Old haunts

AN interesting week for Saltburn Community Theatre. On Sunday it staged a church service – deus ex machina, as they might say in thespian circles – and last night hosted a ghost hunt.

The former, free, had seats in all parts. The latter, £15, sold out.

Opened exactly 100 years ago, the building began life as a Primitive Methodist church – architecturally glorious, not least by the prevailing style of the Prims and proper – that cost £4,263 10s 5d and was first known as the Regent Circus Methodist Church, after that part of the seaside town centre in which it grew up.

Though Britain’s Methodist churches officially united in 1932 – emphasis on the word “officially”, ask them in the dales – the Primitives effectively continued in Albion Terrace and the Wesleyans in Milton Street, divided by about 200 yards, the end of the railway line and about a century of mutual suspicion.

John and Brenda Vayro, delightful couple, remember it well. She was from the Primitive tradition, he Wesleyan.

They married in 1954 at Skelton, a few miles down the road, but became caretakers at Albion Terrace.

“To some the wedding wasn’t really acceptable even then,” says Brenda.

“My father was a Primitive but he sang in the Wesleyan choir. That was frowned upon, too.”

The Albion Terrace church closed in 1969, the congregation finally crossing the tracks to Milton Street and the wonderful 1910 building becoming the community centre.

Last Sunday they all returned for a centenary service, the first service there for 40 years. Old haunts, as it were.

IT’S a pleasant April evening, kids still digging their way to Australia beneath the peerless pier, queues still angling outside the fish shop, the Ochre Beck – as now ineluctably it has been renamed – flowing orange orderly to the sea.

The community centre notice board also advertises Spiritualist Church meetings – “awareness and development circles on a regular basis” – and an evening of mediumship, £3. That was on Wednesday.

Happy mediumship, no doubt.

The ghost hunt is organised by a group called Spirit Seekers – “taking you to the most haunted places in North-East England,” says the website – though not so much things that go bump in the night as things that have to be in bed by 11 o’clock, because that’s the latest the community centre committee will allow.

Some, it’s whispered in the wings, aren’t very happy about the thing going ahead at all.

The group’s website talks of strange shadows and of unexplained noises, said to be those of a smuggler. Saltburn had lots of them.

During 2010, they’re also organising paranormal investigations – “the chance to see real ghosts” – in venues ranging from Hartlepool Borough Hall (“one of the most haunted buildings in England”) to the Unicorn pub in Richmond where there are reports of objects being thrown and, get this, unexplained smells.

Down the years, there are those of us who wouldn’t mind a pint of Strongarm for every time we’ve detected unexplained smells in a pub.

Ann Brignall, a member of the community centre drama group, says that the possibility of a ghost has become “a little bit of a joke”

among the players.

“Sometimes I think there is a presence. There’s nothing sinister about it, it’s quite relaxed and contented.

Some very happy events happened in this building.”

Does she believe in ghosts, then?

“Not really,” says Ann, “but I do believe that we are a lot more complex than we allow ourselves to be.”

WHAT once was the church now has tip-up seats – old enough to have been ninepennies – a stage and a ye-gods balcony from which it’s hoped to take photographs. The door’s locked, the photographer unwilling to do a Romeo and Juliet (or possibly a Jack and the Beanstalk) and clamber his way up. “I can’t, I’ve just been with David Cameron,” he says inexplicably.

Framed out the back are posters signed by some of those who’ve trod the Saltburn boards. Barry Norman had thought it a great evening, Honor Blackman supposed them lovely people, while Edward Knowles, he of the Antiques Roadshow, wrote that Saltburn was Yorkshire’s answer to Monte Carlo. Monte Carlo probably hasn’t a miniature railway, though.

Proceedings begin with advice about what to do in case of fire. For some reason they never do that in churches.

Chris Eddy, the superintendent minister, announces that the evening will reflect the Primitive Methodist traditions of hymnody and good Gospel preaching.

Since the opening hymns are O For a Thousand Tongues and And Can It Be?, two of three greatest in Christendom, it’s easy to imagine a good evening. So it proves.

Roger Lobley, 72, at Albion Terrace since childhood and organist there and at Milton Street, recalls Sunday school leaders like Alf King – “if he’d said a thunderbolt was coming, you’d have ducked” – and Percy Saunders, who had a serious look but a ready supply of Murray Mints by way of enlightenment.

“I felt I was part of a family, everyone counted, the love you felt was real. When the church closed, the family just moved house,” he says.

Centre stage once again, Mr Eddy reprises the preaching of a century ago, rails against drunkenness, debauchery, debt, dishonesty, idleness – “hours and hours in front of the television” – and sundry other sins of the flesh.

“We live in a world which doesn’t do sin any more. Anything goes today.”

Afterwards there’s tea, coffee and world’s-best home-made biscuits.

They’re a good lot. Whatever may have happened before 11pm last night, Saltburn’s Methodists are by no means ready to be giving up the ghost.