John North: Ellington in the aisles

The CD was recorded in Durham Cathedral in 1990 and 1993, Ellington's sacred music within a holy communion service.

Since the Duke died in 1974, however, the rendition was by the Stan Tracey Orchestra, led by the celebrated jazz pianist and formed specially for the occasion.

The catalyst in the cloisters was Canon Bill Hall, friend of the famous and chaplain to the arts and recreation in the North-East since 1968. Canon Hall's work, say the CD sleeve notes, included "a ministry to the region's cabaret clubs".

Since there couldn't be a charge for a church service, it took Canon Hall eight years to raise funds for the project.

The Very Rev John Arnold, then Durham's Dean, doubted if in the 900 years of Cathedral music-making there'd been a night like that one: the Guardian critic said that the congregation had had "a rare and precious opportunity to witness the power of Ellington's inspiration".

Canon Hall, former curate of Thornaby and Vicar of Grindon, Sunderland, is still senior arts and recreation chaplain. Business before pleasure, he was at an all-day meeting when we rang.

FOREVER enmeshed on the Internet is an account of Duke Ellington's memorial service - "a solemn occasion, perhaps too much so" - by broadcaster and musician Steve Race. It was at St Martin-in-the-Fields; they played him out in style, nonetheless.

Steve Race, long time host of My Music, also wrote in 1988 a wonderfully moving book about his grandfather, Joseph Race, a Weardale lead miner who married Hannah Dawson from St John's Chapel and became a Methodist minister and a missionary in China.

In mid-19th century Weardale, there were 34 lead mines and probably as many chapels. In China, there were 450 million heathen and 14 Methodist missionaries.

Joseph had set sail in 1873, accompanied by the "vast collection of trunks without which no Victorian gentleman could contemplate a voyage" and by a homeopathic chest subscribed by the folk of the dale.

Though his impact may have been more medical than spiritual, he himself died from typhoid seven years later - aged 32 - without having returned to England.

Steve continued to nurture his roots, quoted the Upper Weardale Music Festival £245 plus VAT plus expenses to judge a section - in 1979 - before realising his mistake and doing it for expenses only.

The preface to his 1988 book described Weardale as "painfully lovely" but "dying from a potent mixture of neglect and exploitation".

He is now 83, retired, lives in Lord Attlee's old house in Buckinghamshire but, sadly, declines to discuss these matters further.

THOSE of a certain age - that is to say, a fairly old age - may even recall the young Steve Race as pianist and presenter on a children's programme called Whirligig, also featuring Mr Turnip, Hank the Cowboy, Silver King and Humphrey Lestocq (who, alone of those four, was human).

Rolf Harris and Julian Bream made their television debuts there, too.

First broadcast in November 1950, Whirligig went out at 5pm on Saturdays, kids crowded round a 14 inch screen. It also included Francis Coudrillm, the voice of the puppet Hank, described in Race's autobiography as "just about the worst ventriloquist in the history of that introverted art".

If Francis's lips were still, he added, it could only have been because he was playing a four-bar introduction to one of Hank's songs.

Steve's fondest memory, however, is of the time that Whirligig ran a competition inviting budding young composers to write a tune for the recorder.

Six hundred entered, winners gleefully announced. The following day, however, a telegram arrived at Lime Grove: "Second prize winner not Mary Jane Biddles of Yorkshire but Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart of Salzburg."

The runner-up proved to be an early Mozart minuet. Scandalised, then as now, the BBC tried to deflect the discordant press, refusing to disclose the young lady's identity.

The Sunday Express ran a front page story, nonetheless. "BBC gives Mozart second prize."

ANOTHER of Steve Race's ancestors was a founder, around 1820, of the Weardale Society for the Prevention and Prosecution of Felons, its lock-up - rather congenially - on the first floor of the Kings Arms in St John's Chapel.

When a prisoner escaped, his handcuffs were hung outside the pub for more than a century until Steve restored and returned them to the little museum at Ireshopeburn.

We mention this particularly because Coundon's "Felons" Society marks its 150th anniversary next month, an occasion upon which the column has been invited to pronounce the toast to the sesquicentennial celebration.

The Echo's south-west Durham edition has recently been full of felony, and distressing worse, in those parts. It is time, perhaps, for them to return to active duty.

A church with the warmest of welcomes

FERRYHILL this evening, the night of the town council, and thus we will be unable to attend the preview of the new visitor centre at the 12th century St Hilda's church on Hartlepool Headland.

Since it is a lovely church, since Old Hartlepool is among the region's little known joys and since Tuesday was abundantly the first day of Spring, we took a pre-preview, instead.

Inevitably they hadn't finished, an all right on the night job, but in November St Hilda's came third in a competition to find the nation's most visitor-friendly church - St Helen's Auckland was also on the shortlist - and now aims, as it were, to build on that reputation.

The church was built, they suppose, around 1190 - so ancient that the slot for parish magazine subscriptions is marked "3d". It's 45p now.

The new Vicar, the appropriately named Jonathan Goode, arrives next month.

We walked past the battery where, in 1914, fell the first soldier to die on British soil in the Great War, along the town wall built to dissuade the Scots, down streets whose pattern was laid out in 1090 and hasn't changed since.

We walked past the Ship, the Quaysider and the Cosmopolitan, but had one in the Harbour of Refuge where a monkey hangs shamelessly behind the bar.

The views were panoramic, the sea sparkling. It was as if hibernation had officially ended on the stroke of noon and Hartlepool, exultant though not clout casting, had turned out in numbers to greet the new beginning.

More on Ferryhill's little do, and on the real reason for going, next week; more from St Hilda's before the daffs have disappeared.

THE Hartlepool Mail, which St Hilda preserve, reported the birthday of local lad Frank Dickinson, a 20-fags-a-day man who likes a couple of pints in the Mill House or the Marine, enjoys nothing better than a big plate of fish and chips (with scrappins) and, when all that allows, has a few hands of bridge with his pals. He was 105.

THE Sunday Times reports this week's literary festival in Blaenavon, south Wales, Britain's first purpose-made "booktown" where once half the shops were boarded.

Inspired by an American book dealer called James Hanna, business is booming in the former coal and steel town. Ten bookshops opened simultaneously last June, another followed in January, six more are planned before the summer.

It's revived the local economy so remarkably that Mr Hanna plans something similar in an English town though, says the Sunday Times, he declines to be drawn on which one.

The column knows how the story is going to end, though it is one of those rare occasions where we may not be an open book. Suffice that it's in the North-East, is every bit as improbable and, for once, it isn't Hartlepool.