When others’ thoughts turned to retirement, John Clark was still preaching to Methodists, clocking up an amazing 70 years

THOSE few days back in the darkening summer of 1939 were pretty memorable for John Clark. It was the week that he got his call-up papers and the week that he became a fully accredited Methodist local preacher, and that was a calling, too.

They sent him to Brancepeth Camp to join the 8th Battalion DLI, billeted him – blanket, pillow but not yet a uniform – amid the eaves of the British Legion hall, down the road in Willington.

It was there that the local minister stuck his head through the hatch. “I believe we have a new preacher here.” Onward, Christian soldier.

John’s grandfather had been a Methodist local preacher, his father and two brothers – Edwin, Tom and Eddie junior – were Methodist local preachers. They were farming folk, and good Methodists so often followed the plough.

On his 21st birthday, John was told he was going to war, given 48 hours embarkation leave – “What a present”

– and put on a ship for France.

He witnessed the horrors of German occupation, marched to regroup in Belgium, was repeatedly attacked from the air – “I once found myself sharing a gutter with the Duke of Gloucester, who was also in the convoy”

– but lives, happily, to tell the tale.

Much of it is recalled in his wartime memoirs, written a few years ago, the first chapter called “The DLI Seafarers”. It’s appropriate that before the service the organ plays Will Your Anchor Hold.

There were incidents, however, which he couldn’t describe at all.

“Some of the things you experience in war you just aren’t able to talk about,” he wrote, “like people being killed because of man’s evil.”

Now he’s 90, and last Sunday celebrated 70 years of full accreditation – what the Methodists call being on the Plan, what they call a local, a man whose anchor held.

HE’D been raised in Great Langton, a hamlet between Scorton and Northallerton.

Home from the war, he might have been sent to lead an afternoon service at Snilesworth – way above Osmotherley – have his tea and then cycle back to Ossie for the six o’clock.

Then he’d bike home again.

“It used to be quite difficult,” he recalled, “writing all those sermons between milking the cows.”

He was an active preacher until 78, thought he’d retired after an excessively maternal cow kicked out and broke his jaw, was asked two years later to return to his rural circuit – he particularly liked the little chapels.

John would often play the organ, too, often give them a solo. “Oh, a lovely tenor voice,” folk recall and they remember, too, the lighter touches of which he was so fond.

The family have long been in Kepwick, on that great rolling green belt between Northallerton and Thirsk, where his son, Kenneth, now farms and where John maintains both a lively interest and a careful eye for protective cows.

Kepwick chapel now closed, last Sunday afternoon’s service is in nearby Borrowby, the village where his grandfather was a shoemaker and cow keeper before moving to Great Langton, and a founder member of a chapel so tall and so narrow that it looks like it’s holding its breath.

Dressed in Sunday-best suit, wearing a carnation and gently smiling, the man at the centre of attention sits neither at the front nor in the middle, preferring a side pew with his wife, Elizabeth, attentively, affectionately at his side. They were married 55 years last week.

It’s a simple chapel, and none the worse for that, the clock on the wall measuring the Methodist hour as surely as if timing an egg. Traditional hymns include Great is Thy Faithfulness and the line about “There is no shadow of changing with thee.”

It wasn’t written about John, of course, nor any other mortal, but it almost could have been.

Elizabeth’s been baking. “A little bit of tea,” she says with Yorkshire understatement, but it’s enough to feed the 8th Battalion.

Though Kenneth Clark has kindly invited me, their reading habits in those parts are traditional, too.

They’re North Yorkshire farmers, D&S Times people. “Will it,” they press eagerly, “be in’t Darlington?”

SUNDAY afternoon services at Borrowby usually attract 13 or 14 people. Now there are 50 or 60, come from many a mile. Some are extended family, some local preachers themselves.

We fall to pondering the collective noun for Methodist local preachers.

A plan is too obvious, a pulpit possible, a parsonification better. John had preached until he was 87, when he stopped for health reasons.

Robert Gee, a minister in the Northallerton and Thirsk circuit, reckons a 70-year celebration unique in his experience. He talks, too, of changing times. “Many people think preaching is out-of-date and old-fashioned, it certainly isn’t as popular as it was.

“It’s up to us to make the message clear, intelligible and relevant to now.”

After a couple of brief testimonials, the travelling Light Infantryman surprises them by asking if they’d like him to say something, too.

Stick taken from the pew back, he insists upon using the lectern, recalls the occasion (doubtless apocryphally) when at the end of a service he’d realised that all the men in the congregation were asleep.

“When I announced the last hymn, it seemed to wake them up again. As they were leaving everyone said ‘Eeh, grand service, that’.”

He promises to keep on keeping on, hopes for a few more years. Several times he’s warmly applauded, a local lad made good.