Rods for their own back

THOUGH references of a toadying nature may shortly follow, the real relevance of those lines from The Wind in the Willows must await the foot of the column.

First to rodneys.

Last week’s Gadfly, it may be recalled, echoed Keith Bell’s recollection that, in his north-west Durham childhood – long before Only Fools and Horses galloped onto our television screens – the term “rodney” was used critically, usually to describe personal appearance. As in “You look like a bloody rodney.”

It elicited an intriguing email from Bill Bulmer in Chester-le-Street. “My grandfather worked in the Annfield Plain coke works in the 1890s and early 20th Century. The company employed rodneys – men of the road – vagrants who came from all parts of the country.

“They worked extremely hard for very poor wages, were accommodated in a large wooden hut, but in fine weather some of them slept outside, beside the coke ovens.”

Sometimes, adds Bill, police would raid the coke works, round up the rodneys and march them in chains to the court at Lanchester. Usually they’d be released and return to the ovens.

Some of their graves can be found in Harelaw cemetery, near Stanley.

THE Oxford Dictionary backs Bill wholly. Though the word’s origins remain “obscure” – a lexicographical euphemism, meaning they haven’t a clue – a rodney is defined as an idler or loafer, a casual worker or disreputable character.

The dictionary quotes the Daily News in 1892: “The rodney has no home, he sleeps with his back against the coke oven, or in it when it is cleared out.”

There’s an 1866 quotation, too: “There was Devil Lees, a great big rodney fellow as hard as a groundsel toad.”

A groundsel, of course, is a weed.

What a groundsel toad may be, and what’s so hard about it, may only be imagined.

NOW in Belmont, near Durham, Doug Arnold was a Stanley lad, too. “I always assumed that the term ‘rodney’ referred to sartorial elegance, or lack of it,” he says.

Up in that part of the county, however, a rodney was also the term for the male newts – how amphibious can one column get? – for which they fished in Tanfield Lea pit pond.

“They had a scarlet breast. I sort of thought that being a rodney hinted at someone inclined to wear gaudy waistcoats, considered in those days to be a bit limp-wristed,”

says Doug.

Head above water, we await further theories.

SIX of Her Majesty’s fleet have been named HMS Rodney, none slouches.

The last was a Nelson class battleship, launched in 1925 and broken up in 1948.

They were named after Admiral George Brydges Rodney, 1719-92, best known for his commands in the American War of Independence for which he received “unbounded” honour from his country.

Rodneys recently to have appeared in the pages of the Northern Echo include Rodney Mills, the UKIP candidate for Skipton and Ripon, Rodney Tennant the Leyburn auctioneer, Rodney Breckon who is minister of the New Life Baptist church in Northallerton and Rodney Hawkins, chairman of the Friends of Longovicium – the Roman fort at Lanchester.

None fits the dictionary definition in the slightest.

Similarly it must be assumed that Rodney Walk in Coundon, near Bishop Auckland, owes nothing at all to coke works chain gangs or to the peripatetic lifestyle of its residents.

The proximity of Collingwood Street, Benbow Walk and Drake Close suggests something else entirely.

STILL on the high seas – adrift, at any rate – let us turn to Lancelot Blackburne, perhaps the only Archbishop of York to be included in Brewer’s colourful compilation of Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics and almost certainly the only holder of that high ecclesiastical office also to have been a buccaneer.

“Blackburne’s behaviour was seldom of the standard to be expected of an archbishop. In many ways it was seldom of the standard to be expected of a pirate,” says Brewer.

The Blackburne rover (1658-1743) is recalled by Bill Craddock MBE in a lengthy compilation headed “Historical unusual facts but generally not known”.

Though some of this may be apocryphal – his Wikipedia entry ascribes the piracy stories to “popular belief” – Bill, a long-serving former Sunderland city councillor from Washington, reckons him to have been deputy of the infamous Captain Red Hand.

Certainly the archbishop was a bit of a lad – a claim with which his mistresses may not have agreed – and appears to have spent increasingly little time curing the souls of the archdiocese.

On one infamous occasion he is said to have been thrown out of a Nottingham church for demanding pipe, tobacco and ale after a confirmation; another legend is that Dick Turpin was his butler.

The Dictionary of National Biography mentions his “reputation for carnality” and the “laxity of his moral precepts.” Horace Walpole, who termed him “the jolly old Archbishop of York”, insisted that he retained nothing of his first profession – piracy – except his seraglio.

A seraglio is a harem.

BRIEFLY to other matters, and Maurice Heslop in Billingham has what may be the last word, or the final squeak, on mice.

Though they’ve been restricted to his garden – “I wouldn’t let them in the house,” he insists – Maurice went to Dickens and was told they only stocked “humane” traps.

“The chap said that when they were caught, I should just open the trap and let them out again. I’ve never heard anything so daft.”

Maurice’s solution is perhaps more brutal. “I put them in a bucket and drowned the little buggers.”

REMEMBER the clock that went backwards in the night? It continues so to do, reports Wendy Nettleton in Eaglescliffe, though the room has been perfectly dry. Condensation ruled out, Wendy promises further investigation. The clock’s still ticking on that one, then.

BACK, finally, to The Wind in the Willows, and to vainglorious Mr Toad. Before last Thursday’s epochal events, St Teresa’s Hospice in Darlington ran a fund-raising sweep inviting entrants to guess how many seats each of the parties would win.

A large and learned entry included Mr Chris Lloyd, Mr Rob Merrick and others of deep political insights.

The sweep was won, however – and by the length and breadth of Downing Street – by a psephological rodney, an itinerant columnist with his head in the electoral coke oven.

Though I also came last – the estimate of four seats to Labour and 646 to the Tories perhaps a little over-optimistic – it was merely toad-you-so proof that you can’t win them all. It is a theory that any of our intelligent political leaders may readily confirm.