Mike Amos: In at the deep end, Mike yomps up to England’s snowiest village

Copley’s a village of 400 hardy, happy souls, known otherwise for little more than an 1832 chimney that once belonged to the Gaunless Valley Lead Company – protected, if not from the north wind, then by English Heritage from the predations of progress – and for the Literary Institute, opened in 1898 by Lord Barnard, but now more prosaically called the village hall.

Bookwormed no longer, it hosts coffee mornings, zumba – the ubiquitous, mysterious zumba – and, on April 27, after the goldrush, Prelude.

Many also affectionately recall the long gone village pub, known on the sign as the Three Horse Shoes, but to generations of locals as Harry Boy’s. Some sing-songs, they chorus, in Harry Boy’s.

This was a week back Friday – you remember, the day the sun shone – roads clear, but snow still piled proprietorially on the verges.

Ken Cook, 69-year-old parish councillor and retired headmaster, sits by a comforting fire. “I don’t think we were blocked off this time, the council was very good, but the drifts were phenomenal,” he says. “I thought this might be a bad 'un. I forecast it quite a while ago.”

Ken’s the local weather man, records and forecasts. “The snow’s still not far away,” he predicts. “We’ve not seen the last of it yet.”

BASED on Ken’s records, the Met Office reckons that Copley cops annually for an average 53 days with snowfall, fifth in the UK behind the Cairngorms (76), the Shetlands (65) and one or two other Serbo-Scotian extremities.

Some years they’ve had 70 or 80 snowy days, says Ken, this year there’ve been 40 already and all Copley holds him responsible. “I can’t put my head out of the front door without getting blamed for it,” he says.

Widdybank Fell, on the Durham/Cumbria border, is the next snowiest place in seventh overall. The figures, it should be stressed, apply only to places where there are Met Office weather stations.

Ken’s grandfather, a gamekeeper in the Thirsk area, was himself much into weather lore and knew the celebrated amateur meteorologist Bill Foggitt.

Bill, more naturally than scientifically inclined, was once invited to address the Royal Meteorological Society in Durham, of which Ken is an honorary member.

“He came up by taxi, left the meter running. Brought a basket full of branches, leaves, slugs and goodness what,” says Ken. It was very interesting, he adds.

Ken was born in Scarborough, flies the Yorkshire flag at the bottom of the garden, taught in Bishop Auckland for 35 years and moved to Copley in 1995.

Of all the blasted places for a met man to move? “It was equidistant between my two sons,” he says. “I’d personally rather have been right at the very top of the dale. I have a very understanding wife.”

ALSO at the bottom of the garden, between flag pole and vegetable patch, is a great gallimaufry of Met Office measuring mysteria, from the wind-powered to the computer generated. Most statistics are automatically transmitted elsewhere.

From being an observer and recorder, Ken’s now also a trusted forecaster – and still with a weather eye open for snow.

“Just one flake, maybe even a bit of sleet, counts as a snowy day,” he admits – though up there, as Bob Dylan once observed, you don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.

Sometimes he’ll spend several hours a day watching, and charting, all that gusts his way. “It’s always been in my blood, always fascinated me. I wouldn’t say it’s an obsession, but it’s certainly a passion, right back to my grandfather.

“You really have to love it to do it, you’d soon get fed up if you didn’t. It’s easier to forecast with all the computer modelling these days, but it’s good to have local knowledge as well.”

Copley folk, he insists, are quite proud of their extreme claim to fame – love minus zero, as Mr Dylan also observed.

“To be honest, the weather should really be a lot worse, given our latitude. We’re quite lucky really, we should be like Newfoundland. It can be really lovely here in the summer.”

Lambing storms still to come, he thought that Copley might still see another covering over the weekend just passed. He was quite right, of course.

Diddy of them all

KEN DODD bounced on stage at the Civic Theatre, banging a drum. “Fifty years of dreaming of being a star and I wake up in Darlington on a Friday night with an audience awaiting a hip operation,” he said.

It was October 2006, not the first time I’d seen him but the first since the Winter Gardens in Blackpool when, very many years earlier, he’d co-starred with Lenny the Lion.

As always, every seat was occupied – “a tribute to superglue,” said Doddy – as always none expected to leave before being turned into pumpkins.

He promised them two breaks – “the first for lager, the second for Complan” but delivered just one. Anne Jones, who became Lady Dodd just two days before his death, was in the foyer selling £2 tickling sticks.

They looked awfully like BHS feather dusters.

At best, we wrote, the jokes were superannuated. At best, they were mildly risqué. “Fellers, when you get home tonight, pout some ice cubes down your wife’s nightie and say ‘”There, you always wanted a chest freezer’.”

Truly they were rolling in the aisles, though that might just have been cramp.

Well turned midnight he was still at it – “the best time to see Darlington is sunrise, you have a good chance here then” – took a reluctant final bow at 12.50am.

A year later a note from a reader in Hartlepool also recalled seeing Doddy, supposed that his best line was the one where he invites in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, makes them a cup of tea and asks what they want to talk about.

“I’ve no idea,” says the chief Witness, “I’ve never got this far before.”

The reader had a complaint, though. “He wasn’t on stage a minute after quarter to one.”

FORMER Darlington FC director Peter Ellis, now in Northallerton, recalls meeting Doddy in his Gleneagles hotel room when Peter helped organise a golf tournament up there.

“I remember there were four black fibre cases in the room, each of which looked like they could hold a double bass,” says Peter.

In truth they held the Diddymen, each required to be on parade at 6pm so that the future Sir Ken might address them.

The following day, as the entertainer prepared to leave in his elderly Ford Grenada estate – “seen very much better days” says Peter – it was discovered that one of the Diddymen was missing.

Doddy was distraught, the police called, cars searched, a £10,000 reward offered. “His secretary told me that he regarded them as his children,” says Peter. He never did discover what happened to little Seamus.