Magna data

It was a big occasion, nonetheless, when the parish church celebrated its 125th anniversary last weekend and an exhibition in the hall offered happy snapshots of village times past.

"You look a lot less miserable than you do in the paper," they said, a refrain as familiar as the chorus of All Things Bright and Beautiful. We really must fix a new mug shot.

The village is just north of the A66, roughly between Richmond and Barnard Castle, though whether in Yorkshire or County Durham is a borderline case which still arouses local passions.

Until 1974, they were in the North Riding of Yorkshire and generally very happy to be. Then the bureaucrats drew the line, or redrew it, deciding that Hutton Magna and sundry other places south of the Tees should up sticks to Co. Durham.

Next time, they'll probably make up the numbers in Dumfries and Galloway.

The Church of England, older and wiser than the Boundary Commission - the plum tree at the bottom of our garden may be older and wiser than the Boundary Commission - resisted such temporal tinkering. It was the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds who cheerfully joined last Sunday's celebration.

"I hope you still regard yourselves as North Yorkshire," the Rt Rev John Pritchard told the Evensong congregation.

"Very definitely," they, as one, replied.

"You're not really in Co. Durham at all," added Bishop Pritchard, reassuringly.

Once known as Hutton Longvillers, the village was mentioned in the Domesday Book, remaining an estate village until 1935, when cottages were sold for as little as £45 and the Oak Tree pub for £700, becoming - as they say around Barnard Castle - one of Carter's.

Magna Carter's, as it were.

Until the mid-twentieth century, it was the place which both time and the A66 passed by. Mains water and electricity finally arrived in the 1950s, mains sewers in the following decade.

The exhibition was chiefly the work of Marian Lewis, whose family came to Hutton Magna in 1886 and who's been sub-postmistress for the past 25 years. She had worked away for 18 years, said Marian, by which she meant Binns in Darlington.

"It's such a happy village, everyone's so kind to one another. I just love it. We're only small, but there's an awful lot goes on."

There were pictures of Jack Davison's pioneering bus, called Pride of the Road; of George Alderson's tractor and of Jack Ormston's 1931 aeroplane, a Westland Widgeon. Ormston was for 40 years a racehorse trainer in Hutton Magna, said in Marian Lewis's splendid little village history to have trained Le Garcon D'Or, the horse which won more flat races than any other.

There was also a 1962 cutting from the People (of all things) about how "Old Sep" and other Oak Tree denizens were unhappy because two "pretty girls" - our old friend Dorothy Sayer and her sister Gillian Cook - had taken over behind the bar.

We also recalled another, yet more salacious story linking pub and church. "Marian hasn't put everything up," they said, diplomatically.

There's probably been a church since the late 13th century, the partly roofless original replaced in 1878 by the present St Mary's, approached through a lychgate commemorating the 12 villagers who died in the First World War and the two who lost their lives in the Second.

One served with the Green Howards, Yorkshire's regiment, the other was a Durham Light Infantryman.

It's a lovely little church - handsome reredos behind the altar, harvest fruits around the font - which cost £1,578 including supper for the 24 workmen who helped build it.

Around £474, worth around 100 times more on today's values, had been raised at a single bazaar. Whatever the rate of inflation, it was an awful lot of homemade chutney.

One vicar, recalls Marian, was a Jew who changed his name from Abrahams to Collins, another grew his own tobacco - "quite generous in giving this foul weed to anyone who was brave enough to try it, knowing full well that they would never ask for any more."

Though the pipe smoking parson lived until well into his 90s, three other 20th century Hutton Magna incumbents died in the vicarage, each of them on a Sunday, the day of eternal rest.

Christopher Cowper, the amiable present Vicar, is also responsible for Barningham (where he lives), Wycliffe and the little chapel at Scargill, below the Stang Forest, from which we hope to report at Christmas.

His wife Christine - both answer to Chris, not always at the same time - is a lay reader in the parish.

The anniversary service embraced harvest festival, too. Come Ye Thankful People Come meets Lord For The Years. Well over half the adult population must have been there, the rest at home with The Archers.

The service was from the incomparable 1662 Prayer Book, the weather almost invitingly autumnal, the people thankful indeed. It was a lovely occasion.

Afterwards, we all adjourned for harvest supper back in the village hall, and for another debate about whether it was right and proper to pile into the provender before the bishop arrived to bless the feast.

They started anyway; Hutton Magna might have waited 125 years for that.

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