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Hallelujah!
The column attends a big occasion in the Big Chapel at Hetton-le-Hole, the
138th consecutive Good Friday on which an oratorio has been sung there
IF ANYTHING much happened on
Good Friday 1870, it appeared not to
have been recorded in the four pages
of the following day's nascent Northern
Echo. Well, what could you expect
for a ha'penny?
There'd been the usual temperance
soirees, the customary coterie sentenced to
umpteen months hard labour, a Middlesbrough
landlord fined a guinea for letting
an infected room.
The front page carried ads for M. von
Gelderen, travelling dentist - "artificial
teeth, one month's trial" - for Gainford
Academy, to which the young Stan Laurel
would later be sent, and for H Wilson and
Co's chimney tops, "never failed to cure the
most inveterate smoky chimney".
Of the performance of Handel's Messiah
at Hetton-le-Hole Methodist Church there
wasn't so much as a note.
Last Friday they performed it again, the
138th consecutive Good Friday on which
an oratorio has
been sung at
Hetton
chapel,
claimed to
be a unique
record and
with little
prospect of
correction.
Chins up, they even sang during two
World Wars. "I think it's because we're a
stubborn lot," said Mavis Sherwood, one of
the choristers. "It's an old mining area, and
the miners always did like their music."
"There's probably no one around who remembers
the first," wrote the Rev Jenny
Gill, superintendent minister, and once
more seemed several furlongs above contradiction.
We'd last heard The Messiah in Durham
Cathedral, the lady and I, an occasion made
yet more memorable because she fainted
and had to be given a reviver by the stewards.
This one, it should at once be made clear,
was no either/oratorio. Within the stone
walls of that fill-your-boots chapel, built exactly
150 years ago by Hetton's miners at the
end of their hard shift, this was every bit as
scintillating, as coruscating and as utterly
captivating, an evening of unequivocal excellence.
Mind, it got off to a funny start.
We were there early, seats in the gallery,
one or two others apparently having
brought their bait boxes and the lady in
front carrying a cushion. "I've been coming
here for years. I'm not daft," she said,
and really didn't need say any more.
Now Grade II listed, Hetton chapel was
built for men accustomed to working in
3ft seams. Comfort was comparative.
Long before the interval,
nonetheless, it was possible to redefine
the term "hard wood".
Then as now, Hetton-le-Hole called it the
Big Chapel. This was a truly big occasion.
CONDUCTED by Richard Brice, who
also leads Durham Choral Society,
there are four soloists - Susan Kemp
Jordan, Alison Snell, Paul Smith and
Arthur Berwick - a chamber orchestra and
a formally dressed 50-strong choir, black
and white minstrels. They've been rehearsing
since January.
Tom Rennie, Hetton's organist for donkeys'
years, is introduced as if on the stage
of Old Time Music Hall. Your very own
"I have no difficulty at all," insists
Richard. "They gel together really well; it
helps that most of them have sung Messiah
before, but they're a lovely group of people."
Admission's a footling, fatuous, almost
flippant fiver. The next day's Times has a letter
from someone complaining about paying
over £200 at the Royal Opera House.
Hetton's own choir is augmented by
Durham Choral Society and by something
called the A K Chorale, which must not be
confused with the OK Corral. This one's
Arthur Kaye, shooting only from the lip.
The singers include Doug Weatherall, for
50 years a leading North-East sports writer,
now 75 and still in four choirs. "This one's
lovely," he says.
John Goodwill, his mate and loosely connected
cousin, has been Good Friday's child
for 24 years. "The first time I came there was
a chap so old he had to be supported by pillows
in the corner," he recalls. "Mind, he was
still a good singer."
The couple next to us are following the
score as meticulously as Mr Bill Frindall did
on Test Match Special.
It should not be supposed, of course,
that everything has always gone without a
hitch. There's a piece called The Trumpet
Shall Sound for which, many years ago, a
trumpeter had been especially engaged.
His solo, sadly, was at the end and, having
little else with which to entertain himself,
he nipped across to the Commercial, the
pub over the road. Whatever else thereafter
sounded, the trumpet didn't.
If not much of an advert for temperance,
it may have been the first recorded example
of a Commercial break.
ONCE improbably described as a
"sort of 18th century musical", Messiah
was composed in 1741, and in
just 24 days, by George Friedric Handel - a
German who spent almost 50 years in England,
became a British citizen and is buried
in Westminster Abbey.
Though he was afflicted at the time by
insomnia, rheumatism, depression and one
or two other things - not least being damnnear
penniless - Messiah became probably
the best known choral work in classical
music.
It includes And the Glory of the Lord, For
Unto us a Child is Born, I Know That My Redeemer
Liveth and, best known of all, the
Hallelujah Chorus - for which, since George
II's days, the audience traditionally stands.
Some say that it was because George acknowledged
that he was in the presence of
the King of Kings, others that his gout was
playing up. Whatever the reason, there are
some of us who've never been so glad to
stand in our lives. It's followed soon afterwards
by The Trumpet Shall Sound. As if to
lead not into temptation, the Commercial
has been demolished.
THE last Amen resounds shortly after
9.30pm. "That last chorus my mouth
was open but I'm not sure there was
any sound coming out, I was that tired,"
says Maria Tweddle, 54 years with the oratorio.
She'll go to bed, but not sleep.
"Not a wink," she says. "The music will
still be going round in my head. It's just the
way it gets you."
Surprisingly, none waits around. One or
two talk of refreshing their vocal chords,
most are going straight home.
The collective chorus is that Hetton-le-
Hole Methodist church will present its 139th
successive oratorio on April 10, Good Friday,
2009. The correct response is Hallelujah.
HETTON-le-Hole Methodist church, between Durham and Sunderland,
plans a year of events to mark its 150th anniversary.
They include a concert by Hetton Silver Band on April 26, a flower
festival from May 16-18, and services led by Lord Foster of Bishop
Auckland on May 18 and by Alan Beith MP on June 8. Durham Cathedral
organist James Lancelot gives a recital on October 3 at 7.30pm.
Full details on www.hettonmethodistchurch.co.uk
Sloe commotion
YOU'VE heard, of course, of fast
food. In rural Bilsdale the pace is
more gentle. Had not Messiah so
irresistibly called on Good Friday
evening we'd have been at the Sloe Food
Fest at the Buck Inn in Chopgate, between
Stokesley and Helmsley.
It was the pub's second such event.
Bilsdale band played, the place was
packed, village charities benefited - a
sloeblack, slow, black night, as Mr Dylan
Thomas observed in Under Milk Wood.
"There do seem to be a lot of sloes in
the hedges around here," says Marion
McNamara, the Buck's landlady.
"They're said to be best picked in autumn,
when there's a touch of frost, and
then kept in the freezer to replicate the
conditions."
Though the blackthorny crown may
chiefly go to the sloe gin king - who may
even live in a sloe gin palace - there was
sloe chutney and sloe cheesecake, sloe
chocolate brownies, sloe trifle and very
much else besides.
Villagers had also made sloe whisky
and sloe vodka, and variants with plums
and brambles, too. "There's quite a tradition
of sloe gin making in the village,
but it just seems to have taken off," says
Marion.
"It's very potent stuff, probably no
stronger than what I sell behind the bar,
but it just seems that way because it goes
down so easily.
"Competition's quite keen but only in
a friendly way - plenty of goodhumoured
banter but, so far, no
fisticuffs. It was a brilliant night."
At the end of an evening of much distilled
wisdom, however, the prize for the
best sloe gin went to 15-year-old Daniel
Smith, who's only allowed the tonic.
Daniel hasn't been around; his dad
reckons him quite chuffed. "It just started
as a joke. He's allowed a sip for tasting
purposes but no more."
Sloe motion? "Oh aye," says dad,
"plenty of time yet."
THOUGH he was based in Osmotherley,
east of Northallerton,
PC Norman Barningham's beat
would extend to Bilsdale on a good/bad
day.
We've told previously how his posthumous
memoirs - Chief Constable of Osmotherley
- had sold out two reprints,
1,000 copies, and raised £3,000 in his
memory for cancer research.
Now, unexpectedly, the gently anecdotal
patrol around Barney's beat is
back in circulation. "The printer found
some spare pages on a shelf, was going
to throw them out but was advised by
his wife that he'd better ring me first,"
says Dennis Hawthornthwaite, the retired
sergeant who put it all together.
Norman, says his old friend, was a
community policemen before the term
was ever devised. The book's available
for £6 from Ossie Village Stores,
Mitchell's newsagents in Northallerton
or, plus £1 postage, from Mrs Myra
Barningham, 12 Pennine View,
Northallerton, North Yorkshire.
Pennymans hit the pages
MARK Whyman in Richmond
sends a copy of his book, 25
years in the researching, on the
Pennyman family of Ormesby Hall,
reckoned Teesside's only stately home.
That its appearance has taken rather
longer than he anticipated is down, alas,
to the perils of private publishing.
The Pennyman family, clearly, were a
fascinating lot. Though Jim was chairman
of the local Conservative Party he
married Ruth, who described herself as
a Communist, after a whirlwind romance.
"It can hardly be imagined but
led to a most productive partnership,"
notes Mark.
A longer notice will have to follow. The
Last Pennymans of Ormesby - 208 pages,
100 photographs, £9 99 - is available from
the National Trust at Ormesby Hall,
from the Guisborough Bookshop or from
Bargate Publications, 40 Bargate, Richmond,
North Yorkshire DL10 4QY.
and finally, Paul Hughes rings after
watching The Top of the Form Story on
BBC4 on Tuesday evening.
"It was full of bright young things
looking really smart in their best school
blazers and then there was Darlington
Grammar School dressed like a lot of
psychedelic hippies," he says.
"I always thought that Darlington
was a very conservative town until I saw
those guys."
Inevitably it was the 1960s. One or
other of these columns has tried previously,
unsuccessfully, to discover what
happened to the old school. Top of the
form filling, does anybody know?
9:45am Thursday 27th March 2008
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