MEMORIES was on the telly last week. Michael Portillo brought his Great British Railway Journeys to the Stockton and Darlington area, and called in to Croft-on-Tees to speak to us about Lewis Carroll.

Mr Portillo travels the country armed with his “Bradshaw’s”. George Bradshaw was a Manchester publisher who found immortality by bringing together the timetables of 150 different railway companies into one volume along with notes on each of the places passed through. For instance, the 1863 Bradshaw says that Croft “is much frequented by invalids, on accounts of its mineral waters; it is also a very fashionable place during the summer months”.

The weird water that came springing out of the ground near Croft, smelling of rotten eggs, was regarded as health-giving and people came to drink it – surely one of the central inspirations behind the Alice in Wonderland story where Alice is presented with a bottle on which there is a label saying “drink me”. When she does, the contents have a strange effect on her body – just as Croft’s allegedly medicinal waters had on the invalids’ bodies.

Carroll came to Croft in 1843 when he was 11, and his father was appointed village rector. The first stretch of the East Coast Mainline had been opened in January 1841 between Darlington and York within sight of Croft Rectory, and the big steam engines began bringing tourists to stay in the village.

Carroll loved the trains. In the large Rectory garden, he set up his own railway, using a wheelbarrow and barrel. He drew up a timetable and a silly set of rules – you had to be run over three times by a train before you were dead. He travelled from Croft Spa station to Richmond to attend the grammar school, and then to Birmingham to go to Rugby School.

Carroll also loved writing funny stories and songs to entertain his siblings and the village children. One of the earliest of his manuscripts to survive – it is now in America – is a three-act mock opera called La Guida di Bragia that Carroll wrote in the early 1850s when he was still living in Croft. At least parts of it were performed as a Christmas entertainment that he put on in the village school in 1855.

It is a parody of railways and, as the title suggests, of Bradshaw’s guide. The central characters are two railway officers, Mooney and Spooney. They send the trains off at the wrong time to the wrong destination carrying the wrong people and the wrong luggage. Mayhem ensues, and Bradshaw is cast as the lord of mis-rule, having altered the times in his book “to make the world go wrong”.

If truth be told, it isn’t very funny, at least not to 21st Century readers, but many of its early ideas developed into characters who are still with us today. Mooney and Spooney, for instance, became Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and the perils of time may have inspired the White Rabbit who dashed around shouting “I’m late, I’m late.”

The railways were responsible for the standardisation of time across the country, as it had to be the same time in London’s King’s Cross as it was at Darlington Bank Top. Exactly 150 years ago, Darlington placed a time canon in South Park. It was connected to the Greenwich observatory in London by a cable that ran along the railway track. Greenwich informed Darlington when it was precisely noon on a Monday. Darlington waited exactly 60 minutes until it was 1pm and then fired the time canon, so everyone in town could synchronise their clocks and watches to GMT.

If Lewis Carroll were around today writing a parody of, say, Southern Railways, he’d have everyone rushing around, heads bowed, desperately tapping at the black screen of their mobile phones and shouting “Oh my God, oh my God…”. In his today, the equivalent of the mobile phone was the pocket watch. Every rail passenger would have been rushing around, heads bowed, looking at the watchface and shouting “I’m late, I’m late…”

And that’s why, after drinking Croft’s strange smelling water, Mr Portillo bizarrely found himself in a top hat and white gloves with a pocket watch, and bounding around the fields of North Yorkshire as if he were a white rabbit who was late for his train. You can still see him on iPlayer – Great British Railway Journeys series eight, programme four, which also contains the Hitachi factory at Aycliffe. Programme three includes John Walker of Stockton, who invented the match, and is also worth a watch.