Life for Lynn

Hers was the title role. She played Ruth in Life For Ruth. It was her first film role and, 45 years later, it remains her only one.

There've been a couple of commercials for the North Eastern Co-op - "I followed Kathy Secker, I think they must have run out of money" - and a bit of treading the boards with Longbenton Operatics, but her cinema credit rating remains distinctly singular.

"So far as I know no one asked again," she says cheerfully. "It doesn't say much for me, does it?"

Now she's Mrs Wedderburn to a class of 30 at Langley First School in Monkseaton, North Tyneside. "None of them knows about my moment of fame," says Lynn. "Even now, I'd absolutely love to be given a second chance."

Life For Ruth was a highly-acclaimed 1962 movie shot mainly on location in the North-East - Seaham Harbour, Marsden Rocks - and at Pinewood Studios. Other stars included Patrick McGoohan, Michael Craig and the late Janet Munro.

The premiere was at Newcastle Odeon. "I remember me and Freddy Ramsey, who played my brother, being at the top of the stairs when they made an announcement about welcoming the guests of honour.

"We wondered who it would be. We'd no idea that they meant us."

We recalled the film last week, on the back of the proposed multi-million pound film studio at Seaham. Whatever happened to Lynn Taylor, we wondered, and are particularly grateful to Tom Purvis in Sunderland and Tony Hillman in Darlington for helping provide the answer.

She still has the curls, still the coruscating Cullercoats accent, still delighted to see the film stills we'd taken up as a present for the teacher.

"Very Hayley Mills," said the photographer.

"Possibly," said Lynn.

Her father was a miner who also studied in his spare time to be a teacher - "You can imagine how difficult that was" - and who was awarded the MBE for his services to the Cullercoats lifeboat.

"The funny thing is that he couldn't swim and was a bit frightened of the sea," says Lynn. By the age of eight, conversely, she was a confident swimmer - it was probably, she says, what won her the part.

"I was at ballet school when someone arrived to seek out people for the film. I don't think it mattered that I could dance or act but that I could swim, had a strong Tyneside accent, a bit of personality and could turn on the tears like a tap."

Which girl can't, she adds, coquettishly.

She remembers flights to London ("it was BOAC in those days") and "seemingly endless" car journeys to Seaham, on which she was usually travel sick.

"I don't remember standing round very much. I suppose we must have done, but most of the time we just played on the beach. I was only eight, I don't remember a lot of the details but I do remember that everyone was very nice to me."

Ruth nearly drowned in a boating accident, was taken desperately ill to hospital, died - amid much medical and legal drama - when the transfusion was declined.

She also remembers filming the "drowning" scenes, in the tank at Pinewood Studios. "I had a wet-suit and all sorts beneath the duffle coat, so much that my arms were out like a scarecrow.

"They were filming Carry On Cruising and everyone said I must get the autographs of Sid James and the others, but I'd never heard of them. I got Billy Fury's, too. I didn't know who he was either."

It wasn't much of a speaking role - mainly screaming, she recalls. "I was quite good at screaming," says Lynn.

"It was quite emotional when I was lying in hospital dying. I still remember screaming for my father (Michael Craig)," says Lynn. "Even now I can't think of my real father for more than two or three minutes without crying."

Both Life For Ruth and Janet Munro received BAFTA nominations, the film was widely screened in America and Australia, where her godmother saw it. Little Lynn went back to school in Cullercoats.

"My education had been interrupted and I was quite conscientious, at least until I was 16. I suppose I may have been star struck, but I don't remember it; I think my parents went out of their way to ensure I was treated just the same."

She stayed at ballet school until she was 18 - Gillian Quinn, her instructor and film-set chaperone, is celebrating 50 years dance teaching - went to college where she learned both languages and secretarial skills, married a master baker and had three children.

It didn't, she says, leave a lot of time for her acting.

Following in mother's footsteps, her son is now a ballet choreographer and has made numerous stage appearances - "He was the original Billy Elliott" - one of her daughters has just returned from working with Spirit of the Dance in America and her other daughter is a senior lecturer in theatre, dance and performance at Huddersfield University.

Lynn retrained as a primary school teacher 15 years ago - she also teaches dancing and piano - loves the kids, hates (like every other staff room denizen) the ever-increasing paperwork.

"Even now I'd love to go to drama school, but there's really no chance," she says, as bright and as confident as the little girl with the duffle coat and welly boots on Marsden beach.

"I still smell the grease paint, always have this thing at the back of my mind that I'd like to give it another go, still wish that life would be like ballet school, and that someone would come around looking for new talent."

Her particular fancy is a radio part - "that way they couldn't see my face" - replacing the Geordie lass in the Archers. "She isn't a Geordie at all, you can tell, and she hasn't got it right. I don't think my accent's changed at all."

The part in question is Ruth's.

MENTION in last week's paper of Get Carter, probably the best known film with a North-East location, reminded Brian Redhead in Aiskew, Bedale, of another gangster movie made in the region.

Payroll was shot in 1961 - half the cast were shot, too - ten years before Michael Caine made his dramatic entrance. It served, says Brian, as a salutary reminder about what happens when thieves fall out.

He recalls "lovely scenes" filmed around Newcastle and Whitley Bay, atmospheric footage of Tyne Bridge and trolley buses and the spectacular ramming of an armoured wages van by a lorry supposedly driven by actor Tom Bell but most likely by a stunt double.

Halliwell's Film Guide was also fairly impressed - "Tense, vivid, thoroughly predictable... handled with solid professionalism".

Bell apart, it starred Billie Whitelaw, Francoise Prevost. Kenneth Griffith and Michael Craig. Remember Michael Craig? He was the unbending father in Life For Ruth.

A FINAL note. Brought up around Seaham but now in Stanhope, reader Mr J Giles reports having searched for years for a video or DVD of Life For Ruth.

"I've only ever seen it once and would love to see it again," he says. Can anybody help?

Goodbye to two stalwarts

These columns are sustained by a great phalanx of the faithful. They are regular irregulars, assiduously inconsequential, wonderful people.

Two - Frank Robinson in Thornaby-on-Tees and Mike Heaviside in Cockfield, west Durham - have died in the past few days.

Frank, who was 81, was born at South Church, near Bishop Auckland, spent much of his working life as a rep for Cameron's Brewery, was the man who gave Billy and Ena Lynch the freedom of the Central Borough in Darlington. Between them, they held the licence for 40 years.

He'd recall everything from the Toc H Club in South Church to Sunday School trips to Redcar, tanner a time, wondering while on that train of thought why steam engines always stopped outside Schellenberg's bone yard in South Bank.

He'd spot howlers on shop window post cards - "Bridal gown with vale" - offer (March 2006) cures for hiccups, resurrect what may have been the cinema's only example of a quintuple negative.

It was a pre-war film in which a maid addressed her master (played, Frank recalled, by Harry Welshman). "No sir, nobody never said nothing to me about no lights."

Frank also recalled Bert Dowsey, a one-legged acrobat who'd dive from 50ft into two feet of water. Sadly, the search engines can direct no further light. Frank retains the monopody monopoly.

His most valuable contribution to popular culture came, however, when we sought the words of the once-familiar poem about the sex life of the camel. No heads in the sand in Thornaby, he meticulously wrote them down.

The sexual urge of the camel

Is greater than anyone thinks,

In the dead of the night in the desert

It tried to backscuttle the Sphinx...

So - incorrigibly, inscrutably - it went on. Thanks, Frank. God bless.

Mike Heaviside was Cockfield born and raised, an authority not just on the Gaunless Valley area in which he lived - and which he loved - but on Heaviside family history.

Back in the 16th Century they'd been border reivers - "We didn't just rob, we murdered and pillaged" he observed - before heading down the turnpike that became the A68.

He'd share memories of much more, of sherbet dabs and Orozo liquorice sticks, of tanner hops in Cockfield church hall, of Matt Dillon and Scunner Campbell, of why Cockfield Band was said just to be buggering about.

He'd started work as a 15-year-old in Doggart's flooring department in Bishop Auckland - a lino type, the column artlessly observed - allowed to take out a 5 Doggart's club in order that he might dress the part.

His researches were extraordinary, including seven years digging round the family tree before a CD and book called Heaviside Stories - a glorious labour of love - might be produced in 2005. "He has become," said the foreword, inarguably, "probably the world's most knowledgeable person on the family Heaviside." Mike was just 57, his funeral private, his epitaph there in the writing.