The day the Queen came to tea

Firstly to 13 Barrington Road, Newton Aycliffe, home - 41 years ago, as now - of Billy Llewellyn, Punch and Judy man, and of his wife, Lucy.

These days there's a dog, too, purportedly called Rolex. "He's a watch dog," explains Billy.

Number 13 was where the royal couple took tea - by appointment, as it were, though Lucy Llewellyn still had to walk down the little garden path and formally invite them to step inside.

"I had to go in first," Lucy recalls. "It's not very often you get to walk in front of the Queen."

Her overriding impression, and by no means alone, was of how tiny the monarch was. "I remember her standing at the kitchen door as I made the tea and thinking 'Good God, so much weight on such a small pair of shoulders."

Number 13 got lucky, they reckon, because they were in the right place at the right time. The house was on the short walk from the Simpasture playing field (which the royals were "invited to inspect") to the RAFA Club, which they were "invited to open".

(It's officially the Canopus Club. Someone may perhaps explain why.)

Billy was a railwayman and former Darlington councillor. "I'd been up all night changing the toilet paper from BR to ER," he says.

Though the house may have been a palace, it was definitely a little palace. Only the royal couple, the Llewellyns and their four young children and the Development Corporation's housing manager - the well remembered and faintly ferocious Miss Hamilton - were allowed inside.

"It was a proper town when Miss Hamilton was in charge," says Lucy. "If your house wasn't right she was at your ankles like a ferret."

They'd been urged to lay on nothing special - "an ordinary family in an ordinary council house" - though a lemon for the royal tea cost an unexpected 4d. The fairy cake, from which the Queen took three small bites, was a more regular part of Lucy's budget.

"The papers wrongly claimed we'd stayed in hotels while they did the place up, that I'd had my hair done by a leading stylist and been out and bought a really expensive dress.

"It was because everything was so ordinary. They had to make it up."

The Queen wanted to know how they organised the house, the Duke - "canny feller," says Billy, "he just earned a bit more than me" - told the tale of the ship they'd visited that had been painted only on one side.

The visit was scheduled to last 12 minutes, but stretched to 20. That morning the royals had also taken eleven o'clocks at a council house in Peterlee rented by commercial traveller Cecil Tindle, his children given the day off from the Royal Commercial Travellers School, near Harrow.

When a chivvying equerry knocked on the door at number 13, six-year-old Brian Llewellyn closed it on him. "They'll not dare knock again," said the Duke.

Still they keep the royal crockery, the paper serviette, the long lost publications like Picture Post, the Daily Sketch and the Auckland Chronicle which told how the Queen came calling.

The day's other big news concerned rumours of impending marriage between the Queen Mother and Sir Arthur Penn, her treasurer. "Wildly without foundation," said the Palace; Billy Llewellyn, ever the diplomat, thought it prudent not to ask.

He doesn't expect that they'll pop in again, though insists that they'd be just as welcome. "They'd best give us a bit warning, though," he says. "We'd have to send out for another lemon."

PROFESSOR' Billy Llewellyn - it is the Punch and Judy man's customary courtesy - first performed professionally on Coronation day, pedalling his bike round the rainy streets of Darlington with his props in an old pram behind. "The hardest day's work I ever did," he says.

Soon he became familiar on the beach at Seaton Carew ("a most underrated place") and at Redcar, though the donkeys sometimes outnumbered the audience.

They were the days when PC meant, if anything, the polliss who beset Mr Punch around the head.

Now, he says, he has even seen a gay Punch and Judy - it drives me up the bloody wall" - and many others that have been emasculated.

"If you look at the history of Punch and Judy it was always a cruel show. It was never meant to be for children," says Billy, 76.

Brian, 47, is now a Punch and Judy professor, too, though the hangman has long since been repealed ("some of the schools were getting a bit put out") and the ghost tends only to appear at Hallowe'en. It can only be a matter of time before someone gets their teeth into the crocodile, an' all.

Despite it, Brian - who began on Jubilee Day in 1977 - insists he is "defiantly non-PC."

"Just ask the kids who scream and shout and laugh at the antics of Mr Punch and they wouldn't have it any other way. Adults might claim that the children will end up as deranged criminals by watching the wife beating, the baby bashing and the nightmares the crocodile brings - but the kids will tell you that they're only puppets and that Mr Punch gets locked up for being naughty."

Some of the little 'uns also ask why his booth is decorated with flags. "I tell them it's because the Queen might come to tea and that, once upon a time, Her Majesty really did."

THE royal party had earlier visited Durham City; heading south on the old A1 through the familiar Ferryhill Cut. Thousands lined the route, PC Ray Gibbon - stationed at East Howle, your worships - one of three local bobbies assigned to crowd control. No special branch, no sniffer dogs, no Armalites up to the armpits.

One constable was deployed at each end of the Cut, Ray in the middle. "I knew exactly how King Canute felt as I was engulfed by the wave," he recalls. "The powers that be had either forgotten that Ferryhill folk read their newspapers or that half the bus routes in Co Durham went through the village."

The leading car, carrying the chief constable - the affectionately remembered Alec Muir - slowed as it passed. "Through an open window," recalls Ray, "he bade me keep them back.

The royal car followed. "The smiling, happy crowd pushed forward, my sergeant's wife - from whom I expected better - to the fore.

"I finished up being gently nudged in the back by the Rolls Royce as I walked slowly forward parting the crowd.

"A quick glance over my shoulder showed the Queen, totally unperturbed, smiling and waving whilst the Duke gave me a smile and a nod which seemed to say not to worry, because he wasn't.

"It went on for some 50 yards, until I was joined by my colleague who came puffing up the hill."

Now there were two pollisses. "Considering the odds to be against them, the crowd fell back, allowing the royal Rolls Royce to go on its way. The Duke took the chance to turn around and give me a parting smile. They have had my total support ever since."

Ray Gibbon had begun constabulary duty in West Hartlepool, tells many a tale about East Howle - a virtually vanished but once fairly notorious spot near Ferryhill - and finished as a sergeant in Whickham. Now 71, he lives in Witton Gilbert, a few miles west of Durham.

"The great thing about that day," he says, "is that there were no debriefings, no rollockings from the superintendent, no paper flying in all directions.

"The following morning, according to my pocket book, I was back on patrol in East Howle."

MARJORIE Burton from Shildon also recalls the tour of Newton Aycliffe, particularly the visit to the Boys' Club. (These PC days, of course, there wouldn't be boys' clubs, either.)

"My little lad in his pushchair slept through it all," says Marjorie. "People were chasing round the town from venue to venue, trying to get a sight of them. It was a very happy day."

Ethel Dobson from Bishop Auckland remembers the Queen in Durham - "she looked lovely in pale yellow" - and also a visit to Newcastle, about ten years earlier, by Princess Margaret.

Ethel was a student teacher, dressed in gym kit and waiting for hours on a particularly cold day. "Finally the royal car approached, carrying Princess Margaret and her lady-in-waiting. We were freezing.

"The princess was chatting to her lady-in-waiting. She raised her left arm as she passed, but never even glanced our way.

"I vowed then that I'd never wait to see her again - and I haven't."

Published: Thursday, March 8, 2001