Morris dancing to Methodism – and master butchers, too

The lady’s similarly smitten, adamant that the national rugby team should give it a go when faced with the Kiwis’ haka. “Worth a good ten points,” she insists.

We head for Richmond, where six sides – as the cognoscenti call them – are cavorting. It’s Sunday, 11.30am. When’s the beer break? “Just had one,” they insist.

Martin Towell, who taught our boys at the local comp, approaches as never we’ve seen him before, which is to say that he’s wearing Esmerelda pigtails and a frock. He’s a molly dancer, he explains, since in former times women weren’t allowed such disportment.

Now there are women’s and mixed sides, too. A group from Benfieldside, up near Shotley Bridge, even have a couple of stick-clacking bairns – morris minors, as it were – and at the end a morris minuscule, who can’t be more than two.

It’s all to do with fertility rites, they reckon, the guys who put the lust into lusty. The maternity wards, nine months from now, may know the fruits of their energetic labour.

WE’RE heading homeward when drawn, from the opposite direction, by the sound of a marching band.

In Richmond it’s also Green Howards Sunday, the parade headed by the musicians of the Yorkshire Regiment and they in turn followed by veterans in bowlers, straight backed and sober suited, and by a corps of khaki-keen cadets.

The rear’s brought up by around 30 motorcyclists, men and women, astride the sort of massive machinery more commonly associated with the Hell’s Angels.

Some wear military berets, none wears a crash helmet. They’re all veterans, too.

The parade re-forms in the Friary Gardens, still smart as carrots, salute taken by a 90-year-old former brigadier. Amongst award recipients is 81-year-old Bryan Cockburn, who left the Green Howards as a corporal after two years’ national service, became a butcher in Bedale, a Freeman of the City of London and Master of the Worshipful Company of Butchers.

In retirement he became a volunteer at the Green Howards Museum in Richmond.

In 2006, says the citation, Bryan exercised the Freeman’s ancient right to drive a herd of sheep over one of the London bridges, accompanied at first by five policemen and at the end by about 50, so great the fear that they were lambs to the slaughter.

Could it really be true? Would the top brass dissemble? Well of course they wouldn’t.

MR Cockburn hasn’t been available. The Echo archive comes smartly to attention instead.

There were 17 Worshipful Butchers, ceremonially attired, 30 Herdwick sheep brought down from the Lake District, ten shepherds, an outcry of animal rights protestors, up to 40,000 spectators and the Bishop of Southwark (though not necessarily in that order.)

“I’d no idea so many people would be interested,” he said at the time. “I thought we’d just be going sedately over the bridge. It caused quite a commotion; some were under the impression that the sheep were going to be killed.”

They walked from Borough Market to Smithfield Market and St Paul’s, raised £15,000 for charity. “Coming from North Yorkshire, we’d never seen anything like it,” said Mr Cockburn, a little rustically.

The sheep went back to the Lakeland fells, the drovers returned home. As with the morris dancers, it was yet further evidence that there’ll always be an England, and we should be awfully glad of it.

LITTLE may be more English, or more simply glorious, than the Methodist chapel at Newbiggin-in-Teesdale, opened in 1760 and long proclaimed the world’s oldest in continuous use.

Its final service was held last Wednesday, Wesley Day, the column now so greatly familiar in that great treasure house that they’d reserved the customary back bench seat in the corner – “the naughty corner,” said the Lady, irreverently – and the large print hymn book, too.

The website had promised light refreshments; they could have fed the five thousand. Newbiggin, and Mrs June Luckhurst in particular, have never been given to taking refreshment lightly.

Sixty years ago, the Barnard Castle Methodist circuit had almost 50 chapels, half a dozen or more faithfully dotted between Middleton-in-Teesdale and the Cumbrian border. Now there are six.

Tears? “I’m half-Welsh. I just have to hear a male voice choir and I cry,” says the Rev Ruth Gee, chair of the church’s Darlington district.

“I did my crying on the night we made the decision,” says the Rev Bev Hollings, the circuit superintendent.

Mrs Gee adds that she believes it the right decision. “It’s a wonderful building, but in Methodism we’re about people, not buildings.”

John Wesley – they call him Mr Wesley, as a fearful first-former might address the head – preached at Newbiggin four times, usually having ridden over the tops from Weardale and usually wet through from the experience.

“The people were deeply attentive, but I think not deeply impressed,” his Journal recorded in 1772.

Mr Wesley’s pulpit still stands, though these days tight-secured to the corner after it went missing in 1938, finally found (inexplicably) in a local farmer’s barn. The old rogue held forth for £5 for its return.

Once the village was home to more than 1,000 lead miners and their families, regular attendance at chapel and at Sabbath School said to be greatly persuasive on a London Lead Company job application.

Now there are fewer than 100 residents and just two chapel members, both elderly.

The building will be sold, without planning permission, an absence of parking among its challenges. Its great trove of furnishings and Methodist museum pieces, probably even the pot-bellied stove, will be spread about, two pictures already headed to High House chapel in Ireshopeburn (of which more shortly.)

Last Wednesday, a God’s-in-his heaven dales evening, it’s filled for the last time: old lads with Sunday best caps carefully folded in front of them, old ladies with macaroons and with memories.

“This place has served its purpose on the way to the final destination,” Mrs Gee tells them in a quite superb sermon. “This is not the end of the story, this is a new beginning. This is exciting.”

We sing some of Charles Wesley’s greatest – Forth in Thy Name and Amazing Grace, too. It’s all essentially English, and it’s a lovely way to go.

A FINAL word on High House, in Weardale, probably not ten miles as the crow flies, but further and less comfortable on horseback. John Wesley preached there 13 times – “country where the fires of Methodism took hold,” the author Simon Jenkins supposed.

Newbiggin was begun in 1759, High House the following year. Newbiggin’s visitors’ guide styles itself “the oldest Methodist chapel in continuous use,” High House proclaims “the oldest Methodist chapel in continuous weekly use.”

“Weekly” may be a clue, Newbiggin services long less frequent, but its visitor leaflet is canny. High House, it says, is “the oldest Methodist chapel in continual use".

It again stirred memories of the late Geoff Hill’s class at Bishop Auckland Grammar School, patiently taught that the difference between “continuous” and “continual” that continual had an interval. Essential, eternal, English.