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CLIFF Richard didn’t really live in a makeshift house in Newton Aycliffe.

Though boasted in Yours magazine, the claim – like the supposed house – was prefabricated. The column established as much in November 2008.

Fourteen months later, however, we discover very much more about the young Cliff – Harry Webb back then – school javelin champion, magazine contributor and a boy who may have been scared of the dark but wasn’t afraid to admit it.

In truth it is to be something of a show business column. We still haven’t heard the last of Wilfred Pickles or Joseph Colton; the ghost of Charles Simon waits, fag in hand, in the wings.

MUCH of the confirmation that Cliff could never have lived in Newton Aycliffe had come from Margery Burton in Shildon, possibly the singer’s No 1 North-East fan.

Margery had been so astonished by the Yours claim that back in 2008, she rang them to ask if it were a deliberate mistake. Yours unfaithfully, they said they’d ring back and didn’t.

From the days they worked together at Hydro Polymers on the Aycliffe industrial estate, she also recalled Colin Blass, who claimed to have gone to school with young Webb at Cheshunt County Secondary in Surrey.

“To be honest, I didn’t really believe him,” Margery had said, and was thus pretty flabbergasted to find reproduced in a Newcastle City Hall concert programme the cast list from the school production of A Christmas Carol.

Harry Webb played Bob Cratchit, Colin Blass the Ghost of Christmas Past.

We’d visited Colin’s former address in Darlington. That was past, too; the occupants thought he was in France.

He was. A leading PVC scientist, he’s now back in Devizes, spotted his name on the internet and rang. “The interesting thing,” says Colin, “is that Harry always claimed he couldn’t sing.”

VERY kindly, he has now sent all manner of memorabilia, including the 1957 school magazine – The Ripple – to which Webb, form VA, contributed a piece called A Walk Through a Big City at Night.

“As I was walking along the road, I was aware of my feet beating a regular rhythm on the pavement,” he wrote, presciently.

He’d also encountered one of those new-fashioned Teddy boys. “I was amused by the simian manner in which he walked; his arms, abnormally long, dangled by his side.”

Then he turned into a side street.

“Here, alone, I became conscious of the shadows (the shadows, for goodness sake) which stretched ahead of me. Unaccountably I began to run and did not stop until I had returned home, ready for bed.”

COLIN also encloses some sports day programmes – 14+ school javelin record, 131ft 3ins, Webb.

Harry won a talent contest, too, singing Moon River. “It wasn’t bad for someone who said he couldn’t sing,” says his old school friend.

Harry Rodger Webb left Cheshunt County in the summer of 1957, a few months before his 17th birthday.

Two years later he wasn’t just javelin champion, he was top of the pops with Move It. “I have to say,” adds Colin Blass, “I was surprised at the speed with which he did it”

CLEARLY Cheshunt school was a place for aspiring musicians.

Colin himself was an early pianist in the group Unit Four + Two – best remembered for the top ten hit Concrete and Clay – but opted for his job with ICI when they turned professional.

David “Buster” Meikle, a classmate, headed the group The Daybreakers and had also been a member of Unit Four.

Norman Stracey and John Rogers helped found The Roulettes, Adam Faith’s first backing group. Brian Parker, who co-wrote Concrete and Clay and died while playing tennis in 2001, played with Stracey and Rogers in The Hunters, who backed Cliff at the London Palladium.

Colin also encloses a pic, taken 50 years ago, of Cliff with Brian Parker.

The young one hardly seems to have changed.

ON the internet they neatly call them threads, these little themes which, ever more greatly interweaving, seem simply to run and run.

Wilfred Pickles, best remembered for presenting with his wife Mabel the long-lasting radio show Have A Go – a sort of post-war X Factor – has been thread-handed for several weeks now.

Old Wilfred was a Halifax lad and proud Yorkshireman. Les Wilson in Guisborough remembers him starting a bulletin with the words “Ere’s t’news” while the Stokesley Stockbroker suspects that he had something of a Tyke’s parsimony, too.

Have A Go would tour the land, mostly the North. After a show, says the Stockbroker, Pickles would suggest that they all adjourn to the nearest pub for a drink.

“He’d order a large round, be told it was £3 1s 7d or whatever, tap his pocket, announce that he’d forgotten his wallet and ask if they’d accept a cheque.

Nine times out of ten, so it’s said, the publican would never want to cash a Wilfred Pickles cheque and would frame it behind the bar. As usual, Wilfred’s round was on the house.

“I expect you’ve finished with the Wilfred Pickles story,” begins Eric Shuttleworth in Darlington – Oh come, come, the thread’s barely whetted – “but in case you’re interested I enclose a copy of my 1952 Piccadilly Theatre programme, price 6d, for The Gay Dog.”

Originally called A Dog for Delmont, The Gay Dog was a “farcical comedy” written by Joseph Colton – a teacher in Bearpark, near Durham – about whom previous columns have been able to discover precious little.

“I can’t remember much about the play, except the greyhound, but I know there weren’t many people in the audience,” says Eric. “I decided it wasn’t West End stuff.”

As well as Pickles, the 1952 cast included Joan Hickson – still starring as Miss Marple – as Mrs James and Meg Jenkins as Maggie Gay.

Other productions in London that summer included Peggy Ashcroft in The Deep Blue Sea, Edith Evans and Sybil Thorndyke in Waters of the Moon, Katharine Hepburn in The Millionairess and Hermione Baddeley in The Pink Room.

Eric also recalls the old Northgate Theatre in Darlington, immediately before the Regal Cinema replaced it in 1937.

“My father took me to one of the last performances. It was a musty place and also thinly attended. Two men were jumping in and out of bed in their nightshirts. I’ve always assumed they were the repertory players, Charles Simon and John Tanner.”

CHARLES Simon was a lovely man, best remembered for playing Dr Dale in the radio series Mrs Dale’s Diary and for smoking like Peases Mill chimney.

He ran a repertory company in Darlington for 15 years, had started surreptitious smoking when he was a choirboy and continued on 40 a day until pretty much his last gasp.

“My only advice is never to go near a doctor,” he once told one or other of these columns. “He’ll probably find 40,000 things rotting inside you and all you’ll do is worry yourself to death, anyway.”

Even when he returned to Darlington, even when finally he relocated the Civic Theatre – “they’d put a bloody ring road in the way” – he was pictured with a tab between his fingers.

At first, his secretary recalled, it was 40 Players. Then it became 40 Dunhill King Size. He died in 2002, aged 93. It had got him in the end.

...so finally in this nine-act drama back to Joseph H Colton. John Waiting in Guisborough recalls that in his short-trousered childhood, Colton would pass his grandmother’s house in Victor Terrace, Bearpark, on the way to and from the school.

“I recall that he was a little eccentric, either that or he enjoyed the odd alcoholic refreshment. I also believe he had the nickname Pompey.”

Pompey? Was he a Portsmouth football fan, an expert on ancient Rome, or what?

Though John thinks that Colton may have moved to the Windsor area – “not the castle” – his trail remains cold. The curtain falls for the moment; silver threads and golden wheedles, there may be more next week.