Harry’s war

HARRY Bunting was a baby when World War II broke out, still just six when fire ceased. He remembers it, recalls the shelters and the sirens, nonetheless.

“I don’t think we were afraid most of the time, because it’s what we grew up with. You just took it in your stride, a fact of life; our parents sort of protected us from most of it, anyway.

“It was only when the sirens went off that you got a bit scared. I can still hear them, still feel the hairs standing on the back of my neck.”

He grew up in Caxton Street, one of the long terraces, then as now, around the former Ayresome Park football ground in Middlesbrough.

“Spectators would come on their bikes in those days,” says Harry.

“We’d store them and make ourselves some pocket money.”

It’s his fictionalised wartime tales, however, that have found an appreciative audience getting on 70 years later – among the primary school children of today.

“At my old school we learned about the war in Year 2,” wrote a youngster after one of Harry’s associated talks. “I learned a lot more in just an hour than I had in a whole term.”

The semi-pseudonymous Harry Bee has written Printer Street’s War – Caxton Street may easily re-key to Printer Street, too – the book cover depicting one of those long terraces of his childhood.

“We had a terrible job finding one that wasn’t festooned in satellite dishes,” says Harry, whose father was an ICI fitter – and like the father in the stories – a volunteer ambulance driver.

“It’s my first memory, dad walking down the street to the ambulance with the siren sounding. I can still see him doing it”

The book, a sort of forties’ Famous Five – no dog, but still the regulation, sensible, girl – includes an account of detonating an unexploded bomb (Caxton Street escaped) and more adventure when an allied plane returning to Middleton St George crash-lands in fields near Marton.

The five are out picking rose hips.

It’s so greatly captured the youthful imagination that Harry now regularly talks to Year 5 and 6 pupils about what growing up during the war was really like and is eager to do more talking – especially in and around Middlesbrough.

“I love it,” says Harry, himself long in Darlington with Beryl, his wife.

“I’m not really surprised, but I’m very gratified that this generation seem to enjoy it so much. It’s what these days they call living history, and I’m history.

“I think the fascination for them is that there’s someone standing in front of them who actually lived through the war, a time they regard as ancient history.

“The kids come up with some of the most amazing questions, such as asking if I were happy when the atomic bomb dropped.

“What can you say? We were happy that it signalled the end of the war, but it was only later that we began to realise the enormity of the devastation caused.”

A retired computer consultant, his first self-published book was about the improbable adventures of someone of that technological trade. His third, underway, will be based on the escapades of three of his regular walking companions, known for short as the SIS and more bluntly as the Serious Idiot Squad.

Harry also gives talks to adult organisations, anxious to correct the impression that most town kids were evacuated.

“If you ask them, maybe only two or three out of every 30 will put their hands up. Most had to stay put.”

Though he’s an official of Darlington’s United Reformed Church – an elder, appropriately – the book is careful not to preach. There’s a single reference to prayer, a cameo from a kindly minister, a suggestion that winging a Woodbine may not be the wisest thing ever – mostly, though, it’s a tale of a paradoxically carefree childhood.

“We had freedom, we could still roam around and without really thinking of danger. Most of today’s children don’t seem to roam around at all.

“I make it very clear to the children that war isn’t a game and that people die and suffer in other ways – but we still had a happy childhood.”

■ Printer Street’s War costs £5 from Harry Bunting – harrybee@talktalk.net or 01325-462957. He is happy to give talks to schools, and to other organisations.

Digging for victory

WE’RE still at war, the sound of sirens moved a few miles up the coast to Blackhall, north of Hartlepool, where in the spring of 1942 the pitmen engaged in some serious – many sad scandalous – undermining. Two thousand went on strike.

The UK was dismayed, Germany delighted.

Haw-Haw hectored, but could hardly have made it up.

The Mineworkers’ Federation itself called the action “anarchy”, the worst case of coalfield indiscipline they’d ever known. The Daily Express was “baffled”; another recently published book talks of Blackhall v Whitehall.

Around 25,000 tons of desperately needed coal were lost, national notoriety gained, before settlement was reached after two weeks and Blackhall again backed Britain.

By no means for the first time, the dispute was over how pit head coal tubs were weighed and by whom. Pay depended on it, the colliery owners suspected – shall we say – of being wanting in the balance.

The book, a lovely little job, was quietly launched just a couple of days before Christmas and thus unlikely to have filled many stockings. The fourth publication from the Blackhall Local History Group, full of evocative images and costing just £3.50, it remains a gift, nonetheless.

There are ARPs and UXBs, dogfights and digging for victory, Bevin Boys and Aycliffe Angels, switched-off lights and switched-on sweeties.

The Blackhall area also suffered several bomb attacks, the worst – also in 1942 – on a house in Hardwick Street where eight people sheltering beneath the stars were killed. One girl survived. Those in the shelters across the road, it’s recorded, escaped without a scratch.

Blackhall in the War Years is co-edited by Harry Archbold and Alan Roxborough and is available through Durham County libraries.

Time-honoured

AGAIN it is to be an altogether more melancholy column than might ever be wished. The Rev Bill Scott, a lovely and greatly caring man, died on Monday – the first day of his retirement; Chris Langford, one of the bright and talented young things on Tyne Tees Television’s One O’clock Show, has died following a heart attack.

Bill, Sunderland lad, was a headmaster before training for the Anglican priesthood. In 2004 he became priest-in-charge of Byers Green, near Spennymoor, where a mutual love affair swiftly developed.

“He made the most enormous difference to the village, a round peg in a round hole,” says Lynda Gough, the vicar of Spennymoor.

“Bill was totally dedicated and he and his wife Mary put 110 per cent into the community.”

His farewell service, planned for last Sunday, was to have featured in this Saturday’s At Your Service column.

Following a long fight against illness, Bill and Mary had moved to a retirement home in Hartlepool a month ago.

When we spoke on Friday, he was in the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, having been told two days earlier that doctors could no more. “I expect I’ve got a while yet,” said Bill, also an acclaimed photographer and icon painter.

His funeral is at 1.15pm next Tuesday, back at St Peter’s in Byers Green. It will be led by the Rev Kevin Dunne who for many years was rector of Chester-le-Street, where Bill had been a reader.

THE One O’Clock Show was a television phenomenon, singer Chris Langford a key part of it.

Broadcast live five lunchtimes each week, it ticked off in Tyne Tees Television’s first week in January 1959 and ran for 1,200 shows, featuring still-remembered names like George Romaine, Jack Haig, Shirley Wilson and Austin Steel.

Chris, Lancashire lassie and just 19 at the time, had been discovered by Tyne Tees musical director Len Marten, who also spotted Shirley Bassey but sold the contract for £5,000.

“She was a very good singer and in my opinion she became a great one,”

says co-star George Romaine, still in Shildon.

Chris moved to Granada, married Granada director Richard Guinea who died several years ago, lived in a cottage on Saddleworth Moor.

“Every time I rang her, she’d been out chasing sheep,” says former Tyne Tees public relations officer David Dawson.

She still sang professionally. “The last time we spoke she was doing a show in Manchester, still had the voice,” says George. Chris was 69.

Arather happier note from the At Your service column. Former mayor of Durham Ray Gibbon was reminded by last week’s piece on the centenary of Ferryhill Methodist church of his days as both chapel member and polliss up that way.

Ray’s beat was East Howle, then still a thriving little community, and Metal Bridge. He recalls the latenight pleasures of a locked-in pint in the East Howle pub, the necessity to check in hourly from the nearest telephone box, “manning the bridges” on the East Coast main line whenever a royal train was due.

Every bridge had to be covered, usually in the middle of the night.

Ray’s bridge was a couple of fields off the road.

“I’ve stood there many a time, armed to the teeth with my torch and my truncheon and accompanied by my old collie dog while the train thundered past.

“I’d then walk the mile and a half back home, pick up the telephone and solemnly inform divisional office that the royal train had passed safely through. I’d then go to bed, content in the knowledge that I’d done my bit for England.”

….and finally, a belated note of congratulation to Edna March, a smashing lady from Crook made MBE in the New Year list.

She last featured hereabouts in April 2009, chiefly credited as the driving force behind the £300,000 refurbishment of St Andrew’s church in Crook into a Methodist/URC partnership.

They praised her then – “Her love of the Lord, this church and the community is just so evident,” said Ann Shepherdson, the minister – and Edna, characteristically, demurred.

“It’s a team effort. Everyone’s been generous of both time and talents.”

The MBE may speak most loudly