Engaging lives

FOR reasons without need of explanation, the North-East has precious few Conservative clubs. Those which defy political gravity seem always to have a tale to tell, tall Tory or otherwise.

At Horden Conservative Club, known thereabouts as the Owld Tin Pot, there was the night that burglars stole a portrait of Winnie but left the blessed Margaret behind. At Coundon there was the sine die ban for suggesting in print that not every single member would give his last bucket of concessionary coal to Mr Edward Heath, save to burn a brazier beneath him.

At the Darlington club, long demolished, there was the morning that an indolent news editor was caught playing snooker when he should have been up to his oxters in the town's annual agricultural show.

Then the other night to Richmond Conservative Club, where a portrait of a more youthful - and perhaps less worldly wise - William Hague beams down upon the blue blooded.

Eddie Roberts, an old friend, is something quite important there, but it's his 19-year-old grandson with whom we've come to pass a pleasant hour.

Cai Dennis, the most engaging of young men, is just back from a twomonth trip to Ghana, presently playing host to the African Cup of Nations - football, understand - and thus available for transfer to the Backtrack column. There are 1,800 pictures in his camera, and in almost every one of them a young African is beaming from here to ear.

Cai had studied sixth form sport, never much fancied university, still found himself minding a gap year and hitched up with a company called Madventurer to get himself to Ghana.

"It was a quite incredible experience,"

he says. "A white person walking down the road is like David Beckham walking down the middle of Oxford Street.

There'll be two or three people hanging onto each finger, another five or six on each leg, 35 walking behind."

He raised much of the funding himself, not least by working for his father's painting and decorating business, swears for all that that it was something money couldn't buy.

"I thought that if I could help one person, or bring a smile to one person's face, I would have done a job. There really were three aspects - to enjoy myself, to help others and to make friends, and I did it all in buckets.

"The country is absolutely gorgeous and the people are wonderful. It hasn't got a lot, but it's lovely."

Much of the time was spent coaching football or teaching English, sometimes at an orphanage. He'd written to lots of English football clubs seeking equipment and since they get hundreds of similar letters each week was delighted when Liverpool not only offered a complete strip but 300 posters ("I just didn't have room for them all") and a tour of the sanctum stadium to boot.

There was an irony, mind, because it's his mum who's the Liverpool fan. "The first match she took me to was against Manchester United and Liverpool lost.

After that I was hooked, but on Man United."

He'd begged and bought so much else that the airline had to be asked to find more baggage space. It was when the Liverpool strip was unveiled, however, that the young Ghanaians really became excited.

"I'll never forget their expressions when I opened the case," says Cai. "Their eyes and their smiles were amazing.

Everyone knows Liverpool."

If anything, however, Ghana's favourite team is Arsenal - chiefly through the presence of Adebayor, the spring-heeled Togo centre forward - followed closely by Liverpool and Chelsea.

Manchester United, for once, is a distant fourth.

About £2 will get them into a Cup of Nations match, about £6 buy them a box.

Whatever the competition, whatever the hour, there's wall-to-wall football on satellite television.

"Football is the common language,"

says Cai. "There's massive hype, even for the warm-up games."

The pitches on which youngsters play, however, are little more than bush. "I wouldn't walk my dog on them," says Cai and dog, his grandfather reckons, formed part of the lad's staple diet while out there. Cat, too.

He was invited to stay for the tournament, declined, and having missed the ball is now kicking himself instead. Out of Africa, however, Cai has now decided on university after all - sports science, perhaps inevitably - but needs to earn some more money.

It's just turned 9pm and he's off to start work behind a nightclub bar in Darlington.

In the more cloistered atmosphere of Richmond Cons Club, there's time for another one with his granddad.

A little Pease of local history

MICHAEL Wolfers, who cut his journalistic teeth on The Northern Echo, has written a biography of Thomas Hodgkin - "Wandering Scholar" - whose own Darlington links were with the Pease family.

Hodgkin, said to have been a member of the "Quaker intellectual aristocracy", is described as "public schoolboy, Oxford student, colonial official, Marxist, dissident and don". He spent much of his time in Africa.

Dorothy, his wife, won the Nobel Prize for chemistry; both had unconcealed affairs. "None of them made their firm Oxford marriage so much as tremble,"

wrote Melvyn Bragg in his review.

Wolfers was here in the 1960s, lived at the end of a cul-de-sac opposite Polam Hall girls' boarding school, would periodically be stopped by the polliss while homeward bound from back shift in order to explain his 4am intentions.

"In those days," he recalls, "my southern middle-class accent seemed to the police to be a guarantee of good behaviour."

He also remembers a brief attachment to the Darlington and Stockton Times, whose Stockton reporter was the legendary Sid Staples.

Council meetings were held in the evenings. When Sid had had enough, or his notebook was full or the pubs were closing, he'd stand up in the press box and declare that the meeting was over.

"The elected representatives would duly trop off for another day," says Wolfers. There are probably those on both sides who wish things had never changed.

* Thomas Hodgkin: Wandering Scholar by Michael Wolfer (Merlin, £40 hardback, £15.95 paperback)

Absent friends

IT'S ten years this Sunday since the Reverend Nick Beddow - greatly loved and indelibly remembered - lost his unequal struggle with multiple sclerosis.

The occasion will be marked by a memorial service in the chapel of Auckland Castle (1.30pm) and - since it is the time of his widow Gilly's 60th - by a ceilidh the evening before.

Though his own dancing may have been more enthusiastic than accomplished, Nick would greatly have approved.

He'd become vicar of Escomb and Witton Park in 1980, initially doubling - trebling?

- as chaplain to the Bishop of Durham, then John Habgood.

Michael Turnbull, Durham's bishop at the time of Nick's death, told an overflowing church at his funeral that his parish ministry had been "close to genius"

- and so, as both pastor and protestor, it was.

Mostly, however, we encountered him from the other side of a dining table. To Eating Owt readers, Nick was simply the Voracious Vicar.

"Though the truest of Christians," we once wrote, "he is given to suspending standing orders - notably the bit about not coveting thy neighbour's pork fillet and, subsequently, half-inching it."

For several years he'd smoked cannabis, openly and defiantly, in an attempt to ease his physical pain. Finally he was in a wheelchair - "paralysed from the waist down," said his obituary, "coruscating from the neck up."

In fond memory, the weekend's likely to be quite lively, too.

JUST about the next parish to Nick's, t'other side of the river, St Mary's church in Howden-le-Wear holds its final service on Sunday.

The much more cheerful news - and Nick would greatly have approved - is that Witton Park's new Methodist church is expected to open on February 29. For years they'd been meeting in the old station waiting room and, more recently, in the village hall.

St Mary's regular congregation has fallen to about ten, the closure decision taken after two years of debate by the Church Council. "It'll be a very sad day and I recognise people's pain and anger,"

says Father Stewart Irwin, who's also vicar of Hunwick.

"We have to look at being Church in different ways, perhaps at accepting that buildings aren't necessarily the most important things we have."

The final service, led by the Bishop of Durham, is at 6pm.

Since the At Your Service column is already committed to being in North Cowton on Sunday morning, and certainly wouldn't miss the memorial to the Voracious Vicar in the afternoon, that'll be three in a day. You get to be a bishop for less.

LAST Saturday's At Your Service column marked the 130th anniversary of Consett Salvation Army. The corps band, improbably assembled in 1879, is the world's oldest.

The column also carried a splendid old photograph, supplied by the Army itself, of the musical pioneers - said in the text to have been 14 strong.

The observant - among whom Mr Laurence Patterson in Barnard Castle may most certainly be numbered - will have counted just 13. The missing tenor horn player was on the extreme right.

By remarkable coincidence it is Robert Chambers, Mr Patterson's grandfather, said to have been an "under roller" at Consett steelworks.

The corps history describes him as "a stolid, dour character with little sense of humour, but doubtless a useful member in those early days when maybe some opposition needed to be dealt with."

The Army had sent two almost identical images - but one, it transpires, had 13 band members and the other the full, fledgling set.

Though long since promoted to glory, as the Salvationists have it, it seems only right that Mr Chambers should have posthumous acknowledgment on earth.

He's pictured here, a final bow at last.

AUDREY Pagendam's obituary will appear elsewhere. The impact which she and her husband George made upon the social life of the North-East needs nonetheless to be underlined here.

"They were pioneers in every sense of the word. Audrey was quite brilliant at what she did," says Eugene McCoy, who wasn't very far behind.

The Pagendams bought the Black Bull at Moulton, near Richmond, in 1964, making their Good Food Guide bow - the desert's lone oasis - just two years later.

They weren't happy, couldn't cope. "I remember ringing the Good Food Guide and asking to be taken out," Audrey told the column a couple of years back. "A very snooty lady told me that it was they who decided who went in, not me."

After that, customers would arrive clutching the Guide. They were advised not to let Mr Pagendam see them with it.

George died in the year 2000. Though day-to-day running had passed to Sarah, their daughter, Audrey remained a familiar figure - up-front, all-seeing and known personally to hundreds of the Bull's discerning customers.

In April 2006 they'd held a "Last Fling" lunch for her, before new owners took over. The Bull, though, will long bear the brand of Audrey Pagendam.