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WALKING the walk, as they say in Her Majesty’s mail delivery offices, last week’s column reflected upon changing times for Britain’s put-upon postmen.

Back in the flood old days they had been all-purpose messengers in Bilsdale, fetchers and carriers in Eskdale, snow blowers in Teesdale. They were men, in short, who stuck to their post, and with greater regard for their neighbour than for either union or management.

We’d also mentioned Matt Bendelow, a former Shildon miner who for almost 40 years wasn’t just sub-postmaster and auxiliary postman at Bowes, near Barnard Castle, but covered the 24-hour telephone exchange, too.

As the picture illustrates with graphic brutality, there was something we’d overlooked: Matt Bendelow had been gravely injured in the First World War. The walk was nine miles, country miles. He did it, six days a week, on one leg.

The photograph, forwarded by Dave Charlesworth, is from the Post Office Magazine of June 1937. The feature was written by Barnard Castle postmaster Frank Warwick.

The village post office, wrote Mr Warwick, was one of the grey cottages in front of the ruined Norman castle at Bowes. “For a disabled man, Mr Bendelow performs one of the most arduous posts in Great Britain.

“His route leads over moors, fields and country lanes, with steep gradients, returning over the River Greta by means of stepping stones.

“Being unable to wear an artificial leg, Matt performs the delivery on crutches. In all weathers – rain, wind and snow, unless, of course, the snow drifts are too deep to penetrate – he walks the nine miles daily and gaily, crossing the stepping stones with more agility than most able-bodied men.”

Matt Bendelow, said the magazine, was also poultry farmer, pig breeder, successful rabbit exhibitor, billiards and shooting enthusiast and supporter of the village football team.

“In spite of his physical handicaps,”

it added – perhaps unnecessarily – “he leads a full and active life.”

Matt Bendelow was a postman who delivered.

■ David Charlesworth, retired delivery office manager at Barnard Castle, helps run a website devoted to Teesdale postal history set up by retired postman Fred Fawcett and his son Simon. It’s at royalmailteesdale.piczo.com UP to his oxters, or whatever the North Riding equivalent, there’s a similar story from Mick Kilvington – his late father a country postman at Gilling East, near Helmsley.

Mick recalls a particularly severe winter in the late Fifties, drifts 12ft deep and the village cut off for days.

“It was like Christmas Day when finally they got bread and other essentials though to Gilling East, but still they had to be carried to the outlying farms and hamlets.”

Thereafter it might have been subtitled Carry On, Postman. “We had a wooden Norwegian-type sledge, great big job. There wasn’t a nail in it, just held together with leather thongs.

Fantastic thing, it was.

“I remember one time I went out with him and my father fell off a wall.

I thought we’d lost him, the snow was so deep. The response when we finally got through was amazing.”

Mick, now a taxi driver in Richmond, also played Minor Counties cricket for Dorset – once bagging all ten Cornwall wickets for just 26 runs in 16.2 overs. He recalls that there’d be Christmas Day deliveries, too.

“By the time he got a van I’d go along to drive him home, even though I wasn’t old enough. There wasn’t a call where there wasn’t a good drink waiting for him.”

The mail order may have changed, of course, the postmen of a different stamp. Mick’s reaction may embrace pre-war Bowes, too. “Can you imagine,”

he muses, “a postman doing any of that today?”

IT is to be one of those happy and glorious columns written entirely by its readers, and all the better for that.

Among life’s vicissitudes – you know, ups and downs – we’d been pondering the exact whereabouts of Hilly Howly in Shildon. There were more undulations than we’d imagined.

Roy Simpson in Peterlee recalls that in his childhood, Hilly Howly was between the neighbouring east Durham villages of Wheatley Hill and Thornley, a Sunday walk to visit his grandparents.

John Heslop discovers yet another Hilly Howly in the Durham Village Book. “The rainfall is moderate and the air bracing and clear,” it says of Trimdon Station.

“An old custom was to take children suffering from whooping cough to stand on the Hilly Howly, where it was supposed seven airs met.”

Ian Wilkinson recalls that the original, in Shildon, seemed like a day’s walk to ten-year-olds like him – “a packed lunch and a change of clothes in your rucksack.” It can’t have been much more than a mile.

WE’D also recalled that Durham bairns would call “hill” or “howl”

when tossing a cricket bat to see who batted first. It produced so many sob stories of impoverished childhood, there was a real danger of rain stopping play.

Doug Arnold grew up in West Stanley.

“Cash not being a commodity readily available to ten-year-olds the bat would always be spun in the air.

If it landed face down, it was hill.”

Roy Simpson agrees. “It had to be hill or howl. We hadn’t two ha’pennies to rub together, never mind to toss up.”

Now in Saltburn, Peter Birch was a Leicestershire lad. As the bat flew up down there, the cry was Umperolla.

Whichever way it landed, the translation’s much the same.

GOING with the flow, we’d wondered – on the back of the title of Robert Harris’s new novel – how Lustrum Beck on the north of the Tees came by its name.

In Rome, after all, “lustrum” was the term for a period of five years.

Bob Harbron in Norton-on-Tees supposes the name is from the Anglo- Saxon meaning gleaming or lustrous, though both Bill Pearson – “dragged out of nonentity” – and John Heslop find map references to Lustring Beck as recently as 1900.

John, in Durham, has been especially assiduous. Though the north Tees potteries produced lustre wear, lustring was also a lightweight silk taffeta, and Stockton had a thriving cotton industry.

“Lustring,” however, could also mean cleaning surfaces to remove mineral deposits – as they might with urinals. “Could this be a final process applied to pottery after firing, and the waste emptied into Lustring Beck?”

It is perhaps wise to ask no further.

CHRIS Willsden, now in Texas but former landlord of the Bay Horse in Hurworth, adds to the mystery of street numbering across the Atlantic.

He’s number 1475. There are five houses on the drive. On Florida Keys, he reckons, there’s a house numbered 77220. That’s something else for the postmen to worry about.

…and finally, very many readers have remarked – usually unkindly – upon last week’s picture of the columnist as a very much younger man.

Harry Watson in Darlington summarises the stupefied reaction.

“What were you doing? I mean, howay. A nerdy anorak, rucksack, Rupert Bear trousers and – the best bit – a shirt with cufflinks. I bet someone bought them for you.”

The cufflinks and the Rubert Bear trousers may well have been mine.

The well-armed anorak certainly wasn’t. It remains a mystery, Nerd degree, the column returns next week.

Steve's all that

NOTING that in 1965 you could watch Peter, Paul and Mary at Newcastle City Hall for less than £1, last week’s column idly wondered how much a gig might be today.

£22.50 for Jimmy Carr and for the Proclaimers, reports Paul Dobson in Bishop Auckland, £17.50 for Seasick Steve. Who?

A 68-year-old American blues singer and former hobo who was only discovered a few years ago. “All of a sudden I’m like the cat’s miaow,” Seasick said.