John North: 'I never realised we were poor until I caught that train to London'

SEVENTY years after he left Witton Park to seek gold on the streets of London, Hughie Agnew returned last Saturday to Co Durham's most charismatic village.

It was the day before his 85th birthday. "They could never have given me a better present," he said.

Once an iron works village, molten and hot headed, Witton Park sank with the Depression, re-armed in the 1960s in the face of county council and Category D, rises attractively once more.

Its piebald past was again recalled at a perfectly pitched reunion at the weekend - Hughie, all Epsom accent, there to fill in the gaps.

"We used to have a bath but now we have a barth," he said, adding - mischievously - that in Surrey the posh folk had a barth and a shower, an' all.

In truth, the Agnews didn't have a proper bath at all, just a tin in front of the fire after Hughie's unemployed father moved his good Catholic family into 16 Albion Street.

There wasn't hot water, either, or electricity or room to swing a catechism. The night soil netty was at the furthest possible distance down the yard, but pretty unavoidable for all that.

There were three to a bed, 300 to a street, 97 per cent on the dole. It was a community held together by kind hearts and camaraderie, by adversity and black treacle.

Hughie was born in Crook, moved to Stanley Hill Top when his dad took the Robin Hood pub, came down to Witton Park - three miles west of Bishop Auckland - after his father suffered shrapnel wounds in the Great War and hardly worked again.

"We filled up with potatoes," recalled Hughie. "There was still a wonderful atmosphere; I never realised we were poor until I caught that train to London."

He was the only boy in the village with a proper football - "a birthday present from my father" - attended the Catholic school, was an altar boy at St Chad's church.

"I can still remember all my Latin sentences," he said and recited them, deo gratia, like it was yesterday.

The Catholic kids and the council school kids didn't have much to do with one another - "They were Protestant, it was a bit like Northern Ireland in that respect" - though there wasn't very much fighting.

Old school or new, they stuck basically to the three Rs, though there was a chemistry - a potent chemistry, indefinable as indescribable - which made Witton Park, and Witton Parkers, unique.

"You just can't imagine," said Hughie Agnew, "the sheer joy of being back home."

THEY'D sent the 14-year-old Hughie to a college - if not a finishing school - in Bishop Auckland, there to learn about life and practical skills, though not necessarily in that order.

Offered an engineering apprenticeship in Balham - a sort of pre-war YTS - he was given a rail pass to Kings Cross, told to look out for a man with a white carnation, handed a Tube ticket and a chitty for the Labour exchange. Apart from the annual Sunday School outing to Redcar, it was the first time in his life he'd been more than three miles from Witton Park.

Streets of gold? "My wages were seventeen shillings, three and three farthings and my digs were 18 shillings," he recalled, precisely. "Every week I was given another four shillings at the labour, part to pay off the rent and the rest to spoil myself rotten.

"It took me years to get used to London, or before the neighbours really spoke; in Witton Park you knew everyone. If you were short, which you always were, you just went next door."

He did well, became machine shop supervisor, lives a short walk from Epsom racecourse, played at Twickenham and at West Ham United - "alongside Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst" - for the Central Band of the Royal British Legion.

He is also an enthusiastic geologist and still attends adult education classes - particularly keen to talk about something called the Butterknowle Fault.

The Butterknowle Fault, said Hughie - if we understand him correctly - centred in pre-historic times on the south Durham village of that name and was effectively responsible for the creation of the Alps.

We've heard Butterknowle blamed for a canny few things, but never before for the Alps.

SO now he was back on the streets of home, affectionately recalling Quadrini's caf and Kosy Kinema, Dr Carney's surgery and Taff Anderson's butchery, which made the best pork pies in the county if not in the whole known world.

There were three bands, six places of worship, 31 pubs.

He was bright, buoyant, anxious to find out more. "I've met people I haven't seen for 70 years," said Hughie. "The only problem is that I've found so many more lying in that cemetery."

THE reunion, lest we forget, was organised by Dale Daniel - the great driving spirit of cheek by jowl nostalgia - and thronged by folk who hadn't just belonged Witton Park, but Witton Park to them.

Some had become high flyers, others kept feet on the ground. None forgot their fetchings up.

In Witton Park, said Dale, houses were flying up. On the Woodhouse Close estate in Bishop Auckland - the ill-loved "reservation" onto which death knell villagers were decanted - they couldn't knock them down quickly enough.

There were recordings of old television programmes at the time of the Category D fight - the late, great John Callaghan sounding remarkably like an excitable Tony Hancock; we'd not realised that - and a North Home Service tape in which Alex Glasgow interviewed Witton Parkers, circa 1964.

"Witton Park isn't just bricks and mortar," said Glasgow, presciently. "It represents a way of life."

"Witton Park was a thriving village when London was a grazing ground for donkeys," said one of his interviewees, with perhaps scant regard for history.

Another admitted that there were still a few black sheep in the village, but that those there were came from Bishop Auckland, anyway.

"The Bishop folk wouldn't lend you anything," he said, "and if they did, they'd go round telling everyone you had nowt."

The screens flashed up newspaper headlines like "Storm of protest at Witton Park," "Villagers don't want to leave" and "Boot town adopts Witton Park".

They sat around like folks at a vicarage garden party, drinking tea and wondering what went right. Hughie bounced around, absorbed. "From now on," he said, "it's a bath."

* Cast in Paradise, Howard Chadwick's historical novel based on Witton Park in Victorian times, is still available from W H Smith's and from the town hall in Bishop Auckland. Details on www.castinparadise.co.uk