As the nation went to the polls last week, Shildon was casting its vote for a lovely Irish lady

SHE HAS sung for Popes and for presidents, won the Eurovision Song Contest watched by 200 million television viewers, overflowed the Royal Albert Hall and the Royal Festival Hall. On election night, Dana – now a 58-year-old grandmother – packs Shildon Civic Hall, too.

The timing’s appropriate. Standing as an Independent, she came third in the race for the Irish presidency, was an MEP from 1999-2004 and in 2002 stood for the Irish parliament, gaining but 3.5 per cent of the vote.

Strictly non-political, Shildon’s is a sort of Neighbour Party, an evening as relaxed and as soothing as a perfumed bath.

“I knew as soon as we drove into the town that I was going to love it,”

she tells them, all-embracing.

“Everyone’s just so warm.” The Civic reception’s mutually affectionate.

Remember Dana? She was the 18- year-old A-level student who in 1970 became her country’s first Eurovision winner with All Kinds of Everything (which could, come to think, be a sub-title for these multi-faceted columns).

Her dressing room’s basic, a notice on the wall outside insisting that no physical work is to be done without the express permission of the town clerk or deputy town clerk.

There are a few bottles of mineral water, a change of outfit on a hanger, the smell of cooking from the kitchens upstairs.

The first question’s why she still does it, the answer because she enjoys it. “I just love meeting people, especially the young. Besides, I had five years in politics when I hardly sang a note.” The Irish eyes are smiling; the audience awaits.

SHE was born Rosemary Brown, fifth daughter of a Kings Cross railway station porter who went back to Ireland when she was five because the smog was affecting his children’s health.

Her grandmother had raised 13 children in a two-up two-down in Derry, her parents returned to the Creggan estate and to the Bogside, names that were to become synonymous with civil unrest and with hatred.

“I remember when you won the Eurovision,” an Irish lady called Theresa tells her at the Civic Hall.

“The Troubles were really starting.

You brought a light into our lives that night.”

Her parents were both musical, her own debut as a six-year-old at St Columb’s hall in Derry. At 17 she was second in the Northern Ireland song contest, invited to represent the whole country the following year when singing, at least, was unified.

All Kinds of Everything became a worldwide hit. The British entry, Mary Hopkin singing Knock Knock, Who’s There?, was second, six points behind. “Mary was lovely,” Dana recalls.

“Our mothers got on like a house on fire, too.”

Her management had decided that Rosemary Brown was insufficiently catchy – “I was quite indignant, I liked my name” – Dana chosen because it was a school nickname.

An older sister, who became Northern Irish women’s champion, would practise judo throws on her.

The young Rosemary, in turn, tried them on her contemporaries. “Dana”

is Gaelic for bold.

For all that, it seemed almost inappropriate.

“I was always very nervous going on stage. I’d planned to become a teacher and really thought All Kinds of Everything would be my swansong. What happened just completely changed my life.”

The bit bairn photographer thinks he remembers her. “Didn’t she do the Oil of Ulay commercials?” he says.

THE Shildon concert is promoted by Christians in Entertainment, organised by local Methodist minister Graham Morgan who’s spent half the afternoon carting extra chairs from the church hall across the road.

“They’re queuing all the way back to the Co-op,” says Graham, unaware that much the same could have been said about half the polling stations in the land.

Dana’s a devout Roman Catholic, her unbending stance on abortion and related issues said to have been the principal reason for her political decline.

The audience is non-denominational, much of an age, with her from the moment she breaks into A Thing Called Love and clapping along after 11.5 seconds. It may not be a record.

After ten minutes they bring her a bar stool, rather different from the sleek number on which she perched for Eurovision, and from which she was convinced she would slide at any moment.

In truth the gathering could hardly be more appreciative, like Gordon Brown addressing a Presbyterian mothers’ meeting in Kirkcaldy.

Among them are two women from Derry – “Ah,” says Dana, “a flock” – and Lesley Wilson, who in the mid- Seventies had appeared at a Methodist Association of Youth Clubs gala at the Royal Albert Hall with a local group called Geordies Penker. They’d recorded a song to mark the 150th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

Dana had been the “surprise”

celebrity. “She was wonderful, told us how much she liked our dresses,”

Lesley recalls. She’s also singing with the choir of Timothy Hackworth primary school in the town, half of whom may hitherto have supposed Dana to be a midfielder for Red Star Belgrade and the other half – the female half – some sort of make-up.

She’s 5ft 4in, not exactly Danamite, but some of the youngsters are nearly as tall.

The kids are terrific. “I knew you were going to be good, I didn’t know you were going to be fantastic,” she tells them.

A little lad called Morgan – no relation to the minister it should in the circumstances be stressed – is asked how to make one half of the hall sing louder than the other.

“Wipe bogies all over them,” says Morgan, to much hilarity.

“That’s going to stay with me for the rest of my life,” says Dana.

She’s immediately inclusive, effortlessly down on what Durham folk would call her hunkers, mixes freely – “no kicking or biting, mind”

– with the audience of 250. It includes Mamie Lovely and her daughter Alison, from South Shields, who’ve been following Dana since 1971.

“Firm and faithful friends,” says the singer.

A couple are celebrating their golden wedding – “You must have been married when you were ten,”

she says – a lady is wearing her best frock. “Don’t you look terrific,” she says.

She sings some of her own, a bit of Johnny Cash and of Herman’s Hermits, some Irish numbers and is singing the Seekers hit A World Of Our Own – “very appropriate,” she says – at the moment the polls close.

There are occasional gospel messages – “Expect miracles in your life, God will never abandon you” – occasional flashes of emerald folk wisdom.

Gordon Wallace, a Methodist minister in Redcar – “a good Scottish name for an Irishman,” he says – joins boisterously in Dublin’s Fair City.

“I just feel that we have been so close, it’s been a really special evening,” says Dana, leaves the stage at 10.20pm, but is chatting and signing until 11pm.

“Wasn’t she lovely?” says Graham Morgan and even on general election night, none would disagree.

It takes All Kinds…

10 things you may never have known about Dana

■ Mrs Rosemary Scanlon since 1978, she has four grown-up children – none of whom sings professionally.

■ Schools were given a half-day holiday when she married at Derry Cathedral, the crowds so great that it took Dana and her husband Damien four hours to reach the reception.

■ Top of the charts for two weeks in 1970, All Kinds of Everything was preceded by Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge over Troubled Water and followed by Spirit in the Sky by Norman Greenbaum.

■ The song was written by Derry Lindsay and Jackie Smith, compositors on a Dublin newspaper.

■ Fourth place in the 1970 Eurovision song contest was taken by an unknown Spaniard singing Gwendolyne. His name was Julio Iglesias.

■ All Kinds was the first of seven Irish Eurovision Song Contest winners and only the second English language song in the first 15 years to win outright. The first was Sandie Shaw’s Puppet on a String. Lulu was joint first in 1969.

■ Dana recorded Totus Tuus – meaning Totally Yours – to mark the Pope’s visit to Ireland in 1979. It was number one for nine weeks over there.

■ She had a small part of her vocal chords surgically removed in 1976, following the discovery of a nonmalignant growth.

■ She played Snow White in pantomime for 14 years and appeared in three Children’s Royal Variety Shows.

■ Michael Cashman, who played Colin Russell in EastEnders, became an MEP at the same time as Dana.

Plans derailed

THIS week’s column should also have had a piece on one of those occasional transports of delight, a ride behind the K1 steam locomotive 62005, owned by the North East Locomotive Preservation Group and known on West Highland duty as Lord of the Isles.

The plan was to join at Middlesbrough around 9am last Saturday, head cross-country to Ferryhill and then northwards to the former passenger lines around Blyth and Bedlington, among those the Libdems wanted to reopen had not they been electorally derailed.

The train itself had left Carnforth in Lancashire at 5.30am, hauled by what Thomas the Tank Engine somewhat contemptuously called a Diseasel. The K1 was to catch on at the Boro.

A steward, sadly, had bad news.

The locomotive had been discovered to have a cracked cylinder while sidling around Shildon the day previously. The technical term is that it failed, as in O-level maths, the cost of repair around £15,000.

“Did no one tell you?” asked the steward. Do they ever?

The train, officially headed for Morpeth, was full and fascinated, nonetheless. Having a certain sympathy with Thomas, I had a cup of coffee on the station – £2.55, ghastly – and headed morosely home again.

Still diesel-hauled, the train was last seen heading towards Saltburn, which may be on the road to the isles (via Dogger Bank) but certainly not to Morpeth.

Unlike some of us, it no doubt got there in the end.

Swann songs

WONDERFULLY coincidentally, Gordon Peters rings on the day of the Dana show (and, it must be conceded, of the general election).

Gordon’s from Shildon, too. He was born Gordon Peter Wilkinson in Highland Gardens, attended Durham Cathedral chorister school and is probably the only Shildon lad to have had his own prime-time television comedy programme.

Yet more coincidentally, his mother was organist at the Wesley Methodist church (and at the Rex Cinema, long gone.) Thereafter the family moved to Hunwick and thence to Darlington, where his father worked at Jackson’s butcher’s in Cockerton and his mother helped run Eastbourne Youth Club.

The 1970s BBC1 show was pitched directly against Coronation Street and thus rather hit the cobbles. Rather humbler television credits include Dad’s Army (“man with door”) and One Foot in the Grave, in which he played Ronnie.

Ronnie was married to Mildred.

Mildred hanged herself during a game of Happy Families.

Still he treads the boards, reluctant to discuss his age but probably 83, back in Darlington on Friday, May 21, with what might be termed – though probably not by Gordon – a Flanders and Swann tribute act.

He’s Michael Flanders, his friend David Clarke – formerly Danny la Rue’s musical director – is Donald Swann. They’re also at the Empire in Consett next Wednesday and at the Customs House, South Shields, on Thursday.

“I’m still very fit and active, the voice is good and I enjoy doing it,”

he says, Dana to the echo.

■ A Celebration of Flanders and Swann is at Darlington Arts Centre at 8pm on May 21. Tickets, available on the night or by booking, are £10.50 – 25 per cent discount for concessions.