Beck to the future

LUSTRUM Beck flows – maunders, at any rate – through industrial Haverton Hill and other parts of Stockton and Billingham before emptying, enervated, into the Tees near Newport Bridge. Its performance may be supposed lack-Lustrum.

“I feel that in the league table of undistinguished North-East muddy streams it won’t occupy a very high place,” writes David Walsh from Redcar.

Though possibly he means that it would occupy a high place, the message is clear, nonetheless. Until recent days, Lustrum was destined to be one of life’s great backwaters.

Then the celebrated Mr Robert Harris’ latest novel appeared. It’s simply called Lustrum – “a potboiler of a murder detective novel (says David) set in ancient Rome and involving prominent Roman notables as suspects”.

Et tu, they usually were.

It’s the name which intrigues him, explained in the book reviews and on Wikipedia – a sacrifice for expiation and purification offered by one of the censors of Rome at the close of the census taking, every five years. “The name came to mean a period of five years, in the same way that a decade is ten years.”

So why Lustrum Beck? “Were there fishy doings involving second-century sacrifices in Billingham Bottoms or does something happen every five years which is significant to Haverton Hill?” asks David. “If so, can we be told what it is?”

He’s happy to leave it to the Gadfly Irregulars. Further thoughts, perhaps, before much more water flows beneath Newport Bridge.

RECENT columns have also been playing the name game, of course, not least in relation to the pits and villages of the Durham coalfield.

It prompts an email from Keith Bell, north-west Durham lad – Flint Hill, to be precise – now in Ottawa.

Ere the winter storms begin – early November in those parts – he was digging out the snow gear and came across an old map of the county.

Superimposed on it were colliery names like Annabella (1644), Ox House (1660), Nightingale (1751), Hedge Peggy (1759), Beamish Apple (1808), Jawblades (1816), Three Pikes (1835), Piggy’s Stee (1838), Friar’s Goose (1855) and Delight – Dipton way – in 1850.

Keith takes the dates to be when the shafts were sunk. The rest offer a thick seam of North-East etymology.

He, too, is happy to leave its working to the Gadherents.

IT’S to be something of a trans-Atlantic column. Another email arrives from Brian Madden – Darlington lad now in Rockford, Illinois – who’d seen our recent note on the curiosities of house numbering.

“Here in Rockford, things are a bit different. My house is 1308, next door is 1226. We are the sixth house in the street on this side and there are only six on the opposite side.

“Confusing? You betcha.”

SO what would our poor, putupon postmen make of it all?

Mike Morrissey in Saltburn forwards a Daily Telegraph letter from Edward Hart, for many years the Echo’s agricultural correspondent, who lived in Bilsdale in the North Yorkshire Moors and, later, near Croft-on-Tees.

Edward, now in Shropshire, recalled Bilsdale in the Fifties when the postman was the chief means of communication.

“Word of stray sheep, requests for threshing day help, loans of tools, visits to markets and meetings were made verbally via the post van.

“Its driver received no extras other than a good Christmas gift, but this system was essential to the running of the dales before mains electricity, cars and widespread telephones appeared.”

Bilsdale’s line was “Send word wi’t postman.” It’s a good thing, added Edward, that the attitude of today’s union leaders didn’t apply.

IT’S nicely coincidental that David Charlesworth should forward a 1960 cutting from the Echo about the work of rural postmen in Eskdale and Teesdale.

In those days, at least, the job was considered a good ’un.

“I’ve never seen a dead postman, they live for ever,” observed a Lealholm farmer, laconically.

In Eskdale, like Bilsdale, postman Jack Perry was the chief fetcher and carrier, and not just of Her Majesty’s mail. Mr Perry, we added, was astonished one day to be asked his advice on whether an elderly chap should have an operation – “and even more astonished when the advice proved decisive”.

Things were much the same at Bowes, near Barnard Castle, where former Shildon miner Matt Bendelow had not only been sub-postmaster for nigh on 40 years but was also responsible for the 24-hours-a-day manual telephone exchange.

In those days, clearly, postmen were rather less concerned about the letter of the agreement.

ANOTHER letter from America, duly cleared by Customs and with $2.92 to pay. It’s from Ian Wright, long in the US but still remembered over here as a Northern Echo photographer in the Sixties, Harold Evans’s day.

Ian encloses what might most politely be termed a portrait of the artist as a young man – a very young man. It’s one of many submitted for Harry’s recently published autobiography but, inexplicably, rejected.

Ian’s also collaborating with his old boss on a possible book about North- East scandals of the Sixties – “You know, the Geordie Mafia”

– for which there may be ample material.

The biggest scandal of all, of course, was that in 1965 Harry Evans had the chance to take on a grass-green innocent straight from school and, no less explicably, declined it.

LAMENTING the passing of the wonderful Mary Travers – she of Peter, Paul and Mary, more Americans – recent columns wondered if they’d ever sang for their supper in the North- East. They had.

A reader called Dave not only sends Newcastle City Hall tickets from both 1965 and 1968 but a page from the programme, too. “The lanky grace and blonde intensity of Mary Travers on stage breaks so many hearts per audience that it’s hard to believe she isn’t acting,” it said.

In 1965, a best City Hall seat was 17/6d. Three years later it had risen to 25 shillings. What’s it cost today?

…and finally, the column two weeks ago wondered about the location of Hilly-Howly in Shildon, and has prompted a learned response from Robert Bacon.

Now in Wolviston – not a million miles from Lustrum Beck, in fact – Robert was born and raised in Shildon and frequently played on Hilly-Howly – sometimes Hilly- Holey – between All Saints church and Johnny Best’s Beck. (Someone’s going to ask about that name, too.) “The satellite image of Google shows the holes to have been filled in,” he adds.

There’s more. The English Dialect Dictionary, says Robert, defines hilly-howly as “undulating” – as well it might – but in its Geordie section adds that the two sides of a cricket bat are known as the “hill”

– the back – and the “howl”.

Is that true? And if not, what do folk call the two sides of a bat? Beck and call, the column returns next week.