Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

A GANDY dancer, a picturesque occupation always likely to have beaten the panel on What's My Line, is (perhaps was) a track worker on the American railways.

Until a telephone call from Mr Robert Harbron, it was a colourful expression hitherto unheard. Mr Harbron helps run the Norton-on-Tees Heritage Group; it is necessary to follow his train of thought.

Near Norton, on the main line from Newcastle to Middlesbrough, stands a horseshoe-shaped bridge, built in 1834, and now known by locals as the Gandy Bridge.

It's a survivor. During the last war, says Mr Harbron, a 500lb bomb fell 30 feet away, killing several people but leaving the bridge almost unscathed. "In my time it was the Cuckoo Bridge, because you always heard the first cuckoos of the year from the field nearby."

The Oxford English Dictionary keeps step with many tunes, but not that one. "Origin uncertain," it says of gandy dancer, without so much as explaining what a gandy might be.

Sundry websites suggest that the gandy might have been a tool with which the maintenance men "tamped down" the ballast; others reckon that "gandy" is a corruption of "gander", imitating the trackmen's heads as they worked.

In this part of the world, says John Briggs, a gandy dancer was the trackman's trolley worked by depressing a large handle.

Robert Harbron believes that the term - perhaps originally "dandy" bridge, as in dandy cart - might have sailed the Atlantic with North-East navvies in the 1880s and (unlike the men, of course) have been corrupted during the crossing.

He'd love other explanations. Yankee doodle gandy, or what?

AFTER gandy dancers, what of Sand Dancers? How came the canny folk of South Shields by so littoral a translation?

Its origin is thought to lie in the 1930s, possibly because the "Tenters" - people who spent almost all year camped on the beach - held regular dances there.

Another theory ties the name Sand Dancers to the influx of Arab merchant navy men who came to live in the South Tyneside town before the war.

Yet more fascinating - and thus, more improbable - is a link to Wilson, Keppell and Betty, familiar theatrical sand dancers until around 1960.

"They were decrepit, extremely thin old men who performed a spoof sand dance wearing what appeared to be short night shirts with tea towel head dresses," says a website account.

When they performed in Berlin, Goebbels protested that so much exposed calf could corrupt Nazi youth.

Wilson and Keppell seemed to shuffle on for ever. There were three different "Bettys", however - one said to come from South Shields.

The Shields Gazette had a dig around Sand Dancers a while back, concluding that few found it offensive and that none conclusively could explain it.

"There seem to be as many theories as there are grains of sand," their lass concluded - and so the dance of time goes on.

SHIFTING sands (cont.): A picture in last Wednesday's paper - unfortunately he doesn't say which picture - reminded Ernest Brown of the last verse of a "poem" familiar when he served "all those years ago" in Egypt and the Western Desert.

The key words are "the camel's inscrutable smile", against which the Internet offers 136 possibilities ranging from "Today's top poems" through "The sexual life of the camel" to "Gay guide to Giza and the pyramids".

The last verse is:

But the Sphinx's posterior passage

Was blocked by the sands of the Nile,

Which accounts for the hump on the camel

And the Sphinx's inscrutable smile.

The first verse has been forwarded, in plain brown envelope, to Mr Brown. They probably never had these problems in South Shields.

PREPARING on Sunday for a spot of gandy dancing - rambling County Durham's old railways, anyway - we had cause to consult the prolific Charlie Emmett's 1986 book Walking Northern Railways and stand, not for the first time, in his debt.

Describing the former stretch from Barnard Castle to Kirkby Stephen, Charlie - Darlington lad, pushing 80, indefatigable - talks of "green fields wick with wildlife".

Many doubt the propriety of the word "wick" in this context - as in "wick wi' blackclocks", maybe - supposing it only to be something to do with candles and with Cockney rhyming slang. ("Cue old man Steptoe: "You get on me Hampton...")

Charlie, and subsequently the Oxford English, confirms its Northern roots. "Wick" is simply a variation of "quick", as in quick and the dead and means "alive" or "lively". Whether with wildlife or blackclocks is largely immaterial.

MORE Milky Bar Kid's stuff. After the recent piece on Sedgefield lad Gavin Weightman, the "kid" ten years ago, we have heard from John Cornelius, another who thought he just couldn't go wrong as the star of the television commercial.

John still pops up in 101 Best Adverts and After They Were Famous but at 36, accepts that there may be no more star roles. Gavin, he thinks, was the last of the line: "They stopped because people claimed it was racist."

SEVERAL readers have been in touch eagerly to commend BBC Radio 7, one of the new digital radio stations, chiefly because of the re-runs of old favourites like Round the Horne and Journey Into Space. Space restrictions of our own mean there'll have to be more of that next week.

...so finally, Lesley Tate - church council secretary at St Mary Magdalene, Trimdon Village - sends details of the flower festival from July 16-18. More of that nearer the time.

There's also an exhibition by local craftspeople - "as diverse as woodwork, artwork, Faberge-type eggs, tea bag folding, card making and decoupage," says Lesley.

Tea bag folding? How, or come to that why, do you fold a tea bag? When folded what next and does the flavour still flood through?

Is its genius, as the great Thomas Alva Edison almost observed, one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perforation?

Perhaps it's how folk spend the long winter evenings in Tony Blair's constituency. If we can keep the pot boiling, more of this - perhaps even a tea dance - next time.

Published: 26/05/2004