Bowling back in time

We showed a 1965 picture of postmaster Frederick Reeks walking among the 100,000 daffodils he had planted on the green five years earlier. The picture came to the attention of Mr Reeks’ daughter, Alison, who lives in Edmonton in Canada.

“My parents, Fred and Marjorie Reeks, bought the village shop and post office from Mrs Britton in 1947, and owned it until about 1985,” she says.

IN BLOOM: Alison Glass' picture of Eppleby Post Office in 1969. It is now a private house.

In about 1960, Fred bought 100,000 daffs from a market garden in Yarm. “It took two cattle wagon loads to bring them here, and for three weeks I spent all my spare time planting them,” he told The Northern Echo in 1965.

Alison says: “He spent many hours getting a single furrow dug around the perimeter of each of the pieces of the green and creating the words "Cross Keys" in bulbs in front of the pub and "Post Office Eppleby" around the turning bay in front of the shop in letters about 3ft tall.”

The daffodilic writing is no longer there, but vivid yellow lines of flowers still frame the green every spring.

Fred died in 1983, and Marjorie kept the post office until she emigrated to join Alison in Canada in 1986. The next owners were Annie and Tim Wellock, although the business was run by the Chapman family for nearly two decades. The post office closed in October 2009.

TIM, of course, is The Northern Echo’s cricket correspondent, and so his connections to Eppleby place him close to the beginnings of the game in the region.

A couple of miles from Eppleby, as Memories 244 told, is Stanwick, where the Earl of Northumberland, Sir Hugh Smithson, built a splendid hall and pleasuregarden in the 1740s before moving north to take up residence in Alnwick Castle and becoming the 1st Duke of Northumberland.

“Although it is hard to imagine from his picture in Memories,” says Jack Chapman of Hebburn, “Sir Hugh Smithson “espoused” one party and the Duke of Cleveland the other in the first known cricket match in County Durham, which was played at Raby Castle in 1751.”

NOW DEMOLISHED: Stanwick Hall, home of the Smithsons – only the Orangery on the right still stands

Jack should know – he wrote the definitive history of club cricket in County Durham, entitled Cream Teas and Nutty Slack, which was published in 2003.

Cricket became the most popular team game in this country around the 1730s. There were two 2ft high stumps set up 2ft apart surmounted by a bail, and the batsman defended his wicket with a curved bat, like a hockey stick, which was designed to see off the fast, low, underarm bowling.

In those early days, cricket was embraced enthusiastically by the nobility, not because they considered it genteel, but because they could wager large sums of money on its outcome.

Even royalty was playing. The debt-riddled Frederick, Prince of Wales, who was the son of George II and heir to the British throne, died aged 44 in March 1751 of a burst abscess on the lung – a condition reputedly caused by being struck by a cricket ball.

Undeterred by such danger, five months later, an eleven put together by His Grace the Duke of Cleveland took on a side “espoused”, as a contemporary report says, by the Right Honourable the Earl of Northumberland. The teams – all “Gentlemen” – met twice in a week, “for a considerable wager”.

A report in the Newcastle Journal of August 10, 1751, says: “The first Time it (the match) was played at Stanwick, the Earl’s seat in Yorkshire, and the last at Raby Castle, the seat of the Honourable Henry Vane, in the County of Durham: at both places the Earl of Northumberland’s Party beat that of his Grace by a great Number of Notches.”

As Jack explains in his book, the pencil scorebook so beloved of cricket followers had yet to be developed. Instead, a chap with a knife and a long stick kept the tally by cutting a notch for every run scored.

There are still a few copies of Cream Teas and Nutty Slack left, and they are now available for the bargain price of £5 plus £2 postage from the author, Jack Chapman, at 5 Park Road, Hebburn, NE31 2UL, or email jackgchapman74@gmail.com.

AMERICAN HERO: Colin Bainbridge's picture of the Smithsonian Castle in Washington DC, which was the institution's first building in the 1840s

COLIN and Donna Bainbridge of Darlington holidayed in Washington DC in the US and, naturally enough, visited the Smithsonian Institute, which is the world’s largest museum with 138 million items. They were so taken with it that they took a photo of the memorial to the founder, James Smithson, inside the Smithsonian Castle, that they took a photograph of it.

They arrived home to find Memories 244 lying on the doormat and were delighted to learn that James Smithson was the illegitimate son of Sir Hugh Smithson of Stanwick Hall.

James was born secretly in Paris in about 1765, but he grew up to inherit his mother’s substantial fortune and become a well-regarded scientist, studying everything from the composition of tears to the art of coffee-making. Whether he came to Stanwick we do not know – he didn’t publicly use the surname “Smithson” until after his philandering father had died – but he did explore Kirkdale Cave shortly after it was discovered in 1821, near Kirbymoorside, and found that there were bones of hippopotamuses, elephants and hyaenas in it, which gave a completely new complexion to the history of North Yorkshire.

FLANKED BY FLAGS: James Smithson's tomb in the Smithsonian Castle in Washington DC

James died unmarried in Genoa in 1829 and left his scientific collection and $500,000 fortune to the new American government “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge”. It, in turn, created the Smithsonian Institution and, in 1904, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, exhumed James’ body and brought it to the Smithsonian Castle, where Colin and Donna found it.

In the 1920s, James’ old family home of Stanwick Hall was demolished, and we understand that wooden panelling from it was shipped out to the States to be used in the Smithsonian Castle. Colin and Donna didn’t know about this until they got home and so weren’t on the look-out in Washington for old bits of North Yorkshire, so if you are going, please see if you can spot them – and send us a photograph.

STANWICK and Eppleby are part of a cluster of small villages near the slightly larger village of Aldbrough. Memories 242 raised eyebrows among Aldbroughians due to its inconsistent spelling of their village’s name.

A stray ‘o’ slipped in. “Aldborough is somewhere near Harrogate,” harrumphed someone who lives in Aldbrough. He has a point – when an unwanted ‘o’ sneaks into Middlesbrough, there is usually a howl of indignation.

The word “aldbrough” means “old fort or town”, which must come from its proximity to the Iron Age fort at Stanwick which, when Jesus was a lad, may have been the headquarters of the Brigantes tribe.

Aldbrough has a Sunday name: Aldbrough St John. We understand that this is because there are aldboroughs and aldbroughs all over the place and to differentiate them, in the 1930s, the Post Office added “St John” after the name of the parish church.

THERE were also raised eyebrows over our claim for Aldbrough’s village green, which is large. It is one of the largest in the country, but not the largest, as we claimed. Quite where it fits in the pantheon of village greens, we don’t know because we can’t find a size for it.

But the largest designated village green is Duncan Down, near Canterbury in Kent, which is 52 acres. It, though, shouldn’t really count as it is a mixture of grassland, scrubland and woodland, so Great Bentley in Essex claims its 43-acre green is the largest. This annoys Old Buckenham in Norfolk which has a 40-acre village green with a duckpond. Frampton-on-Severn near Gloucester also lays claim to the title, but its green is a mere 22 acres – yet it does appear to be the longest.

Anyone got any figures for Albrough St John?

LAST POST: Caldwell Post Office in February 1960

DOWN the road from Aldbrough is Caldwell – where once there was a cold well. Memories 242 contained a picture of a gadgee coming out of the shed-like village post office in February 1960.

Marian Lewis in Hutton Magna said that it used to be on High Row, which is the small lane behind the Brownlow Arms pub. “I took over Hutton post office in 1978,” she said, “and Caldwell was closed long before that – probably in the late 1960s.”

IF you can add anything to our rambles around these villages, please get in touch. Cockerton is coming soon.