THE Salvation Army citadel stands enduringly in Bolckow Street, Eston, the Cleveland Bay next door on one side, the Wellington Hotel 100 yards away on the other.

It was once an ironstone village, Henry Bolckow the ironmaster, and still a village when Eston United - known for reasons unspecified as the Kids - twice reached the FA Amateur Cup final, in 1909 and 1912.

Now the A174 Parkway divides Eston from its long-abandoned iron workings, and precious little divides it - locals might disagree - from the rest of the Middlesbrough sprawl.

Whatever else may have changed, however, the Salvation Army resolutely remains, last weekend celebrating the Corps' 120th anniversary with an awful lot more bodies than there were in the Cleveland Bay.

The Army, in truth, had turned out in force. The enemy may have changed but the fight goes on, and the country's top officer spent the weekend leading from the front.

Commissioner Alex Hughes is Scottish, began his Salvation Army career as a young lieutenant in Ryhope and New Seaham before a posting to Alnwick. "It was the nearest they'd let me get to Scotland," he says.

When he became an officer, the Army nationally had almost 100,000 soldiers. Now he commands 40,000.

His wife - Commissioner Mrs Ingeborg Hughes - was born in Bolivia of German Salvationist parents. They met in London and married in Chile. Officially he is the UK Territorial Commander.

There, too, was Major Ray Kirby, the Middlesbrough-based district commissioner, known in Salvation Army parlance as DC. Whether Commissioner Hughes is known at headquarters as TC, and whether or not his fellow officers watched Top Cat, we were unable to ascertain.

They were, at any rate, a most engaging couple. "We try to adapt to a changing society," said the Territorial Commander. "It's not the Gospel that has changed, it's just the gift wrapping that does."

Anniversary celebrations had begun on Saturday evening with a regional meeting in the municipally-owned James Finnegan Hall, the singing - said the poster - accompanied by the United Timbrels.

On Sunday morning the Eston corps had had its own service, on Sunday evening they were joined by other Teesside members, by the At Your Service column and by the mayor, who'd attended on Saturday through duty and the following night through choice.

We sat by the radiator, a serious mistake. If this is the temperature at which the Army normally marches, the heat of battle must be formidable.

They are the original happy clappies, of course, and no disparagement in that. The songsters even clapped themselves, Commissioner Hughes leading everything with such soft-spoken passion that at one point he became so carried away in describing a hymn that he forgot to give out the number.

(He was also, he revealed, a bit of a Sunderland football fan and was amiably booed - or chided, at any rate - for his candour. You wouldn't expect a similar response to, say the Archbishop of Canterbury. Besides, the Archbishop of Canterbury supports the Arsenal.)

The commissioner spoke of the importance of stillness and of the need to avoid "terminal inflexibility". Sometimes, he added, they would like to do a lot more. "What's important is that we do what we can do."

Terminal inflexibility had clearly not affected the youngster who e-mailed the corps sergeant-major to offer his apologies for absence from the evening's proceedings. The reason was more traditional: his dad wouldn't let him.

Commissioner Mrs Hughes, known to her husband as Ingie, spoke of her own early Army life as assistant to a brigadier - "for young people, brigadiers were born old" - and of her affection for the Salvation Army flag, the same throughout the world. She pronounced "Corps" almost exactly as in Corus, the wretchedly named successor to British Steel. Around Eston just now, Corus is not a term of endearment.

The meeting lasted two hours, ended joyously with "Go Out in the Strength of the Lord" and with tea and cakes before the commissioners and their briefcase-carrying aide-de-camp headed back through the night to London.

"The captain drives while the commissioner and his wife hold hands in the back," the sergeant-major had said. "When he gets tired I take over," said Commissioner Hughes.

Lillian Watson, 60 years in the Eston corps, spoke of how honoured they were to have the top brass for the weekend, of how times had changed - once the band and songsters had 40 members each, now there aren't either and 40, in total, "only on a very good day".

The only thing that hadn't changed, said Lillian, was the great love of the Lord.

Commissioner Hughes reckoned it a wonderful weekend. "We may be numerically smaller but some very exciting things are happening. We are responding all the time to social change, involved in so many different areas of life."

The Army runs everything from clubs for latch-key children to help-groups for relatives of Alzheimer's disease sufferers. There's even something called Babysong - "just to give mothers the chance to talk and sing to their children, to form a relationship".

It would be after midnight before they arrived back in London, 7.40am when the commissioner would be back at his desk.

He smiled as he had done all weekend. There was, said TC, a great deal to be done.