John North: Company matters

Notwithstanding that boys will be boys, the BB - the angry Brigade - has banished it. He's not even allowed to pay for an advert in the magazine.

It may not be a BB bodice ripper, but there's still an awful lot between the sheets.

"It's rather underground at the moment," admits Allan. "I'm confident it will go well but it's going to take time. It would have helped if it could be freely mentioned within the organisation, but I think it will derive strength from being banned publicly."

He was a Boys' Brigade member and employee for 50 years, half of them as field officer in an area stretching from Northallerton to Berwick. Two years ago, rain on his parade, he was made redundant.

The book, and the tears, followed. There were some, he admits, who would have been very pleased to see the back of him.

A friendly QC checked the book before publication. This is the fourth draft. "There were limitations to what I could say about some people," he says. "I'm being urged to put the first draft on e-Bay."

Save for the vexed issue of girls in the Boys' Brigade, there's no real sex at all. There's talk, however, of the "dark forces" of Freemasonry, of politics and posturing, of bitching, backbiting and empire building within the 123-year-old, church-linked organisation.

"No wonder the Boys' Brigade is in such a sad state," wrote Sir Douglas Lovelock, after seeing an advance copy.

Allan, 63, lives in Durham with his wife Sue, their daughter and their pets. A customised London Transport map on the wall charts his early journeys in the south. He wouldn't return.

Most of the book is affectionate, full of praise for the uniformed organisation which started in Glasgow, learned the drill and spread around the world with a "foursquare programme" of educational, physical, spiritual and social improvement.

"There's no way I could set out to injure the BB. I loved it and I still do," he insists. "There was great concern that my book would be titillation or scandal, but I really have striven not to go down that route."

Born in north London he joined the Boys' Brigade at 12. His mother was from Wallsend, had worked at the pit and at Swan Hunter, became personal maid at the Park Lane Hotel to the King and Queen of Siam. Very Catherine Cookson, he says.

"The BB instantly appealed, there's no denying it. Whatever you were interested in, the leadership could offer. It was the 1950s, and the organisation was at its peak.

"There are still people today who call themselves Christians because they were in the Boys' Brigade. They didn't join to discover Jesus, they joined to play football with their mates, but there was some fantastic Christian leadership."

He left school at 15, worked for three and a half years in a tax office near Wembley Stadium - "I hated every minute of it" - got a job on the Brigade newspaper and stayed for nine years before moving north.

As field officer he succeeded Granville Gibson, who trained for the ministry and became vicar of Newton Aycliffe and Archdeacon of Auckland.

His initiatives included opening a conference and training centre in Northumberland, starting a youth employment agency after the closure of Consett steel works - "at one stage 1,000 people were receiving their pay cheques from the BB" - and co-ordinating the charities centre at the Gateshead Garden Festival in 1990.

Not everything was rosy there, either. "There were enormous difficulties through mismanagement," he says, among other things.

"The BB has had this image problem continually, partly with the name. I always preferred BB and I was always anxious that we should be seen to be out in the community, the natural place, not behind closed doors in a church hall on a Friday night."

He also favoured greater informality, once dressed down for wearing the new, more casual, uniform at a Buckingham Palace garden party - "an absolute disgrace to the organisation" - and again berated by the Lord Lieutenant of Durham for not wearing his dress uniform. That he didn't have one seemed not to matter.

On another occasion, a Tyneside vicar threatened to take out an injunction against him.

"I was allowed to be creative, which could be a nightmare for some, and had fairly strong views on key issues like the name, the job and girls in the BB.

"I was also an eternal optimist, I had to be to survive all that time in the job. I was always looking to help the Church build its tomorrow."

In his 25 years in the North-East the number of companies fell from 136 to 125. "Despite a lot of blooming hard work, I have to say that I failed."

News of his departure - at one stage he calls it "dismissal" - was broken at a meeting in a Durham hotel. Former Brigade secretary Sydney Jones called it "inept", Allan goes further.

"Anything of that nature must always be difficult, but it was very badly handled. I had been asked to write a book for several years but wouldn't. Suddenly it just clicked."

It's a collection of anecdotes, says Allan, not a history of the Boys' Brigade. The title is partly borrowed from a paper written 30 years ago by Boys' Brigade executive member and former Darlington deputy headmaster David Roberts.

Allan now works for other charities and churches, is a consultant to Boys' Brigade companies and does actually help Sue, a poetry teacher, to run a bed and breakfast.

The Boys' Brigade, he believes, will flourish again. "It's been having a tough time and I don't know how low it will have to go, but things are cyclical and I'm sure it will become a force again.

"I always believed that the BB could deliver. I still think it can."

* No Sex Please - We're BB is available for £14.95 plus £2.25 postage from Anchorage Publications, 25 Langley Road, Newton Hall, Durham 0191-386 2323.

Ale and very hearty

AFTER centuries of cloistered calm, Auckland Castle is to host its first beer festival. "There'll be 40 different real ales, I'm sure it'll all be very decorous," says Simon Gillespie, one of the organisers.

Simon's chairman of Bishop Auckland Round Table, the hosts. That he also co-owns the Wear Valley Brewery - they of the splendid Amos Ale - may not entirely be coincidental.

Much of the castle, historic home to the Bishops of Durham, is now operated commercially. Dr Tom Wright, the present bishop, is known to like the occasional glass of the real thing.

The festival runs from May 4-6. "We're hoping he'll be there to give it his blessing," says Simon.

STILL in Bishop, we hear of another old BAGS reunion. BAGS (of course) is Bishop Auckland Grammar School, the do for those of both sexes who started between 1958-60 and left between 1963-67.

The column, it's fair to say, may be among the old faces.

The reunion is at Bishop town hall on Saturday September 16 (7pm-midnight). Organiser Barbara Spark, formerly Matthews, reckons that in view of advancing years, they'll turn the disco down.

She's at 6 Thompson Road, Bishop Auckland DL14 6DZ, (01388) 604585. Tickets, including buffet, are a tenner.

LAST week's piece on the Baldasera family, ice cream kings of east Durham, appears to have gone down like a sixpenny cornet.

Peter Lambert recalls an incident in the early 60s when he walked, long-faced and 17 years old, into Aris Baldasera's shop in Wheatley Hill.

Peter and the lads had planned a day in Redcar, but his old jalopy wouldn't start. Aris at once handed over the keys of his altogether newer model and asked them only to fetch it back clean.

"I'd just passed my test and was scared to drive it, so gave him the keys back," says Peter. "To cut a long story short, the lads walked up to Aris's then-new house in Cemetery Road and cleaned his car instead.

"He was a great guy, never a bad word for anyone. The rest of the family were the same."

Mike Baldasera, now in Darlington, was pictured in last week's column with his 93-year-old mum Elsie, Aris's widow (see below). He's had plenty of positive feedback, too.

"There'll be no enforcers in padded waistcoats heading for Shildon to make you an offer you can't refuse," he says

Mike has just one problem, however. His mother, he says, looks younger on the photograph than he does.

...and finally, a quick return to Pongo, Jack and Crabfat, suppliers of military surplus to Hetton-le-Hole and the lands thereabout.

Former RAF man Granville Chambers in Darlington recalls that during his service in Gibraltar in the 1960s, a high level Ministry of Defence edict was sent to the two offending services ordering that the use of the term "Pongo" for soldier must cease.

The RAF in turn issued a directive that Army personnel shouldn't in the future be referred to as Pongoes.

The Royal navy - "typical," says Granville - sent an order that in future Pongoes should be known as Army personnel.