Hallelujah!

IF ANYTHING much happened on Good Friday 1870, it appeared not to have been recorded in the four pages of the following day's nascent Northern Echo. Well, what could you expect for a ha'penny?

There'd been the usual temperance soirees, the customary coterie sentenced to umpteen months hard labour, a Middlesbrough landlord fined a guinea for letting an infected room.

The front page carried ads for M. von Gelderen, travelling dentist - "artificial teeth, one month's trial" - for Gainford Academy, to which the young Stan Laurel would later be sent, and for H Wilson and Co's chimney tops, "never failed to cure the most inveterate smoky chimney".

Of the performance of Handel's Messiah at Hetton-le-Hole Methodist Church there wasn't so much as a note.

Last Friday they performed it again, the 138th consecutive Good Friday on which an oratorio has been sung at Hetton chapel, claimed to be a unique record and with little prospect of correction.

Chins up, they even sang during two World Wars. "I think it's because we're a stubborn lot," said Mavis Sherwood, one of the choristers. "It's an old mining area, and the miners always did like their music."

"There's probably no one around who remembers the first," wrote the Rev Jenny Gill, superintendent minister, and once more seemed several furlongs above contradiction.

We'd last heard The Messiah in Durham Cathedral, the lady and I, an occasion made yet more memorable because she fainted and had to be given a reviver by the stewards.

This one, it should at once be made clear, was no either/oratorio. Within the stone walls of that fill-your-boots chapel, built exactly 150 years ago by Hetton's miners at the end of their hard shift, this was every bit as scintillating, as coruscating and as utterly captivating, an evening of unequivocal excellence.

Mind, it got off to a funny start.

We were there early, seats in the gallery, one or two others apparently having brought their bait boxes and the lady in front carrying a cushion. "I've been coming here for years. I'm not daft," she said, and really didn't need say any more.

Now Grade II listed, Hetton chapel was built for men accustomed to working in 3ft seams. Comfort was comparative.

Long before the interval, nonetheless, it was possible to redefine the term "hard wood".

Then as now, Hetton-le-Hole called it the Big Chapel. This was a truly big occasion.

CONDUCTED by Richard Brice, who also leads Durham Choral Society, there are four soloists - Susan Kemp Jordan, Alison Snell, Paul Smith and Arthur Berwick - a chamber orchestra and a formally dressed 50-strong choir, black and white minstrels. They've been rehearsing since January.

Tom Rennie, Hetton's organist for donkeys' years, is introduced as if on the stage of Old Time Music Hall. Your very own "I have no difficulty at all," insists Richard. "They gel together really well; it helps that most of them have sung Messiah before, but they're a lovely group of people."

Admission's a footling, fatuous, almost flippant fiver. The next day's Times has a letter from someone complaining about paying over £200 at the Royal Opera House.

Hetton's own choir is augmented by Durham Choral Society and by something called the A K Chorale, which must not be confused with the OK Corral. This one's Arthur Kaye, shooting only from the lip.

The singers include Doug Weatherall, for 50 years a leading North-East sports writer, now 75 and still in four choirs. "This one's lovely," he says.

John Goodwill, his mate and loosely connected cousin, has been Good Friday's child for 24 years. "The first time I came there was a chap so old he had to be supported by pillows in the corner," he recalls. "Mind, he was still a good singer."

The couple next to us are following the score as meticulously as Mr Bill Frindall did on Test Match Special.

It should not be supposed, of course, that everything has always gone without a hitch. There's a piece called The Trumpet Shall Sound for which, many years ago, a trumpeter had been especially engaged.

His solo, sadly, was at the end and, having little else with which to entertain himself, he nipped across to the Commercial, the pub over the road. Whatever else thereafter sounded, the trumpet didn't.

If not much of an advert for temperance, it may have been the first recorded example of a Commercial break.

ONCE improbably described as a "sort of 18th century musical", Messiah was composed in 1741, and in just 24 days, by George Friedric Handel - a German who spent almost 50 years in England, became a British citizen and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Though he was afflicted at the time by insomnia, rheumatism, depression and one or two other things - not least being damnnear penniless - Messiah became probably the best known choral work in classical music.

It includes And the Glory of the Lord, For Unto us a Child is Born, I Know That My Redeemer Liveth and, best known of all, the Hallelujah Chorus - for which, since George II's days, the audience traditionally stands.

Some say that it was because George acknowledged that he was in the presence of the King of Kings, others that his gout was playing up. Whatever the reason, there are some of us who've never been so glad to stand in our lives. It's followed soon afterwards by The Trumpet Shall Sound. As if to lead not into temptation, the Commercial has been demolished.

THE last Amen resounds shortly after 9.30pm. "That last chorus my mouth was open but I'm not sure there was any sound coming out, I was that tired,"

says Maria Tweddle, 54 years with the oratorio.

She'll go to bed, but not sleep.

"Not a wink," she says. "The music will still be going round in my head. It's just the way it gets you."

Surprisingly, none waits around. One or two talk of refreshing their vocal chords, most are going straight home.

The collective chorus is that Hetton-le- Hole Methodist church will present its 139th successive oratorio on April 10, Good Friday, 2009. The correct response is Hallelujah.

HETTON-le-Hole Methodist church, between Durham and Sunderland, plans a year of events to mark its 150th anniversary.

They include a concert by Hetton Silver Band on April 26, a flower festival from May 16-18, and services led by Lord Foster of Bishop Auckland on May 18 and by Alan Beith MP on June 8. Durham Cathedral organist James Lancelot gives a recital on October 3 at 7.30pm.

Full details on www.hettonmethodistchurch.co.uk

Sloe commotion

YOU'VE heard, of course, of fast food. In rural Bilsdale the pace is more gentle. Had not Messiah so irresistibly called on Good Friday evening we'd have been at the Sloe Food Fest at the Buck Inn in Chopgate, between Stokesley and Helmsley.

It was the pub's second such event.

Bilsdale band played, the place was packed, village charities benefited - a sloeblack, slow, black night, as Mr Dylan Thomas observed in Under Milk Wood.

"There do seem to be a lot of sloes in the hedges around here," says Marion McNamara, the Buck's landlady.

"They're said to be best picked in autumn, when there's a touch of frost, and then kept in the freezer to replicate the conditions."

Though the blackthorny crown may chiefly go to the sloe gin king - who may even live in a sloe gin palace - there was sloe chutney and sloe cheesecake, sloe chocolate brownies, sloe trifle and very much else besides.

Villagers had also made sloe whisky and sloe vodka, and variants with plums and brambles, too. "There's quite a tradition of sloe gin making in the village, but it just seems to have taken off," says Marion.

"It's very potent stuff, probably no stronger than what I sell behind the bar, but it just seems that way because it goes down so easily.

"Competition's quite keen but only in a friendly way - plenty of goodhumoured banter but, so far, no fisticuffs. It was a brilliant night."

At the end of an evening of much distilled wisdom, however, the prize for the best sloe gin went to 15-year-old Daniel Smith, who's only allowed the tonic.

Daniel hasn't been around; his dad reckons him quite chuffed. "It just started as a joke. He's allowed a sip for tasting purposes but no more."

Sloe motion? "Oh aye," says dad, "plenty of time yet."

THOUGH he was based in Osmotherley, east of Northallerton, PC Norman Barningham's beat would extend to Bilsdale on a good/bad day.

We've told previously how his posthumous memoirs - Chief Constable of Osmotherley - had sold out two reprints, 1,000 copies, and raised £3,000 in his memory for cancer research.

Now, unexpectedly, the gently anecdotal patrol around Barney's beat is back in circulation. "The printer found some spare pages on a shelf, was going to throw them out but was advised by his wife that he'd better ring me first,"

says Dennis Hawthornthwaite, the retired sergeant who put it all together.

Norman, says his old friend, was a community policemen before the term was ever devised. The book's available for £6 from Ossie Village Stores, Mitchell's newsagents in Northallerton or, plus £1 postage, from Mrs Myra Barningham, 12 Pennine View, Northallerton, North Yorkshire.

Pennymans hit the pages

MARK Whyman in Richmond sends a copy of his book, 25 years in the researching, on the Pennyman family of Ormesby Hall, reckoned Teesside's only stately home.

That its appearance has taken rather longer than he anticipated is down, alas, to the perils of private publishing.

The Pennyman family, clearly, were a fascinating lot. Though Jim was chairman of the local Conservative Party he married Ruth, who described herself as a Communist, after a whirlwind romance.

"It can hardly be imagined but led to a most productive partnership,"

notes Mark.

A longer notice will have to follow. The Last Pennymans of Ormesby - 208 pages, 100 photographs, £9 99 - is available from the National Trust at Ormesby Hall, from the Guisborough Bookshop or from Bargate Publications, 40 Bargate, Richmond, North Yorkshire DL10 4QY.

and finally, Paul Hughes rings after watching The Top of the Form Story on BBC4 on Tuesday evening.

"It was full of bright young things looking really smart in their best school blazers and then there was Darlington Grammar School dressed like a lot of psychedelic hippies," he says.

"I always thought that Darlington was a very conservative town until I saw those guys."

Inevitably it was the 1960s. One or other of these columns has tried previously, unsuccessfully, to discover what happened to the old school. Top of the form filling, does anybody know?