Warts and all

Michael Manuel’s book has 1,000 historic photographs, many wonderfully evocative. It has more than 400 pages, has taken him for four years to compile, cost more than he dare imagine and when it sells – certain to set till bells ringing – will benefit the County Durham community that in 69 years he has never once thought of leaving.

It’s what folk call coffee table size.

Should the table leg break, the book might sturdily support that, to boot.

We’re talking Crook, a hard hewn town said in 1859 to be a “dirty filthy”

place and with a fair few problems 150 years later. It’s home, nonetheless, and to Michael Manuel there’s simply no place like it.

He was brought up in a one-up onedown with a single cold tap beneath the stairs and a solitary two-pin plug.

He became an apprentice hairdresser and remained throughout working life at the cutting edge. Once Crook had ten barbers alone, though the gentleman who promoted himself with the slogan “Let Gilbert make you handsome” might not have got away with it today.

Later Michael would work in customers’ homes – around 700, he reckons.

“I’ve a good tongue in my head.

I’d just ask people to recount little stories, or try to dig out old photographs.”

Other material came from picture postcard fairs. “I might go through thousands of cards,” he says. “If I found one I wanted, it was worth it.”

Four previous books, none so lavish, have raised about £20,000 for community causes. This time he declined even to seek grants.

There are memories of Pickford Holland’s and of Pickwick Pickles, of Roddymoor and Rough Lea, club trip and carnival queen, scoury stone and rag and bone.

There are also anecdotal, quirky, year-by-year accounts, back to the town’s industrial incarnation in 1840.

Railway station 1843, Wesleyan chapel 1844, police station 1851, post office 1855, Co-op 1865.

It was a place built on coal, liberated by football. Michael’s a lifelong Crook Town fan, watched them four times in the FA Amateur Cup final at Wembley, tells of collapsing after struggling from his bed to watch a big game during a flu epidemic and remembering nothing else for three days.

Now, though, he worries for his beloved town’s future, fears that they are being fed municipal crumbs. “It’s my little town and Durham County Council are butchering it, like a lot more towns. If you’re north of Durham, you seem to get money.

Places like Crook get nothing.

Particularly he’s concerned about the football club, in danger of being adrift in planning limbo. “The council seems to be doing nothing to help us, but in two or three years they’ll condemn the stand and close the place. It would be terrible if anything happened to Crook Town.”

Right at the end, the epitaph, he records that Crook featured in an episode of Inspector George Gently.

They filmed in the graveyard. “It sums up the town’s prospects,” says Michael.

Nooks & Crannies, A Chronicle of Crook and District 1840-2012 is available from Hope Street News, Stephenson’s newsagent’s. The Hive or on eBay. Michael Manuel is on 01388-772683. The softback is £20, a limited edition hardback £40.

IT is not the sort of thing about which Michael Manuel might write, but we hear news of another local author.

Craig Raine, Shildon lad, has been named “The Nearly Man Of Bad Sex”

by the Standard in London. He is unlikely to welcome the accolade.

Raine, raised in a prefab, but educated on a scholarship at Barnard Castle School – where he told friends that his unemployed father was a football manager – is a poet and emeritus professor at Oxford University. It was his novel The Divine Comedy which won involuntary entry to last week’s Literary Review “Bad Sex In Fiction” awards, however.

Though The Independent thought him a “shoo-in”, the award went to Nancy Huston, a Canadian. To mark that climactic occasion, one of her followers is said to have fixed a latex gauntlet to the crown on his head and to have beaten it with drumsticks, thus replicating the sound of armadillos mating.

Raine’s unwilling entry is best not repeated, if not on grounds of taste then because it’s quite hard to know what’s on about.

Were there to be a bad pun award, his reference to “proof of the pudendum”

might fare better, however.

His response to such literary emasculation was terse. We don’t do bad sex in Shildon.

LAST week, perchance, a visit to the seasonally delightful Locomotion railway museum in Shildon, where the shop sells Glimpses of Shildon Folk, an alluring but rather more modest photographic album from the prolific Tom Hutchinson. There are one or two well-turned ankles, the occasional memory of innocent youth, but – happily – nothing of the three-letter word whatsoever.

WE wrote a few weeks ago about a wonderful book of railway photographs, chiefly based around engine sheds at Darlington, West Hartlepool and at Philadelphia, near Houghton-le- Spring and taken from half-forgotten glass plates that Richard Gaunt had found in the attic.

Richard himself couldn’t be traced, partly explained because he writes, kindly, from Cardiff. His mum’s still in Darlington, though.

We’d noted that his first job was on building the A1(M) near Newton Aycliffe, wondered if he were navvy or gaffer. “I certainly wanted to be a navvy,” he says, “but when the foreman found out that I could add up columns of figures in my head, they put me on the staff.”

The book’s going well, a second imminent, a third possible. After that, Richard suspects, the railway images will be exhausted. “The non-railway stuff will have to go back in the loft.”

GUNS blazing, proving that we have our uses after all, 81-year-old General Sir Charles Huxtable, former Commander-in-Chief of UK Land Forces, joins the debate in the correspondence columns of The Times over the point of a newspaper. “Surely,” he writes from Leyburn, “it’s something with which we can swat flies.”

FINALLY, and still with the military, the Christmas issue of The Oldie magazine returns nostalgically to the subject of Nig-Nogs, still an Echo favourite. A letter from a gentleman in Penrith recalls National Servicemen when, to NCOs, all of them were Nig-Nogs. So what, someone timorously asked the sergeant major, might be one of those be? “A pregnant fairy in army boots,” he replied.