Band aid of a different kind

HAD Mr Bob Geldof and a sticking plaster manufacturer not thought of it first, they might have called it Band Aid. Mike Devereux is appealing for unwanted musical instruments to ship out to black children in South Africa.

If music be the food of love, it’s hoped that hundreds of John North readers will tune in to his wavelength.

“We’ll welcome anything from piccolos to penny whistles, from guitars to grand pianos,” he says. “It’s the only way the kids are going to learn the real joy of music.”

Mike’s a director of Billinghambased Devereux Developments, chiefly involved with transport. He’s working with Professor Denis Goldberg, a white South African given four life sentences in 1963 for involvement with the anti-Apartheid movement.

One of the so-called Rivonia Eight – the only white member – he was the technical officer. It meant, among other things, that he made the bombs.

“Being black and being involved in the armed struggle meant you had the support of many people,” he once said. “Being white and involved meant being isolated.”

Released in 1985, after gaining four degrees while in prison, he lived with his family in exile in London, launching a scheme called “A Book and Ten Pence” which resulted in almost two million second-hand children’s books – and an equivalent number of tenpences – being sent to the black townships. Now 85, he’s back in Cape Town.

“The kids had been denied literacy because of apartheid. Most of them couldn’t read or write,” says Mike, a former trustee of the Education in Africa charity.

“When they’d finished with the books, they took them home to their parents to help them to learn to read.”

Now Prof Goldberg hopes that music will have the same effect.

However old the fiddle, the tune – and the inspiration – will be new.

Mike, a self-effacing sort, has been shipping stuff to South Africa – without charge – for years. “One lot was manual typewriters, old sewing machines, that sort of thing, all going to the squatters’ camps.

“It had to be non-electrical equipment because the camps didn’t have electricity. If they’d had to pay for shipping, most of the people concerned couldn’t have afforded it.

“I just gather it up and stick it in a crate. Provided you have a bit of space in the back of a container, it needn’t cost anything.”

Denis Goldberg, he says, is remarkably upbeat despite his long incarceration.

“He’s not antagonistic, he doesn’t want to upset people. He’s a great guy, a real bundle of fun, but his only interest now is education.”

Though all musical instruments are welcome, he may be unable to take more than one piano. “It’s either one or 20,” he says. “In that case Denis would have to find a use for the other 19.”

A good reader response would be sweet music, indeed. If not Band Aid, then group therapy, anyway.

■ Mike Devereux will arrange to collect bulkier items. He can be contacted at mikedev@britdev.com or on 01642-560854.

The tattooed titled lady

AFTER Christmas, when there was time to read, I took a cutting from the Telegraph’s list of “Major anniversaries” of 2009.

April 21 was the 500th anniversary of the death of Henry VII, the 18th the 60th anniversary of Ireland’s becoming a republic and April 26 the centenary of the birth of William Connor, known better as Cassandra of the Daily Mirror.

In 1959, the pianist Liberace had won a libel action against Connor, who’d described him as a “deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice covered heap of mother love”.

The term “fruit-flavoured” was held to suggest homosexuality, a state of affairs which Liberace denied.

The Telegraph thought his victory “surprising”.

Particularly, however, we were drawn to April 23, and would have been drawn a bit sooner had not last week’s column overflowed in different directions.

It was the 50th anniversary of the death, aged 80, of Edith Vane-Tempest- Stewart, the Dowager Marchioness of Londonderry. The Telegraph summed up her life: “Between the wars, at Londonderry House, Park Lane, held weekly ‘Ark’ with herself as Circe, Balfour as ‘Arthur the Albatross’, Churchill as ‘Winston the Warlock’ and Ramsay Macdonald as ‘Hamish the Hart’.

Tried to improve relations with Germany by popping over to see Hitler.”

The Londonderrys owned lots of County Durham, including Wynyard Hall, near Billingham – a bolthole much favoured by the future Edward VII for reasons which need not detain us – and Seaham Hall further north, now a top hotel.

The fifth Marquess was MP for Durham North and Lord Lieutenant of the county, the seventh married Edith and was Air Force minister from 1931-35, the ninth and present incumbent was married to the ballerina Doreen Wells. They were a colourful bunch.

Edith had become Colonel-in- Chief of the Women’s Volunteer Force during the First World War and was the first woman to be appointed DBE, military division. The photographs, for reasons which will shortly become obvious, don’t show her legs.

Her Park Lane gatherings became legendary, Ramsay Macdonald reckoned especially close. The Marquess himself was said to be a “close friend” of Hitler and of others in the German high command.

The Northern Echo of April 24, 1959, mentioned nothing of Hitler or high society, though we acknowledged that she had been “one of the last of the great political hostesses”.

The same day’s paper recorded that Hartlepool boxer Brian London had signed to fight Floyd Patterson for the world heavyweight boxing title, that All Saints church in Eaglescliffe had been consecrated by the Bishop of Durham, that the 18,750-ton Maloja – the biggest ship built there – had been launched at Smith’s Dock in Middlesbrough and that Crowborough Engineering in Newton Aycliffe (whatever happened to them?) were planning a £750,000 extension to create 1,000 new jobs.

Back in the obituaries column, we also revealed that in her “high spirited younger days” the future Marchioness had had a snake and several crests tattooed on her legs.

“I was young and very foolish,”

she’d said. “Looking back, I must have been much worse than anyone in the present-day so-called Chelsea set.”

It’s a 50-year snapshot, no more.

The story of the real tattooed Lady is but a glimpse of how the other half lived.

St George and the bacon

WAVING the national flag, we looked last Thursday into the St George’s Day breakfast at Sadberge village hall, outside Darlington.

Darlington mayor Ian Haszeldine was there in his regalia and had been doing his homework. Local councillor Brian Jones was there in his pinny, and had been doing the washing up.

The photographer had all three of us wear red and white plastic bowlers, which we wiggled like Wacky Jacky.

Amazing how many remember him.

Old George, the mayor had discovered, was a Turk who served with the Roman army, became a centurion and was the patron of 12 other countries.

England, everyone agreed, would be his favourite.

Councillor Haszeldine had also found out that, for failing to renounce Christianity, George had first been poisoned, crushed between two spikes, boiled in molten lead before, when all that failed, being beheaded.

“He deserved to be a saint after that lot,” said Coun Haszeldine, and has signed the petition calling for an April 23 bank holiday.

The hall was patriotically decorated, the breakfast excellent, the company convivial and the community spirit evident. Even the raffle prize went to a deserving cause.

Sadberge is also blessed with splendid views westward, across what Coun Jones called Ketton country, though all that may be about to change.

Developers are planning at least ten wind turbines, each 125m high – “five times as tall as the Angel of the North” – between the hall and the skyline.

Wind up, Sadberge is unimpressed.

“I think you can safely say that they’ll have a fight on their hands,” said Coun Jones. Cry God for Harry, England and St George.

THE St George’s bandwagon annually gains wheels; the bunting burgeons. They’d something similar to Sadberge at Ingleton on Saturday evening, except that for full English breakfast read steak and ale pie and mushy peas.

The pies were from Simpsons of Cockfield, nearby. Had the dragon eaten a Simpsons steak and ale pie before succumbing to the gallant St George, it would indeed have supposed that it was to die for.

Ingleton’s vaguely between Darlington and Barnard Castle, a place of rare talent, mod-cons village hall and glorious lack of inhibition.

The evening began with courtly dances from the village dance group, suitably accompanied by the Palatine Waits. “Waits” were originally watchmen, later musicians who roamed the late-night streets – especially at Christmas and New Year – in the expectation of a few coppers.

Steeleye Span’s first LP was Hark the Village Waits. A William story was called William Joins the Waits, in which our childhood hero hoped to raise five shillin’s to supplement the usual borin’ Christmas presents.

“The resulting sound was diabolical,”

wrote Richmal Crompton. “Diabolical is a strong word, but it is hardly strong enough. The English language does not really possess a word strong enough to describe these waits’ rendering of The First Noel.”

The Palatine Waits, formed ten years ago, were conversely wonderful.

When Harriet Boyd and Martyn Coates played Sweet Georgia Brown it pretty near brought the house down.

The Castle Players from Barnard Castle performed a merry old mummers’ play; Ian and Susan Kirkpatrick, two of their number, led the entire company in music hall songs.

A trio of Zambian exchange visitors sang We Are Marching in the Light of God – “We’re still trying to work out what that has to do with St George,” said Neville Kirby; the Dalesiders, led by Neville, performed with customary verve.

The only regret was that they denied the column’s incorrigible invitation to end with There’ll Always Be an Ingleton – but there will, and an England, for all that.

ALITTLE late for St George’s Day, Sharon Carter-Ward of the Bay Horse in Masham anxiously seeks a morris dancing side to enliven her beer festival this weekend.

“I just don’t know how to find one.

I’ve looked all over,” she pleads.

“You’d think England would be full of them.”

Sharon, it should be said, has a licensed trade pedigree. Jim and June Carter, her parents, had the Cover Bridge Inn near Middleham for 23 years – the late and lamented Jim once barred by local magistrates from crossing his own pub threshold after 9pm, something to do with what apparently are called stoppybacks.

June kept the licence and her husband, their marriage sustained (shall we say) via a ladder to the bedroom window.

Sharon, at any rate, would love to dance to a morris tune. She’s on 01765-689236.

AFTER last week’s trip on the North Bay Railway in Scarborough to help launch the first of Joe Coates’s children’s books, a nostalgic little volume arrives from Doug Hardy in Darlington.

Doug was a sort of associate railwayman, started in 1958 at WH Smith’s bookstall on Scarborough station, leafed his way through half the Smith’s station sites in Yorkshire and the North-East.

Appealingly illustrated, his book paints a cameo of Scarborough workings exactly 50 years ago, when the railways were losing steam but still at their peak.

Conference trains overflowed, excursions arrived from all over the land, there was even a special to ICI Billingham (though why on earth it was going there is, sadly, unrecorded.) Doug’s book, a misty-eyed delight, costs just £2.99 including postage from him at 19 Alfred Street, Darlington DL1 2JD.

…and finally, last week’s column sought the title of the only known top 20 hit to offer a name-check to George and Alfred Black, the founding brains behind Tyne Tees Television.

Though there wasn’t a prize, a gratifying number knew that it was the diminutive Charlie Drake – My Boomerang Won’t Come Back, number 14 in 1961. The column rebounds next week.