The mystery is solved - and then some...

DEAR readers, thanks to you, we know just about everything there is to know about the “old codgers”.

Their picture, bought from an internet site based in Wales for a fiver, featured here last week.

This week, we can tell you everything: the precise location of the seat; why one codger has two sticks; the dimensions of the cornstacks, and even, despite this being a black-and-white picture, the colour of the tractor.

Thank-you, one and all.

THE LOCATION

Outside Nutters Buildings on Binchester Moor.

Two terraces – front (12 houses) and back (seven houses) – were built from rough rubble, presumably by a Mr Nutter, shortly after nearby Westerton Colliery started producing coal in 1841. They were substantial, two-up, two-down pit houses without running water, and were demolished in 1968-69.

A little estate called Westerton Close has replaced them. It is now part of Middlestone Moor (which itself runs seamlessly into Spennymoor). “That seat was where the old men used to congregate and sit and talk,” says Enid Dailey, of Spennymoor. There is still a seat there today – only it faces the other way.

THE OLD CODGERS

Tommy Stamp: Worked at Westerton, lit the Nutters’ gaslights and was a bookies’ runner in the days when gambling was illegal. He had eight runners working for him – he paid them half-acrown for every £1 they collected. In turn, he laid bets off at a bookmaker’s in Spennymoor.

“I was only ten or 11 and I used to reckon his bets,” says his grand-daughter, Marlene Stroud, who lives near Mansfield. “The police knew what was going on, because they came drinking with him at night. It was only when a high-up officer was on the patch that there was trouble.”

Harry Blenkinsopp: A Chilton miner, the youngest of the codgers who died a couple of years ago in his eighties.

The child: Could be Richard Gibson or Peter Ebdon, or one caller thought it was a girl.

Pat Smith: A Chilton miner.

Like all the codgers, he lived in Nutters.

Tommy Horn: “He was my grandfather who died in 1968,” emails Gillian Agar.

“He worked at Chilton Colliery but was forced to leave work in 1959 due to a road accident (hence the two sticks).”

Danny Hicks: “My grandfather was the watchman at Westerton woodyard on the site of the pit,” says Enid Dailey of Spennymoor. He died in 1962 aged 80.

THE DATE

Taken by an Evening Despatch photographer, probably in the early Fifties.

“I can remember it as if it was yesterday,” says Marlene. “The camera just came from nowhere and we all got these photographs. I was wanting to get on it, but my grandfather was saying ‘it’s not for little girls, go away home, our Marlene’.”

THE PUB

Opposite Nutters was the Excelsior, known as “the top house”. It was a Camerons pub run by Mr Lishman. “It was an old-fashioned pub, a men’s bar – no women were allowed in,” says Bryan Sheldon, of Spennymoor.

It too was demolished in the late Sixties.

THE FIELD

Belonged to Dorman, Long and Company (which owned Westerton pit from 1929 until nationalisation in 1947), and was farmed by the Cornforth family. In the early Thirties, early aeroplanes involved in something like Alan Cobham’s Air Circus used it as a landing strip.

More conventional was its agricultural use – some years corn, others potatoes.

Arthur Stelling, 91, of Middlestone Moor, but a former Nutters resident, remembers creating the “tattie pie” in the field.

The potatoes were harvested in October and piled along one side, covered with straw and soil. This was the “tattie pie”.

“If I was on foreshift at Chilton pit, I’d finish at dinner time and would go tattie picking on the afternoon,” remembers Arthur, a veteran of Nutters.

“I’d get a pail of potatoes and a shilling.”

The pie was opened by the farmer before the end of the year. Merchants and hawkers would buy the potatoes by weight and take them to market.

THE COLLIERIES

Westerton’s peak was during the First World War, when it employed 822 men and boys.

Binchester colliery was part of the same complex. It started declining in the War drift revived it for a few years. It closed in October 1961.

Because of Westerton’s decline, Nutters also housed Chilton miners. Chilton, which grew phenomenally in the first decade of the 20th Century, employed nearly 1,500 men into the Fifties. It closed on January 15, 1966.

THE CORNSTACKS

This column has had trouble by the forkload with its stooking terminology.

Lawrence “Lol” Daniel, from Well, near Bedale, says the men in the background of the picture are leading corn to the stacks.

When Lol, 81, was a farmer in the East Harsley area of North Yorkshire, cornstacks were built in rectangles eight yards by four yards. They got wider as they went up so that the water could drip out.

Their widest point was called the “easing course” after which they became narrower again like the roof of a house.

Or as Lol explains: “You spring them out to the easing course and then draw them back in.”

Cornstacks were built in pairs with just enough room to get a threshing machine between. Both stacks could then be threshed without the inconvenience of moving the machine.

The dimensions of the stacks meant that each could be threshed in half a day.

So a pair of stacks made up a full day’s work.

THE TRACTOR

“And the tractor,” said Norma Staff, granddaughter of Tommy Stamp, with a hint of triumph in her voice, “was red.”

You can tell from the curve of the grille that it was a Farmall tractor made by the International Harvester company. Farmalls were the world’s most popular tractor in the inter-war years. A million of them were built in the Rock Island, Illinois, factory from 1923 to 1954.

They outshone Ford’s vehicles due to their manoeuvrability and high ground clearance.

In 1949, production of Farmalls began in Doncaster, although this may have been one of the Farmalls sent to Britain by the US Government during the Second World War to bolster the Home Front.

The most famed of all Farmalls were their letter series: models A, B, C, H and M denoting the size of the tractor tailored to match the size of your farm.

It is with great disappointment, therefore, that we report that our readers have failed to identify which letter our tractor is, but Norma is quite correct about the colour.

Originally all Farmalls were battleship grey. In 1936, a corporate decision was taken that all Farmalls should be painted “Farmall Red” – a muddy red as opposed to a vibrant pillar box red – and so they were until International Harvester dropped the Farmall brand in 1973.

Ten-week introduction to all things medieval

A TEN-WEEK introduction to British medieval history, open to all, is to be run in Darlington. The course will be given by Richard Almond, a former tutor at Darlington College and now an independent scholar and writer, ahead of the publication of his latest book about the period 1300 to 1600.

“It will be an introduction to give people a good grasp of the seminal events in the Middle Ages in England,” said Mr Almond, who lives in Richmond, North Yorkshire. One of his specialties is medieval hunting and his book, due out in September, takes a groundbreaking look at women’s involvement. Hunting was hugely important 600 years ago as it provided sport, exercise, preparation and training for war, social contact, food and subsistence, and also pleasure.

It was also a good way to impress the ladies – the first Wags were the wives and girlfriends of the hunters who sat at the top of specially-built towers while their menfolk chased deer in the parkland all around.

But Mr Almond’s contention is that women were also more actively involved.

He said: “They helped their men poach, they helped track down the game that had been wounded by the aristocratic hunters, and at the lower level they went after sparrows and rabbits – everything was fair game in those days. It was hunting for additional protein and raw materials.”

Women are believed to have been particularly adept at falconry.

The king had 550 forests in which he hunted – or sold the hunting rights. Behaviour in these forests was controlled by forest laws which were upheld by forest courts, the highest of which was the forest eyre.

The difficulty in researching women’s role is that this was a male-dominated society.

“Any women involved in a crime like poaching didn’t feature in forest court records because their husband had to appear before the court, face the charges and pay the fines which distorts the historical records,” said Mr Almond.

He has trawled the country’s academic libraries and uncovered works of art that prove women were far more than passive onlookers. There are drawings of them netting small birds, flushing rabbits out of warrens with ferrets and catching ducks with their falcons. “My mission was to prove that women across the social board were involved in hunting because it has been completely ignored by other historians,” said Mr Almond. “This is another example of the way that the voices of women from the medieval age have not been heard.” Mr Almond’s book, Daughters of Artemis, is due to be published by Boydell and Brewer in September. In the meantime, the course in Bondgate Methodist Hall begins on April 30, and will run for ten Thursdays, from 1.30pm to 3.30pm. Places cost £50. Call 01748-824266 for further details.

■ DARLINGTON Centre for Local Studies in the Crown Street Library is holding a Military Family History Day on Saturday, from 10.30am to 3.30pm.

Displays and staff will help people to trace their military ancestors. There will also be a free talk on the subject at 1pm. There will be drop-in help sessions in the morning and people can book one-toone tracing sessions in the afternoon. Call 01325- 349630 for further details.