A 50th anniversary celebration for a North-East Salvation Army singing group went with real swing, thanks to a wealth of talent.

ANOTHER golden jubilee, Shildon Salvation Army's songster brigade marked 50 high note years last weekend. They have appeared everywhere from Over 60s Club to the Royal Albert Hall.

An ineluctably happy band, the brigade had been formed by Madge Longhurst, an innocent abroad second lieutenant sent to Shildon - "to be honest, I'd never heard of the place" - as her first posting after training school.

Now retired Major Madge Engene, she was back to join the celebrations and to meet old friends in Shildon's ministry of music.

Five founder songsters - Ken and Ray Wilson, Peggy, Edie and Arnold Dunn - remain in fine voice and good heart. Probably they've changed less than the dear old town has.

Shildon had been dominated, recalled Major Engene, by the railway wagon works. "You could walk down the street and literally hear the men going hammer and tongs. I don't think I could find my way about any longer."

The Salvation Army citadel had changed, too. Then it was a draughty old place near the railway line; now they have a gleaming new headquarters opened in 1995 - the last time that the column was on Salvation Army parade thereabouts.

They'd had singers before, of course, and a band renowned far beyond its home beat, but never a songster brigade.

"I knew there were some very capable singers," said Major Engene, "but the thing about Shildon folk - then as now - was how remarkably faithful they were."

There'd been two Corps in 1879 - Old Shildon and New Shildon, a familiar division - united in 1912 at services attended by General Booth. A family tree of Smiths and Dunns grows interwoven throughout its history.

Vincent Smith has been brigade accompanist from the start - apart from his time at the Royal Academy of Music and on National Service with the band of the Scots Guards - and has been bandmaster for 39 years; Ken, his younger brother, has been songster leader since himself returning from college in 1970.

Their mother, perhaps inevitably, was a Dunn. Both their grandfathers were Salvationists. The wedding takes place on May 25 between Philip Dunn and Gemma Smith - "not one of our Smiths but definitely one of our Dunns," said Ken.

The musical standard remains exceptionally high, not some willing band of hope and little ability but rather a musicians' union of high accomplishment - "a wealth of talent," said Major Paul Church, Shildon's commanding officer.

"You don't have to be musical to be in the Salvation Army but I suppose it helps," said Ken Smith.

The jubilee weekend had attracted Salvationists from as far away as Bristol and Bath, Wickford and Wood Green. There, too, was our old friend Major Louis Kinsey - who swapped military pips for Salvation Army and is now back at Catterick Garrison - and a lady who'd been a clippie on the United when you could travel from Shildon to Bishop for threepence, so long as you fibbed about being 14.

Major Kinsey is coming up 65. "People ask me what I'm going to do when I retire. I tell them I'm going to turn somersaults," he said.

We were greeted by a chap with his arm in a sling who said he'd fallen off the back of a lorry. On a God's in his heaven sort of morning almost everyone was in shirt sleeve order, even the little lad with the non-uniform "Beckham 7" on his back.

As might have been expected, they were once again wonderfully on song, music ranging from Holy, Holy, Holy to Shine, Jesus, Shine. Happy but rarely clappy, the column carries a notebook in order to render the act impossible.

Ken Smith recalled marching through Shildon with band and songsters. "You couldn't do it now, too much traffic, but there are still people who don't think it's Christmas until they've heard the Salvation Army band playing carols."

An enjoyable gathering lasted 75 minutes, after which there was coffee for most of us and yet another rehearsal for the band. If practice makes perfect, as folk suppose, the musicians of Shildon Salvation Army are manifestly at the head of the march.