John North: Lyke for Lyke

We woefully reported as much on June 9, regretted that Britain's most eccentric long distance walking outfit was finally being laid to rest and added that a last wake - always a wake - would be held on Saturday October 1, 50 years to the day since the Lyke Wake Walk began.

There can be no doubt about it. It is as dead, as Mr Dickens observed, as a doornail.

On the same night, however, and close to the walk's opposite extreme, another wake will be held - to celebrate the birth of the New Lyke Wake Club.

The Lyke Wake Club is dead, long live the New Lyke Wake Club - that's if they haven't done one another a mortal mischief first.

It is all rather bizarre, though by no means as improbable as the Lyke Wake Walk itself.

Stretching the 40 moorland miles between Osmotherley, near Northallerton, and Ravenscar on the North Yorkshire coast, it began on October 1, 1955, after moors farmer Bill Cowley had issued a challenge in the Dalesman magazine.

Mr Cowley, who died in 1994, began the club soon afterwards. It had a coffin motif, issued black edged cards to all who completed a crossing and conferred "degrees" like Dirger, Master of Misery and Doctor of Dolefulness according to the number of successful attempts.

The column is itself a Master of Misery, though that may come as little surprise.

By the 1970s, up to 15,000 walkers annually completed the oft-arduous route, a total - it's reckoned - of around 160,000 crossings. Then other long distance walks took a foothold, the moors became eroded, annual numbers fell to below 500 and the club - which never had a constitution or membership list - decided on the last rites.

That's when the new club began knocking, Lyke for Lyke, on the oak lid. It has a coffin motif, issues black edged cards and has degrees like Doctor of Dolefulness...

Their October 1 wake will be at the Golden Lion in Northallerton, a traditional Lyke Wake venue; the original club's do is at the Ravenscar Hotel, another long time favourite.

"There was a lot of unpleasantness at the wake which decided to close the club, but we want to be positive," says new club secretary Gerry Orchard - who signs letters "Yours in traditional gloom and despondency" and has "tiredlegs" as part of his e-mail address.

They also claim to follow closely in Bill Cowley's footsteps, to have "great respect" for him and his widow and to have the blessing of the old club's "Council of Elders". Unlike Bill Cowley, they also have the advantage of new technology.

The founder's filing system, says the new club, consisted of a tea chest into which he threw letters after he'd replied to them. "When the tea chest was full, Bill made a bonfire of the contents and started again."

Gerry Orchard says they were "very disturbed" when the old club closed, but had no say in the matter. "The clash of wake dates is sad, but that's the golden jubilee date. Unfortunately, the old club secretary seems to have blanked us."

Gerry, who lives in York and is an industrial chemist in Northallerton, has completed the walk more than 130 times - "I really must count them up" - and admits some "blistering" failures, chiefly in midwinter.

We took a short evening walk with him on sunlit Strensall Common, near York, the venue shared by a couple of panting huskies, before adjourning for a gentle hour in the pub with Gerry and his partner, fellow outdoor enthusiast Julie Bushell.

His first crossing was as a schoolboy, after someone else dropped out. "In those days I'd have caught the bus across if there'd been one. It was a terrific battle but I made it and I was hooked.

"The walk has history, tradition and some wonderful people. I suppose it's become an addiction, but sometimes you can have a healthy addiction."

Free membership is open to all who've completed the walk, no matter when; already around 300 have joined. "If that's lack of interest, I'd hate to see us when we're busy," says Julie.

As a fund raiser, the new club is also selling for £20 limited edition car stickers of a skeleton carrying a coffin. "We intend to continue the old traditions and maybe invent a few of our own," says Gerry.

Paul Sherwood, secretary of the original Lyke Wake Club, says that the decision to close was taken democratically. "The new club doesn't have our blessing. The way in which some people treated Bill Cowley's widow was extremely offensive."

The Lyke Wake Company Ltd will continue. "If the new club starts infringing our copyrights," says Paul, "we shall jump on them."

The simultaneous wakes go ahead as planned. Whose funeral is it, anyway?

* Details of the Lyke Wake Club and its "thoroughly morbid artefacts" can be had from Gerry Orchard, 4 Cavendish Grove, Hull Road, York YO10 3ND or at www.lykewake.org

IN the theatrical equivalent of Hartlepool Reserves playing Real Madrid, the St Augustine's Repertory Society plays Hamlet next week. They're confident of victory.

"It's the most complex and challenging play ever written in the English language. We agonised for months and months before doing it," admits Jo Potter, producer of the church hall Hamlet. "I saw their jaws drop when they announced it, especially those who would have to play the principal roles."

Now, as the Prince of Denmark might have supposed, they're mad for it...

The amateur dramatists, conveniently abbreviated to STARS, are based at the Roman Catholic church just off Darlington town centre. Last year they staged A Midsummer Night's Dream; this June they're sleeping a little more fitfully.

"I've had dreams about forgetting the lines," says 19-year-old Peter McGovern, who plays Hamlet - his first ever non-musical role - before studying at the Guildhall in London in the autumn. "You don't often get the chance to do Shakespeare, much less Hamlet. I just couldn't refuse the challenge."

As all Hamlets must, he has also posed with Yorick's skull for publicity pictures - this time in Holy Trinity churchyard.

Opposite him as Ophelia is Rachael Deverell, 18, whose stage debut was as a seven-year-old in The Roman Invasion of Ramsbottom.

"I was the only Year 3 who had a line," she recalls. "I practised it for weeks and in every possible voice."

The two principals hadn't previously met. "I'd heard he was quite good," she says.

Peter claims to have made his acting debut in a Darlington Operatic Society production of Oliver - "the youngest and smallest of Fagin's orphans" - though there are those at St Augustine's who still recall him as a reception class drummer boy in the school nativity play.

"There was no doubt about it," says one of the mums, "a star was obviously born."

Jo Potter also takes the parts of the "player king" and the ghost. "I try to make what little I have go a long way," he says.

Rachael, who hopes to go to RADA after university - "I don't care how long it takes, I'm going to do it" - says that Jo Potter's enthusiasm has made it much easier.

"Shakespeare needs a director with passion and he certainly has it. I'm lucky because I just need to read the lines a few times and pick them up. It's quite easy to learn Shakespeare because it's poetic and it's obvious when you go wrong because it falls out of sync."

Peter admits the part is difficult. "Obviously he's mad but sometimes he's just pretending to be mad and others it's hard to tell which. My biggest fear is that people will lose interest because of the length of it, not because of my performance. I hope we can give it something a bit extra."

Slightly abridged, it will be performed in 1970s costume on a stage the company has built itself.

The play being the thing, the Prince of Denmark insists he's looking forward to it. "In a sense it doesn't matter whether it's the Old Vic or St Augustine's parish centre; after Hamlet, everything else is easy."

l The STARS' production of Hamlet runs from Wednesday, July 6, to Saturday, July 9, at the parish centre in Larchfield Street, Darlington, starting at 7.15pm. Tickets, priced £4 (£3 concessions) are available from Alice Potter (01325 483277), Christine McKeown (01325 266501) or Martin McLean (01325 465275).

IN February 2003, the column told how councillor, raconteur and man about Darlington Roderick Burtt had been engaged to the no less delightful Judith Kent since 1969.

"If we got married, I'd have to re-write all my speeches," said Rod.

Last May, nearly 35 years after his mid-summer's day proposal, we reported that finally they had tied the knot, in a quiet ceremony at St Augustine's Roman Catholic church.

"If I'd known a day could be so happy, I'd have got married more often," said Rod, who lived in Hurworth and was a former national president of Round Table.

It was, he conceded, just a "mostly happy" story. He had cancer and had been given only a few months to live.

Encouraged and enthused by Judith, he battled incredibly. We had a drink, a good drink, a couple of months ago - Rod inevitably cheerful, remarkably resilient, characteristically thinking first of others.

He died at the weekend, St Augustine's likely to be altogether more thronged for the bitter-sweet funeral than for that blissful wedding.

Shortly before his passing, they'd been on an Arctic cruise, Rod particularly keen to see the Northern Lights but warned that if anything happened - as, euphemistically, they say - it could cost a fortune to get him home again.

They carried on, regardless.

I don't even know if it's wholly true, but it sings of credibility and of Roderick and Judith. He was a truly lovely man and they the perfect couple.

It just took a little while to formalise it.

LAST week's column on the Big Pit museum at Blaenavon, south Wales, mentioned that it was the second time we'd been underground - the first at Horden in the 1970s with a motley crew from Co Durham's adopted ship who found things so difficult (shall we say) that several regurgitated the previous night's grog.

Bill Groves, working on the coal face that day, recalls - good, friendly Durham pitman that he was - offering the sailors a "chow of baccy" as well. Needless to say, adds Bill, they weren't very impressed by that, either.

IN the "Answers to Correspondents" column in the Daily Mail last week, someone sought information on "a felon nicknamed Rubberbones because he repeatedly escaped from prison."

This appears to be a reference to the late Ronnie Heslop, who in 1961 became the first man to escape from Durham jail - painstakingly removing a grille with a teaspoon and then squeezing through it.

Generally a gentle soul, Ronnie - who came from Page Bank, near Spennymoor -was never more angry than when John McVicar, a villain from a different league entirely, claimed autobiographically that it was he who'd been first over the Durham wall.

None, so far, has responded to the Mail's request. It may be time to put some flesh on the Rubberbones.

...and finally, the column on June 9 noted that celebrated Irish folk singer Fergal Flaherty would be playing a charity gig at the Hole in the Wall in Darlington the following Wednesday. We'd been misinformed, it was the Thursday - a potential problem for the three elderly Flaherty fans from Redcar who travelled specially to help fill the Hole the night previously. Somewhat fortuitously, Fergal had also arrived a day early and was having a drink in the bar. "They had him all to themselves and were delighted," reports pub landlord Phil James. Anything to oblige.