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If they can march why can't we?
ALMOST 125 years after 74 men and boys died in the Trimdon Grange Explosion, villagers have been warned against marching in their memory on Durham Big Meeting day.
Police say that they won't supervise the traditional early morning parade through the village - a mile from Prime Minister Tony Blair's constituency home - nor any other local Big Meeting march unless road closure orders have been applied for.
Angry officials claim however, that when around 25 members of Real Fathers for Justice marched through the Trimdons on June 16, almost as many police officers - and the force helicopter - were deployed to supervise them. Employing a "road management" company would cost about £600.
"We've been told that it's illegal to march on the road and that we could lose our houses in the event of an accident and a compensation claim, but the march will go ahead no matter what they say," says one of the organisers.
"We lost 74 men at Trimdon Grange lodge in one shift, plenty more at other times, and now they're telling us that for a few minutes once a year we can't remember them in the way that we have for more than 100 years.
"We're only working lads trying to maintain the traditions of the Gala, but they're trying to put pressure on us by talking of losing our houses."
The explosion, immortalised in a song by Tommy Armstrong, occurred in the early hours of February 16, 1882. Almost every family in the village lost a close relative.
A heated meeting earlier this month between police, council officials and representatives of five former colliery communities in Sedgefield borough - Spennymoor, Ferryhill, Fishburn, Chilton and the Trimdons - was told that police had no powers to halt or re-direct traffic without a road closure order.
A Durham police spokesman said that banner parade organisers across the county had been invited to appear before their local safety advisory group - particularly since Heritage Lottery funds had become available to restore banners.
The spokesman added that, last year, marches were thought to have taken place without formal road closures. "Organisers would have been liable if there had been accidents, injury or even death. That remains true for any event where advice is not sought or followed."
The Real Fathers for Justice march was "a legitimate demonstration by a recognised pressure group" near the Prime Minister's home, say the police. "It was a one-off event, unlike the Miners' Gala which is a major annual public gathering."
Led by the Reg Vardy band playing Gresford - the miners' hymn - the Trimdon gathering will defiantly halt at 7.20am on Saturday, July 8, outside the Aged Miners' Homes before marching down the main street and then taking a coach to Durham.
"We've been told it will be illegal but it's definitely going ahead and that way we might get the police there after all," says the organiser, who has asked to remain anonymous.
"We've nothing against Fathers for Justice but it's crazy that they can come from all over Britain to march through Trimdon and we can't. The only way we won't march in memory of those lads is if they lock up every one of us."
Hoping to make railways sexy
YOU know, of course, about the Strategic Steam Reserve. It's that secret subterranean engine shed, hugger-mugger beneath some hill, where dozens of muck and bullets locomotives await once again the return of the firing squad.
It is, of course, a load of mothballs, about as plausible as the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, still awaiting the call to arms in the hour of England's need.
There are many, for all that, who not only swear that it's true but that they have a cousin who knows a bloke whose dad's mate's steam engine was mysteriously commandeered as it clattered off one morning on the milk train to Middleton-in-Teesdale.
Locations vary, the Cotswolds a clandestine favourite. Paul Screeton, who has dug deep and found little, concedes slight circumstantial evidence. "It's a crock of ferrous metal at the end of the rail rumour rainbow," he says, "and, of course, it's not there."
The story so fascinated Screeton that he contemplated a book on it. Instead it's a chapter - "Rust never sleeps" - in his fascinating new book on railway folklore and urban legend, the real and the surreal, parallel lines and, sometimes, parallel universe.
"I'm hoping this will do for railways what Nick Hornby did for football - make it sexy," he says.
The story of the North Road station ghost is in there, him and his black Labrador, the legend of Thorpe Thewles viaduct (there wasn't really a horse and cart buried beneath it), the mystery of the Thornaby Class 37 and the football-related saga of how a B17 steam engine came to be called Darlington, and not Newcastle United.
There are fairy stories, too - it's said that George Stephenson's line digging in the Middridge area was spellbound by the little people - and even flying saucers. Urban legend, urban spaceman. Interesting chap, Paul Screeton.
Lifelong railway enthusiast and long-time sub-editor on the Hartlepool Mail, his life changed in 1996 after an apparent vision - on a train from Paddington to Newton Abbot, second class - of the York martyr, St Margaret Clitherow.
"Be yourself," the vision said. It meant the end of the Mail train, anyway.
Still in Seaton Carew, he now has more time to write and research books, to edit a magazine called Folklore Frontiers and, unashamedly, to be a loco ("not train") spotter.
"When you get to 60, you don't worry if people think you're a bit weird," he supposes.
When you get to 60 you also get a bus pass - "It's transformed my life," says Paul - which is why three or four times a week he may be found somewhere beneath Yarm's handsome railway viaduct, said by his geography teacher to have been built upon wool.
"I'm not sure about that one," he says, generously, "but Yarm viaduct's better than a station. I like to see the wheels."
He arrives, like the happy wanderer, with a knapsack on his back. It holds his binoculars, his camera, the day's paper, some railway books. He wears a body warmer, not an anorak. The preferred vantage point is outside the Blue Bell - inside if wet - the ideal companion a pint of John Smith's Smooth.
Even at home, he can see the coastal line from the back bedroom window. "The eight o'clock cement train to Seaham on a Friday usually has something good on it. I can see it and then go on the Internet to find out what the number was. It's a lazy man's train spotting."
Unusually for a soot-smeared child of the steam age, he prefers diesels. Incorrigibly, he remembers that his road to Damascus was on platform one at Penrith.
"It was 1957. A chap asked me when the Royal Scot was due and I didn't know. Then a diesel came along, 10203.
"It was only a green box-like diesel, but it made such an impression on me. It was a bit like that quote of Bruce Springsteen when he said he'd seen the future, he'd seen rock and roll.
"I call it my epiphany. I'd seen the future and it was bloody brilliant. I still get a thrill when I see a locomotive for the first time."
His next volume is likely to be a more detailed investigation of urban legends, his earlier books include an account of the Hartlepool Monkey and something, reprinted and again sold out, called The Man Who Ate a Domino.
It was about this feller in the Horden Hotel who, when the doms were going badly, would conjure a cough and swallow one. Nature, alas, failed to take its course on one occasion and he ended up on the operating table.
"What we didn't say in the paper was that nurses had a sweepstake on what domino it would be when they got it out," he insists, double blank.
It may be the stuff of eager exaggeration, it may even be legend. Paul Screeton could become a bit of a legend, too - a surprisingly good book, weird but rather wonderful.
* Crossing the Line is available from Heart of Albion Books, 2 Cross Hill Close, Wymeswold, Loughborough LE12 6UJ, price £14.95 plus 80p postage. Further details on www.hoap.co.uk
AFTER last week's reports of tigers earning their stripes in North Yorkshire, Frank Richardson - transferred for a substantial fee from the Backtrack column - sends a photograph of the strange beast he came across while walking in Pelaw Woods, near his home in Durham.
"Could it be the legendary Durham puma?" he asks. (Or could Frank be toying with us a bit?)
REPORTING that we had been unable officially to open the new community facilities at High Grange, near Crook, last week's column noted that others who'd been asked had demanded exorbitant fees for the privilege.
In the event, the job was done by Willington county councillor Brian Myers. "It shows the grit and determination of a hamlet of around 60 houses who've done enormously well," he reports.
Brian's also happy to talk about his remuneration. "It was exactly three times as much as you were going to receive."
THOUGH I was at Timothy Hackworth Juniors in Shildon with his daughter and son-in-law, I never knew Frederick Sylvester Vasey, whose death notice - "four weeks and three days before his 91st birthday" - appeared in Tuesday's classifieds.
Mr Vasey, the obit noted, had been taken "in a coffin made by himself" from the James Cook hospital in Middlesbrough to the University of Newcastle, as a donation to medical science.
The notice ended with the note that there would "therefore be no funeral for this remarkable man" and with a quotation in French: "Je suis seul ce soir mais fattendrais."
Linguists hereabouts translate it as "I am alone this evening, but I will wait." It would be good to learn a little more.
BACK from a Welsh waysgoose, last week's column also wondered if the seaside spot of Seaton Carew had any connection with the castle and village of Carew, in Pembrokeshire. The camps are riven.
Bob Harbron in Norton-on-Tees reckons that the Hartlepool manor of Stranton and port of "Seton" were sold in the 1670s to the Bishop of Durham, Nathaniel Crewe, who renamed it Seton Crewe.
From Durham itself, however, Martin Snape quotes the late Victor Watts's Dictionary of Co Durham Place Names that it takes its name from the family of Robert Carew, who held the fee of Seaton in the reign of Henry I, 1100-1135.
Carew or false? We may not have heard the last.
...and finally, Mr Alf Hutchinson in Darlington wonders why last week's note on the Victorian Flatulator - about to blow into the town's market square - failed to mention the prodigious Carter. (As in "There was an old fellow called Carter...")
The reason, of course, is that this is a family newspaper. Suffice that the limerick in question ends with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and that Carter was very adept at it.
9:05am Thursday 29th June 2006
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