Golden oldie

PERHAPS it’s innate humility, perhaps because the place is overflowing a bit, but Ron Davies-Evans keeps some of his citations – the framed story of an extraordinary life – half-hidden on the cloakroom wall.

There’s his RAF commission, his war medals, his Open University degree, his long service award from the Football Association.

More visibly displayed are a “Veteran’s badge” certificate from the Ministry of Defence, a scroll recording that in 2003 he flew a glider to 2,500 feet – “It was an 82nd birthday present, better than a box of chocolates”

– and several acknowledgements that he and his old comrade Laurie Smith have annually been County Durham’s record collectors for the RAFA Wings Appeal.

“We’re a double act,” says Ron.

“You’re not supposed to shout and rattle the tins, but I think these days we’re old enough to get away with it.”

There’s also a signed photograph, “To Ron, from Henry Mancini”. I meant to ask him about that.

At Easter the walls of fame were further adorned when he received a citation marking 50 years as a Methodist local preacher. Next week there’ll be one more, acknowledging 50 years as a Freemason. Mr Davies- Evans, it might be said, is a golden oldie.

It’s his church discipleship about which primarily we’ve come to speak to him, since Ron is a man who manifestly practises what he preaches.

A copy of the Living Bible – well thumbed, well lived – sits on the table; a brief biography may be useful, nonetheless.

He was born and raised in Darlington, still lives in the town, became a football referee and was a linesman in the 1960 FA Amateur Cup final, Kingstonian v Hendon, at Wembley.

They offered him £3 13s 6d or a gold medal, definitely not both. Ron forsook the money and ran.

For his sins he’s also a long-time Middlesbrough season ticket holder, and presently looking heavenwards.

“Football’s all about scoring goals and they can’t do it. They paid millions for Alves and he can’t score from four yards. I fear we’ve had it.”

He served as a navigator in RAF Bomber Command, became a JP, worked on the railways – half Darlington did – rose to become head of the British Railways Transport School, still gives talks as well as his sermons.

Just last May, the Darlington & Stockton Times carried a report of his talk – “Humorous Reflections” – to the Cleveland Retired Men’s Association.

“It was just that,” noted their correspondent, “one of the best, funniest and most instructional presentations that we have enjoyed.

A wonderful speech.”

He also wrote four anecdotal books for charity, one with a chapter on newspaper headlines.

Whether the heading “Something went wrong in jet crash, says expert”

said more about the expert or the sub-editor is anyone’s guess.

I’d written the foreword to another of them, grumbled about only being allowed 291 words, described him as “vivid, versatile and thoughtprovoking”.

Ron will be 88 next week, and continues as before.

AFTER a period of what the Methodists call being on trial – though not, presumably, to discern guilt or innocence – he became a fully accredited local preacher in 1959.

What kept him? “I suppose,” says Ron, “that the war got in the way.”

So few preachers had cars when he began that four or five would be dropped off around the chapels of south Durham.

Once, he insists they were taken by travelling shop. “The owner insisted that we keep on singing hymns. That way, he said, we couldn’t be eating his stuff in the back.”

In the Yorkshire dales it was customary for preachers to double up, an afternoon service followed by a farmhouse tea and a service elsewhere in the evening.

Ron recalls the local preacher who declined the usual sumptuous spread on the ground that he didn’t like to hold forth on a full stomach.

When the farmer returned from chapel, his wife asked how the preacher had gone on. “I think,” said the farmer, “that he might as well have etten.”

Ron himself, local lad made good, was on a train to London when he fell into conversation with a woman who asked if he’d preach at her church. It proved to be in San Francisco and he’s now been back eight times.

“Sometimes they have 1,000 people or more, in Barton I’m preaching to eight old ladies. I’m not saying that America’s better, but it’s certainly different. When there are only half a dozen, you can associate much better with people; you can’t do that when there are a thousand.”

There may, in truth, be many small Methodist chapels where the congregation struggles to exceed eight, or the average age to dip below 80.

Ron’s undeterred.

“If anything it has the opposite effect.

It makes you feel that it’s part of your duty to try to resurrect things, to try to get the old days back.”

He remains on the Darlington District’s “active” preachers’ plan.

Number one. What would he say, he muses, if he stopped and was confronted – he doesn’t say by whom – and asked why he’d given up after all these years?

“I wouldn’t have an answer for that, so I carry on.”

Even approaching 90, he’s reckoned particularly good with children.

“Some preachers tend to fizzle out a bit with youngsters, I try to make things meaningful for them,”

he says.

“I always liked reciting poetry and telling stories. I suppose it followed on from there. There’s something about preaching which keeps you on your toes.

“When I was refereeing and didn’t feel too well during the week, I’d tell myself that I had to pull my socks up by Saturday. It’s the same with preaching, only it’s Sunday.”

A WIDOWER, he still travels regularly to Marske, between Redcar and Saltburn, where his son, a former deputy head of Dodmire primary school in Darlington, has been a Cheshire Home resident for three years after suffering a viral brain infection.

They travel together to watch the Boro. “It’s something he can look forward to, he knows a great deal more about football than I do,” says Ron.

But doesn’t it challenge his faith, the agony of an 87-year-old father with a severely disabled son? “I suppose there are people that that would have happened with, but it hasn’t to me.”

“I don’t have the ability to determine why these things happen, so I just leave it to God to decide. When you go to Marske, you realise that there are many people far less fortunate than you are.

“You think to yourself how lucky you are. I’ve done that all my life.”

Wayward Wynyard

TO the point, as it were, last week’s column recalled the Marchioness of Londonderry – the tattooed Lady – who died 50 years ago on April 23. The lady, it becomes increasingly clear, was a vamp.

The Londonderrys owned great swathes of County Durham, particularly around Seaham and around Wynyard, near Billingham. The Marchioness, as discreetly we had observed, had a snake and several “crests” tattooed on her legs.

Ron Tempest, himself now living at Wynyard – though not, of course, in that magnificent hall – recalls that the snake tattoo appeared in 1903 when the “strikingly attractive” future marchioness was in Japan, just 23 and married to someone else.

“As women’s skirts shortened, so eyebrows rose simultaneously,” says Ron.

In high society, however, standards weren’t always commensurate. We’d recalled Lady Londonderry’s weekly “Arks” – animal-magic sessions at her Park Lane home in London – at which Churchill played “Winston the Warlock,”

Ramsey Macdonald was “Hamish the Hart” and Balfour “Arthur the Albatross”.

They also included Stanley Baldwin as “Bruin the Bear”, the “mild-mannered”

Chamberlain as “Neville the Devil” and the seventh Marquess of Londonderry as “Charley the Cheetah”.

Whether “cheetah” was intended as a play on words is, alas, not entirely clear.

“The rules,” adds Ron Tempest, “suggest that frisking, coaxing, coquetting and gambolling were all to be encouraged, within limits, alongside games of chance such as hunt the slipper, beg my neighbour, animal grab, rabbits, puss in the corner, gathering nuts in May, kissing the ring and bumps.”

Ron restrains himself. “I am unsure whether any or all of these games are still played, or indeed are lawful in our present times.”

WE’D also noted Lord and Lady Londonderry’s friendship with Hitler and other senior German figures of the Thirties. David Walsh in Redcar recalls that Joachim Ribbentrop, the Führer’s foreign advisor and later ambassador to Britain, was a Wynyard Hall house guest in 1936.

Wynyard tenants, says David, were ordered to wave swastika flags as the German passed by– “an unusual sight in Wolviston” – in order to make him feel at home.

“Hitler,” adds David, “was all the rage among some of the upper crust at the time.”

Ribbentrop, says Ron Tempest, not only left behind a Meissen figurine – of a stormtrooper – but, more inadvertently, his leather greatcoat which was appropriated by George Daggert, one of the keepers.

Only last week they were reminded by a farming neighbour how George was fired upon after confronting poachers. The shots failed to penetrate the greatcoat.

CHARLES Vane Tempest-Stewart, the seventh Marquess, had been a captain in France during the First World War, became Air Minister from 1931-35 and was a cousin of Churchill. He is said – “despite evidence to the contrary” – to have believed that Hitler was a man who could be trusted.

Sacked from the government, he became a frequent visitor to Germany, a shooting companion of Goering and on February 2, 1936, first met Hitler. In a speech at Durham, he is even said to have commented on the German leader’s impressive face.

Ribbentrop, who appeared to have a look of the late Mr Alastair Sim about him, stayed at Wynyard in November 1936. On the Saturday the party went pheasant shooting, the following day he joined the Marquess – who’d become Mayor of Durham – at a Civic Sunday service in the Cathedral.

“Great interest” was caused, reported the Echo; hundreds lined the route. The following day’s front page was all but given over to Nazi warmongering; inside we told how the German ambassador had sat in the choir, next to the Bishop of Jarrow.

Conrad Eden, the organist, played both British and German anthems after the service. At the start of the second, Ribbentrop’s arm rose quickly in the Nazi salute. His host, it’s said, no less quickly lowered it again.

There’s a photograph of them all walking back down Owengate towards the town hall. Neither the mayor nor his corporation appear greatly amused, but the town clerk clearly finds something hilarious.

LAST week’s column also hinted at royal goings-on – what Edward VII vigorously termed rumpty-tumpty – behind the walls of Wynyard.

Firstly as Prince of Wales, then as king, Edward became hugely fond of the Londonderry air. “At Wynyard I can live the life of a gentleman, have as much rumpty-tumpty as I wish and no one gives a damn,” he wrote.

Even the court circular was issued from Wynyard, for the first time from a private house since 1625.

His favoured companion was Mrs Alice Keppel, 29 years his junior and the maternal grandmother of the present Duchess of Cornwall. Mrs Keppel was said to possess Alabaster skin, blue eyes, chestnut hair, large breasts and a vivacious personality. Apart from that, it was impossible to suppose what the randy royal saw in her.

Though they insisted that his friendship with the Marchioness was platonic, Ramsey Macdonald was said particularly to have enjoyed his visits, too. Wynyard ways.

BACK finally to where we began, and to Edith, Marchioness of Londonderry.

Ron Tempest also recalls that her ladyship had a violent row with Himmler and Ribbentrop – “the most outspoken language” – after the arrest of two of her Austrian ski guides following the 1938 Anschluss. The guides were eventually freed, the Marchioness walked away. “I’ll bet,” says Ron, “that not many people had that on their CV.”