Hedley has his day

TO the dogs, as usual, last week's column puzzled over the three carved canines now on sentry turn at the reborn North Road railway museum - otherwise Head of Steam - in Darlington.

The facetious notion that a railway museum needs guard dogs may, of course, be discounted.

In supposing that they had previously been mounted outside a long-gone coaching inn called The Talbot we were also, it transpires, barking up the wrong tree.

Today's version is better informed if not necessarily repentant. It is a case, nonetheless, of showing your art in Binns window.

The intriguingly human wooden carvings, by celebrated North-East artist Ralph Hedley, hung high outside the mock-Tudor facade of Sydney H Wood's shop in Blackwellgate, where Binns store is now extended.

For more than half a century, however, they had hardly seen the light of day before once again rearing their rather striking heads.

Wood was a photographer and art dealer who died in 1959. Thomas Wood, on the site before him - and presumably his father - was described in a 1901 street directory as "carver, gilder, picture frame maker, dealer in pictures and artists' colourman".

In 1953, however, the council bought the property for demolition, in order to widen the road. Alan Watson, in charge of window displays at Binns, next door, asked if he might have the carvings.

"They were really eye-catching and I planned to use them in all sorts of ways," he recalls. "I put them in a store room ready to dust them down a bit but three weeks later the council asked for their dogs back.

"It was a pity, because they'd have been perfect in the window. Until they appeared in Thursday's paper, I'd never seen them since."

Alan Suddes, retired curator of the former Tubwell Row museum in Darlington and now himself a wood carver, can even remember the carvings outside Sydney Wood's shop. "My first set of watercolour paints came from there, it must have been just before it closed."

Two of the heads were displayed at Tubwell Row, either side of a chimney breast. "They were really nice pieces. He was predominantly an artist but obviously a very talented wood carver, too.

I'm delighted they've again gone to a good home."

THE son of an itinerant joiner, Ralph Hedley was born in 1848 at the Farriers' Arms in Gilling West, near Richmond. Though his parents moved to Newcastle before he was two, he always thought of himself as a Yorkshireman.

By the age of 22 he had his own business as an "artistic and architectural carver", his work still in both St Nicholas' cathedral and St Andrew's church in the city. It's as a painter of daily North-East life, for pictures like Geordie and the Bairn and Picking Raspberries, that he is much more greatly recognised, however.

"What Burns did for the peasantry of Scotland with his pen, Ralph Hedley with his brush and palette did for the Northumberland miner and labouring man," observed the Newcastle Daily Chronicle after his death in 1913.

He is thought to have completed around 900 paintings, 50 of which were displayed in the Royal Academy.

Around 40 are in the Laing Gallery in Newcastle, where his "Cat in a Cottage Window" - Hedley liked his cats - is the best-selling postcard and print.

The Tournament, depicting boys having a piggy-back fight, sold for £44,000 four years ago after being put up for auction by La Sagesse school in Newcastle.

Truant's Log - a sort of Victorian tagging system for errant schoolboys - realised £27,000 at the same sale.

Seeking Sanctuary, a portrait of a boy waving a blood-stained sword outside the Great Door of Durham Cathedral, is reckoned his finest work of all.

It's owned by a great grandson, who lives in Australia, but who returned it to the North-East in 1993 for an exhibition marking the cathedral's 900th anniversary.

Hedley also spent many summers at Runswick Bay, on the North Yorkshire coast - his parents were married in Whitby - encouraging many others to join the artists' colony there.

His painting of the Bilsdale Hunt was used as an advertisement by a whisky company, apparently to Hedley's very great chagrin, and later in a slightly altered form by Bovril.

In the mid-20th Century, however, his work became so unfashionable that many painting were burned or thrown away.

Julian Brown, another great grandson who lived in South Shields until his death three years ago, paid just £50 in 1971 for a painting called The Brickmakers, showing workers at Hutton Rudby, with the Cleveland Hills in the background.

Julian wrapped it in polythene, strapped it to the roof rack of his Mini and drove home from London in a rainstorm.

In 1999 it was valued on The Antiques Roadshow at between £35,000- £40,000.

In November 2004, the Lord Mayor of Newcastle unveiled a commemorative plaque outside the house in Spital Tongues - now part of the Belle Grove pub - where Hedley lived from 1885 until his death.

Only last month, Gateshead-born Sir George Russell, deputy chairman of ITV, gave The Widow - a Hedley painting said to be worth £10,000 - to the Shipley Art Gallery in the town.

Experts predict that his work will appreciate still further. As probably they say after closing time at the North Road railway museum, every dog has his day.

■ With thanks also to Katherine Williamson, of Darlington local studies library.

Resistance was futile

MENTION last week of "Battling"

Bessie Braddock, from 1945-69 the formidable Labour MP for Liverpool Exchange, reminded Stan Wilson in Sowerby, Thirsk, of National Service days in the 1950s.

"If anyone got picked on by the sergeant major, it was always Bessie Braddock they were going to report him to," Stan recalls.

"You wouldn't exactly say she was the Forces' Sweetheart, but she was regarded as the great friend of the underdog."

Battling Bessie, subject of that still-remembered exchange with Winston Churchill - "Tomorrow I shall be sober, but you will still be ugly" - is also said to have given the celebrated libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck his first taste of action, after the Bolton Evening Post claimed she'd "danced a jig on the floor of the House of Commons".

What was so particularly dreadful about that may best be left to the imagination.

Stan Wilson, a former chairman of the college Socialist Society but later a Lib Dem councillor and parliamentary candidate, got to see Bessie when a young teacher in Thornaby - "a pretty rough place in those days".

The MP was due to address a public meeting at Mandale primary school. When she hadn't turned up, Stan attempted a getaway on his Lambretta but was halted by Ald Chris Thornton, the governors' chairman.

"He told me she was on her way and to get myself back.

Discretion being the better part of valour, I did as I was told. Even from a distance, you didn't argue with Bessie Braddock."

CANON John Hester, a Hartlepool-born Anglican priest whose duties once included being chaplain to more than 50 Soho strip clubs, has died. He was 81.

"A striptease performance is a display of beauty sipped, and its bouquet savoured, as one might do with a rare and delightful wine," he once observed.

Educated at West Hartlepool Grammar School, as was, he became fascinated by theatre after being taken to watch Macbeth, with John Gielgud, at Newcastle Theatre Royal.

Noticing that the goblets were empty in the banquet scene, the 14-year-old Hester even wrote to Gielgud pointing out what he perceived to be a mistake.

Gielgud replied that it was theatrical convention.

As rector of Soho from 1973-85 he became friendly with many stars, was godfather to the daughter of Peter Sellers and Britt Ekland and officiated at Sellers' funeral.

He liked to say that he'd been "dogged" by good fortune, a serendipity summarised by a favourite uncle. "If you fell off Hartlepool pier you'd come up with pockets full of fish,"

he'd say. John Hester believed that he had.

THE At Your Service column has several times commented upon the splendour of worship at St James the Great church in Darlington.

The commitment to excellence clearly extends to their social life.

No matter that it was St Mark's Day, and that the next parish was that very evening celebrating its 50th anniversary, I spoke last Friday at their St G e o r g e ' s dinner.

The occasion was magnificent, the meal cooked and funded by parishioners.

There was beef from Pittaway's - locals will understand - carrot and orange soup that actually tasted of both staples, amazing puddings, English ale.

Accompanied on piano, we sang Keep the Homes Fires Burning and The Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.

Father Ian Grieves, the vicar, waved his St George's flag like the last night of the Tiddley-om-pom-Proms.

Around 400 English churches are dedicated to St James the Great, brother of John. Only about 12, one of them up't top at Forest-in-Teesdale, stand in the name of St James the Less.

Though the speaker's suggestion that they essay some sort of ecclesiastical twinning arrangement is unlikely to be adopted - one is geographically high but liturgically low, the other the polar opposite - it was a great evening.

All that may not have been made in England was the gift at the end. Since it was Irish, single malt and 20 years old, that was wholly acceptable, too.

RECENT columns' nostalgia about the Globe Theatre in Stockton will be echoed on May 14 when Globe enthusiast Barry Jones gives a talk on its life and times at Stockton library (2.30pm.) Perhaps inevitably, it'll be called "Stars Fell on Stockton", after the Shadows record written in the orchestra pit.

Barry's taking along some of his numerous Globe mementoes. "It won't just be me talking; there'll be a chance for everyone else to reminisce," he says.

The theatre, meanwhile, still stands semi-derelict. "It's absolutely disgusting the way the council has allowed it to happen,"

says Barry.

"Other historic theatres have had mega-bucks thrown at them. Ours has just been abandoned."

and finally, it wouldn't do to name the North-East school where, on the nomination of the childcare department, a year ten girl recently won the "student of the month" award for effort and achievement.

At the time they'd no idea where all that effort was leading. They do now - she's pregnant by a lad in year nine.

Achievement.