Going to town on a new image

The parish council, he says, has commissioned a flag bearing the emblem of Chilton Town Council - and that's only half the story.

Without announcement, the parish council last month formally declared itself to be a town council and the former pit village - there's a pub, a workingmen's club, a few shops and a recreation ground - thus to be a town.

Though Chilton New Town rings a little hollow, the urban space men are entirely within their rights, it transpires. Any dot on the map parish can unilaterally elevate itself to town status, though becoming a city - as Middlesbrough, among others, can testify - is an altogether more complex rigmarole. The council has yet to decide, however - this bit's true as well - whether the head lad will remain chairman or if Chilton will soon have its first mayor.

Paul Gray, now town clerk, insists that Chilton is expanding, with a population of nearly 4,000. "It's no longer a village as such. We are trying to project the way forward for when work on the bypass starts next year, trying to up the ante a bit.

"Turning from a village into a town gives us a bit more importance, though I suppose people will still call it Chilton village."

There was also a problem, he adds, because callers - "mainly in the south" - kept asking to which church the parish belonged.

Delusions of grandeur? "Far from it. We are an ex-mining village with all the usual problems, but Chilton has had a bad press for a long time and this is an attempt to get some positive comment. The decision was unanimous."

Tom Toward, secretary of the Durham County Town and Parish Councils Association and town clerk at Shildon - Shildon, as everyone knows, is a proper town - confirms that any parish can call itself a town simply by passing the appropriate resolution.

"There's no difference in potential powers between a parish and a town council, it just depends how aggressive you are and how big or little you want to sound.

"A town is a town if the people think they are." Even Mr Gray admits, however, that being a townie is going to take a bit of getting used to.

"I still call it a parish because I have done for ages. It's quite strange suddenly calling a village a town, quite difficult to remember."

The town council's new standard had been temporarily replaced by the union jack - Remembrance Day - when our photographer called. It'll be back up the pole today, flying the flag for the new township.

IDLY, as always, last week's column mused upon the bad name which history has attached to Cockfield Band. "Like Cockfield Band, just buggering about" - and similar phrases implying inertia - are common in County Durham.

Local historian Mike Heaviside has now sent a splendid 1908 photograph of Cockfield Silver Band taken outside the home in Esperley - a nearby hamlet - of Gordon House Colliery mining engineer Percy Widdas.

Second right in the front row is band secretary and cornet player John William Heaviside, Mike's grandfather. The two youngsters on the left of the middle row are Harold and Cyril Heaviside, his uncles.

Sadly, he hasn't been able to suggest why such a fine body of musicians should be remembered on so discordant a note.

It is apparent from the photograph, however, that Cockfield Band is not just buggering about at all.

PADDY Burton, wandering minstrel and keeper of the county folklore, has sent a delightful poem called Pollard and the Brawn - performed last year as street theatre by Jack Drum Arts.

The brawn, of course, was the wild boar said to have terrorised the land of the Prince Bishops. Pollard was the Bishop Auckland lad who finally put its bait up. Had Cockfield Band played on that gladsome occasion, too? We searched in vain for a reference. The epic is very clever, nonetheless. One verse:

And now let us meet the dramatis personae

These guys are hunkier than Sylvester Stallone;

And the lasses they're with are drop dead canny,

Prettier and wittier than Kylie and Dannii...

Old tune, new fiddle, we have also asked Paddy for thoughts on the merry musicians. We may play it again next week.

RECALLING the Oldham Athletic v Shildon FA Cup tie in 1961, last week's column also wondered why Oldham's central station - to which hundreds of Shildon Wagon Works lads took out free passes - should be called Oldham Mumps.

It's catching.

Susan Jaleel - in Darlington, but long on the column's north-west frontier - suggests that the old word ga-mumpi meant "a meeting of two streams" but also that "mump" meant to beg, and that there was a workhouse in the area.

Stephen Howarth, in Sadberge, near Darlington, was born in Boundary Park hospital - next to Athletic's football ground - and began working life in Oldham Corporation bus depot. That was in Mumps, too.

He, too, had heard about the beggars coming to town and that there was a mumpers' lodging house nearby.

John Briggs, also in Darlington, e-mailed Oldham Council and had a reply from Terry Berry. "The origin of the name," he says, "is uncertain."

WITH the attention to detail ever imbued at Bishop Auckland Grammar School, two old boys have corrected last week's exercise about the chemistry teacher called Cosher because of the Bunsen burner tube with which he exacted retribution upon the recalcitrant.

Cosher taught maths.

Between them, Philip Steele in Crook and Bill Taylor in Canada also recall Killer (Watts), Pip (Applegarth), Teasy-Weasy (Raymond), Dracula (Donaldson, "a very scary man") and, his nickname inexplicable, the late Nixie Guy.

Peter Barron, the Echo's esteemed editor, remembers that at St Peter's Comprehensive in South Bank, near Middlesbrough, they had a "cracking" teacher called Vince Couhig - ingeniously known as Mr Shifter "because his name was pronounced Coo-ee, as in the PG Tips adverts."

Top of the class this week, however, is Mrs J Watson from Harraton, Washington, whose husband went to Wallsend Grammar School where - "by glorious chance" - a teacher called Victor Wallace took gardening lessons.

"It had to come. His nickname was Victor Manure."

...and finally, great corrections of our time (number 387). This one's from the Friends of the Settle-Carlisle Railway's admirable quarterly magazine.

"The article on the demise of the mail train was incorrect when it referred to the author of The Travelling Post Offices of Great Britain and Ireland as having been the Prime Minister. The author is Harold S Wilson, C.Eng, M.I.Mech.E, who is president of the Railway Philatelic Group.

"I have known Harold for 35 years and, so far as I know, he has never been Prime Minister."

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