Labourers’ party

CONSIDERING the lilies of the field, how they grow, the good folk of Windlestone Methodist church asked me to open their flower festival, a great pleasure, last weekend. Two evenings later I went back for harvest festival, no less enjoyable but rather less well attended.

The biblical line about the harvest being plenteous but the labourers few may itself have been overworked of late.

“It’s very difficult to keep the church going,” admits Ruth Owens, the secretary. “Folk round here are good givers and there are plenty who come to weddings and funerals, but when we try to get them back on a Sunday it’s the same old story.”

Windlestone’s effectively part of Chilton, on the old A1 near Ferryhill, once-distinct communities divided by the level crossing that ran across the road. Chilton to the north, Windlestone south.

Once, too, the Methodists were equally divided. Before union in 1932, the villages had Primitive, Wesleyan and United Methodist congregations, the latter suggesting a contradiction in terms.

Windlestone Colliery’s Wesleyan and PM congregations met at different times in a corrugated iron hut – one of those famous tin churches – before the Wesleyans moved into the present building in 1913. They bought the land for £125 from Sir William Eden, built the church for £1025 18s. “It’s not changed all that much,” says Ruth.

The village, too, offers both reminders of the old and a flavour of the new, many of the long colliery rows still standing but most of Oswald, Norman and Victoria Terraces shuttered and awaiting demolition.

A notice on a door advises that it is alarmed, as well it might be. Another proclaims that it is part of the Hartlepool Revival and may thus be considered a little disorientated.

Nor might the early Methodists much have understood the unisex salon, the chop suey house or the tattoo parlour where, it says, the only limitation is the imagination. Mr Peaker’s drapery, conversely, may have been there since gentlemen wore frock coats.

Chilton also has both a chippy and a fish shop. The fish shop’s called Chilton Aquatics.

What also may be unchanging is that, the glory of the floral arrangements notwithstanding, everyone hurries to the hall next door for the accompanying five-thousand feast.

Windlestone Methodists are famous for their spreads.

What has changed is that there’s not just a raffle, once forbidden on Methodist premises, but bottles of wine as prizes. The chap who secretly whispers the vampire bat joke could find himself in trouble with the Methodist Conference, even so.

THE flower festival is on the theme of Village Memories, overseen by the ever-blooming Kathleen Edmenson who’ll be 80 next year and looks at least 15 years younger.

There are recollections of the pit, inevitably, and of the Regal Cinema, of school and of seaside outing, of friends and of family. Many have given, many helped.

A rainbow arrangement at the front is in memory of Sylvia Kelly, a remarkable lady who, until her death in 2007, had organsied an annual appeal which sent almost 1,000 filled shoeboxes to needy children.

“She loved rainbows, they were very special to her,” says Bob, her husband.

Derek Slater, who began down Mainsforth colliery as a 15-year-old, has loaned some of his pit paintings for the occasion. His uncle Joe, himself a former miner, became MP for Sedgefield, assistant Postmaster General and ultimately a life peer.

I’d also been at the church four years earlier, speaking at a Methodist tradition called the stripping of the silver tree. It raised £1,384, and by no means all in 10p pieces. That someone gave £1,000 may have helped.

Then as now, the raffle was the great constant. As my old mother used inexplicably to observe, I couldn’t win a monkey up a stick.

ABOOKLET to mark the present church’s 75th anniversary noted that peak attendance had been in the Sixties, when there were 49 members.

In 1988 there were 23, and worrying signs. “These are not easy days for Christian mission,” wrote the Reverend John Platts, then chairman of the Darlington Methodist District.

“All the churches are struggling,”

wrote Bill Jackson, senior steward of Chilton Methodists, and his church closed soon afterwards.

These days the average attendance is around 15, a few extra visitors at the harvest festival which closes the weekend’s events. They expect to have raised around £450. “Canny,”

says Ruth.

The service is led by the Reverend Michael Pullen, the Spennymoor area minister, a preacher both inclusive and expansive, a man almost historically histrionic, a communicator thought provoking and effective.

Though not from the North-East, he has also learned enough to know that by 6pm, his congregation will have had their breakfast, their dinner and their tea and be wondering what’s for supper.

Though there are traditional harvest hymns, sturdily sung, there are also two in memory of the Reverend Fred Kaan, a United Reformed Church minister and prolific hymn writer, who had died a few days earlier.

Alwyn Outhwaite, the church treasurer, talks afterwards of the good folk of Chilton. “They’ll give to anything, wonderful for charities and good causes, but we just can’t get them in here. We’ve tried everything, we really have.”

A harvest moon’s shining as everyone heads happily homewards: all they need now is a few more hands to the plough.