Heart and sole

THE splendid Mrs Rita Everett, who helps her son, Peter, run Darlington Snooker Club, celebrated her 67th birthday at the weekend. Since a gantry of real ales sold at just 67p a half to mark the occasion, it may be imagined that we joined in with enthusiasm.

As things wore on, the conversation turned lightly to The Army Game, among the best remembered programmes from the early days of ITV – 154 episodes between 1957 and 1961 – and in particular to Mr John Briggs’s insistence that Ted Lune, who played the goggle-eyed Private Len Bone, came from Sunderland.

Though John’s rarely wrong, especially on Sunderland matters, he was this time. Lune was a Lancashire lad, believed to have taken his stage name from a river in those parts.

Since we are playing the army game, however, a few questions for those of a certain seniority – and a week in the glasshouse for those who cheat by using the internet. Answers at the foot of the column.

1. What was the number of the hut in which the conscripts found themselves?

2. Which Army Game actor became the first Dr Who?

3. Which 1956 film inspired the series?

4. Harry Fowler played Corporal Hoskins. What was Hoskins’ nickname?

5. The actor who played Captain Pocket featured in another military series. Who was he?

6. What was Sergeant Major Snudge’s first name?

7. And Private Bisley’s, played by Alfie Bass?

8. Later a famous comedian in his own right, who played Private “Chubby” Catchpole?

9. Bernard Bresslaw played Private Popplewell – what was his catchphrase?

10. What was Lance Corporal Merryweather’s nickname?

SISTER Mary Elisabeth writes from the Carmelite convent in Darlington, seeking to acknowledge all those who made the recent visit of the relics of St Therese of Lisieux so successful.

The sale of roses raised £2,105 for St Theresa’s Hospice in the town. Tomorrow’s John North column will attempt to embrace a list of the worthy.

There was a surprise, however.

The Darlington community are not only Carmelites but discalced Carmelites. It was a word neither encountered nor suspected, one I took to be a typing error until – discalce learning – checking Chambers.

“Discalced: without shoes, bare-footed; as a branch of the Carmelite order.”

So, like the speckled hen in the Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, do Darlington’s nuns still go barefoot?

“We still call ourselves discalced as we are a separate branch of the Carmelite order,” responds Sister Mary Elisabeth.

“It referred to hemp sandals rather than posh leather shoes.

These days we have to get what we can find.”

BRITAIN’S bestknown discalced person may be Sandie Shaw, the singer, remembered almost as much for going barefoot as for songs like Always There to Remind Me and Puppet on a String. Even her autobiography was called The World at My Feet.

Born Sandra Goodrich in February 1947, she was an IBM operator at Ford in Dagenham, until being spotted by Adam Faith.

Soon, said the Guinness Book of Hit Singles, she was “the barefoot pop princess of the Sixties” – and no matter that her fashion company sold shoes, too.

In August 2007, however, Shaw – by then a qualified psychotherapist – revealed that she had had corrective surgery on her feet, which she described as “ugly”. It left her immobilised for several months.

NO cold feet, either, for my dear old friend and former classmate John Robinson – otherwise the Barefoot Crusader – who raised thousands of pounds for charity from his heart-and-sole endeavours.

Shildon lad and martial arts expert, John had made barefoot ascents of Ben Nevis and Scafell, his eye on Snowdon to complete the set, when he became ill with a brain tumour.

“There was a buzz going round the mountain,” he’d reported after the Ben Nevis climb. “Everyone was asking one another if they’d seen the dozy devil in bare feet.”

Shod, we’d once joined him on a walk from Chester-le-Street to Heighington when a radio reporter rang.

“Why on earth are you walking barefoot?” he asked.

“I couldn’t do it on my hands,” said John.

The Barefoot Crusader died in September last year, discalced but never forgotten.

MARY Travers, whose death we have been lamenting, certainly wore shoes on stage. Well-heeled, too. A reader who simply signs himself Dave suggests, however, that we were mistaken to suppose that Peter, Paul and Mary had never appeared in the North-East. “I first saw them in concert at the City Hall, Newcastle, at the height of their fame.” Anyone got the programme?

WONDERING how the Slake pub in West Cornforth came by its quenching name, last week’s column found itself digging into limestone quarries and, inevitably, getting into a mess.

Pete Winstanley in Durham and Peter Wilson in Barnard Castle both try to untangle crossed mineral lines: slaked lime, in short, is produced by hydrating quicklime, the stuff used to purify the graves of plague victims.

On the etymology of Butterknowle Slack, in the Gaunless Valley, John Hallimond in Cockfield suggests that “Slake” is old Viking for “a dwelling place in a shallow valley”, which sounds pretty much like the Slack.

Then there was the Hills and Holes, the local name for the area behind the Slake. It prompts Keith Hopper in Darlington to ask where Hilly- Howly was in Shildon.

Keith won’t say. Can anyone fill in the holes?

ALL that led to Jarrow Slacks and to the sad case of William Jobling, in 1832 the last man in England publicly to be gibbeted. Extraordinarily, Wendy Acres’ it great great grandfather witnessed as a sevenyear- old, the macabre sight of Jobling’s tarred body swinging in the breeze off the Tyne.

Her grandfather became chief engineer at Darlington Waterworks, the story passed down the ages. “It left a profound impression on him,”

says Wendy. “I suppose well it might.”

WE’D also been pondering the origins of the name Busty, familiar in many Durham pit communities. John Heslop quotes from the Burnopfield entry in the Durham Village Book, published in 1992 by the County Federation of Women’s Institutes.

“Busty Bank, so named because a hilly bankside burst and exposed a seam of coal. This hilly road became known as Bursty Bank and later as Busty Bank.” Women’s instinct, perhaps?

Burnopfield’s close to the Northumberland border, near the Gibside estate. Another part of the village, from which Turner painted the famous Gibside watercolour that hangs in the Bowes Museum, is called Bryan’s Leap, or sometimes just the Loup.

Robert Surtees acknowledges it in his History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham, published in 1820. “Bryansleap stands on the heights above Gibside, in a position sufficiently eminent to render it probable that the name (which is of no antiquity) was imposed from some tremendous feat or marvellous escape, but the legend is lost.”

Loup of the imagination, can readers find it again?

The column now stands down for a week. Back on October 28.

ARMY Game answers: Hut 29.

William Hartnell. Private’s Progress.

Flogger. Frank Williams, the vicar in Dad’s Army. Claude. Montague. Dick Emery. I only arsked. Moosh.