the North-East, and none was more North-Eastern.”

Around us, work progressed on a £16m Ramside expansion which includes a second 18-hole golf course, 47 new rooms, infrastructure for two housing developments and a £1.35m expansion of health club and spa.

State of the art? “Oh yes,” said the hotelier, “definitely.”

THE Cornish cream is vaguely coincidental, since it was from Cornwall that we’d just returned. The Cornish Camra pub of the year for 2015 was five miles north of the cottage in which we stayed and the rural pub of the year two miles to the south. It had been a random booking, yet further evidence that “serendipity” is the most wondrous word of all.

THE Birthday Honours list always coincides with holidays. About 15 years ago, we read of Mike Adamson’s MBE in a Waitrose car park in Abergavenny, or somewhere. News of Peter Freitag’s came en route to the Grand Duchy.

Incomparable, incorrigible, indomitable, the retired Darlington estate agent and leading North-East Liberal Democrat drops names like careless fielders drop catches. The investiture can only add to his personal honours list.

He keeps a VE-Day photograph he took of George VI – “I climbed onto the BBC platform while the policeman wasn’t looking” – but still carries a particular torch for the late king’s younger daughter.

“A girlfriend was president of the Oxford Union when Princess Margaret came for a look around. She was a stunner. I’d like to say I was invited to accompany her, but I did in my mind, anyway.” Peter, bless him, is 84.

BEFORE heading south-westwards, we’d been recalling North-East night life in the 1960s – not least the indelible occasion on which the Beatles played the Globe in Stockton, JFK was shot in Dallas and Stockton’s parish church bells pealed in tribute to the president.

“I reckon they chose to dedicate their ringing to Kennedy’s memory, rather than cancel it as a gesture of respect,” wrote Peter Sotheran, himself a campanologist, and then assiduously tracked down Margaret Jobson, one of the tower team 50-odd years ago.

Margaret, however, had been swinging not in the bell tower, but across the road at the Globe. “Sadly she can recall nothing of that Friday night’s bell ringing,” says Peter, “but the Beatles were fab.”

TIM SUTTON in Byers Green, near Spennymoor, recalls a mid-60s night at Club La Bamba in Darlington. A group of fellow solicitors had been to a black tie bankers’ dinner – “the man from head office boring us to death” – and, still in dinner suits, were loudly cheered when they walked into the club about midnight.

“They thought we were The Five Smith Boys or someone,” says Tim. “We quietly informed them that we were humble members of the legal profession.” Not their turn at all.

RECALLING Roy Orbison, all-time favourite at Club Fiesta in Stockton, we said his widow Barbra was still travelling the world. John Bainbridge, a former Orbison fan club member, points out that Barbra died on December 6, 2011 – 23 years to the day after her husband.

MORE, too, on B1 steam locomotives. Both Ken Stoves and John Gray point out 61264, based on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, isn’t the only surviving member of the class.

61306, now named Mayflower, is on the North Norfolk Railway – something of an impostor, says Ken, because Mayflower was originally 61739.

We’d also recalled a doubtless mighty B1 named Ajax and another loco of that name on the LMS. Graham Redfearn adds a third, built by Robert Stephenson and Hawthorn and – complete with Weardale cab – preserved at Chatham Dockyard where it spent its working life.

The humble saddle rank has even popped up a few times recently on Call the Midwife. Fame, as they say, at last.

Correspondence closed

THEN as now, the paper in November 2001 carried a list of the day’s birthdays – the great, the good, and Alan Archbold, 57, from Sunderland.

The Northern Echo:
Alan Archbold in his Labour councillor days

Alan, who may also have been great and good, crept in not for those reasons but because he was among these columns’ most valued occasional contributors and had bet a mate ten pints that he could get into the birthday honours list. The Gadfly column fixed it for him.

Alan, who has died – aged 70, as might be calculated – was a glorious purveyor of oft-mischievous inconsequentialia, often sourced in the pub.

He it was who proposed a collective noun for barmaids – Alan suggested a skive – who worked out that “Old West action” was an anagram of Clint Eastwood, who spotted the notice on the hand pumps in the Wavendon in Sunderland that they were being cleaned and out of action. The cleaning had taken six months.

Usually he and his cronies formed themselves into an Oshabot Club – Old Sods Having a Beer or Two.

Having spotted a Gadfly paragraph about a perhaps apocryphal Ferryhill farmer called Alf Hart, Alan also rang a local radio phone-in – at least four times – announcing himself as a gentleman of the same name. They didn’t even smell it.

As an apprentice compositor he’d once misspelt the notorious word “ophthalmic” on a range of optical literature, reprieved partly because the boss had read the proofs and partly because he was a member of the National Graphical Association. “In those days, gaffers didn’t say much to members of the NGA,” he recalled.

He later became a youth worker and, briefly a Labour councillor. “There was a lot he didn’t agree with,” recalls his son Ian, in Newton Aycliffe.

Much of his time was spent in Sunderland, or in East Boldon up the road. On one memorable occasion, however, he’d called into the Bridge Inn at Grinton – in Swaledale – just a few weeks after the Eating Owt column.

Eating Owt had been impressed, save for the carrot and cauliflower mousse. “In a list of 101 things to do with carrot and cauliflower, it would come 102nd,” we wrote. “It is the sort of stuff which should be fed only through straws to the enfeebled.”

Alan spotted the cutting on the pub wall, beneath it a Weakest Link-style ballot form on whether the mousse should be retained. Signatories on the “Yes” side included Egon Ronay, Gordon Ramsey, Jamie Oliver and Mike Amos.

The last of them is suspected to have been a forgery.