PRINCESS Elizabeth was one year old on April 21, 1927. She awoke at Windsor, reported the following morning's Northern Echo, to find "a wondrous assortment of dolls and toys awaiting her pleasure."

The little princess, we added fancifully, "said something to herself that grown ups are not permitted to understand".

Probably it was: "Not another blinking rocking horse".

From Windsor Castle to Witton Park. At Bishop Auckland police court the same day, a mother of four from that long benighted village was charged with cruelly neglecting her children.

The bairns, the court heard, were verminous and near naked. One was unable even to stand because of ricketts. The stench in the house was overpowering, the food consisted in its abonimable entirety of a quarter of a loaf of stale bread.

Whilst the drunken wretch of a mother went to prison for three months, the children were left to the mercy of the Poor Law Institution.

It is irrelevant, save as a snapshot of a much changed society. We also reported that Johann Strauss had arrived in London and declared that the waltz was making a comeback, that a 16-year-old rope boy had been killed at Browney pit, near Durham - it made four lines - and at rather greater length that a white leghorn pullet owned by Mr Fred Coates of Staindrop had laid a four and a half ounce egg.

The Northern Echo of April 22, 1927, additionally recorded that 100 priests had attended the opening of St Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic church, built for £3,025 in North Road, Darlington - an occasion used by the Very Rev Fr Wheatley to have a pop at the opposition.

"The poorest and meanest of our (Catholic) churches are greater than even the greatest (Anglican) cathedrals because of the perpetual presence of God in the tabernacle," he said.

No doubting Thomas's now, the church's 75th anniversary was celebrated last Sunday joyously and without contention, attended by Mr Thomas Aquinas Taylor - born on the day of its consecration - and by Miss Rose Prior, who was 26 at the time of it.

Bright as a Brasso belfry, she declined a wheelchair - "it's for old women" - walked to her long accustomed place, recalled that she missed the opening service because of a family holiday.

"I got a ticking off from Canon Chadwick," she said.

Canon Thomas Chadwick, the "w" silent as in Fenwick, was not only the inspiration behind St Thomas's but through his remarkable craftsmanship made everything from the altar to the processional cross, still used.

He was parish priest of St William's, over a mile away on Albert Hill, to which Catholics from northern Darlington walked every Sunday. Chadwick, his diary recorded, bought grazing land for 3/4d a square yard and was particularly delighted because on the other side of North Road it would have been ten shillings.

The parish's menfolk had dug the foundations themselves, rewarded for their toils with a "diggers' dinner" in Heaviside's Cafe. The gentry celebrated with lunch in the Kings Head.

Fr Syd Riley, the present parish priest, suspects there were 13 or 14 who actually got their hands dirty. "On going around the parish, I have discovered at least 700 families which lay claim to one of them."

The first priest had been Fr Leo Hart, pretty unique (neither grammarians nor moralists need stir themselves) because his father was also a Catholic priest - ordained after his wife's death.

Fr Charles Hart, it is recalled, caused further confusion - and mischief, no doubt - by employing his daughter as his housekeeper.

Strangers would come to the presbytery door asking to see the priest. "Hold on," the housekeeper would reply, "I'll go and get my dad."

Other priests who have served St Thomas's include Fr John Caden - who whilst curate from 1948-51 also kept goal for Darlington Reserves and swears still that the bishop would have killed him if he'd found out - and Fr Peter Cleary, wartime chaplain and at St Thomas's from 1956-93.

In all those years, it's said, he failed just twice to celebrate daily Mass, and had the reasonable excuse that he was in the Memorial Hospital at the time.

Sunday's 6pm service was led by the Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle, a year younger than the church, and so thankfully overflowed that when the column nipped out five minutes before the start - shamelessly to check on the Arsenal score - someone had pinched the seat at the moment of back being turned.

Bishop Ambrose Griffiths praised the "immense hard work" that had gone into the church's celebration facelift - closed for a month, magnificently topped and bottomed, volunteers again - Fr John Butters, now in Billingham but raised in the parish, offered a historic (and very helpful) homily on the church's founding years.

There were "famous" sales of work, he recalled, at which visitors were expected to buy from the moment they entered until the moment of their departure.

There were prayers for the Queen, a year older, and for her people, and afterwards a spread to rival any diggers' dinner ("a little sustenance," the engaging Fr Riley had said) and a splendid exhibition, chiefly mounted by Mr Peter Taylor, of 75 years of St Thomas's.

There'd been May queens and male voice quartets, passion plays, Rosary rallies and rules of the Men's Club, a penny a week and no gambling for money - "cheques valued 1d to be exchanged for goods on the stall."

Any minute, the rules added, could be altered at the priest's command.

On a most memorable evening, there was also a concert by the Meltones, led by Mr Thomas Aquinas Taylor - a fitting note on which to end, and on which to begin again.

* St Thomas Aquinas, North Road, Darlington; the principal Sunday service is at 9.30am. Fr Syd Riley is on 01325 463636.

Published: 27/04/2002