THE plaque was solid bronze, but long abandoned and filthy - hacky black, as they say in Shildon, where it was discovered amid a pile of rubbish in an abandoned tea hut at the railway sports ground.

We mentioned as much two weeks ago, restoration by Peter Dargue and friends having revealed that it was a memorial to Pte John Cree of the 4th Royal Fusiliers, who died in 1917.

But who was John Cree, and why should so handsome a tribute so ignominiously have been abandoned? As they might say in the Cree family, the chickens have been coming home to roost.

Not only have we discovered much more about Pte Cree but also that one of his direct forebears - another John Cree, engine driver - was killed in 1828 when the boiler of Locomotion No 1 exploded.

Bits of the rudimentary locomotive were spread across adjoining fields at Aycliffe Level, where Heighington railway station now stands. Water pumper Edward Turnbull was so badly burned "that his face was black and speckled like a Dalmatian dog ever after".

The main source of this information is 78-year-old Dennis Cree Turnbull, the engine man's great great great grandson and the soldier's second cousin.

"I once tried to find something about the Locomotion explosion in contemporary records," he recalls.

"There was nothing about John Cree but quite a lot about a cow it killed."

Cree is a proud family name, now passed down to Dennis's three-year-old grandson. Turnbull appears coincidental - just as John Dixon, helpful treasurer of the North-East War Memorials Project, has the same name as the chap who carried the red flag in front of the steam belching iron horse.

That Darlington has a John Dixon Lane isn't happenstance at all. The war memorial man is.

THE early locomotives were always unreliable, of course, records suggesting that Locomotion No 1 once simply "fell over" at New Shildon, though it will not have been the last to do that.

Four months before poor Cree was killed, Locomotive No 2 - known as Hope - had also exploded at Simpasture, near what is now Newton Aycliffe, blowing John Gillespie, the driver, for 24 yards. He died from his injuries, probably the first fatality on a public passenger railway.

John Cree died on July 3, 1828, two days after the accident, and is thought to have been buried the following day at St Helen's Auckland.

Though Timothy Hackworth rebuilt Locomotion No 1 three times, the engine covering 25,000 miles a year, it was rapidly - well, relatively rapidly - being overtaken by mechanical advance.

It was taken out of service in 1841, worked as a pumping engine in the south Durham pits and in 1850 was offered as scrap for £100. There were no takers: the rest is railway history.

JOHN Heslop in Durham, also most helpful, suggests putting "Shildon" and "John Cree" into Google - how would Hackworth have fuelled a search engine? - finding the German Wikipedia site and hitting the "translate" key.

There instantly emerges a vast treatise, in which that great pioneering undertaking is known throughout as the Stick clay/tone and Darlington Railway.

"It connected to locations like Bishop Auckland, Shildon and Darlington coming to a hold on tea and haven Darlington, the today's Middlesbrough."

Something, alas, appears to have been lost in the translation.

BORN in Shildon, Dennis Turnbull has long been in Darlington. "My father foolishly volunteered for the First World War," he says. "When they came home, people didn't want to know about the soldiers, so finally he had to come here to find work."

It was Dennis, an enthusiastic family historian, who contacted Peter Dargue after the find appeared in the column.

Brought back from the trenches in France, Pte Cree had died in a Stockport hospital just days before his 20th birthday. His coffin was covered in the Union Jack, the last post played by two members of the 1st Shildon Scouts as, in a snowstorm, it was lowered into grave 541 in All Saints churchyard.

The family were leading members of the Primitive Methodist church in St John's Road, Shildon, then one of seven Methodist churches in the town. John Dixon guesses that the plaque probably hung there - it's not 100 yards from the sports ground - until the chapel's demolition 40 years ago.

The Durham County Chronicle reported that a large congregation had sung Nearer My God To Thee and God Moves in a Mysterious Way, a theme bravely taken up at the funeral by the Rev John Brewis.

"That a young man in the flower of manhood should be allowed to be cut down is an enigma to human experience," said the minister. "We cannot understand many of the mysteries of this life, but God is too wise to err in his dealings with us.

"Pte Cree felt that his country needed him, and he responded to the call."

Peter Dargue believes that the memorial plaque couldn't be in better hands. Dennis Turnbull, nice feller, offers it to any with a better family claim.

"There are no good wars but that one was terrible, slaughter. So many young lives thrown away like John's. Just terrible."