Teacher’s Pet

Eddie Gratton remembered it, too.

“Stunningly brilliant. I’ve seen hundreds of plays and that was the funniest ever,” he says.

A great mystery remains, however, about the life and times of Joseph H Colton.

Eddie, familiar throughout the North-East as both cricketer and light opera principal – the Backtrack column long since christened him the Singing Seamer – was born in the east Durham pit village of Thornley in 1938, just eight or nine years old when the Thornley Dramatic Company performed Dog for Delmont at Wheatley Hill welfare hall.

It should have been Thornley welfare hall, says Eddie, but it had just burned down.

A Dog for Delmont was The Gay Dog’s original title. Delmont, he supposes, was a slight variation on the former Belmont greyhound track, near Durham.

“There were people queuing down the stairs and into the street,” says Eddie, long at Blackhall Rocks. “It was meant to be three nights and it ran all the following week.”

He still remembers the plot, the fixed set, the old miner in his tin bath in front of the fireplace, the greyhound loving vicar. He remembers the dog – “it was called Raving Beauty”

– believes it was the play’s premiere, if Wheatley Hill may have such auspicious occasions, recalls that Colton himself not only turned up to watch but was refused admission.

“He was wearing quite a posh scarf and hat. I suppose he looked suspicious,”

says Eddie.

This is reminiscent, of course, of the famous incident in the early 1970s when Del Shannon, the charttopping American singer, was refused admission to his own show at Shildon WMC.

“I’m top of the bill,” said Shannon.

“They all say that,” said the doorman.

Eddie, at any rate, has tried all over to find a copy of the script. “If I ever get one, I’ll make my stage comeback,” he promises.

Since every Dog has its day – and since the Eddie Gratton show really would be worth seeing – can any reader help?

JOSEPH Colton lived in Esh Village, west of Durham, in the 1940s and 1950s. He taught at Bearpark, a couple of miles away and was reckoned a bit of a character.

Not even that assiduous theatre historian John Foster, from Langley Park, has been able to discover what happened after the Colton wanderer took wing, however. “It’s a real puzzle, I’ve tried everything,” says John.

Who knows?

THE film had much the same plot, of course. Wilfred Pickles, canny Yorkshireman and Have A Go hero, was already a big name; supporting cast included Megs Jenkins, Peter Butterworth, the young Jon Pertwee and William Russell who, inexplicably, had changed his name from Russell Enouch.

“A warm and happy glow,” said Kine Weekly in July 1954. “Delightful,”

wrote Richard Harries; “unimaginative,” concluded the Monthly Film Bulletin, discordantly.

It was Pickles’ co-star, the 21-yearold Petula Clark, who really caught the critics’ eye, however. “Pretty Petula Clark is as fresh as ever,” said Today’s Cinema.

Now 78, Petula Clark made her radio debut in 1942, swiftly billed as Britain’s Shirley Temple. She first appeared on television in 1946, is reckoned to have sold 68 million records, was awarded the CBE in 1998 and released a Christmas album just two months ago. She has long lived in France.

Clark’s tale? That’s one to which we may return.

JOSEPH Colton did write at least one other play, however – and Mrs Dora Davidson, now 89, was its star.

The year was 1953, the play Love and Learning, the company the Ionian Players, the producer Leslie Robertshaw – whom memory suggests had the pharmacy in Coundon and was something big in the Felons – and the venue St Aidan’s church hall in Chilton, near Ferryhill.

Whether or not Colton himself turned up, and whether he was allowed in, is sadly unrecorded. The Northern Echo’s critic was clearly impressed, however.

“Joseph Colton has the happy knack of reproducing on the stage intriguing cameo sketches of the people Durhamites live among and know,” he wrote.

“Though he is known at the moment by only two plays, it seems likely that this Durham school teacher, who hails from Old Esh, will go far in the world of theatre.”

The play, our man added, was polished, swift in action and “eminently indicative of a sure grasp of theatrecraft.”

The near-omniscient Google, for all that, offers not a single reference to it nor to how far Colton really went.

Mrs Davidson, still in Chilton and still hanging on to the cutting, recalls that the group was formed to perform just one play – Little Women – to raise money for a new stained glass window for the church.

“It just went from there. We did everything ourselves, all the scenery, even made our own footlights from tin cans hammered out. It would never be allowed to happen today.”

She starred alongside the late Walter Storey, whose son Ian is now an international opera star. Further evidence of how times and meanings change, William Davidson’s part was described as “the gay man about the mining town”.

Dora Davidson can’t understand what happened. “We really enjoyed the play and the audience also seemed to. Maybe it was prejudice against the north. It took a long time for that to go, didn’t it?”

AMONG the more preposterous manifestations of the freeze, the claim on the front page of the Independent on Sunday that the 57cm at Westgate, in Weardale, was Britain’s deepest snow. They’ve measured it everywhere else?

Then there was once-reliable BBC Television news, also on Sunday, which supposed that the accident where the poor chap fell through the ice was on the River Tees in Newcastle.

Still, we all make them – Peter Sotheran in Redcar points out an Echo sketch map where France has mysteriously become Spain while Tom Dobbin, in Durham, takes exception to the term “over-studentification”

in last Wednesday’s paper.

No matter that it was in quotes, he’s right to.

A NOTE, too, from Alan Hogstedt in Hartlepool who draws attention to page 713 – the “Menu” section – of their new Yellow Pages. It’s there that customers are asked to “bare with us during busy periods.” The Naked Chef comes to Middlesbrough, no doubt.

…and finally back to the weather, and from the neglected view of the Poor Bloody Infantry.

While most of the four-wheeled media bang on about the state of the roads, the pavements – where many of the elderly perforce must pursue their daily round – have been a disgrace.

On Monday evening I walked from Darlington town centre to Cockerton.

Four-fifths of the journey was dancing on ice. How many fractures have there been on pavements like that? Is this really the best we can expect?

The railways have been better. Up to London on the worst day of all, the train was understandably, but not absurdly late. Back through the blizzard, it was spot on time.

The greater credit, however, must unequivocally go to Arriva’s bus drivers.

They take some stick, these guys – some of it deserved, not least for being so thoroughly graceless – but with the exception of the dozy devil on the X27 whose wrong turn meant a ten-mile detour, they’ve been patient, persevering and punctual.

The foot soldiers salute them.