In the pink

A £32,600 grant, as Tuesday’s paper reported, will enable the Durham Amateur Football Trust (Daft) to digitalise its crumbling collection of Saturday night sports editions.

Tuesday’s paper also made mention of the Madonna of the Pinks, a painting by Raphael once sold by the Duke of Northumberland for £22m, though there is not thought to be any connection.

Daft’s Pinks are the Sports Despatch, our lamented sister evening paper, a weekly triumph of hot metal and fevered brows.

There were running reports and halting progress. At the end of my first week there, wet-eared and woeful, I was sent to cover the Darlington v Carlisle rugby match despite knowing as much about rugby as about rhubarb.

Three different Pinks vied try-line and deadline. Six more newspapers wanted considered accounts thereafter.

It was what they called a lineage pool and this was the deep end.

Forty five years later, they still haven’t paid.

Almost every Football League town had a partisan Pink or sometimes, like the Hartlepool Mail, a Green ‘Un. The final whistle would blow at quarter to five; by six o’clock they’d be on the newsagents’ counters, as essential a part of Saturday night as Dixon of Dock Green.

Frequently a cartoon figure would instantly indicate win, lose or draw.

Daft’s Despatches, from 1946-67, belonged to Bishop Auckland journalist Derek Hebden who passed it to former local councillor Chris Foote Wood.

If not Madonna, that’s Barbara Wood – Daft treasurer and former national athletics champion – with news of how Bolton Wanderers won the FA Cup. You read it here second.

TUESDAY’S paper also reported the death, at 92, of the composer and pianist Sir George Shearing, the man who wrote Lullaby on Broadway.

It was a reminder of a conversation ten years ago with the Reverend Michael Shearing, then vicar of Cockfield and neighbouring parishes.

Were they by any chance related?

“Certainly,” said the vicar, “he’s my uncle.”

They were a musical family, the Shearings. “My father used to wince when someone sang out of tune. He literally couldn’t stand it,” said Michael.

George Shearing, blind from birth, had spent the last 60 years in America, though he and his nephew had met a couple of years previously in Sunderland. Michael, formerly a teacher in Hartlepool, has now retired to Barnard Castle.

Word is that there’s also a connection with the Shearings holiday company.

Sadly, his phone appears on the blink.

DIM as a Toc H lamp – a phrase which someone may care to explain – last week’s column also claimed a Cockfield connection for Sir Joseph Swan, the man who invented the incandescent light bulb. There wasn’t one: as many luminous readers have pointed out, he was born in Sunderland and lived in Gateshead.

ANOTHER half-correction, reports of the death and funeral of Arnold Hadwin – my first editor – claimed that he was raised in a terraced house in Marmaduke Street, Spennymoor.

Barrie Hindmarch of those parts points out that – “with the exception of my parents’ house, which was detached”

– it was a street of semis.

“Your assumption that there were no Tories in Marmaduke Street was also way off beam,” Barrie adds.

“There were at least four businesses when Arnold lived there and I know for certain there were a couple who waved the blue flag.

“Please donate the prize for spotting the deliberate mistake to a suitable charity.”

ANOTHER sadness: Michael Thompson has died. He was a former Darlington police officer who joined the Teesdale beat and even after retirement preferred to stay in the former police house in Mickleton. Mickleton Mick was a community policeman before they even thought of the term: affable, approachable, knowledgeable and – no doubt when need be – capable of looking after himself, too. We’ve been mates for getting on 40 years and he wasn’t a bad hand at dominoes, either. It’s a pleasure to have known him.

HIS email headed “Ever been discalced?”, the admirable Peter Sotheran, in Redcar, seeks an airing for his version of the old television favourite Call My Bluff.

What, for example – and the answer’s at the foot of the page – is dunderfunk?

Is it a) a Dickensian word for a chump, b) a ship’s biscuit or c) a device used by bellringers to deaden the sound when practising their art? What might be termed discalce learning, regular readers will have known the answer to his first question, however. It means “bare footed”

and was carefully explained back in 2009.

Darlington’s Carmelite nuns were a discalced order, though later shod.

“It refers to hemp sandals rather than posh leather shoes,” said Sister Mary Elisabeth. “These days we have to get what we can.”

Peter’s Bluff stuff is a fundraiser for the Sir William Turner Almshouses in Kirkleathem, for which he works tirelessly. He’s seeking bookings throughout North Yorkshire , south Durham and Cleveland and into 2011. He’s at peter.sotheran@tiscali.co.uk ANOTHER fundraiser, the folk of Ingleton – between Darlington and Staindrop – plan an evening of French music on March 5 to benefit the village hall.

Angela Arundel – “terrific singer, looks the part,” says Neville Kirby – will be singing mostly French songs, many made famous by Edith Piaf. She’ll be accompanied by the Dalesiders Folk Band who’ll play music from other cultures, too. Two members will also perform a Stephane Grappelli/Django Reinhardt classic.

Tickets, including French food at the interval, are £6. Licensed village hall bar, too. Tickets on 01325- 730092 or 739250.

􀁧 A dunderfunk, last of all, is a ship’s biscuit.