I WAS delighted to learn on a trip round the restoration works at the Darlington Hippodrome this week that the exterior window frames are being painted in “Darlington Green”.

Darlington Green, I was assured, was a genuine colour, a rather dark green, that was somehow related to the railways.

Intrigued, I tried to find the story of Darlington Green.

In 1854, the North Eastern Railway (NER) was formed by amalgamating the region’s small lines, like the Stockton & Darlington Railway. Its passenger locomotives were built at Gateshead, Darlington, York and Leeds and, in the early days, were painted whatever light green paint was at hand.

In 1885, the NER’s locomotive superintendent Thomas Worsdell standardised the colour chart so that all locos were painted with the same appley green colour – NER Green which was sometimes called Saxony Green as the pigments were made from copper compounds in Germany.

In 1923, there was another amalgamation of railway companies to create “the big four”. The NER joined with the Great Northern Railway (GNR), based in Doncaster, and created the London North Eastern Railway (LNER) that controlled everything north and east of London up to Aberdeen.

The LNER bosses decided in March 1923 that their passenger locos should all be painted in the same “apple green” colour – Flying Scotsman famously runs in LNER Apple Green.

But apple green was the colour of the GNR. To the men in Darlington’s North Road shops, it looked as if dastardly Doncaster was taking control of the new company, right down to the last hue.

So Darlington, its collective nose put out of joint, carried on applying its version of apple green. This Darlington Green was a shade or two lighter than the official LNER Apple Green – known as Doncaster Green – but the bosses were too scared of the might of North Road to tell them to tone it down a bit, and so turned a blind eye.

After 20 years, the greens of Darlington and Doncaster were replaced by a wartime black – Austerity Black – and after the railways were nationalised in 1948, British Rail adopted Brunswick Green as its national colour, named after the German town of Braunschweig where the pigments orginated.

Therefore, since 1941, Darlington Green has only existed on railway modellers’ colour charts but now it is on the windowframes of the Darlington Hippodrome.

THE entire population of the planet is due to descend on defenceless Durham City tomorrow for the Miners’ Gala, or Big Meeting.

“Gala” comes from an old French word, “galer”, which meant “to rejoice, make merry”. Therefore, when you were dressed up in your best clothes ready for some partying, you were said to be “en gala”. A “gallant” person in the 16th Century was a well-dressed, high-spirited party animal going to a gala.

When the word crossed into English use, the posh people who knew a smattering of French, pronounced it “gar-la” to show they were clever enough to know its foreign-sounding origins.

The theory is that when the working classes wrapped their tongues around it, with no knowledge of French, it came out “gay-la”, as in “why-ay mon, ah’m gannin t’gayla”.

Nowadays, it seems that just like the Durham mines have died out, so that Durham miners’ gayla is fading away to be replaced by the garla.