Part of the reunion

IT’LL be 25 years on June 29 since brutally they shut up Shildon Shops. Last weekend almost 200 of the 2,000 workforce gathered for a reunion, Shops talk and then some.

Young John Raw, pot model son of a still-lamented father, took names at the door – men like Ray Sewell and Jackie Stainthorpe, both with 40-odd years in.

“Just to be spikey, I asked a few of them for their clock card number,”

said John. “Some could still give their National Service number as well.”

They gathered at orderly tables, a bit like the works canteen, but with Guinness and grey hair. Who’d also have thought that, 25 years on, the lads wanting a Woodbine would have had to stand still further out in the cold.

The Shops was Shildon Wagon Works, officially described not many years before its closure as the jewel in the crown of British Rail Engineering.

Though the south Durham town’s housewives may not have bought anything there, it still represented an awful lot of eggs in one brittle-bottomed basket.

“They were Shildon Works for Shildon workers,” recalled John Priestley, a fitter who led the action group against closure. “If you got a job you expected to be there for life, and your sons to follow you with an apprenticeship.

“The day that the Shops closed, the heartbeat of this town just stopped.”

The gathering – you don’t get me, I’m part of the reunion – was at the Railway Institute, barely a quarter of a mile away. Most lads were still local; some were back up from Doncaster where the railway had tried to reroute them. Donny works didn’t last much longer.

Many others, of course, were long dead. “Many had gone within two or three years,” said Bobby Thompson.

“There was no work for them around Shildon. They died of boredom.”

Barrie Hutchinson, his mate, recalled that Shildon had subsidised other workshops within British Railways.

“It seems a bit appropriate,” he added, “that what we’re best known for now is a museum.”

The reunion had been organised by Alan Robson, known as Pop and once in the paint shop, conscious that the only time folk saw old friends was at a funeral but still amazed at the turnout.

The bitter-tears wake had been a quarter of a century previously.

This was an affectionate act of remembrance.

“We got here at half past six to sort out the food and already they were queuing outside,” said Pop. “A lot of the lads hadn’t seen each other since the day those gates closed for the last time.”

The Works at its 24-hour peak had employed 2,600 men, occupied 58 acres with 12.9 of them under cover, served ceaselessly the biggest railway siding in the kingdom An eggs-in-one-basket case certainly, perhaps even occasionally prone to an early-night shift, but they turned out top quality railway wagons in demand all over the world.

Closure was announced in 1982, shortly after the works had landed a multi-million pound order for the Congo. A hard-won year’s reprieve offered false hope: like an A4 Pacific at the end of a country branch line, the Lady wasn’t for turning.

“Maggie Thatcher was hell bent on closing the wagon works as fast as she could,” said John Priestley. “We were making a profit, turning out wagons faster and better than the Japanese, no one could touch us.

“She was a Prime Minister who actually boasted about never having been on a train in her life, that’s how much she cared about the railways, and she was determined we wouldn’t beat her.

“We tried everything, went to Brussels, had questions asked in the Commons, had a march through London.

Norman Tebbitt even asked me to speak at the Tory conference in Blackpool, and there’s not many Labour Party members can say that.

“I was very proud to lead those lads.

When we marched through London, the police superintendent said it was the most disciplined march he’d ever seen.

“It said everything about the spirit of the lads. They kept their dignity, though the government repeatedly kicked them in the teeth.”

They’d hired a train. British Rail quibbled at that, too. The whole lot of them were on free passes.

Twenty five years later – “It really does just seem like yesterday,” said Pop – the old town still hardly seemed the same without the wagon works buzzer, or the time-marking thump of the steam hammer, or the joyous first day of the works holidays.

John Priestley, who lives a few miles west near Cockfield, supposed that the town of 12,000 people still hadn’t completely recovered. Former local councillor Tommy Taylor talked of the struggle for rebirth.

“It’ll never get back to where it was, the closure took too much out of the town. Everyone knew that Shildon was the wagon works.”

They talked, too, of characters once familiar in those parts – of Bert Trussler and Charlie Raine who’d provided the turn at the 1984 wake, of Tommy Trebilcok, the floridly ubiquitous polliss, of Tucker Thompson, who kept the store horse.

Many had also had nicknames.

Bobby Thompson was always Monty, as (inexplicably) in Montmorency; Tommy Taylor was Rocket, though whether on account of being particularly fast or particularly slow was never properly ascertained.

At the wake in New Shildon Club, Tommy had sung Your Cheating Heart, a reference to the Government and to the management of British Rail Engineering. He didn’t reprise it; which seemed a pity.

Pop had put up a great wall of old photographs: Shildon Works in full vigour, Shildon Works in 1975 when it was the throbbing fulcrum of the Stockton and Darlington Railway celebrations and a chuffed world steamed to its door; Shildon Works in the 1980s when anxious men fought ferociously for their future but probably knew the worst all along.

They’d fought, said John Priestley, like no one else could have done. “It was all about the community. This was Shildon, full stop.”

Half way through the night, a rumour was loose-shunted round the Railway Institute that a new wagon works was to be built on redundant sidings in Gateshead.

None gave it five seconds thought.

The jewel is lost, the crown lies toppled for ever.

Delight double

DIPTON’S in north-west Durham, mentioned almost in passing a couple of weeks back as the place to which the amazing James Fawcett – subsequent sage of Satley – would walk ten miles each way for lessons in Latin and Hebrew.

The reference intrigued Keith Bell.

“Anything about Dipton is intriguing to me. I spent the first 13 years of my life in its north-east suburb.” He means Flint Hill.

The puzzle is who in that 19th Century mining village might have offered lessons in Hebrew and Latin, the possible answer in the Roman Catholic church at Brooms, to the south-west.

Dipton has, at any rate, another claim to fame – two members of the 1918 Parliament lived a few hundred yards apart in the same Commons touch village, and never once flipped homes.

John Wilkinson Taylor, whose father had been landlord of the Jolly Sailor in Wearmouth, became a miner at Dipton, general secretary of the Mechanics’ Association, county and district councillor, good Socialist and Primitive Methodist – the two so often arm-in-arm – and in 1906 the first Labour MP for Chester-le-Street, beating one of the Shafto squirearchy for the Conservatives.

MP for 13 years, he lived in Wesley Terrace, Dipton.

John Edmund Swan was elected Barnard Castle’s MP in 1918, having moved to Dipton as a child and attended (as did Keith Bell) what then was Collierley Board School.

Despite his humble upbringing he loved books, read as he walked through Dipton woods, and also kept goal for Dipton Wanderers, though presumably not while reading a book.

After a scholarship to Cambridge, he became an Independent Labour Party pioneer and a member of the Durham Miners’ Association executive.

Both men had worked at the pit that dominated Dipton from 1855- 1940, improbably named the Delight.

The village has long had a Delight Row; modishly, there’s now Delight Court, too.

To what extent things were delightful, below ground or above, readers must suppose for themselves. A column on colliery names may be called for, nonetheless.

DAVID Thompson, governor of the top security Falkland prison outside Durham, sends details of a new restaurant at HMP High Down in Surrey, serving 1,000 meals a day to staff, visitors and commercial customers.

Inside the walls and past security, it’s cost £550,000 to create, the bespoke furniture made by Falkland inmates under the direction of David Knight.

The restaurant’s the idea of High Down chef Alberto Crisci, formerly at the celebrated Mirabelle in London, and offers training, work experience and qualifications to those looking for a new career on release.

Crisci also manages the more conventional prison kitchens, serving 3,000 meals at an average cost of £1.68 per men per day. The new venture is called The Clink.

HEIGHINGTON, midway between Darlington and Bishop Auckland, is among the places to be this midsummer weekend. The Music, Arts and Gardens festival covers much ground.

The Carol Andrews Singers launch proceedings tomorrow, 7.30pm, at St Michael’s church (tickets £3, 01325- 314903 or 308727) followed on Saturday morning by village hall workshops on jewellery making, art felt making and millinery. Places £8, details 01325-308727.

Also on Saturday, singers are invited to perform a “scratch” Faure’s Requiem, rehearsals at 2pm, performance at 5pm. The cost’s £3, including refreshments (01325-314903); the performance, in church, is free.

A dozen gardens will be open from 1pm on Saturday and Sunday, artists working in most of them. Maps and tickets available from the village hall, £2.50. The festival service is on Sunday at 10am in St Michael’s – where exhibitions of art by village school children and work by the Darlington Embroiderers’ Guild will be on display throughout June. Teas in the village hall; further refreshment in Heighington’s three pubs.

THE intensive care encounter with the bull now happily (and painfully) behind him, the redoubtable Doug Anderson throws open the barns at Moor House Farm, Brignall, on Sunday to a Collection of Teesdale Talents.

Doug’s 72, the farm – south of the A66, near the Morritt Arms – his lifelong home. The bull’s gone.

“We were getting him in a trailer to go to market and I don’t think he wanted to go. He knocked me over and I’d have got up, but then he jumped on top of me.”

Among much else, Doug’s a long serving warden at Brignall church, for whose funds the day is being held.

Around 25 exhibitors will include artists, wood and other craftsmen and food producers.

There’ll be barbecue and bar, a bottle tombola, competitions like welly throwing and guessing the weight of the ram. It runs from 2-6pm – adults £2, under 12s free.

ALTOGETHER more strenuously, the Boys of Elm Road Cycling Society – unselfconsciously known as the BERCS – will spend Saturday and Sunday on the 135-mile Coast-to-Coast route from Whitehaven to Sunderland.

Elm Road’s a workmen’s club in Shildon, the ten riders more accustomed to bending arms than legs.

“We’ve been talking about doing it for years, usually after a few beers,” says Brian Burn, one of the organisers.

They’ve been training for ten weeks, supposed that the mischievous acronym might further be translated as Backsides Extremely Raw Cos of Saddle, will raise funds for Macmillan Nurses and the Lupus Society.

Already, says Brian, they’ve bagged around £2,500.

Brian’s on 07816-831069 or donations can be sent to the club or left at the Grey Horse, the Three Tuns or the One Stop Shop in Shildon. Shildon works.