Old school

ANYONE see Hear All Sides last Friday? Into the broad-brush brouhaha over the Zurbaran paintings at Auckland Castle, Martyn Wood introduced the subject of the fire-damaged “old” block on the site of the former King James I Grammar School, also in Bishop Auckland.

It’s now known as the Laurel Building after the comic genius who spent about a term and a half there, may not have found it much of a laughing matter and was carted off to Gainford, instead.

Mr Wood didn’t think much of that, either. Why not call it the Mike Amos building, he wrote – “after all, he spent a lot more time there than Stanley Jefferson”.

It’s true, seven years, though it’s possible that Martyn simply means that we’re both ravaged, unsightly and a bit past our best.

The front bit of the old building was the art room, genially presided over by a master called Bob Raymond – inevitably nicknamed Teasy Weasy – who’d commute from Seaham Harbour or somewhere and who instinctively knew an 11-year-old who couldn’t paint a barn door while sitting on the handle.

It probably explains the first form mark of 25 out of 100 – “room for improvement” – though even that far surpassed the woodwork mark.

Woodwork just went against the grain.

The subject was taught on another part of the site by Ed Bibby, nicknamed Isaiah on the dubious anatomical pretext that his eyes were set at different levels.

One year I managed just eight out of one hundred. “The eight,” wrote Isaiah in the end-of-term report, “is for spelling his name correctly on the back of the bit of wood.”

THE original Teasy Weasy Raymond was the first of the celebrity hairdressers, the original cut above.

Born Pierre Raymond Bessone, in Brixton – which did nothing to explain his faux French accent – he worked in his father’s barber shop making false beards and moustaches before opening his first Mayfair salon and launching a Saturday teatime television show.

Soon he was as big a star as those for whom he crimped and craved. In 1956, busty blonde Diana Dors paid him £2,500 – megabucks, back then – to fly across to America to give her a shampoo and set.

He also made headlines by describing the Duchess of Windsor’s hair as “dogmatic” though it was impossible, of course, to know precisely what he meant.

Teasy Weasy was also a racing man, known on the track as Mr P B Raymond, owner of the 1963 Grand National winner Ayala and of Rag Trade, which beat Red Rum into second place in the 1976 National.

He also had an apprentice: some feller called Vidal Sassoon.

THE North-East’s answer to Teasy Weasy was undoubtedly John Hunter, who liked to style himself John Hunter of the North and who styled others with equal flamboyance.

Like Raymond, he’d learned the trade as a lather boy in his father’s back street barber shop – in Shildon, across the back street from where we lived – like Raymond he owned racehorses and enjoyed a flutter.

Though never quite in the same enclosure as P B Raymond, he did once win the Gallowgate Selling Stakes at Newcastle when PC 49, ridden by 18-year-old apprentice Michael Dunlop, romped home at 100-6. “Try not to come last,” John had told him.

He and his wife Mary lived in Darlington where he also established a travel agency, became a councillor, high-profile director and ultimately life president of the football club, but still never forgot his browtings up.

“It’s lovely here, but not as nice as Shildon,” he told the Spanish press after buying a villa in Magaluf.

John died, aged 70, in January 1986. The lovely Mary, to whom he’d been married for 47 years, died in June of the same year. He was utterly delightful: a thoroughbred gentleman.

BACK briefly to the Zurbarans, this week’s Church Times supposing Northern Echo coverage of the story to have been “absolutely first rate” and listing compelling reasons for that conclusion.

Opinions since we broke the story have been sharply divided, of course. “I tried to get them to sell both the paintings and the castle years ago. They’re irrelevant to us,” confided a retired former senior Durham diocesan cleric to whom we spoke the other day.

All that may be unanimous – indisputable, indeed – is another Church Times observation: “This is not a story which shows the Church Commissioners in a particularly attractive light.”

A NEWLY surfaced games area in Bishop Auckland is having to be dug up, it’s reported, after our old friend mares tail pushed in where it wasn’t wanted.

Mares tail is reckoned the world’s oldest weed, and probably the most obdurate. The Latin term is hippuris vulgaris, the botanical term that it’s a bugger.

Never mind weed killer, half a ton of gelignite mightn’t shift a mares tail infestation.

We’d last written of it in 2005 when Billingham Town Football Club copped for a terrace full. “We’ve tried everything but it just laughs at us,” said Tom Donnelly, the chairman.

For poor Billy Town, however, things have got worse. Hartlepool United are taking court action against them over a contested £10,500 debt. If the STL Northern league side loses, they’ll almost certainly be wound up. The case is listed for December 23, two days before Christmas – that may be the real sting in the tale.

THE other problem with mares tail is where – if anywhere – to put the apostrophe. The botanists insist there’s not one; others may know where to put it.

The pesky blighters – the apostrophe, not the weed – have also featured in recent columns’ debate over the term “magistrates’ court”. Just when we’d concluded that was right, Ivor Wade in Darlington offers a dissenting verdict.

“The court doesn’t belong to the magistrates, it belongs to the Crown. Therefore the apostrophe is inappropriate.”

He also takes us back to where we began. “The apostrophe on the wall outside the court building in Bishop Auckland was probably put there by some common irk who didn’t study English language at Bishop Grammar, like what we did.”

IT may not be that Gadfly readers are watching too much television – that’s up to them – but several have rung to air their grievances.

Margery Burton in Shildon is fed up of falling over dropped aitches – “either that or they’re putting them where they don’t belong, no wonder the kids do it” – while former Aycliffe councillor Eric White, now well into his 80s, seeks a bit grumble about the number of times the phrase “You know” is used during daytime viewing.

“I’ve nothing much else to do these days and it’s driving me crackers,” he says.

Warming up like a Fifties’ 14-inch, Eric also recalls the long-past occasion when he called a fellow councillor a pillock. “The Northern Echo had never heard it before and neither had anyone else. It caused quite a stir,” he says.

The word, in truth, has been around since the mid-16th Century – “an offensive term that deliberately insults someone’s intelligence” says the Bloomsbury English Dictionary – though Eric still claims pioneer’s rights.

“If you’re talking about councillors,” he adds, “a lot of them still are.”

NEWS of the week’s most improbable TVehicle comes, however, from The Weakest Link viewer Martin Birtle in Billingham. Last week, he swears, Anne Robinson invited a contestant to name the locomotive which in 1938 set a new world steam record and which had the same name as a duck.

Aylesbury, he replied.

Teasy does it, the column returns next week.