Out for a duck

Since then, alas, feathers have greatly been flying. Three senior members of the Gresley Society, including vice-chairman Andrew Dow, have resigned in protest, an on-line petition calls for the bird’s reinstatement, the letters pages of The Times are awash.

Protestors claim that the mallard – the name of the Gresley-designed steam locomotive which in 1938 broke the world speed record – would draw greater interest to the statue and to Gresley himself.

The petition says that the its inclusion makes the statue engaging and charming. “Even little children will want to know why the duck is there,” it adds.

A Times writer goes further. “All this veto will do is pander to the reactionary and narrow-minded views of an unimaginative minority.”

The Gresley Society, of which the column is a member, has been chuffering along since 1963 with barely so much as a ripple of controversy until the mallard muddied the waters. “We’ve not had a blip for 52 years and now all this” says another North-East member, who asks to remain nameless.

The £95,000 statue is due to be unveiled at Kings Cross station next April, the 75th anniversary of Gresley’s death. Though Sir Nigel himself had mallards on his moat, both his sons were against their inclusion.

“They have the view that it detracted from the dignity of the statue,” says Gresley Society chairman David McIntosh. “We came to the view that the Mallard was a sideshow. Those who have resigned seem to think that the statue is less important than a blinking mallard.”

Mr Dow, who lives in Newton-on-Ouse near York, is unwell. “He did a lot of the work on commissioning the statue and is very upset,” says his wife, Dr Stephanie Dow.

“The mallard would have drawn huge attention to the statue. Without it, it’s just one of hundreds of London statues of a kindly, elderly gentleman.”

A Gresley Society spokesman admits that they hadn’t consulted the family before commissioning the statue. “The majority of our Council took the view that if we are to promote interest in the life and work of Sir Nigel Gresley, we cannot overrule requests from his family.

“The publicity would have been even worse if they’d brought it out into the open.”

The great locomotive engineer’s fondness for mallards may in any case have been exaggerated, adds the spokesman. “Mallards can be a real menace to other wildlife; at this time of year they’ll mate with anything. Sir Nigel would probably have taken a gun to them.”

RATHER more prosaically, the Deerness Valley Railway steamed from Durham to Waterhouses,

infrequently at best and at the end just once a year, on the occasion of the Big Meeting.

These days the track bed forms a six-mile walk westwards from the Broompark picnic area. Ever-pleasant, it’s simply glorious on days like Easter Monday.

Two-thirds of the way along, near Esh Winning, a sign indicates the Lion’s Den tea room, described as shabby chic – aren’t we all – and part of the Lionmouth Rural Centre.

I couldn’t find the tea room, though the gent’s was a relief, so continued to Esh Winning Football Cub, who play at Waterhouses, and enquired why Lionmouth is so called.

Club chairman Charlie Ryan had an improbable theory that it’s named after John Lyon, a son of Quebec – the Co Durham Quebec, of course – the man who invented the diving bell.

Though the internet suggests that the diving bell was invented in 1924 by Otis Barton, an American, appropriately in-depth research (with thanks to Dr Graeme Forster) reveals a 1950s patent application for an improved version by the wonderfully named Hiram W White of Yankton, Dakota. It’s witnessed by John W Lyon.

“Oh aye,” says Charlie Ryan, triumphantly, “I told you John Lyon invented the stratosphere” (and, just possibly, the bathysphere as well.)

THE seven-acre Lionmouth Rural Centre is run by a non-profit making Community Interest Company seeking, says its website, “to promote wellbeing of the vulnerable in our community through practical and creative activities.”

Its project director is Brigid Press – Stokesley lass, former Northern Echo gardening columnist, Yorkshire and England cricketer, morris dancer and green-fingered good egg. Opened last year, it’s going very well, she says.

So why Lionmouth? Brigid’s theory is that the area round about once had a number of springs, one of them cascading from a fountain shaped like a lion’s head – “but yours,” she concedes, “is very much more interesting.”

LAST week’s column was Waterhouses way, too, inclined to ask after the origins of Buttons Bank – Buttonses Bank in those parts – and the farming family after whom it was named.

The second visit pays off: that part of west Durham may have had more Buttons than a High Church cassock – “there for at least 200 years,” says Gwen Raine (nee Button), who paid for the memorial bench, photographed last week, to be placed near where they’d picnic as bairns.

David Parkinson, Esh Winning FC’s treasurer, at once heads home to ferret through the family archives. His copy of the 1881 census lists Martin Button – “butcher and farmer” – as head of a family of seven children in Waterhouses.

A newspaper cutting 21 years later records Martin’s death, inquest and funeral, following a pony and trap accident near Stanley (Crook) Colliery.

Poor Mr Button had died 11 days after the accident, without regaining consciousness. His death was on a Friday, the inquest the following day – at the Wooley Inn – and the huge funeral at Brancepeth parish church two days after that. Forty nine vehicles followed the cortege with any more on foot – “an eloquent manifestation of the high esteem in which the deceased had been held.”

Coincidentally, a Button family reunion – a fastening, perhaps? – was held on Sunday at the Hardwick Hall Hotel in Sedgefield. Newly furnished with the 1902 report, might the conversation have turned to how inquest and funeral could be completed in three days – and how long these things take more than a century later?

EMAILS, too, from Alan Vickers in Sunderland – whose wife was a full cousin to members of the Button family – and from Anita Atkinson, royalist supreme.

Anita recalls happy days at Wooley Farm, visiting Eleanor Button, her best friend at Wolsingham Grammar School. “Eleanor introduced me to the art of farming as practised by her dad, Tommy. We drank milk straight from the churn and made swings in the hay barn. It was the first time I’d seen a real cold larder, too. I have some wonderful memories of the farm and surrounding area. Your column brought them flooding back.”

...AND finally, the same piece mentioned that Billy Row, above Crook, once had both Primitive and Wesleyan Methodist chapels almost opposite one another – and stirred memories for Methodist local preacher Susan Jaleel, in Darlington.

Back in the 1990s, Susan asked Crook area superintendent minister Alan Powers why she was never offered preaching appointments at the remaining chapel. “You have to show your conversion credentials at the door in order to gain admission,” said the minister.

Finally she got to lead a service there – “and was warmy welcomed and greatly blessed by the experience.”