Shanks for the memory

No bright red van. No GPO bike.

Alone and on crutches, Matt Bendelow walked the walk. The walk was nine miles.

The Gadfly column told his truly extraordinary story last year.

Last week the Grey Panthers, a retired men’s walking group from Teesside, set out to follow in his footsteps.

Four days later, the lady of this house and I in turn went on the track of the Panthers, at almost every stride marvelling at Matt Bendelow, at why someone doesn’t make a film and at how he never got a medal.

He was a Shildon lad, which may explain quite a lot. Married in 1914 when just 17 years old, he went off to war a few days later with the Green Howards.

Seriously wounded, he lost a leg above the knee, had muscles in his left arms removed but returned, nonetheless, to the pit.

When the miners went on strike, he got a job as village postman at Bowes, a stone-built village alongside the A66 in that area where County Durham, Cumbria and Yorkshire periodically wonder who should have what.

He remained for almost 40 years, manned the little telephone exchange – Bowes 1 – at night, would be up at 6am to meet the mail train and then set off for the hills. Matt delivered.

A father of five, he was also a prizewinning rabbit breeder, a successful billiards player, saddler, shoemaker, swimmer, bone setter, chimney sweep, castle custodian, cartoonist, poet, accomplished cook, St John Ambulance man and the first in Bowes to volunteer for the Home Guard.

The Gadfly column had also talked to Lillie Clowes, his 85-year-old daughter, in Richmond. “I don’t think he had any regrets, except perhaps that he couldn’t dance,” she said.

“I think he’d have been a very good dancer, but for what happened.”

BOWES post office is gone now, though there’s still a pub, a small and improbable workmen’s club – “an 18th Century gem,”

says the 2010 Good Beer Guide – and the 17th Century Hutchinson’s primary school.

The school boasts a splendid endwall mural – the white rose may need the forbearance of Durham County Council, in whose bailiwick the building now lies – and a “secret garden”, prominently and contradictorily proclaimed.

The local history group will this very evening enjoy a talk on the Waifs and Strays of Bowes – it is almost as if they’d heard we were coming – whilst the notice next to that one advertises the services of an enthusiastic mole catcher.

Whether it is the moles or their nemesis who are enthusiastic is not entirely clear, though we must presume the latter.

Postman Matt’s walk would have taken him down the hill to the hamlet of Gilmonby, where a sign on a tree urges visitors not to feed the bears. The total absence of those poor creatures suggests that they have, indeed, died through lack of nourishment.

A bit further on, the road divides – left to The Rigg, right to Sleightholme, though Sleightholme may be inconsequential indeed. Beyond, back of beyond, are Scargill High Moor and Faggergill Moor.

Matt would have turned eastwards, past Howlugill Farm, past Plover Hall, past the mole hills – the critters seem to have been working enthusiastically – and finally down the pitted track to Pry Rigg, near which a colourful Citroen 2cv lies abandoned, eviscerated.

At White Close Hill Farm there’s a herd of belted Galloways – the lady thought the effect like that of a cummerbund.

They’re bred for Rules, said to be London’s oldest restaurant and owned by John Mayhew, who also has the Lartington estate on the other side of Barnard Castle.

At Pry Rigg – now occupied, it’s said, by the former Barney bookseller Michael Fryer, who also broadcasts on Teesdale radio – the postman would have turned around, perhaps admired the distant views of the ruins of Bowes Castle, maybe been given a cup of tea. He still wasn’t halfway round.

“When the snow drifts got really bad, he’d throw his crutches across the other side and struggle across after them,” Mrs Clowes had recalled.

“I don’t think that we ever thought of him only having one leg, or worried that he mightn’t make it back. He just always did. He got on with it.”

BACK at Gilmonby, wary of bears, Matt would have turned westwards, almost parallel with the trunk road, along to West Gates, to Lady Myres, West Charity and East Mellwaters.

It must be getting on two miles each way.

These days there are signs about premises protected with smart water, quad bikes, an underpass beneath the A66 through which the farmer gets his cattle from A to Beast.

These days, too, there’s the Pennine Way which crosses the gushing River Greta by a new bridge and ambles back to Bowes.

We complete the walk, gently, in about three-and-half hours and then head, by car, for lunch in the reopened Bowes Moor Hotel. Much more of that in the Eating Owt column on Tuesday.

Matt Bendelow would have had all sorts of other things to do, no postman’s knocking-off at all.

BHE Grey Panthers are a group of half-a-dozen friends in their 60s and 70s, and thus not to be confused with an American body of the same name who variously are described as “ageing insurrectionists”

and “an intergenerational advocacy and educational organisation dedicated to achieving economic and social justice and peace”.

The North-East panthers are dedicated to the countryside and to the pleasures of a good day’s walking, their website – thegreypanthers.com – offering details and photographs of more than 250 walks in the North- East and Yorkshire undertaken in the past few years.

“I’m passionate about the countryside and it’s unbeatable up here,”

says Edward Nicholl, a retired ICI man from Stockton. “There are footpaths which date back centuries and they’re all there for people to use.”

He’s also much involved with the Friends of the Green Howards Museum, Richmond-based – Matt Bendelow, of course, was a Green Howard – and has been working with David Charlesworth, who runs a wonderful website on Teesdale postal history.

Their trek in Matt’s memory – “a nice figure-of-eight walk” – was plotted after they, too, had visited Mrs Clowes. “She not only remembered every single farm but the order in which he visited them. All I had to do was write them down,” says Edward.

The Panthers added a couple of bits where Matt would certainly never have ventured and did it last Wednesday.

“We usually only decide on a route a day or two in advance,” says Edward.

“The BBC said the day was going to be brilliant; it was bloody awful, but we still had a good walk.

“We’re fit and active and you don’t just have to sit and fret when you retire.

The next stage is coffin-dodging, and we don’t fancy that just yet.”

Particularly, he’s anxious that people follow the mail trail of postman Matt. “Just thinking about it is amazing. He must be the most incredible man of whom I’ve ever heard.”

OLD technology, but still heading in the same direction, Ian Andrew’s midweek walking group has produced a booklet of a dozen of its perambulations around Co Durham.

Keeping right on to the end of the road, they seem chiefly to have been fortified by the East Knitsley farm shop and cafe, near Lanchester.

The booklet, with helpful maps, is £3 with all proceeds going towards the Willowburn Hospice, in Lanchester.

Ian’s at 15 Watling Way, Lanchester, County Durham DH7 0HN.

STILL on foot – this may be one of the most pedestrian columns in history – the North-East’s two most senior Methodists set out on Palm Sunday to walk the Wear from mouth to source.

Ruth Gee is chairwoman of the Darlington district, embracing Teesside, Durham and the North Yorkshire dales. Leo Osborn is chairman of the Newcastle district, including Wearside and the rest of County Durham.

They leave Sunderland on Sunday morning, aiming for the county cricket ground at Chester-le-Street, finally arriving at the wonderful High House chapel in Ireshopeburn for a 2pm service on Good Friday and a short walk (what else?) of witness to Wearhead.

It’s 71 miles. Bad back notwithstanding, Leo’s confident. “John Wesley would have done it on horseback, but I never was much good with horses,” he says. The At Your Service column will catch up some time, too.

…and finally, a note that Shanks’ Pony is simply a reference to the lower part of the leg, the term believed to originate in 18th Century Scotland.

In America it became Shanks’ Mare, as witnessed in a less-than-prescient report in the Dubuque Daily Herald of 1869.

“A public exhibition of the velocipede was given on the streets last night by Mr Clark, who managed the vehicle with considerable skill. They are a toy, and it will never come into general use in comparison with Shanks Mare.”

Mare and merrier, the column returns next week. There may even be mention of hum-dum-dum.