Force field

WHEN Barry Wood became a policeman they still had whistles, possibly even bells and whistles.

The whistles rarely worked, he recalls, because they were full of fluff.

There were no personal radios, no Panda cars of whatever hue, no sagging equipment belts heavy with technology and Taser guns. There wasn’t as much bother, either.

“We had a pair of handcuffs, a truncheon and a torch,” says Barry.

“If it got nasty, usually it was just as easy to hit them with the torch.”

Back in 1966 he was PC 1000, straight from training school and starting two years as a probationer in Bishop Auckland. He retired 16 years ago.

Now he’s secretary of the North- East Police History Society, anxious to collect evidence of police work between Tweed and Tees, especially from the Fifties to the Eighties.

“It was when everything changed,” says Barry. “We have lots of Victorian stuff, even the birching stool from South Shields police station – it’s amazing how many people walk past that and say they should bring it back – but when we took a look, very little from more recent times.”

Each July they hold an exhibition at Beamish Museum, usually on a special theme like wartime policing, special constabulary or women in the force. Next summer they hope to reflect the years when Dixon of Dock Green begat Z Cars and may even have been second cousin to The Sweeney.

Even the wrong ’uns were all right back then. Most of them, anyway.

“There was perhaps a degree of mutual respect, a bit of give and take.

The uniform was like a suit of armour, people very rarely attacked a policeman in uniform. The people you’re dealing with now are different altogether.

“Certainly a great deal has changed, but I’m not sure it’s for the better. I suppose all the equipment has made the job safer. These days if anything’s looking dodgy they carry out a risk assessment first.”

He was a Horden lad, spent most of his service with the dog section in Hartlepool and the Durham coast, retired as a sergeant and now lives in Edmondsley – “paradise” – a few miles north-west of Durham.

Hartlepool, inevitably, was liveliest on Friday and Saturday evenings.

“We’d wait with the dog at the bus station for the colliery lads to go home.

“They were a different breed from the Hartlepool lads. Sooner or later someone would shout ‘Who hung the monkey?’ and it was like a starting pistol had been fired. It all kicked off.”

His formative years in Bishop Auckland, some of the streets still gas-lit, coincided exactly w i t h mine. Press box and witness box.

Thus we spent half yesterday morning talking about Rubberbones Ronnie Heslop, the first man over the wall at Durham prison, Chief Constable Alec Muir and Caesar the constabulary bloodhound, about nipping in the back of the Essoldo to keep warm, about the nights when the Spirit Vaults would overflow and about the rather large lady who was the first woman on the dog section.

“She was lovely, she really was, but a lot of people thought they’d rather be attacked by the dog than by Maureen.”

At training school – North Riding lads in caps, Durham in helmets, Newcastle appropriately with blackand- white cap bands – they were shown a film of how to deal with a murder.

“The cars had hooded headlamps, the radio man sat on the back seat with a Morse keyboard. It was 1966 and they were showing us wartime films. That’s how much things have changed.”

Back then they’d walk almost everywhere, check every shop door front and back, stand by the telephone box on the hour in case the station needed to ring them.

“It was so unusual to have cars on the street after 11pm that if we heard one coming, we’d step back into a shop doorway and write down its number. Ronnie Heslop had a Jaguar, PPT 730. You couldn’t tell anyone, of course, you hadn’t a radio.”

Even when personal radios were introduced, they weren’t exactly onmessage.

“They were like tin cans with a six-foot extendable aerial and a safety pin thing that went down your trousers. You had to hope there wasn’t a thunder storm.

“You couldn’t get Bishop Auckland police station from the market place, but if you stood at the top of Batts bank, a few yards away, you got Whickham loud and clear.

“I could be back at one end of the main street, hear about an alarm at the other, and catch a number 56 service bus to see what was going on. I never did commandeer a car; I always wanted to do that.”

In winter they wore serge, in summer barathea. Always they wore smart van Heusen shirts with detachable, laundered collars – so stiff that if you suddenly turned your head you risked being decapitated.

“The uniform changed every April 1, changed with the shift at 6am.

“There could be three feet of snow outside and you had to go into barathea,” says Barry.

Foot patrol also meant thinking on their feet. “We picked up a lot of intelligence that way, not paying lots of money to informants, just talking to ordinary people.

“One of these days, someone’s going to reinvent the wheel and decide what a good idea it would be to put the bobbies back on the beat.”

The policeman’s lot, supposes PC 1000, was altogether better back then. Mind, he adds, the retiring pollisses probably thought the same when he was just starting out.

“It just seems vital to us to preserve a record of the way things were, because in another 40 tears people are going to be even more amazed at what went on.

■ Barry Wood would welcome information and any old photographs of police offices, buildings or equipment – to be copied and returned – or about equipment of any kind used from the Fifties to the Eighties. He can be contacted on 0191-371-8366.

Music matters

IT is doubtless an everyday story of country folk, but I am much taken by the lots – and lots – at tomorrow evening’s auction of promises in aid of Danby Wiske church.

Danby Wiske is north of Northallerton, its church unnamed – 12th Century Scots marauders are said to have destroyed the records – but very fine.

The At Your Service column attended a Christmas service there in 1997, noted that Canon Gary Beswick had previously been Vicar of Idle – “the Idle vicar,” he insisted – and that Gary only had one ‘r’ because his mum was a Gary Cooper fan.

Now the tower’s crumbling and faces a £49,000 repair bill. The auction – promises, promises – will help.

Plenty of high-quality items, pedigree but perhaps predictable, include a House of Commons teddy bear from Mr William Hague and the chance for two people to take lunch with the Eating Owt column. It’s the rural charms which particularly appeal.

There are days of shooting, fishing and birdwatching, rather a lot of stainless steel garden forks – offered individually – five chances to hire a muck spreader for the day, 500kg of cereal wheat seed, a couple of bags of working dog food, a £100 Genus ABS genetic voucher and, no bull, ten straws of Bilsrow Oscar semen.

The auction’s in the village hall at 7.30pm, viewing from 6.30pm, admission £5 to include supper and a glass of wine. There may be a further report next week, but no promises.

BENEATH the all-purpose headline Durham’s Glory, the Church Times records a new book featuring hymn writers with a cathedral connection.

It grew and grew. “Almost everyone who is anyone in English hymn writing has a Durham connection,”

the Church Times concludes.

Durham Sings! has been compiled by Canon Rosalind Brown and embraces everyone from the celebrated 19th Century bishop William Walsham How – he of For All the Saints – to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had Coxhoe connections.

There’s also much on our old friend Cyril Alington, who became Dean of Durham in 1933, is said rarely to have walked down the aisle of his cathedral without wondering if it took spin and previously had been headmaster of Shrewsbury School.

It was there that he was rebuked by the former Yorkshire and England cricketer Ted Wainwright, the school’s cricket coach, for riding his bike across the square.

“Ah didn’t give a bugger who he was, he ought to have had more sense,” said Wainwright.

Alington almost agreed – “but I do think,” he said, “that he could have admonished me in language a little less drastic.”

He composed hymns like Good Christian Men Rejoice and Sing, wrote detective stories and, as previously we have observed, penned an Ode to Coronation Day, in 1937, beginning with the immortal lines: Shildon, Spennymoor, Shiney Row, Seldom Seen What have you done for your King and Queen?

The picture, taken at Auckland Castle, shows the dear old Dean with a chorister who was to play a leading role in Coronation Street. Episcopally- minded readers may have identified him already.

■ Durham Sings! Durham’s Contribution to English Hymnody costs £9 plus £2 postage from the Friends’ Office, the Chapter Office, The College, Durham DH1 3EH.

Cheques payable to the Friends of Durham Cathedral.

MORE music: further to last week’s splendid story about Sir Michael Tippett and the Boosbeck connection, Mark Whyman stresses the importance of the Teesside Archives in piecing it all together.

The young Tippett, it may be recalled, had composed an opera called Robin Hood to be performed by unemployed east Cleveland ironstone miners trying in the bleak Thirties to survive on Heartbreak Hill.

“It’s not often that operas are premiered outside London, much less in Boosbeck,” says Mark, inarguably.

Parts of it have again been sung, again by locals, in the Station Hotel in Boosbeck, which is near Saltburn.

It can be heard on BBC Radio 3 at 12.15pm on Saturday.

JUST two brief railway notes this time, the first that George Stephenson’s may not have been the first Rocket after all. An American website notes that John Stevens – another Stivvie, perhaps – built a wood-fired locomotive in 1825, four years earlier. That was Rocket, too.

Nor is the Darlington-made Rocket replica in the Chicago science museum our only trans-Atlantic export.

Chris Willsden, once in Darlington but now in Texas, reports that the Shildon-built loco Samson, Nova Scotia’s first steam engine in 1839, is preserved in a museum there. It was one of Timothy Hackworth’s, sans pareil regardless.

…and finally, we are indebted to Dr Karen Pusey, writing otherwise theologically in the Middleton Tyas Village News, for what she insists is the only joke she knows about prayer.

It concerns the elderly rabbi who, turned 90 and not expecting much longer on this earth, asks God to let him just once win the Lottery.

After three weeks nothing has happened. The heavens, says Dr Pusey, are as brass.

Finally, a weary voice emanates from above. “It would help if you bought a ticket.”