A retired surgeon hopes to stir memories with his first play

THE song was sarcastic, of course. The Eighth Army counted its casualties in hundreds of thousands, believed that Lady Nancy Astor had terribly traduced them. Though she forever denied it, an extra verse was added:

You’re the nation’s sweetheart, you’re the nation’s pride –

We think your mouth’s too bloody wide….

Rob Wilson – retired professor of medicine, consultant surgeon and medical director of the James Cook hospital in Middlesbrough – was watching a documentary about the Eighth Army in which a veteran in his nineties was recalling his experiences.

“He struck me as a tough person who’d seen a lot of things in his lifetime, but the one thing that made him emotional was that someone had called them the D-Day dodgers. It reduced me to tears, too. It all seemed so unfair.”

Rob had been casting round for ideas for a piece of theatre. The result’s The D-Day Dodgers? – the question mark crucial – which has its premiere in Richmond on March 16.

The performance isn’t at the Georgian or some other traditional theatre, but at the Art Haus gallery, a stage for Middlesbrough-born artist Mackenzie Thorpe who has produced an image for the programme cover, otherwise embraced the idea and is said to be an It Aint Half Hot Mum enthusiast.

Two days later, the cast of five will repeat it at the Nightingale Hall care home in the town – the first of what Mackenzie Thorpe consultant Wendy Bowker hopes will be many similar venues aimed at both reviving singalong memories and raising funds for residents’ activities.

“It’s not political, it’s not about trying to sell paintings, it’s just trying to help a bit,” says Wendy, whose mother died recently after a nine-year struggle with dementia.

She herself worked for nine years as a prison officer, was script consultant for the Bad Girls television series, ran a restaurant in Darlington and since the age of eight has been just about Liverpool FC’s most passionate fan.

“I remember being told that I shouldn’t go on the Kop because someone would pee in my pocket,” she once told the column. “I was quite disappointed when they didn’t.”

Rob, whose wife Sylvia is a priest at Egglescliffe, near Stockton, has written about two Eighth Army friends – one said loosely to be based on Eighth Army man Denis Healey – with a mutual interest in music. The play follows them through the theatres of war, embraces a talent contest, particularly features the song Lily Marlene but includes many others of the time.

“I spent several months on it. I like a challenge and it was certainly that,” says Rob. “I’m hoping someone will see it and think it worth pursuing further – but if it just makes for a good afternoon, it will all have been very worthwhile.”

Details of tickets and performances from the Art Haus, 01748-826605.

GEOFF HILL may inadvertently have filled more column inches than anyone over these past 50 years: he was the man who taught us apostrophes, and other arcane essentials of the English language.

Geoff spent much of his career at Bishop Auckland Grammar School (as was), nicknamed Chester because a permanent limp suggested resemblance to Matt Dillon’s sidekick.

His meticulous, greatly patient, third form English lessons were often in Room 14, a brick built standalone building next to the town’s cricket field. Since he himself was a cricketer – with Shildon Town, memory suggests – his temptation to bunk out of the window may have been yet greater than that of his charges.

He also became a teacher/governor and an Independent member of Wear Valley council, and was from time to time acknowledged hereabouts.

Geoff died on February 12, aged 82. We owe him much, and are doubtless not alone. He’d once sent a tongue-in-cheek letter. “You have done good with your writing,” it ended.

THE Valentine’s Day column about trips to the pictures reminded John Maughan of childhood days in Bishop Auckland, when his parents had a shop in Gibbon Street (“noted for our Danish bacon” said the ad in a nearby phone box) and would post playbills for the town’s four cinemas.

As reward, eagerly accepted, John and his siblings would receive free tickets for all four – the Odeon, Essoldo, Kings Hall and Eden Theatre, as John Davison also recalls (and he had an Essoldo free pass, too.)

Tony Johns upped numbers in Ferryhill from one to three – the Pavilion, the Gaiety and the Majestic, so majestic that locals knew it as The Ranch. Richard Wardrobe recalls that Butterknowle’s cinema was the Kino, now a corn supplier’s, that Cockfield had the Crown, Evenwood the Empire (aka the Tin Shack), Barnard Castle the Scala and West Auckland the Grand. Grandness notwithstanding, that was known as the Ranch, too.

John Maughan’s now in Wolsingham, retired three years ago, received among his presents a £10 Vue Cinemas voucher. The nearest – where he saw a matinee performance of Fury, starring Brad Pitt was in Gateshead.

“There was only me and a couple down the front watching the film. It’s a dear do going to the flicks these days, but I still have 50p on my card for future viewing.”

SPENNYMOOR may have had six cinemas. Joe Bulmer, who still lives there, recalls the Tivoli, the Arcadia (now Wetherspooons), the Cambridge and the Town Hall in the centre, the Empire at Low Spennymoor and possibly another on Tudhoe side.

A theory hitherto unencountered, Joe also suggests that the Odeon name came from Oscar Deutsch, the chain’s founder, and was an acronym for Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation.

The story was certainly popular with Odeon publicists, but there’d been Odeons in France and Italy before Britain’s first opened, in Birmingham, in 1930. When Deutsch died in 1941, the country had 258.

THE same column supposed that bairns at the Hippodrome in Shildon were advised not to sit on the floor, for fear of squashing the cockroaches.

At the Age UK men’s breakfast in Durham the following day, Paul Hodgson wondered if we’d meant blackclocks, thus reopening the argument over whether cockroaches and blackclocks are entomologically identical and stirring memories of buildings that were wick with them.

Held at Durham’s indoor market, the monthly men’s breakfasts are ever-enjoyable, this one enlivened by songs from Gerry Finn.

Mind, it’s going up from £3.50 to £4. Market forces, perhaps indoor market forces, are blamed. Henceforth it’s the Brexit breakfast.

WE live near Scotch Corner. A time and motion man, calculating the eternal hours I spend waiting for buses outside the Scotch Corner Hotel, might suppose it to total about three-and-a-half weeks in every year. Such gloomy occupation has occasional lighter moments, like the passing last week of a mucky truck which on the side identified its driver as a highways environmental hygienist. They used to warn us at Timothy Hackworth Juniors that we’d end up as highways environmental hygienists if we didn’t pass the 11+, only in those days they were known as road sweepers.