Felon feeling

As they have done every year since 1854, they dined on vegetable soup, roast beef and cheese and biscuits (in season).

Back then, County Durham alone had around 80 Felons societies, local vigilante groups. Now just 14 remain nationally – Coundon and Weardale in the County Palatine, a couple in the Esk Valley, others scattered elsewhere.

Back then, recalled the appropriately named Inspector Martin Peace, Durham Constabulary had just appointed its first two detectives to supplement a force complement of chief constable and 60 officers.

I’d spoken at a couple of previous suppers myself, inevitably recalling the incident in 1961 when Arthur Stephenson, the Coundon bobby, was ordered to take ten local youths to juvenile court for playing hum-dumdum (finger or thumb) outside Ranaldi’s Café.

Another speaker, a medical gentleman, had revealed that a felon was also a whitlow. A sore point, anyway.

This time the principal speaker was the Right Reverend Mark Bryant, the newish Bishop of Jarrow, who may also be the Church of England’s leading authority on Coronation Street.

The plot about the garage guy’s girl getting God, and Ken Barlow’s humanist hubris, intrigues him. “I’m amazed none of the national papers has been on for a comment,” he said.

Bishop Mark also revealed that not only is the religious fervour set to last for a year, but that Sophie Webster (for it is she) falls in love with another young lady in the congregation.

Asked if he had a direct line to Granada, the bishop proved characteristically self-effacing. “I think I may have Googled it,” he said.

EVERYWHERE I go, Mr Terry Joyce is the comic. Turn again. The last time was Fishburn. “You keep pinching my gags,” he said. In the presence of so many latter-day crime fighters, Terry deflected attention from Coundon. It’s now West Auckland, he said, where the wheelie-bins are on bricks and the Samaritans ex-directory.

AT last we have been able to talk to former One O’Clock Show singer Barbara Law. Fifty years on, she’s still ticking along very nicely.

A product of Warrington – “Me and vodka,” she says – she was spotted by impresarios George and Alfred Black shortly before Tyne Tees Television went on air in January 1959.

The five-days a week live lunchtime programme proved a steep learning curve. “Terry O’Neill told me that any television I did afterwards would seem easy by comparison and he was spot on, but they were fabulous days in the North-East.”

She’s long lived in Tenerife, still singing round the clubs and nightspots, still married after 52 years to former boxer George Reed, known around the North-East halls as Mac O’Bryan.

They’ve also a 12-year-old cat called Gazza. A sweetie, says Barbara.

“Even now, people are always wanting to talk about the One O’Clock Show,” she says. “I won the Tyne Tees Television personality of the year award and it still has pride of place in my house.

“Someone even came up the other day and remembered me appearing with Eddie Calvert at His Majesty’s Theatre in Aberdeen.”

Law unto herself, she lived during the week in a flat, returning to Warrington at weekends to rehearse with her pianist. Fellow One O’Clock Show star George Romaines recalls that frequently she’d bring in fresh eggs for the folks.

“Barbara swore she fed the hens on cornflakes,” says George. “She probably did. Whatever it was, the eggs were delicious.”

■ No prizes, no nowt, but readers are invited to name the only known record – a top 20 hit in 1961 – to include the names of George and Alfred Black.

STILL shelling out, last week’s column on egg jarping prompted an email from Brian Harrison – he’s ex- Tyne Tees Television, too. “I took my young granddaughter to the Riverside Park in Chester-le-Street, a few yards from our house. No sign of anyone egg jarping, but we did come across a 40ft hen.” Feather in the cap, Brian’s photograph, left, lays the evidence on the line.

RECORDING the passing at 97 of esteemed veteran cyclist Arthur Rodgers, from Northallerton, last week’s column noted that it was at the Cyclists’ Church Service at Coxwold that we’d heard the only known joke about a vicar’s bike.

Since it also concerned the seventh commandment, further detail seemed inadvisable.

A subsequent call from Mr Tim Stahl in Darlington wonders if we also knew the one about the vicar’s bike and the envelope, and with the aid of a surgically wielded penknife illustrates it over a pint.

Mr Stahl proves remarkably dextrous, as perhaps a man of his calling should be. “I learned the joke from a sister in the pain relief clinic,” he says.

Unfortunately this one also embraces the seventh commandment, only yet more graphically. It may not be repeated, either.

…and finally back to St George’s Day, where (more or less) we started. It’s also the eightieth birthday of veteran Darlington councillor Peter Freitag, still running an estate agency in the town. His wife planned a surprise holiday earlier this month. “She didn’t think I’d last until the 23rd,” he says.