Royal blue

IT has divided public opinion for 40 years. For four decades, too, it was believed that Princess Anne had maintained a diplomatic royal silence after unveiling Resurgence, the “modern” sculpture in front of Darlington town hall.

She didn’t. The princess’s two-word comment, picked up by the young Kate Adie, has finally been revealed. The second word was “me”.

It was May 27, 1970, the day that Her Royal Highness opened the new town hall and also visited The Northern Echo to mark our centenary. The princess, who once ordered a bunch of photographers to “naff off”, was, of course, altogether more regal with us lot.

They even gave her honorary membership of the print unions, so that she could start the presses.

Her unequivocal thoughts on Resurgence are recorded in the newly-published second volume of writer and actor Michael Palin’s diaries, following a chat with rising star Adie in 1980. Ten years earlier she was a 24-year-old reporter on BBC Radio Durham.

The civic talk was of the “Spirit of New Darlington”. As everyone applauded, Palin records, Princess Anne turned to Adie and muttered a heartfelt…

Well, it wasn’t what you’d call purple prose, more royal blue.

Resurgence, a two-and-a-half ton stainless steel sculpture which cost £5,000, was the work of John Hoskin, who won a Lions Club-sponsored competition that in 1967 attracted 86 entrants. Hoskin went on to become professor of fine art at Leicester University.

The Public Monument and Sculpture Association’s national archive records that the mayor at the time viewed all five shortlisted “non-figurative” maquettes and thought them all rubbish.

Letters written to the local newspapers, the archive adds, suggested that a new public toilet would be preferable to “an ambiguous abortion in steel”.

The young princess, fashionable skirt way above her knees, had been welcomed by flag waving thousands. That she appeared puzzled by the sculpture was reflected in the following day’s front page headline: “Tell me, what does it mean?”

“I said it was the thousand dollar question,” said Hoskin, after meeting the princess.

Eric Jackson, the mayor, had similarly been interrogated. “She seemed to think I knew more about the sculpture than the sculptor did,” he said.

“I explained what it represented and that it had already caused a lot of controversy. She didn’t pass any comment on it.” Nor, we added, had she commented to Mr Hoskin.

She had to the cautious Kate Adie, though – and after all these years we finally know what the future Princess Royal thought about the New Spirit of Darlington.

A LARGE latte – or to be quite fearless, a large latte and an orange and lemon muffin – with John Williams MBE, long-time leader of Darlington Borough Council. He’s surreptitiously shown page 60, asked his own first impression of Resurgence.

“I think it would have been ‘What’s that?’” says Councillor Williams. “Not quite the same words as our esteemed royal.”

There are those who suppose the town hall every bit as unprepossessing – the term may also be considered euphemistic – as the overgrown angle-iron which stands in front of it.

The leader’s cautious. “The town hall may not be architecturally memorable but its greater problem is that it’s not particularly work friendly. It was built at a time when central heating and air conditioning were optional extras. It can be too cold in winter and too hot in summer.”

And the sculpture? “I think it’s symbolic of the change that was happening in Darlington at the time.” How? “I’m not talking of artistic merit, but I think its symbolism is very clear.”

In what way? “Well admittedly just looking at it you wouldn’t know much of its background, you could think it was just girders welded together.”

Plans to demolish the town hall, mooted when Tesco wanted a centrally- situated supermarket, have been abandoned. Had the council headquarters moved, would Resurgence have been upwardly mobile, too?

“That’s the 64,000 dollar question,” says Coun Williams. “I don’t know, it’s hypothetical, but no one’s stopping me in the street or launching on-line petitions to complain about it.”

So has he noticed how jaded it’s looking, or the graffiti it’s attracted? The Public Monument and Sculpture Association archive describes its condition as dirty, with pockets of rust, peeling paint and scratched graffiti.

“It’s like your back garden shed, you don’t look at that either, I’ll have to take a walk past,” says Coun Williams but Resurgence, the New Spirit of Darlington, speaks only of recession now.

MICHAEL Palin has a few more North-East memories, too, including filming on the Esk Valley railway – a place he considered pretty close to paradise – and speaking at Durham University Union to the proposal “This is the age of the train”.

The pre-debate dinner was better than anything they ever had at Oxford, he supposed; the drink flowed so freely that ASLEF leader Ray Buckton, also taking part, proposed calling the speakers out on strike and continuing to pass the port.

Palin also recalls sitting at the premiere of Mel Brooks’s film History of the World next to celebrated former Northern Echo editor Harold Evans, coincidental because Evans is himself a former Durham man – BA 1952, MA 1966 – and because his own autobiography has just been published.

Palin wasn’t greatly impressed. “He seems to be very anxious to please – asking me what I’m doing, as if he knows me… A propensity to do the right thing by clapping whenever Mel Brooks appears on screen makes me suspect him. Surely Times editors should be made of harder stuff?”

Yet more coincidentally, Harry Evans, 81, is expected back in Darlington tomorrow for a book signing. He will find himself in the paper once again.

HALFWAY to Hollywood, Michael Palin’s diaries from 1980-88, is published by Orion Books at £20. This copy, however, cost £12.99 at Waterstone’s and will go to first reader out of the hat next Wednesday correctly to name his first volume of diaries. Email entries are fine.

Special delivery

MR Allan Barkas, good bloke and former St Helen’s Auckland shopkeeper, celebrated his birthday last weekend with a most enjoyable dinner at the South Causey Inn, near Stanley. He’s 60; there was much baby talk, nonetheless.

Allan, it transpires, was a Hardwick Hall bairn. I was a Hardwick Hall bairn, our kidder – 20 minutes later – was a Hardwick Hall bairn and so was the nice lady sitting next to me at the do. There must be thousands of us.

Immodestly, we’d suggested a few years ago that one of those blue plaques be erected by the front door. “Not such a good idea,” wrote Keith Walshaw. “To earn a blue plaque you have to be dead.”

Built by John Burdon in 1748, Hardwick Hall – just outside Sedgefield – became renowned for its parties and good living, for fine ladies and (it was said) true gentlemen.

More frugally, it was a base for Bevin Boys during the war, must have become a maternity home immediately afterwards and covered a large area.

The lady’s parents had lived in Haverton Hill, near Billingham. “It was winter, the roads blocked with snow, my father walked every day,” she recalled.

The internet reveals little else, save a vague recollection that the regime was “strict” and a 1957 Commons debate in which Joe Slater, then Sedgefield’s MP, expressed concern for the maternity hospital’s future.

Hardwick, for all that, was left holding the baby for another 11 years. In 1990, the Echo carried the story of how Billingham lass Joanne Meehan, one of the last to be born there, was holding her wedding reception – on her 22nd birthday – in what had become the Hardwick Hall Hotel.

In 1968 it was bought for £21,500 by Ramside Estates, who still own it, despite director Mike Adamson’s first impression that it was ghastly. Certainly, said Mike, it bore a sort of institutional blandness.

Now it’s an elegant place, the former labour room a board room, the cries merely of those feeling the squeeze.

Ramside’s managing director John Adamson, Mike’s lad, hasn’t been around. When he is, we shall suggest that he hold a sort of Hardwick Hall together, a reunion of the many from the southern half of County Durham who arrived in state – and, with luck, of some of their parents.

It’s our birthright, after all. TED Harrison, the Wingate miner’s son who became Canada’s most acclaimed, most decorated and most philanthropic artist, is the subject of a new and richly illustrated biography, Painting Paradise.

It means the Yukon, which he painted for 40 years. Ted Harrison has Yukonasia.

He’d got a teaching job there in 1967 – “Weaklings need not apply,” said the ad – took strength from his surroundings, only once saw a grizzly. “It was at the bottom of a garbage pit,” he told the column during a return visit three years ago. “He looked at me and I looked at him and we ran in opposite directions.”

Now 83, he’s a friend of Norman Cornish, the Spennymoor pitman painter whose 90th birthday on November 18 will be marked by the publication of his own biography, written by Bob McManners and Gillian Wales.

Ted’s biography is by acclaimed author and long-time friend Katharine Gibson – “as bright and as engaging as Ted Harrison’s paintings,” says a Canadian reviewer.

The “collector’s” edition, which includes a CD of the six-movement suite The Cremation of Sam McGee, costs $295, the soft back is $75.95. Details on tedharrisonbiography.com

SPEAKING of talented County Durham colliers, I’m ploughing through the bound files for February 1936 – someone wants details of how his grandad killed himself – when the eye is caught by the headline “Crook quartet to broadcast”.

The Crook Unemployed Miners Quartet – W Cruddace, J Kearton, J Braithwaite and T Rowell – had passed a BBC audition in Manchester.

The story was short, the final paragraph summed it up. “Mr Kearton taught his colleagues the rudiments of music and the party practised singing last summer in the fields and country lanes of the Crook district.

“Their headquarters at present is in some allotments at Beckfields, Crook, and the men practise in a little wooden shack.”

It’s a fascinating note. Can anyone amplify it?

STILL at the coal face, last week’s column told of the 19th Century miners who left County Durham in search of America’s promised land.

Joe Howe, Paul Dobson’s great great granddad, was among them. “Family legend had it that he left with only a spare collar in his pocket, but the 1870 US census shows him at Wheeler Creek mines in Virginia with his wife, so maybe she carried the bags,” writes Paul, from Bishop Auckland.

By 1875, other man’s grass, they were all back home in Newbottle.

…and finally, it wouldn’t be a column without a whisper of the Hush-Hush, the Nigel Gresley-designed experimental locomotive that has so greatly occupied readers’ minds of late and which still shows little sign of running out of steam. Tim Ruffle in Chilton sends a learned explanation of what was “different” about it and why it proved so problematical – “basically, it went through coal as if there were no tomorrow”.

Enthusiasts may wish to find out more on lner.info/locos/W/w1.shtml