Tune army

It may not be said that he is forgotten, for Dykes is on millions of lips every Sunday, but Billy Mollon is convinced that the composer could be better remembered, nonetheless.

Billy worked for Durham City Council's parks department for 34 years from 1971, one of his first jobs regularly to plant flowers on Dykes' grave in St Oswald's churchyard. It stopped in 1974. He blames local government re-organisation, at whose gate many other misfortunes are laid.

He also asked the tourist information office what they had on Dykes. Nothing, they said, not a note. JB Dykes, says Billy, deserves a better hearing. "I'm not a religious person, but I can appreciate talent in writing tunes - and think of the American tourists."

His tunes include those generally accompanying ever-popular hymns like Holy, Holy, Holy, The King of Love My Shepherd Is, We Plough the Fields and Scatter, Praise to the Holiest in the Height and Eternal Father Strong to Save, sung at the funeral of four 20th Century American presidents and at the American naval college every night.

Nearer My God to Thee, said to have been played as the Titanic went down, was one of his, too.

That Durham may not in turn sing his praises is echoed in a 1978 broadcast by John Betjeman, recently reproduced in a book called Sweet Songs of Zion.

Dykes, it's supposed, didn't just write sweet music, he made it saccharin, too.

"Despite the odium of scholars," said Betjeman, "his tunes survive and flourish, presumably because they are good tunes."

Vaughan Williams, who edited the English Hymnal, even jettisoned many of Dykes's "sentimental" tunes to an appendix at the back. The chamber of horrors, he called it.

The odium of scholars? The chamber of horrors? We shall have a scholarly second opinion in a moment.

JOHN Dykes was born in Hull in 1823, his father and grandfather both Church of England parsons.

Bacchus - the god of drink, and sometimes of excess - seemed a curious choice of middle name.

A natural musician, he was assistant organist of his father's church at ten, organist at his grandfather's when he was 12. He studied classics at Cambridge, was co-founder and first president of the university musical society, became curate of Malton, North Yorkshire, in 1847.

Though the cathedral choir had a national reputation under his direction, at St Oswald's he fell out with the Bishop of Durham because of his high church leanings. The bishop would only sanction two curates if Dykes abandoned the coloured stoles, and the incense, of which he was fond. He refused.

He wrote more than 300 hymn tunes, mostly in the music room at St Oswald's vicarage, played piano, organ, violin and horn.

Many tunes are named after northern saints, some after local places like Durham, Glebe Field or Hollingside - the cottage in which at one time he had lived and which is now occupied by the university vice-chancellor.

He is also credited with helping persuade Thomas Harrison, the great organ builder, to move from Rochdale to Durham in 1872.

The strain of running the parish single- handedly - and of forever feuding with the low church Bishop of Durham - is said to have been a contributory factor in his death, at 53. His gravestone stands, alone, in the middle of the old churchyard.

BETJEMAN sympathised. He and Jeremy Dibble, professor of music at Durham University, clearly sing from the same hymn sheet.

"Both words and music are undoubtedly sentimental," Betjeman said of Nearer My God to Thee. "They have even been known to make people cry which means, of course, that they are very, very bad and should be banned."

Prof Dibble's tongue is rather further from his cheek. "I have always been a great fan of John Bacchus Dykes, he was a great harmonist. Most of his hymns are masterly, and I really mean that. Of the 300 or so, 200 were winners.

"They are really, truly inventive, quite complex, written by a real composer not someone churning things out on a conveyor belt. He would have been a fine composer if he hadn't taken to the cloth."

Best and most important of all, adds Prof Dibble - and quotation marks may be assumed - they are a bloody good sing.

Like Billy Mollon, former council gardener, Prof Dibble believes that Durham should dance more greatly to John Dykes' tune. "For a long time he was regarded as persona non grata, the object of Victorian disapproval.

"He has been rather relegated and it's time he was promoted again. I believe that he will have his day."

SUE Pitts, as great good fortune would have it, is both a churchwarden at St Oswald's and the Durham City councillor responsible for the £5.5m culture and leisure portfolio, which includes tourism.

St Oswald's, she says, regards Dykes as a really important person, fought to have his gravestone remain when the rest were cleared, has a large portrait in church and regularly, reverently, sings his tunes.

"I have never heard of odium, only heard his name discussed with respect and affection, but I suppose Betjeman wouldn't have made it up. I can't imagine it suddenly popped into his head."

So why doesn't the tourist information office know the score on the great composer? Why doesn't Durham's "amen" resonate more roundly?

He's the man on millions of lips every Sunday, but the little-known John Bacchus Dykes - composer of more than 300 hymn tunes - probably deserves a much better hearing

"Promoting him more sounds a very good idea, we'd be happy to do it," says Coun Pitts. "There are a few people I could have conversations with; there could be a lot more interest in Dykes."

It's not the column's idea, of course, but a seed planted by Billy Mollon, council gardener.

The memory of John Bacchus Dykes may yet blossom anew.

Messing about in the mud

CHRISTMAS trees barely stripped, Lent begins next Wednesday. Easter Day's March 23 and may never - someone may know - have been earlier.

Penance is preceded, of course, by pancake races - health and safety permitting - and by the Sedgefield Ball Game, one of 20-odd similar rough-andtumbles nationwide which are featured in Uppies and Downies, a new book by Hugh Hornby.

Hornby, a former curator of the National Football Museum in Preston, has got stuck into many of the games. "Few historians are so steeped in football lore," says his publishers, "none is so steeped in mud."

Described as "a blend of ritual, playfulness and competition", Sedgefield's annual clart-on is supposed to date back 750 years, when craftsmen working on the construction of St Edmund's church challenged local farmworkers, tempers subsequently assuaged by ale served from four gallon casks. The first written record is from 1802.

Though it all seems a bit brutal to the caffy-hearted observer, Hornby insists that Sedgefield's game is "hardly the most physical". Heavyweight pile-ups are rare, unlike other festival games.

It generally ends about 4pm when - now as in 1802 - "the players drink deep ere they depart", ■ Uppies and Downies by Hugh Hornby (English Heritage: £16 99, paperback.) AMONG the functions the column was unable to attend last week was a reunion of journalists who'd worked alongside ICI on Teesside.

They recalled the workforce that had fallen from 35,000 in the 1960s to 100 last December, that ICI had held half the shares in Cleveland Potash in Boulby before selling the lot for £1 and that the ICI press office had given a Teesside reporter a box of fudge to mark his retirement.

They'd been fudging, it was explained, for years.

I'M not naturally a ceilidh male, more a case of mass wisteria, but Gilly Beddow's 60th birthday bash last weekend was a splendid occasion. The Trimdon Folk Band, it should be said, added enormously to it.

Gilly's the widow of the Rev Nick Beddow, former chaplain to the Bishop of Durham and vicar of Escomb and Witton Park, the tenth anniversary of whose death was marked the following day with a memorial service on Auckland Castle chapel.

Someone at the party recalled one of the numerous, perennially unsuccessful, diets with which Nick would keep his congregations up to date.

"I've reached overture," he announced one morning at Witton Park, only later enlightening the faithful that he was down to 18-12.

Nick was also chaplain to Bishop Auckland FC - both bishop's chaplain and Bishops' chaplain - and became quite passionate about his football. Concerned that player Dave Laws' wife was ill, Nick asked Steve Newcomb, then the club's chairman, if he might have a pastoral word after the match. Steve introduced the rotund, genial, dog-collared newcomer in the dressing room.

"Lawsy just jumped up in the bath bollock naked, started the most terrible effing and blinding and demanded to know what sort of time it was to have a strippergram. They got on famously after that."

STILL with weighty matters, the closure for refurbishment of Taylor's pie shop in Darlington may be regarded as among the greater disasters recently to befall the dear old town.

"We've seen folk walking round the town who look like they're wasting away to nothing," says Paul Garthwaite, one of the directors.

Though a limited service has resumed, the official re-opening will be next Thursday at 9am, performed by one of the shop's most appreciative and contented customers. After that, I may have to go on a diet, too.

ALL the publicity this week about Mike Keen's remarkable new art deco home at Tindale Crescent - a community just outside Bishop Auckland - again raises the question of just who was Tindale.

The Durham Mining Museum's website not only records that the nearby Woodhouse Close colliery was also known as Tindale Colliery but provides a lugubrious list of 25 deaths - from George Ord, 11, to 64-year-old John Blackett - in its relatively short life.

It still doesn't resolve Tindale's identity, of course - but David Simpson, our resident expert, suggests a belief in some quarters that the nearby River Gaunless was once known as the Tyne.

David disagrees. He thinks - honest - that it was known as the Clyde. Like the happy little Gaunless, this one may have some way yet to run.