Thelma’s at home

MRS Thelma Denholm MBE, BA, JP celebrated her 100th birthday yesterday, a truly remarkable and wholly indomitable lady who barely 12 hours before the big day had been taken to hospital after a fall.

“You’ll have to hurry up,” she told the doctor – or words, it should be conceded, to that effect – “I’ve an appointment with The Northern Echo at half past two.”

X-rays completed, little damaged save for a bump on the forehead, she returned home. Three hours later than had been scheduled, the centennial interview took place.

“She’s a great girl,” said her friend, Peter Warburton. “She has continued to take a keen interest in politics and issues of social change – very independent, very warm-hearted but very business-like.”

“I’m very sorry, dear,” said Mrs Denholm.

William Whitely, her father, was MP for Blaydon and for almost 20 years Labour Chief Whip, mostly under Clement Attlee. Her husband, Alexander Denholm, was Durham County director of education but died in 1954.

She herself spent 40 years as a magistrate and for ten years was chairman of the Durham bench. She was chairman of the Durham County probation committee – Peter Warburton was chief probation officer – served on Durham prison’s board of visitors, the fledgling Peterlee Development Corporation and many other voluntary bodies.

Her MBE, in 1979, was for services to County Durham, and there can be no higher accolade.

“My father only asked me to do some social work, he didn’t mind what it was,” she recalls.

“He also wanted me to see the world, even if it meant that I couldn’t afford other things, and I have managed to do that, too.”

Though blind and largely housebound – blue light jobs excluded – she will still be hosting “at home”

days from now until Sunday, to which all friends and former colleagues are invited.

“I’m not having a party, I hate parties, but it would be very nice to see everyone again,” she says.

Great old age slightly puzzles her.

Might it be something to do with being “almost” vegetarian, she wonders?

Or that she doesn’t smoke, drink or take drugs? Is it so great a blessing, anyway?

“The first half of my life was wonderful.

The second half, after my husband and parents died, was really not.

“I have done my best, undertaken a lot of voluntary work, kept myself busy.

“It isn’t that I haven’t been all right, I have, but there are times when you get very lonely, you know.

I’ve never fully got used to that at all.

“I’ve followed what my father said about living in this world, knowing what was going on. He said that a lot of people didn’t live, they existed.”

BORN in 1881, William Whitely began work as a clerk at the Miners’ Hall in Durham, became a lodge official, stood unsuccessfully for Blaydon in 1918, won the seat in 1922 and, with a four-year gap, held it with NUM sponsorship until his death in 1955.

His annual salary was £400 plus train fares to London. Accommodation and secretarial support had to be met from his salary. “It was a different world,” says his daughter, “he’d be amazed at what MPs get up to today.”

Though a close friend of Attlee, he turned down invitations to join the Cabinet and subsequently declined a peerage. “He just enjoyed being around the Commons,” says Mrs Denholm. “If he’d been a minister, he’d probably only have been there on Wednesdays.

“He was a disciplinarian, but in a kind way. He wanted to know everyone in parliament, regardless of their colour. He wanted them to know what he stood for and hoped that they would stand for it, too.”

Framed on the wall, a Daily Mail cartoon following a Labour defeat in the Commons in 1950 shows the Chief Whip in danger of flagellation, nonetheless.

After his death, Mrs Denholm looked after her mother, who also became blind. “Things were different, there were no carers in those days, you looked after your family. I couldn’t get full-time work, I just had to take what I could.”

Now she herself needs carers, though determined to remain in the book-filled house with its drawing room, its grand piano, its photographs and its memories. Now she uses talking books from the RNIB, and is hugely grateful for them.

“It’s my salvation, £76 a year for as many books as you like. I don’t like Barbara Cartland, but I’m very fond of Jeffrey Archer, geography books, nature books, anything at all.”

After a short spell in a nursing home, she’d insisted on coming home. “I like to do everything that I can still. I can’t stand hospitals, I’m frightened of them, and I couldn’t stand the nursing home. This will do me.”

Her “at home” days were advertised in the Daily Telegraph and produced a bill for £1,351, the shock of which may have had something to do with the fall.

It is thus the column’s great pleasure to announce, usual rates, that Mrs Denholm will be receiving visitors from today until Sunday, 10am to 11am and 2pm to 3pm at Treetops, Flassburn Road, Durham.

She’ll offer a piece of birthday cake, proudly display the Queen’s greeting, asks for no flowers or gifts, but suggests a small donation to the British Heart Foundation, 79 North Road, Durham. “Maybe they will make a few pounds,” says Mrs Denholm.

“I have always tried to help.”

Nothing in pocket for fallen rocket

CRASHED to earth, we reported a couple of weeks back that the familiar – some would say iconic – “moon rocket” steeple at Christ the King church in Bowburn, near Durham, had been brought down in the October gales.

It fell onto the bus stop near the former vicarage. Happily, the lady who’d been waiting there a few moments previously had realised she’d forgotten her bus pass and popped home for it.

A £10,000 bill for its restoration has now arrived; Bowburn church folk simply can’t afford it. Last Friday the rocket was taken away on the back of a lorry.

Father Mel Gray uses the same Latin line that was chalked on the smokebox of old Coffee Pot, when long ago it hauled the last train on the brief branch line from Easingwold to Alne, in North Yorkshire.

Sic transit gloria.

ANDREW Dundas, to whom many should be more grateful than they know, looked in for a chat last week. We had a pint of Strongarm. It had to be.

Andrew was marketing manager at Cameron’s Brewery in Hartlepool in the 1980s, his strategy credited with seeing off a hostile takeover by Scottish and Newcastle. Real ale lovers at that time would appreciate the potential horror.

“The response was amazing. We even had Hartlepool folk taking market stalls to collect names on petitions,”

he recalled. “We laid a trap for S&N and they fell into it.”

Formerly a Darlington resident, he’s now hoping to win the Labour nomination as the town’s parliamentary candidate – not least with a pledge that he’ll just take the pay of an average Darlington worker, with the balance going to support equality initiatives in the town.

That he’s 65, he believes, shouldn’t be an issue. “My problem is that I’ve been told I have another 30 years, and I want to do something positive with it.

“I’ve no interest in taking long holidays in Bermuda or somewhere.

There isn’t any Strongarm.”

IT’S probably fortunate that the Norfolk clergyman who last week stirred so much debate by criticising customised funerals wasn’t at Terry Garnett’s in St John’s church, Darlington, on Tuesday. The many hundreds who were there were each given a pictorial aide memoir of Terry with the legend “Lived, loved and laughed”. We wrote of his sudden passing last week. Terry, great lad, was carried out to the strains of The Kinks, Lazing on a Sunny Afternoon.

Not for the first time, he laughed last.

SAD, also, to record the death at 73 of Gordon Thubron, one of these columns’ occasional and much valued correspondents.

Quarrington Hill lad originally, Gordon had been a miner at several pits in that area before joining the police force and becoming an inspector in Newton Aycliffe, where he lived. “A real old coppers’ copper,”

says a former colleague.

His contributions ranged from Newton Aycliffe street names to memories of Baldasera’s café in Wheatley Hill – “cup of Bovril, cream crackers and a Pashe cigarette for threepence, old money”.

Perhaps the best remembered, however, concerned the local folklore that a then-new house in Quarrington Hill front street was named following the 1913 FA Cup final between Sunderland and Aston Villa.

Had our boys won, it was to be called Sunderland House. Since they lost 1-0, it became Aston Villa. Aston Villa still squarely stands; the legend remains, too.

LAST week’s piece on William Harbutt, the North Shields-born inventor of Plasticine, sent Paul Dobson in Bishop Auckland plodging the internet. Finally, he discovers that Harbutt’s father was a spirit merchant and commission agent – “What, Grattan’s catalogue?” – the problem with the fact that he’s recorded as Harbull.

Paul’s philosophical. “Census officials were notoriously bad spellers,” he says.

A story with legs

A CHILDHOOD fantasy fulfilled, a classic case of what goes around coming around, fun-of-the-fair man Paul Evans has finally taken delivery of the lorry that carried his dreams.

It’s a 1949 split-screen Leyland Octopus, so called because it had eight wheels. “I’m like a boy with new Dinky toy,” says Paul.

“It’s taken a lot of Sherlock Holmes work. These beasts are very rare indeed.”

He’s a Shildon lad, would gaze wistfully from the window of Tin Tacks school 40 years ago when Lawrence Nichols’ funfair pulled annually onto the potholed site in Middleton Road, just across the fields.

The rides were diesel generated; Paul’s fuelled by nostalgia. “I’d watch the sky getting darker, the orange bulbs flashing, KKC 81 generating the power, the smell of diesel and the sound of Abba singing Fernando.”

By the time he was 14, they’d even allow him to drive the Octopus – tentatively, tentaclively – on site. Soon afterwards it seemed to have split for ever.

Paul also recalls – and we must indulge him for a further paragraph – chips from Fishy Finn’s, “wonderful”

Kendal Mint Cake from the shop opposite the Masonic hall, the dentist’s and the Methodist church on the corner. Shildon once had seven Methodist churches; now there’s but one.

Then there was Brian Shaw, another Shildon lad, who’d record the fairground’s top ten singles on condition that they were back by six o’- clock, so that the shows might go on.

Lawrie Nichols would visit for three or four weeks at Easter, wintered on the Middleton Road site from 1968-72. “Mucky brown” wagons, formerly Stylo shoes lorries, would carry the sideshows. Proud crimson, KKC 81 transported the Noah’s Ark ride.

“It was convertible into a waltzer,” Paul recalls. “The kids thought they were getting two rides.”

They’d even operate the Noah’s Ark on Saturday nights in winter, that and the penny arcade and, ideal home, the housey.

Still in Shildon, Paul now runs fairground rides himself. He hopes fully to restore the Octopus, but would love to hear from anyone who has photographs of the fair – and particularly of KKC 81 – on the Middleton Road site around 40 years ago. He’s on 07836-350507.