Where Nobby Scandalous worked

IN the railways’ scheme of things, prosaic amid the incomparably mosaic, Ribblehead Viaduct is known simply as Bridge 66. Wherever its great battalion of builders got their kicks, it sure as snowfall wasn’t on Bridge 66.

More than 6,000 worked in the 1870s on Ribblehead and the nearby Blea Moor tunnel, and how many well-intentioned sub-editors have added a final, comfortless, k? Blea Moor was blasted enough without it.

More than 200 navvies, their wives and children are buried in St Leonard’s churchyard at Chapel-le- Dale. Many died from smallpox, some were simply blown from the bridge. The wind, observed the philosophical John Ruskin, was so great that even the mountains must rock.

The rain averaged 70 inches in a good year, might top three figures in a bad one.

The Midland Railway – ever generous – agreed £200 for the graveyard’s ineluctable extension.

If the navvies faced a fearful task, and goodness knows they did, the folk from the Settle Temperance Society – sent up to convince them of the error of their inabstemious ways – may have been almost as daunted.

Ribblehead’s on the Settle and Carlisle line, a dozen miles across the moor from Hawes, in Wensleydale, but on the Cumbrian side of the North Yorkshire border. Officially it traversed Batty Moor. “Batty” didn’t mean totally bonkers back then; it just seemed that way.

The story of its construction, and of Blea Moor tunnel’s, is told – holiday reading – in the ageless Bill Mitchell’s latest book, Thunder in the Mountains. “At Ribblehead,” he writes, “the brief summer flush was like a wink between two long winters.”

The men and their families survived (most of them) in shanty towns with names like Jerusalem and Jericho, Sebastopol, Inkerman – not to be confused with the celebrated Tow Law suburb of the same name – and even, tongue-in-cheek, Belgravia.

The rats had “jovial doings”. Belgravia, observes Mitchell laconically, did not score highly on the social scale.

The men often had nicknames, many simply identifying them as Birmingham Bill or Welsh Jack.

Nobby Scandalous is a little more puzzling, especially since his name wasn’t Clark, but Williams.

The viaduct’s foundations were 25ft below ground, the line 100ft above. There were 24 pillars, 23 arches, innumerable problems.

No hard helmets in those days, of course, the curious thing is that images atop the erection show gaffers still wearing their bowlers and workers their flat caps, and neither holding on to their hats.

Other photographs are simply stupendous.

With Ribblehead Viaduct, how could they fail to be?

Down below, the Blea Moor men couldn’t even see light at the end of the tunnel, for there was a bend in the middle.

They did it, of course, Ribblehead surviving both the Second World War – the Home Guard despatched to protect it from the Luftwaffe armed with pick ace handles and a single rifle – and Dr Beeching, who may have been yet more formidable.

The line was finally reprieved in April 1989, the Settle and Carlisle now much used by both passenger and freight services.

Bill Mitchell, now in his 80s, suffers from Settle and Carlisleitis – “an incurable disease,” he confesses. A long-time former editor of The Dalesman he will lead a mass walk across Ribblehead on July 26, when engineering operations close the line elsewhere.

It costs £15, groups setting off at hourly intervals – over-14s only and must be pre-booked. Profits to the Friends of the Settle and Carlisle.

The caffey-hearted columnist will be beneath such things, of course.

MORE holiday reading, the Scottish edition of the Sunday Times carried an interview with Duncan Bannatyne, the Glaswegian entrepreneur and philanthropist whose base is now firmly in the North-East.

It was thus something of a surprise to read of his family home in Stockport – “the kids play at the end of the cul-de-sac, it’s just like a caravan site” – when most thought he lived in Stockton (or Wynyard, to be precise).

This isn’t a Dragons’ Den excoriation, however, merely an example of how easily these unfortunate errors occur.

The column two weeks ago told of the bespoke furniture-making operation at Falkland Prison, near Durham, when clearly it should have been Frankland.

Doug Arnold in Belmont, Durham, queries it most memorably.

“Falkland prison must be a bit of a trip if the governor comes home for his lunch.”

HOMEWARD along the A66 – not to be confused, of course, with Bridge 66 – we looked into the former Kirkby Stephen East railway station, where restoration proceeds apace (or “steadily”, as they more prudently prefer).

KSE, redundant since 1962, was on the LNER from Darlington and Barnard Castle to Tebay and Penrith.

Kirkby Stephen West, a mile away, was not only on a different line but before nationalisation run by a different company, the LMS.

In the distant way of the railways, neither could ever have been supposed Kirkby Stephen Central.

The set-up’s impressive, the building restoration painstakingly magnificent.

The hope is that things will really be moving, both steam and diesel hauled, by September 2010.

It’s now run by the volunteer Stainmore Railway Company. Mike Thompson, the chairman, has just taken early retirement as a lecturer at Newcastle University medical school – he’s a diabetes specialist – to devote himself full-time to the railway. Mike’s from a railway family, was once the regular fireman on Sir Nigel Gresley, spends four days a week on site and the other three doing the paperwork – “and the housework” he cheerfully admits – at home in Sedgefield.

“I’m now an unemployed labourer,”

he says, though for “unemployed”

should be substituted “unpaid”.

Sue Jones, his partner and the company secretary, is a consultant – again in diabetic illness – at Hartlepool and North Tees district hospitals.

She’s atop a ladder, meticulously painting a locomotive. “I don’t suppose many of my patients would recognise me,” she says.

The SRC was formed nine years ago, among its first jobs to shift 7,500 tons of contaminated material from the site. With grant aid, it cost £300,000.

Already some of the locos and stock are again ready for action, including an immaculate 1948 saddle tank called FC Tingey, known to its friends as Fred. Fred has no better friend than Derek Hamilton.

Derek worked on the engine when it went for a couple of years to Brechin, Scotland. When Fred came back to KSE, Derek decided to follow it south. “It’s a lovely little engine,”

he says, self-evidently.

They’re also restoring five or six Gresley coaches, once familiarly steamed over Stainmore. One, in the platform, gleams gloriously already.

“Ten coats of varnish, six to go,” says Sue.

The station already has a buffet car, gift shop and a fascinating little museum, including a sign indicating a booking office for horses. Something to do with the Appleby Horse Fair, says Sue. There are station cats, too, but they’ve scarpered.

Keith Richardson, whose book on KSE (John North, July 17, 2007) has had to be reprinted, is anther regular helper. Now in Finghall, near Bedale, he grew up in Kirkby Stephen.

“I’ve loved this station since being a child,” he says.

They’ve completed a picnic area, overlooking the shed from which steam engines will soon re-emerge, Mike and Sue taking a breather there for photographs. “We’re not just overgrown kids playing at trains,” he insists, and already they involve schools, community groups and those with special needs.

It’ll all officially be opened at 7pm on July 24. In the meantime the KSE heritage centre is open from 10am- 4pm every Saturday and Sunday – admission and parking free. There’s a car boot sale from 11am-3pm this Sunday. Further information for visitors and volunteers at kirkbystepoheneast.

co.uk AFEW miles north-west, we also dropped in on the Eden Valley Railway which now operates from the former military railway station at Warcop along the sixmile stretch to Appleby and hopes itself to reach Kirkby Stephen one day. Sadly, nothing was in operation.

It was noticeable, however, that the Eden Valley has one of those huge railway snowploughs.

It’s still the high Pennines. They know their place.

Race relations

STEVE Race, musician and broadcaster, died last week, aged 88. Nationally he may best be remembered for the radio programme My Music – 520 shows; he didn’t miss one – but in Weardale for a wonderful book about his grandfather.

By the time he was ten, Joseph Race was a washer boy at a lead mine. At 11 he had what his grandson later called “one of those startling Victorian conversions” and decided he wanted to become a missionary.

At 25 the Reverend Joseph Race, newly ordained into the Methodist Church, set sail for China. Seven years later, a combination of typhoid and overwork, he was dead, leaving two children and a third unborn.

The Two Worlds of Joseph Race told the story compellingly and touchingly. I’d reviewed it in 1988.

“In mid-19th century Weardale there were 34 lead mines and probably as many chapels; in China there were 450 million heathen and just 14 Methodist missionaries.”

Race, from Ireshopeburn, had – against her father’s will – married Hannah Dowson from St John’s chapel, next village down. Once in China he discovered that the other missionaries were “tea drinkers”, set off up the Yangtze on his own and determined to convert the nation single-handedly.

“The turning point came,” Steve Race recalled, “when he realised it was no good talking to the Chinese about their souls when their bodies were in such a bad state, partly due to the effects of opium.”

Joseph simply called it “that infernal poison”.

Race relations, Steve had discovered his grandfather’s diaries and letters home in chests in the attic. That he was also an accomplished writer became quickly evident in the subsequent book.

Though a classically trained musician and talented jazz pianist, he probably made most money – and won prizes at the Venice and Cannes film festivals – from an advertising jungle for Birds Eye peas.

Sweet as the moment...

He helped turn the early children’s television programme Whirligig – remember Mr Turnip and Hank the Cowboy? – had a top 30 hit with Pied Piper, won an Ivor Novello award for the song Nicola, named after his daughter, was deputy chairman of the Performing Rights Society and in 1992 was appointed OBE.

He’d also had a heart attack at 44 and at once gave up his 30 cigarettes a day. His Who’s Who entry listed one of his recreations as “avoiding smokers”.

Occasionally he’d return to his roots, and to the splendid High House chapel in Ireshopeburn where his grandfather had preached. Once he asked £245 plus expenses to be a judge at the Weardale Music festival – it was 1979 – remembered whence he came and waived the fee.

He also spoke at the annual dinner of the Weardale Society for the Prevention and Prosecution of Felons, mysteriously returning a pair of handcuffs they’d lost in 1820, and spent two days in the Wear Valley to promote his book.

“The dale is dying from a potent mix of neglect and exploitation,”

he said in March 1988.

“The feeling of liveliness and vigour in the area is really striking,”

he wrote to the Echo a month later.

The book’s still somewhere on these shelves. Unable to find it, the lady of the house bought another copy via the internet. It cost 10p.

Steve Race’s memory is worth a lot more than that.

...and finally, the aptly named Rain or Shine Theatre Company presents The Taming of the Shrew at Mount Grace Priory, near Osmotherley, at 7.30pm on Saturday. “Bring your chairs, picnic, wine and friends,”

urges Jon Hogan of English heritage and the column plans to take him up on it. Gates open 6.45pm, performance 7.30pm. Advance tickets are £11, £9 concessions (01609-883494) or £13 and £11 on the night. Rain or shine, more next week.