A nun’s tale

Still, says Sister Mary Elisabeth, the presence of the queen of the roses remains. “We still feel that joy, that peace. It’s lovely really.”

The relics of the 24-year-old saint have been touring Britain – enrapturing the faithful, mystifying the doubtful, stirring the scornful. The glow may be rosy, but by no means universal.

Sister Mary Elisabeth, a 35-yearold former bookbinder from Middlesbrough, was in charge of preparations for the visit to the Carmel convent in Darlington, one of few venues – though Wandsworth prison was another – that wasn’t a cathedral.

She admits that they were organisational innocents, that the visit in the end became something of a back door job, that there are many without whom it would have been impossible and to whom they are endlessly grateful.

“It was a major event for the town of Darlington. The police told me that people took degrees in organising things like this. They came every day for a week, they were fantastic.”

Beyond doubt, it was hugely successful.

Between 1,500 and 2,000 people saw or touched the casket, 3,480 roses were sold at £1 each, £2,105 given to St Theresa’s Hospice in the town. Nine florists did the arrangements; a German sister has pressed thousands of fallen petals.

Sister Mary Elisabeth, as joyful as she is delightful, may be the only nun likely to break into a run down the convent corridor, or dextrously to work a power point presentation, or to suggest – at least to a visiting journalist – that the Pope is like their grandfather.

She catches the raised eyebrow at that one. “Well, he’s like my grandfather, anyway,” she adds, disarmingly.

The sale of roses particularly delighted her. “I thought we might make £240, ten roses for every year of the saint’s life. Then it got to £500 and I was becoming really excited.

“Finally, Morrisons had to send out to shops in Stockton and all over to get enough roses for us.

“At first I didn’t say to the people at Morrisons that they were to do with the relics. I said they were for St Therese, but they asked when she was coming, so I had to explain.

“I didn’t feel it was the bones, I felt she was with us in spirit, that she was a palpable presence.”

Among the problems was that they discovered that most of the convent doors were too small to allow the casket’s passage. Eventually Vatican permission was sought to take it, escorted by Royal Dragoon Guards from Catterick Garrison, through a back door and into what’s called the enclosure – the inner part of the house where normally only the nuns themselves may venture.

“I had to tell the sisters that everyone was going to be tripping around the enclosure. They weren’t very keen,” she admits. “Some of the sisters are quite old and don’t see people much. It was even the first time my mum and dad had seen inside the enclosure, so it was very exciting.”

The planning took a year. A week on Sunday, the order formally marks 150 years in Darlington. Sister Mary Elisabeth expects that they’ll have “a little something” but supposes that it’ll be a long time before there’s anything like the visit of St Therese.

“The buzz is still here, the joy is still here, but what I need now is a holiday.”

SISTER Mary Elisabeth had initially emailed, grateful for the media coverage and to many more. “Hundreds helped the visit to be a success and to run smoothly. Would you be able to help us thank them?”

■ The police – especially Inspector Steve Steen and PC Mandy McAllister – offered “fantastic organisation and moral support”.

■ The Royal Dragoon Guards, who guarded and lifted the casket, were “outstanding – beautifully turned out and great fun to have around”.

The men will go to Afghanistan in the new year. “We will pray for them in a special way,” says Sister Mary Elisabeth.

■ The council, especially chief executive Ada Burns and estates manager Guy Metcalfe, “pulled out all the stops”.

■ Jeanette and Andrea from the Co-op Funeral Service provided a taxi from the station for visiting Carmelites.

■ Ray Wade Caterers and Sue Hopkins from the Fox and Hounds “refreshed the many guests”.

Terry Rotherham organised stewards and ushers.

■ Kath Kelly, the organist, and staff and pupils at Carmel Tech provided a beautiful choir.

Christine Boyce and the children of St Teresa’s primary school sang their school song dedicated to St Therese. Staff and children of Holy Family school read the intercessory prayers.

■ Catholic and Church of England parishes sold roses, Morrisons sold them, and managed to find enough.

Pilgrim's Progess

THE Church Times reports the death, at 72, of the Reverend David Jones, a lovely man who was vicar of Staindrop for 13 years from 1992.

“Mr Amos seems to write most of the Echo, so I’m not sure which bit we’ll be in,” he’d said, gratifyingly, when the At Your Service column visited in 1999.

A former forces chaplain, he’d acquired a formidable squad of suffixes, occasionally paraded. He was MA, BA, DipTh, Cert.Ch.Sch.Studies(D), M.I.Mgt, Assoc.R.Hist.Soc, SCF (retd), hadji.

Memory suggests that David explained what hadji meant – Hadji was subsequently a Sunderland footballer – but fails to add the answer.

Staindrop’s in the Raby parish, Lord Barnard said (doubtless apocryphally) to have told the rural dean that the new vicar would sort out all the right wingers.

David himself said (doubtless jocularly) that the reason half his congregation had receding hairlines was because of all the forelock tugging that went on.

He was one of four Stockton Grammar School boys from the same era of the Fifties who became Church of England priests. The others – Peter Holland, Bill Hall and Les Welsh – happily survive.

THE Church Times also has a question and answer with the Rector Dr Peter Jupp, a United Reformed Church minister who’s a research fellow at Durham University and an expert on cremation. “I ought to be cremated or I’d be letting a lot of people down,” he says. So what of his own funeral? “I’ve told my children that if they have My Way, I’m coming back to haunt them.”

The proof is in the picture

WHISPER who dare, the Hush-Hush is running longer than the Tees Tyne Pullman. This wonderful picture of 60700 passing the then-new south signal box at Darlington in the summer of 1939 offers compelling proof that the old steamer really did get back home occasionally.

It’s the work of Jack Armstrong, a prolific railway photographer with the ear of an operating department who let him know about special workings.

JW Armstrong, as generally he was by-lined, was the son of a Tebaybased engine driver who moved to Darlington. He himself worked for Richardson’s Engineering – they of the Bank Top station thermometer.

After his death in 1987, a trust was set up to care for his collection of 10,000 photographs, from the North- East and beyond, taken from the mid-Twenties over a 50-year period.

Soon the trust had acquired, or been left, many more. Now it has more than 200,000, and is still waiting to see what develops.

Richard Barber, Darlington-based secretary of what is now the Armstrong Railway Photographic Trust, believes that the photograph of 60700 – to become the seldom-seen Unnamed Streak to a generation of North-East trainspotters – may have been affected by the clouds of war hanging over Darlington (and elsewhere) in the summer of 1939. It looks pretty good from here.

“I never met Jack, but having helped identify many of his photographs, I think I know him very well. When I was first asked to look at his collection, I little realised how the thing would take off or that it would end up the size it is today.”

The trust makes images available to railway periodicals and authors.

Many of the photographs can be found at 51a.fotopic.net and clicking onto the Armstrong pages.

ANOTHER railway line, the “mass visitation” to Teesside Airport station – revealed here a couple of months back – takes place a week on Saturday. It has to be a Saturday. That’s when the only train of the week runs.

It’s the idea of the entrepreneurial Alex Nelson, self-styled station master at Chester-le-Street, who wants in the eight minutes it takes from Darlington to the airport to remove the halt from the “bottom ten”

of Britain’s least used stations.

Last year, say official figures optimistically, it had 52 passengers – precisely one a week. “It’s hardly surprising,” says Alex. “It’s poorly located for the airport, on the far side of an industrial estate and the airport itself has few flights.

“The ghost station even has the wrong name. The airport became Durham Tees Valley in 2005.”

They leave Darlington at 10.20, return from the airport at 13.41 – either that or the week after – with plenty planned in between.

Ready for take off? A report later.

Stivvie's o#life on the line

ROBERT Stephenson, the great railway engineer, died 150 years ago on Monday, aged just 56. Excess – of work, of cigars, of calomel and of what darkly are called narcotics – may have had something to do with it. Stivvie was a man who lived his life on the line.

It was thus inappropriate that the northward train to attend a Newcastle Cathedral evensong in his memory should be 55 minutes late, less appropriate yet that I should find myself sitting in the choir stalls.

Stephenson and his father, George, would not have been pleased about the former, the choirmaster about the latter.

Nor, it should be said, do the choir stalls in Newcastle Cathedral appear to have been designed for any other purpose than to ensure that generations of choristers find it impossible to nod off during the sermon.

Robert was George’s only son. His mother died from consumption when he was three.

He attended the village school in Longbenton, then Bruce Academy in Newcastle. The first public passenger railway still a decade away, his father bought him a donkey so that he might daily return to Killingworth.

By the age of 19 he was helping George survey the Stockton and Darlington Railway; at 23 he joined his father and Edward Pease to set up the world’s first locomotive works, in Newcastle. At 30 he was appointed chief engineer of the London and Birmingham railway, the first into the capital.

His High Level Bridge spanned the Tyne, his Royal Border Bridge the Tweed. his Britannia Bridge the Menai Straits. He also became Conservative MP for Whitby – not many may have known that – but is said in a biography not to have been active in the Commons. Nothing new there, then.

Christopher Holliston, the dean, told Monday’s congregation that Robert was also a “committed Christian”, regularly attending evensong in Westminster Abbey, where he is buried.

“Sombre, but fitting”, we also sang the hymns from his funeral service.

The second was Drop, Drop Slow Tears, attended by the taking of a collection.

There being little in the Bible about railways, or steam engines, the reading was one of those curiously vengeful Old Testament things instead.

The dean gave thanks for Stephenson’s creativity and ingenuity, for his impact on city and region, prayed that that evening’s travellers might be “conveyed speedily”.

Thus winged, we were back in Darlington in time for the fives and threes.