In for a penny

Crowds lined the sodden streets, cheered loudly and appropriately. That the magnificent Amy Tinkler passed simultaneously, in an open-topped double decker – adrift and drookit from its usual route along Scarborough sea front – may or may not have been coincidental.

Had she been a judo player and not a gymnast, the kids could have come as fancy dans.

In the event they ranged from Willie Wonka and umpteen Oompa Loompas to a scurvily-crewed pirate ship and a little lad beneath a large umbrella imaginatively illustrating the obvious – that it was raining cats and dogs. Perhaps they might all have come as drowned rats.

A lone piper led the parade, playing Lament for an English Summer (or, possibly, Scotland the Brave.) There was also a Beatles tribute act, neatly named Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Darts Club Band, and a Miss Whippy. Lest anyone suppose a sado-masochistic sideshow, the lady merely sold ice cream.

Byers Green’s near Spennymoor, a former colliery village where up to 750 men and boys toiled beneath the earth and many died, the youngest just 12. “Falling of apparatus tub upon him,” it was recorded.

Its most celebrated native was Thomas Wright, an 18th Century astronomer (and much else) said to be the first accurately to describe the shape of the Milky Way and who now lends his name to a restaurant with rooms.

The pit’s long exhausted. The community spirit, manifestly, survives it.

PENNY for your thoughts, another little tent at Byers Green featured those once-familiar wooden framed slot machines made and operated by Oliver Wales in Redcar. These days a penny costs two bob.

“They used to call him the penny millionaire, after he’d opened up all the machines on a Monday morning,” said Trevor Carroll, the current owner, from Crook.

Oliver Wales coined it in the 20s and 30s, though the machines remained an essential part of workmen’s club trips to Redcar long after the war, sometimes offering the chance to win-a-ciggie.

Many were called Allwins, though the name’s etymology is as questionable as its legitimacy. Tennants in Leyburn recently sold one – mechanism shot, “cosmetically very poor” – for £250.

Peter Sotheran, who knows much about Redcar, recalls that Oliver Wales operated above Dodgem City on the Esplanade, between Denney’s garage and the former pier (which makes it sound a bit like the Novelty Rock Emporium and Stones’ Amusement Arcade.)

Peter also tells a story, perhaps apocryphal, of the burglars who broke into the Wales emporium, humped numerous bags of coins to the top of the fire escape and, perhaps weighed by expectation, left the lot at the top of the iron stairs and fled empty handed.

Should readers have memories of those heady times, we’ll find another slot. At Byers Green we spent rather a lot of pennies, but failed to trouble the aura.

BEFORE his somewhat combustible consecration*, Dr David Jenkins and I met for lunch in a pub around the corner from Auckland Castle.

It was an agreeable first encounter, right down to the traditional ping-pong over who was going to pick up the bill.

It was only half way back to Darlington on the bus that I realised neither of us had, and just managed to get to the pub manager before he got to the rest of the world’s media.

Thereafter we got on famously – and the incoming Bishop of Durham, who died last week, never forgot the adage that there’s no such thing as a free dinner.

*Dr Jenkins’s niece had a letter in The Times last week addressing the York Minster fire – three days after the bishop’s consecration – and the claim that it was an act of god. Dr Jenkins’s wife, she said, always supposed it an act of the devil – “God would have got the timing right.”

THE Candlelighters folk club may have been running since Wee Willie Winkie did the rounds. “Put it this way,” says Tommy Taylor, “I’m 75 and I remember giving them a song when I was 19.”

No matter that these days it’s more like an old folk club, or that the first turn’s the Old Age Travellers, it remains a brilliant and greatly convivial evening – most of them not even singing for their suppers. They meet on Tuesday evenings at Moore Lane Sports Club, somewhere near the fields of Arthenry, in Newton Aycliffe.

Tommy – honorary Durham County Council alderman and chairman of Shildon Boxing Club – has a charity do for the National Tremor Foundation, an organisation which has much helped him. With one thing and another, it tops £1,000.

On a good night, we also win a couple of raffle prizes, including a pound box of liquorice allsorts – which others greed, as the late Bobby Thompson used to say – and a soft toy which may or may not be a short-necked giraffe. More folk tales, anyway.

LAST week’s note on the relationship between Edward Heath and his parliamentary private secretary Tim Kitson – Richmond’s MP from 1959-83 – recalls a story in Heath’s autobiography and, in turn, a famous episode of Yes Minister.

Heath was visiting Singapore, where he got on well with fellow PM Lee Kuan Yew – whom he knew as Harry Lee. Dinners, even the informal sort, were accompanied by a menu with “Smoking is not permitted” writ large on the top.

Dining on one occasion, Sir Tim was approached by a butler, made his excuses and said he needed urgently to phone London. At the end of a meal similarly interrupted on two or three further occasions, Heath asked his PPS what on earth was going on.

“Oh nothing,” said Sir Tim. “I just needed to have a smoke.”

THE piece (August 16) on Garsdale station and the nearby Hawes Junction chapel mentioned that the “Sunday School songs” service had been admirably led by Andrew Souter, who has a baker’s shop in Leyburn.

A few days later we happened to be in Leyburn and looked into Andy’s Bakery – best scotch pies, honest, this side of the Great Glen.

We’d also mentioned recently that Reeth fire station – one appliance, one entrance – now has a large sign reading “Bay 1. Front.” It’s the same at Leyburn, where there’s also just one fire engine and no access from the rear.

Clearly if you’re a North Yorkshire firefighter these days, you just can’t be too careful.

NO known North-East connection, no good reason, we have paid a first visit to Silloth, a pleasant little watering hole on the Solway coast in Cumbria. In truth it marked the end of the Silloth season. The column returns in a fortnight – that is to say, in the autumn.