John North: The Kop parade

Last night they formed a graveyard "Friends" group to help keep it that way.

"It's very much a balancing act between the environment and the needs and feelings of relatives, but people are very proud of Spion Kop and I've been amazed at the response," says Helen Beaman of Hartlepool Council.

There are foxes and stoats, hares and skylarks, rare plants and orchids - "all sorts of things you find nowhere else in the area," says Helen. Part is a designated site of special scientific interest.

The Spion Kop, of course, was also the name of football's most famous terrace - the 130yds wide, 50ft high bank at Liverpool upon which up to 28,000 people could never possibly walk alone.

The Kop, as it were, ranneth over.

It was also the name of a 1930s race horse, a steam engine (60098) and is the second hole on the spectacular Traigh golf course in the Scottish highlands.

What does it all mean? We have been on a Spion mission.

Spion Kop - literally "spy hill" - was in the Natal province of South Africa, scene in January 1900 of a particularly bloody Boer War battle which left thousands dead. Many were Liverpudlians.

The cinder banking that once had been Liverpool's Oakfield Road Embankment became the Spion Kop in 1906 at the suggestion of the sports editor of the Liverpool Post and Echo.

It was roofed in 1928, echoed yet more resoundingly in the 1960s and was demolished in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster in 1994.

In Hartlepool, the name Spion Kop was first given to adjacent open land overlooking the North Sea before the cemetery, opened in 1856, also acquired the name.

Next to it is the Jewish cemetery. At the end of the 19th century, says Hartlepool Historic Society chairman Kevin Kelly, the town had a huge Jewish population.

"Settlers thought they were going to America and when they were dropped on the North-East coast were told that's where they were. It's how the men who founded Binns and Woolworth's got here."

He, too, is enthusiastic about the Kop's resurrection. "It's been neglected over the years, a lot of vandalism. This will bring new life to the cemetery."

RECENT columns have also wondered how Hartlepool came to be British West Hartlepool, a debate amplified on Saturday when 75-year-old Brian Matthew - a DJ since 1948 - played Benny Hill's "Transistor Radio" on Sounds of the Sixties.

Two readers report the airing. A third who supposed the singer to be Tiny Tim has now recanted his folly. Transistor Radio made number 24 in June, 1961, with couplets like:

Last night I held her little hand, it made my poor heart sing

It was the sweetest hand I'd held, four aces and a king.

As Tom Purvis in Sunderland points out, however, the Benny Hill reference wasn't to Hartlepool but to "Fred Clockenlocker in British West Hartley Port."

That, presumably, was a different place altogether.

THEN there was Jimmy the Murderer, his universal soubriquet a reference to an alleged incident involving a cat and a washing mangle. Dave French, still in Hartlepool, appears in the Murderer's defence.

They grew up in the same street - "a nice little dapper man, about five feet tall, ex-Army and always walked as if he was marching."

Poor Jimmy would chase the kids who ragged him, gentle admonishment administered thereafter. "He was a nice man," says Dave. "He couldn't possibly have done it."

LAST word on Scrabble, perhaps, from Aled Jones in Bridlington, 1994 winner of the Nottingham Round Robin Scrabble tournament. The column on September 18 said that the Franklin Mint offered a gold played Scrabble set, tempting Aled - formerly Andrew Lightfoot - onto the website. They don't any longer. He blames the recession.

WHILE Stockton sleeps, most Tuesdays about 4.30am a bus from London pulls up outside the parish church in the High Street.

Until their late change of routine, this week's column was to have joined the welcoming committee.

The bus carries asylum seekers. There to meet them is Bridget Noble, a lay minister at St Thomas's, who offers food and clothing, respect and love before, officially, they are "dispersed".

Bridget's an animal lover, too. This Saturday at 3pm she's organising the church's annual animal service at which are expected several miniature horses, a hen belonging to a two-year-old and a duck with cataracts.

The column must be elsewhere at 3pm on Saturdays - but more of the Noble gestures ere long.

The man who let the cat out of the bag

DEVOTEES of these columns will know of our affection for J L Carr's Dictionary of Extraordinary Cricketers, a book as thick as an outside edge which also embraced five women, two dogs and a horse.

The horse, circa 1890, was called Horace - "a creature of such exquisite sensibility," noted Carr, "that when Fred Morley, the invariable Nottinghamshire last man, left the Trent Bridge pavilion, it sidled unobtrusively towards the roller."

Jim Carr relished such quirky detail. A note on his map of Westmoreland recalled that a Mrs Bell of Appleby had a son in the Westmoreland Militia whom she accompanied by coach to join the Fleet at Portsmouth only to discover they'd missed the boat.

"Hearing that the Fleet was becalmed off the Isle of Wight, she rowed him there. A wind sprang up and she could not return, so with true Westmoreland spirit, she went to war with the boy."

Carr, second son of the assistant station master at Thirsk - like "Just William" Brown, he had a sister Ethel, though not a dog called Jumble - also wrote How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won The FA Cup, which always we had assumed to be a nod towards Ainderby Steeple or Sinderby - both within a few miles of his childhood home.

It is with regret, therefore, that we learn from a vibrant new biography of the author and primary school headmaster that the book was based on his experiences as an 18-year-old full back with South Milford White Rose, Wakefield way.

The family had left Thirsk when young Jim was seven, though he so vividly recalled the biblical text on a nearby barn wall - "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul" - that many years later he paid for its restoration.

Byron Rogers's book is delightful, a portrait of an Englishman much loved by journalists for his eccentricities. "Like America," says Rogers, "Mr Carr was always being discovered."

Perfidiously, however, it is not J L Carr but his elder brother Ray - "independent, tough, grumpy" - to whom irresistibly we are drawn.

Ray followed his father onto the railways. On night shift in the parcels office at Leeds station he inadvertently let out of the bag a cat travelling from Newcastle to a show in Birmingham, replaced it with one of the LNER cats - rodent operatives - and upon hearing nothing further assumed that the station cat must have won.

In 1940, however, Ray was offered a station master's job on the scintillating cliff top line which inched from Whitby to Scarborough via Robin Hood's Bay, Ravenscar and Cloughton. He was 35 and, says Rogers, promptly parted company with the world.

Though his father would urge him to find bigger platforms, Ray Carr was blissfully going nowhere.

He had his roses, his best kept station awards and his .22 with which to sort out the rabbits. Though it is unnamed, we surmise the station to have been Hayburn Wyke.

The idyll couldn't last, of course, the writing on the waiting room wall when, after another best kept station success, he was told to award himself £5 from the takings. It was two months before the takings amounted to a fiver. When the halt closed in 1965, he bought it, later moving to a nearby house owned by the vicar.

Jim Carr died in 1994, his brother was 95 when Rogers met him but still possessed of so clear a memory that he recalled when the cinema manager at Thirsk kept order at children's matinees by patrolling the aisles with a whip.

His telephone no longer rings. It is possible that Ray Carr is no longer at Hayburn Wyke or anywhere else on this network map, but truly he had found life's station.

* The Last Englishman: The Life of J L Carr by Byron Rogers (Aurum, £14.99).