Iveston (and on and on)

SINCE it's the silly season, recent columns have indulged in what might be termed pun and games. It prompts David Walsh - inevitably, incorrigibly - to write about shop names which play on words.

Hairdressers are the worst - Curl Up and Dye, indeed - now closely followed by tanning parlour operators. Tanarife's in Wingate, Tanz-in-Ere has been discovered in Newton Aycliffe.

David reports that there's a fish shop in Borough Road, Middlesbrough, called Cod Almighty but that Melon-Cauli - a greengrocer's on the town's Pallister Park estate - proved lamentably more mortal and has gone to seed.

In Sunderland he saw an old record shop called The Vinyl Solution, while the owner of an 8 Till Late shop in east Cleveland, having installed an ATM machine in a bank-free zone, drove a van with the slogan: "The handy wall hole: famous for more than 15 minutes."

Maybe they thought Andy Warhol was Boro's new centre forward. "At any rate," adds David, "it seemed to go over most of the locals' heads."

Gadfly is familiarly fond of the Blackhall Wok, a Chinese take-away in the Durham coast village of Blackhall Rocks. The lady of the house recalls that a stall on Darlington market selling vaguely Middle Eastern nick-nacks was called Darlo Lama.

We also hear of the imminent opening of a tanning parlour in Darlington, simply - neatly - to be called Darlingtan.

With other businesses, of course, the message is simplicity. In Leadgate, through which we strolled on Saturday, they've both a Paper Shop and a Card Shop. The latter, presumably, is to provide some stiff competition.

LEADGATE'S near Consett, tranquil enough save for the Saturday afternoon karaoke in the Coach and Horses. It wasn't always so.

In 1847, it's recorded, Irish immigrants seeking work at Consett Ironworks and at nearby collieries clashed with locals in a three-day confrontation that became known as The Battle of the Blue Heaps, after the slag tips on which it was chiefly conducted.

Only when the army was sent, tappy-lappy from Shotley Bridge, was order restored.

Fifty-three years later, October 25 1890, Leadgate Exiles were drawn against Leadgate Park in the Durham Challenge Cup second round. The Exiles were Catholics, if not necessarily left-footers. The Park were Protestant.

"The utmost enthusiasm prevailed among the patrons of each club," reported the Echo, euphemistically, for soon they were enthusiastically knocking lumps out of one another.

The crowd at the Durham Road ground was 4,000, the same as watched Bolton Wanderers v Sunderland the same day. The women, wouldn't you know it, were said to have been worst.

Finally, a detachment of pollisses sent from Consett were able to charge the crowd, lock up the ringleaders and bang a few more heads together.

"It was a rather serious riot," conceded the Echo, "the yells and shouts which rent the air were really deafening." They should have heard the karaoke at the Coach and Horses.

LEADGATE is also home to the mid-Victorian parish church of St Ives - we're getting there, honest - the hamlet of Iveston half a mile down the road.

That England has two well known places called St Ives - one in Cornwall, the other in Cambridgeshire - may be a little confusing. That they are dedicated to two entirely different saints may be considered more puzzling yet.

The Cornish saint, says local tradition, was an Irish virgin who crossed the Irish Sea on a leaf, a form of transport latterly replaced by the Holyhead ferry.

St Ives in what once was Huntingdonshire owes its name, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Saints, to the body found thereabouts in the year 1001. Following a peasant's dream it was "unhesitatingly identified" as that of a Persian bishop who'd come to England to live as a hermit.

Leadgate's church, built in 1865, may take a leaf out of the colleen's book. "The unusual dedication," says a 1995 guide to Durham diocesan churches, "probably derives from a desire to make the hundreds of Cornish tin miners who emigrated to the Durham coalfield feel at home."

IVESTON'S claim to fame, other than a pretty good Chinese restaurant where in olden days the New Inn stood, is that in 1964 a 380-ton Royal Naval minesweeper was improbably named after the village.

Locals went to the commissioning in Portsmouth; crew members would perennially splice the mainbrace - or whatever is the nautical term - in the New Inn. Everyone got on swimmingly until 1970 when five of Iveston's 33 crew members were charged with mutiny - the first time that the charge had been used for 16 years and, confirms the National Maritime Museum, the last.

The court martial was told that the five had not only sung Irish rebel songs - karaoke not having been invented at the time - but disobeyed orders and imitated characters from Mutiny on the Bounty. One had struck a petty officer. All were found guilty. The ship's name was changed shortly afterwards.

Back to puns, and Ivan Garnham in Stanley - the one in north-west Durham - attempts to say it in verse:

I wish I had a puny shed

In which to lay my punnish head

But then I may be punish-ed,

For every little pun I shed.

TRYING to be clever, last week's column meant to report that a postcard in a Croxdale shop window offered for sale two computers, including a "Parkard Bell" - presumably, we said, the one with the faulty spellcheck.

For "postcard", alas, we said "postcode" - Brian Humphrey in Darlington the first of many to underline the error.

Some would call it schadenfreude, others the biter bit. Tim Stahl in Darlington almost quotes Shakespeare: "Hoist by your own postcode," he says.

WE also said last week that a letter, addressed to "Lord Amos of Shildon", had nonetheless cost the company an excess £1.23 because it hadn't been stamped. Phil Chinery in Darlington reports similar problems when a Royal Mail card advised him of a letter awaiting collection, on receipt of a suitable surcharge. Happily, it informed him that he'd won 24 bottles of beer; unhappily, it had been sent by this very company.

HAD those kits and whatnot all been going to St Ives there'd have been a total of 2,801 - unless a: the narrator himself were included, which would make it 2,802 and b: that incomparable mathematician Robert Bacon in Billingham supposes differently. The riddle's traditional answer assumes that as he was "met", the pussy-galore polygamist was travelling in the opposite direction.

Just one was going to St Ives; the column heads in a similarly perverse direction next week.

www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/ columnists/feature/gadfly