Camp Meetings….

Mike had recalled the marvellous Bill Gypp, and how he had sold his accordion to Edwin Coats. Neville Kirby (Edwin’s nephew) sent in this old photo of Cockfield camp meting.

For those who are not from Cockfield; the camp meeting wasn’t a congregation of ‘gay’ people, but a Methodist service, held once a year on Cockfield Fell!

Edwin, who died last year, had indeed bought the late Billy Gypp’s accordion to save it from being repossessed.

By 1948, when the picture was taken, he’d bought a new one – funded by his decision to give up smoking.

Billy’s accordion was used in part-exchange.

I remember going to the camp meetings as a child; they were great. We had to go to Sunday school anyway, so it was always a treat for us to go ‘round the fell’. To be honest, we didn’t so much join in with the choral activities and worship, but would hide in the next ‘bomb hole’ (* See below) and throw sheep droppings at the minister and congregation!

I know, I know, I’ll never go to heaven!

I can still see Tommy Metcalf (the then school care-taker) running over the top of the bomb hole shouting “Ya little buggers, I’ll kick ya bloody arses!”

‘Some religious man’ he was!!

I think the meetings died out in the early seventies, but you can still listen to a lot of the music from those days by standing outside the CO-OP!

* When we were kids, playing on the fell, was a matter of course. As little kids, we had homemade wooden guns, (broom shanks) and would play ‘Japs and English’ amongst the bracken, ‘Bomb Holes’ and pigeon crees, on the top fell.

I can still remember the day I came home, filthy, and scratched to bits after such a day.

“What have you been up to?” asks my mum.

“Playing in the bomb holes on the fell” say I.

“Bomb holes! What do you mean by bomb holes?” says the old girl.

“You know Ma,” I said, “It’s where the Germans bombed the fell in the 2nd world war”.

“They’re not all bomb holes” she says, “most of them are ‘pit falls’ from where the Bell Pits used to be. They just fell in on themselves.

‘PIT FALLS’!

I was devastated. Many a young couple have done some serious courting in them holes, and its just not so romantic thinking of them as pit falls!

At least I can console myself that the ones I played in, were indeed, the original BOMB HOLES!

Apparently a German bomber was being pursued by a couple of our RAF lads, during WWII, and in their desperate attempt to get away, they ‘Dumpt’ their bombs. The bombs landed somewhere near the top fell, and blew out windows, but happily, no one was injured, although Jean Colgrove, who was just a baby at the time, sleeping in the front room of a house, was covered in soot!

Barbi Close was telling me that her dad, Bob, who was about fifteen at the time, had been given a piece of shrapnel off his boss in Staindrop.

When he was on his way home (And with not a clue what had just happened) he met his father, and with marked excitement shouted, “Look at this dad, it’s shrapnel!”

“SHRAPNEL? Shrapnel!, don’t talk to me about shrapnel” says his dad.

“The bloody house IS FULL of it!”