12:08pm Wednesday 17th March 2010
By Chris Lloyd
This week Echo Memories remembers a Canadian pilot’s bravery, revels in the rhymes of a 19th Century scribe and finds out how a few stones and an iron plate turned spending a penny into a hair-raising experience.
THERE can be no easy way to tell a serviceman’s wife she has suddenly become a widow.
Thelma McMullen learnt the dreadful news in a fourparagraph letter that has recently been found mysteriously tucked inside an old book.
Not only did she learn that her husband, Pilot Officer William McMullen, was dead, but by the time she received the letter he had already been buried.
To compound her grief, she was 3,000 miles away in British Columbia, Canada, while he was being laid to rest in the Royal Air Force Regional Cemetery, in Harrogate, North Yorkshire.
“Your husband, who was a member of the crew of an aircraft, lost his life during flying operations at 8.49pm on January 13, 1945, at Darlington, Durham County, England,” wrote Air Commodore DE MacKell, of the Royal Canadian Air Force. “The aircraft fell to the ground during a training flight.”
Thelma, who now had to bring up their five-year-old daughter alone, would have received a telegram telling her that her husband was “missing, presumed dead”, a couple of days earlier.
But these four paragraphs, dated January 19, were the official confirmation.
The last paragraph read: “I realise that this news has been a great shock to you, and I offer you my deepest sympathy. May the same spirit which prompted your husband to offer his life give you courage.”
And that was that.
A few weeks later, Thelma received a far more effusive letter from the mayor of Darlington, saying that her Billy had been a hero.
He had remained at the controls of his stricken bomber while his crew safely baled out.
He then had the chance to jump himself, but refused, staying in his seat to steer the Lancaster away from the houses beneath him.
“It’s only me for it,” he told the last of his crew to bale. “There are thousands down below.”
Mayor Jimmy Blumer wrote to Thelma: “For sheer self-sacrificing heroism, your husband’s action will be remembered and honoured by the people of Darlington for years to come.
“Our sorrow is mixed with great pride in the knowledge that our mighty Empire produces men like William Stuart McMullen.”
The four-paragraph letter – which appears to be an official file copy rather than the original sent to Thelma – is now in the hands of Jeremiah Vokes, who runs an antiquarian bookshop in Coniscliffe Road, Darlington.
■ To be reminded of the full story of McMullen’s bravery, go to the Echo Memories blog on the Echo’s website.
MOLLY DOLLY had many nom de plumes, depending upon which part of Darlington she was wheeling her barrow in the Forties. Cliff Yarrow knew her as Rise Carr Eva or Cockerton Sal.
“On many occasions I saw a woman wearing men’s boots, a flat cap, and often with a pipe clenched in her teeth,” he says.
“She pushed a heavy wooden box about 3ft long by 2ft 6in wide and 2ft 6in deep.
The box ran on two cast steel spoked wheels, roughly a foot in diameter.”
Because of the barrow, Eddie Hope knew her as Bogey Eva. “Her pinny was made of sacking,” he says.
By common consensus, Molly/Eva/Sal’s stock in trade was bundles of firewood.
Moving on, Cliff throws in another Northgate character – “Gis-a-Fag- Jacky”.
“Although we were too young to smoke, he rarely failed to stop us and say: “Gis a fag, Jacky.”
It could be that the poor fellow was a victim of First World War shellshock.
Bill Gillham recalls another shellshock victim begging in Darlington town centre.
“He used to say ‘have you got a odd halfpenny’, hence we nicknamed him ‘Odd Halfpenny’,” says Mr Gillham.
“My father learnt to be a tailor after the First World War in which he’d lost a leg on the Somme.
“He made me an overcoat when I was about six, and as it was a similar colour to Odd Halfpenny’s, it was always referred to as my ‘odd halfpenny coat’.”
BILL ALDERSON, pastchairman of the Darlington Men’s Forum, has a wonderful exercise book written by his distant ancestor, Thomas Metcalfe, who lived at Ivelet, in Swaledale.
In flowery, copperplate writing, Thomas dated the book October 25, 1828, right, and leafing through it, you can hear his quill scratching down through the ages.
He was obviously a young chap perplexed by love – as many of his pages are filled with riddles about maids.
My Laundress
When lovely Susan irons smocks
No damsel e’er looks neater
Her eyes are brighter than her
box/And burns me like a heater.
Reason Why Women Have No Beards
Nature, regardful of the babbling race,
Planted no hair upon woman’s face.
Not Packwood’s razors,
though the very best,
Could shave a chin that never is at rest.
George Packwood of London began advertising his razor strop and paste in the mid- 1790s. Soon he was repeatedly advertising in provincial papers and his business became extremely successful.
His adverts always entertained with an amusing poem or a satirical skit. The rhyme Thomas saved may well be an advertising jingle.
Finally, can you solve this riddle that Thomas wrote on the cover of his book?
A denial and T and the name of a metal
And a word Roger uses at
Plough to his Cattle
These with the best part of a swine for to close
Makes the name of a town
which I beg you expose.
Hurworth mathematician William Emerson (1701-82) could have solved that riddle.
He has many claims to fame, but Mick Harris, of Darlington, doubts it was Emerson who came up with the idea of building river bridges on foundations of sacks of wool, as suggested here. Many mid-19th Century bridges in the Tees Valley – Blackwell, Croft railway – are said to be built in this way. Mick points to Wadebridge, in Cornwall, as the pioneer. It began life as plain old Wade at a ford on the River Camel, which regularly got the hump and drowned people and animals as they crossed it.
In 1468, a local vicar, the Reverend Thomas Lovibond, had a vision of a bridge built on the backs of sheep.
He set to work, using woolpacks for the basis of the foundations. Wade became Wadebridge. A pub nearby is still called The Bridge on Wool. So it was Cornish ingenuity, not Emerson’s cunning, that devised the method. But Wadebridge’s websites pour scorn on the theory, saying Wade was prosperous in the 15th Century because of its wool trade.
So the bridge was built on wool because the cost of its construction was covered by the wool merchants.
In 1963, the bridge was extended and core samples revealed remnants of wool.
The people of Wadebridge dismissed them as a hoax, but the company that sent its employees to do the extension was none other than Cleveland Bridge – of Darlington.
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