A vivid pride about the place

Saltburn always seemed a bit upmarket when we were bairns; the club trip only ever went to Redcar. On Monday, however, we caught the 6pm train, snapped like a six-week Peke with a camera known to down-the-nose professionals as idiot-proof, wondered what the evening sun was doing loitering luminously above Marske-by-the-Sea if it's meant to drop anchor over Ireland.

Folk are invited to sponsor a hanging basket for £36 ("includes 12 weeks watering"), Somerfield's car park hosts boot sales for Saltburn in Bloom, even the railway station was floribundant.

It was a good start. There's a vivid pride about the place, reflected almost everywhere.

On a lovely, hand-in-hand sort of an evening, surfers and splashers cavorted so joyously that we were reminded of Mr Carroll's poem in which they gyred and gimbled in the wabe. So they did in Saltburn's newly purified waters, and not a Jaberwock anywhere.

There weren't even any horses in the sea, either. That's another of the improvements.

The pier is re-opened, a £65,000 extension to the woodland centre complete, a water sports centre planned, the Valley Gardens verdant, the promenade smartly spruced. Though the theme remains resolutely Victorian, they have largely resisted the reproduction lampposts that so disfigure other places (not least the Borough of Sedgefield.) Saltburn, indeed, has probably overtaken Whitby as the North-East's most alluring seaside town, Hartlepool a dark horse third.

(The Improvement Company, it's true, may be about to mar all this by erecting statues, to the iconoclastic chagrin of local councillor John Robinson who believes the best place for them would be three miles out to sea. Probably he's right; SIC transit gloria, Saltburn.)

Tomorrow, however, the town will welcome former Culture Secretary Chris Smith, officially to re-open what remains of the pier, 1,500ft long when it opened in 1869 and now barely a third that length.

If not quite re-invented, he will find that the old place has been carefully reconsidered - and all things considered, they've done very well indeed.

NO stone unturned, we have been able to reacquaint Teesdale councillor Raymond Gibson with the spicy delights of Hoe's Sauce, the one with the duck on the label.

Last week's column issued a plea for help from Coun Gibson, who represents Evenwood, after a fruitless search for his childhood favourite. "I thought it had been liquidated," he says, unwittingly.

Now he has a lotta bottles, enough to keep him going for hours. "It used to be a square bottle; it must have been modernised," he says.

The expenses dug deep for three bottles from Lewis and Cooper in Northallerton, whilst Christine McFarlane from Darlington sacrificially brought in one she'd bought at Fenwick's, in Newcastle.

The label not only reveals that it's "celebrated", was first poured in 1854 and has a gold medal, but lists those things - "fish, game, soups, hot and cold joints, chops, steaks, entrees" - to which it is considered the ideal accompaniment.

Curiously, there is no mention of pease pudding sandwiches. "My grandmother Corner ate nothing else," says Raymond, "and always with Hoe's sauce."

We are grateful also to Jim Jennings from Durham who buys his Hoe's at Chester-le-Street Co-op, to Maud Lowdon from Langley Park who still Hoes down to Alan France's fish shop in the village and who as a child knew the label by heart, to Gillian Wootten in Darlington who also remembers Hoe's piccalilli sauce - "bright yellow, like piccalilli only with the lumps of pickled cauliflower and things" - and to Viv Crawford, who not only pointed us towards Lewis and Cooper but also recommended their Yorkshire Relish.

The Yorkshire Relish, another story, is made at Leek in Staffordshire.

PERHAPS, because they are famously tinned in tomato sauce, perhaps because he was having a day of pun and games, Stan Rylatt writes about the fishy business of sardines.

They should not be confused with red herrings - though they will be, ere long - or with the folk who live in Sardinia. That's Sardinians.

Stan, from North Ormesby near Middlesbrough, is a 75-year-old fairly mature student who recently attended a farewell do hosted by a group of Scandinavians on his course.

Though the food was good, they were disappointed with the open sandwiches. Couldn't get sardines anywhere.

"It was more a can of worms than of sardines," says Stan. "I came across more red herrings than the Russian trawler fleet. Have they all gone John West?"

Then he cast his net towards Hutchinson's Encyclopaedia, which reveals that since a 1915 court case the name "sardine" is restricted in Britain to the young of the pilchard, caught off Sardinia or Brittany.

Unsuccessful attempts to change it were made in 1980, the plaintiffs arguing that it adversely affected packers of indistinguishable little chaps like sild (a young herring) or brisling (a Norwegian sprat.)

Who, after all, would really want to eat a sild?

There may be little left to say about sardines, though readers may think otherwise. Sprat and mackerel, we'll squeeze it in next week.

LAST week's invitation to toast the polliss at the annual dinner of the Coundon Society for the Prevention and Prosecution of Felons was followed by a copy of the Bishop Auckland Herald - December 1, 1854 - reporting its foundation.

Two men had been killed in an accident at Shildon Lodge Colliery, attendance at a meeting of Bishop Auckland Church Union had been "very indifferent" and Mechanics Institute plans to mark the new year met, similarly, with a "lazy indifference".

At Coundon, however, a great number of the inhabitants had been moved to catch on with the Felons.

The editor, meanwhile, had also been much moved by a letter to The Times appealing for old linen for military hospitals in the East, and hoped that those who possessed a supply would not withhold it. The letter was signed by Miss Nightingale...

THE Bishop Auckland Herald would surely also have saluted Nellie Bowser and Mary Hodgson, latter day ladies with the lamp.

For almost 40 years they've helped provide extra amenities - "comforts", as sometimes they are called - to geriatric patients at Tindale Crescent Hospital, outside the town. They were at it so long, they had to buy Santa Claus a new suit. On July 21, however, Mary and Nellie - chairman and secretary of the Tindale Crescent Hospital Helpers, indomitable octogenarians now - hold their last Tindale Crescent garden party. Next Spring the hospital's services will be absorbed into the new Bishop General.

"We're all getting old and knackered so it's time to empty the tea pot and put the raffle tickets away," says the noble Nellie, a recent MBE recipient.

Mary, magnificent, was a trainee nurse at Tindale when it was a fever hospital before the war - "when the weekly hours were reduced to 58 we thought it was marvellous, but the matron said she'd never cope" - and with Nellie helped launch a pioneering hospital radio station.

Tindale Crescent will be remembered in the new hospital - a Tindale Wing or Tindale Unit - and they've also won permission to bury a time capsule ("photographs, press cuttings, odds and sods") to commemorate over 100 years of caring.

"It's been a fantastic hospital with staff second to none and we don't want it to be forgotten," says Nellie - and if the new administration wants anything doing, she adds, then they probably know where to find them.