Village people

BUCOLIC as always, last week’s column reported attendance at a dinner at the Village Hotel, a couple of miles from North Shields.

The Village Hotel, we said, was the approximate size of Newton Aycliffe.

So it is: 157 bedrooms, 25-metre swimming pool, health and beauty spas, separate pub and umpteen function rooms.

The hotel’s part of the Cobalt Business Park, sometimes itself known as Cobalt Village. Cobalt accommodates 8,600 workers over 1.2 million sq ft, with a further 120,000 sq ft – capable of housing 1,600 people – “speculatively” completed.

It’s the same small-is-beautiful philosophy, the same attempt to persuade the punter to smell the hay meadow, which yields food companies with names like Country Wench and Dingly Dell that in all probability are based on some damn great industrial estate in the middle of some damn great conurbation.

The photograph shows the Village Hotel in all its rustic glory. Business is another country; they do things differently there.

HOWEVER splendid the April weather, the column remains slightly (and happily) stuck in the snow of March 16 to 19, 1979.

The link has become too long to unravel, but we’d wondered why the Officials Club at Easington Colliery – as, probably, elsewhere – was known as the Leather Cap.

Mary Bell had explained that, before safety helmets, the bosses wore leather caps and the workers flat caps.

Robin Wallace in Ferryhill now sends a photograph, taken at last year’s Durham Big Meeting, of what he believes to be an example of that high fashion.

The splendidly English gentleman was the gaffer of a group of morris dancers – from Tyneside, Robin thinks. Was this the pitman’s bowler?

MUCH the same theme, John Barr in Darlington recalls sharing a room in the Sixties with four other men, one of whom went to bed every night in coms and flat cap. The cap, at least, was never removed.

At least they had separate beds. As a journeyman electrician he once had to share with two other men, in digs in York. “When I complained to the landlady, she said it was the reason that it was so cheap.”

John did a lot of journeying, could write a book about it, he says. His chief conclusion, however, is as simple as it may be understandable. “It was always a mistake to lodge in a pub.”

ONE of life’s insatiable itinerants, if not necessarily a journeyman, Peter Sixsmith in Shildon reports that in Consett he spotted a van belonging to an ironing company. It was called Crease Monkeys.

FOLLOWING last week’s note on the deteriorating state of the railways – though not, of course, because of it – Lord Adonis, the rail minister, has been undertaking a round-Britain tour.

Lord Adonis, splendidly named and no doubt commensurately striking, paid £375 (on expenses) for a standard class, all-lines Weekly Rover. He travelled 2,000 miles on 40 trains.

The Times caught up with him at Newcastle – late, because the train was – where it was also revealed that the ministerial press officer had been charged £103 too much for his ticket because the machine at King’s Cross gave misleading information.

Broadly, the minister was full of praise for railway staff and rather less impressed with stations and infrastructure.

Particularly, and with a relevance shortly to become clear, he was critical of Birmingham New Street station. “It was a bad experience, a terrible station that must be one of the worst Sixties planning disasters on the railways – no lights, dank and congested.”

It’s a reminder of the comment by Dr David Jenkins, the former Bishop of Durham, on reaching his 80th birthday.

The bishop, now 84 and in Teesdale, said that he’d given up driving more than ten miles or making any rail journey which involved New Street station.

By no means for the first time, Dr Jenkins appears to have been right all along.

WE’D also touched upon Durham County Council’s tentative and highly contentious decision to award the Durham City park and ride contract to the transport giant Arriva, though the highly regarded local firm Scarlet Band was the lowest bidder. It was mistaken – though Scarlet Band was the lower bidder, another quotation beat either of them. The County Council points out that “quality”, including impact on the environment, is also a key issue.

FRUSTRATION isn’t just confined to the national rail network, as the column and hundreds of other travellers on the Tyne and Wear Metro discovered last Wednesday evening.

I’d joined the 21.19 at Bede station, on an industrial estate between Jarrow and South Shields, in the expectation of catching the 22.00 southbound from Newcastle. The Metro train never moved another inch.

There was a power cable fault between Gateshead and South Shields, it was explained, all trains south of the river affected. By 10.15pm, when it became clear that even the last train from Newcastle was out of the question, I’d to summon the cavalry (bless her) from North Yorkshire.

Others were less fortunate. Women and the elderly complained anxiously that they were stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no lift and little protection.

The Metro blithely advised them to make alternative arrangements. They were what’s known as the vulnerable, Bede.

YESTERDAY’S Backtrack column enthused, as well it might have done, about Alf Ramsey Knew My Grandfather – the play at Durham Gala Theatre which, until Saturday, marks the centenary of West Auckland’s first World Cup win.

Admittedly fictionalised, wonderfully entertaining, it several times employs the phrase “Heavens to Betsy” which may not have been terribly familiar on the streets of County Durham in 1909 but keeps cropping up round the place, nonetheless.

It’s also been the name of a punk band, of a book about a female church minister called Betsy Blessings and a website which sells proggy mat wool and things.

The World Wide Words website supposes the phrase to be “almost exclusively American” and to be “associated with mature females of the Prohibition era”.

All suppose the origin inexplicable. Readers may know better.

…and finally, the Stokesley Stockbroker writes “with much sadness” of the passing last week of Clement Freud. They met just once, at Carlisle Liberal Club, the Stockbroker particularly remembering the old hangdog’s reaction when told that the following year’s party conference would be at Margate.

The south coast, concedes the SS, was slightly down at heel. Freud was less pacific. “Margate?” he exclaimed. “Even the all-night café closes at 8.30pm.”

None of the quotations dictionaries includes him. Brewer’s Famous Quotations acknowledges the Australian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud but once: “The great question which has not been answered and which I have not been able to answer despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul is ‘What does a woman want’?”