Herd instincts

“Former world champion boxer Lennox Lewis was in the area last Friday when he met the group, who are in the country to make a film and assist with teacher training.”

Montego Bay? School trip? Goodness, what lessons there are to be learned.

I attended King James I Grammar School, as then it was, for seven years. Other than the occasional cross-country run to Etherley Dene, about a mile and several stops for breath away, the only time we officially got to leave the premises was when the Royal Show came to Tyneside in 1962.

Never mind Montego Bay, even in Newcastle upon Tyne – alas – we were innocents abroad.

THAT great farmers’ fiesta was in those days something of a travelling circus, a different venue every year. Those four days in July 1962 were the eighth (and last) time that the show had pitched up on the Town Moor since its inception in 1839.

The previous visit had been in 1956, the attendance a record 242,000.

Events of 1962 weren’t helped by the typical July weather – gale force winds, temperatures in the low 50s – though Alfred Morris Furs, based in Shildon, had prudently taken a stand, too.

“Despite the precautions,” reported the Echo, meticulously, “it was reported last night that two Guernsey cows had caught a chill.”

The four-day visitor total was 186,000, officially considered “amazing”, not a hotel room to be had between Morpeth and Northallerton.

The Royal Station Hotel in Newcastle had been fully booked for two years.

Inevitably described as “radiant”, the Queen Mother was also among the visitors, though probably she’d got in for nothing.

The day previously they’d welcomed the Duchess of Gloucester, stewards obliged to order the removal of two “life-size pin-ups” outside the London Visitors’ Club tent.

The Club represented 26 nightspots, or fleshpots or whatever then they were called, the sort of place in which a weary farmer might find himself after a hard day’s meat trading at Smithfield Market.

Organisers were indignant. “It is not compatible with the interests of the show,” explained a spokesman.

“We have standards to maintain. If we allowed these pictures, the next thing would be striptease.”

Altogether more decorously, the Echo had published a four-page supplement, including a photograph of trainee milkmaids at Houghall Agricultural College outside Durham.

They looked like State Registered Nurses in wellies.

Many visitors were school parties, taking – said the Echo – a “particular delight” in the attractions on offer.

The Durham Chronicle (RIP) devoted a full page to the schools.

Chester-le-Street Grammar had on show a “biological survey of a local wood”, Sugar Hill primary in Newton Aycliffe a display of south-west Durham castles, Spennymoor Grammar Tech – clever beggars – something called “Smith is king”.

This wasn’t a reference to a mock election, apparently, rather to the guy beneath the spreading chestnut tree.

Our lot, memory suggests, did nothing at all except collect vast amounts of promotional literature which may most kindly have been described as specialised, and more accurately as junk.

Homeward on the train, we tipped the lot – thousands of pieces of paper – from Durham railway viaduct over the unsuspecting city.

King James I was a good school with, in Denis Weatherley, an admirable headmaster. It’s time not just to own up but to apologise.

Clearly we didn’t get out enough.

IMPOSSIBLE to link Bishop Auckland and Jamaica, however educational the outing, without mention of the diminutive but wholly admirable Mr Brian Hunt, Durham County Cricket Club’s longserving scorer and a familiar man about Bishop.

Back in the 1980s, Brian was persuaded – ticed, as they say in those parts – to compile the centenary history of the Northern Football League.

Characteristically meticulous, he spent seven years on it. By way of thanks, the league gave him and his wife a Caribbean holiday which included two test matches.

On arrival at Kingston Oval, however, Brian discovered that he’d left his tickets and passes in the hotel room, 30 miles away. All he had in his wallet was his Northern League “all grounds” pass.

Swiftly he flashed it at the gateman, a worthy chap who’d clearly been watching too many Alan Whicker commercials. “That’ll do nicely,” he said. Oval teenies, they were in.

YES, yes, I really have surfed all the stuff about the League of Ovaltineys, the secret signs and signals and the seven things that every member must promise to do – get plenty of exercise, study hard at school, swear daily to drink swimming pools full of Ovaltine – even the signature tune. It’s all getting rather a long way from King James I Grammar School, but if anyone still has their Ovaltiney membership stuff it would be wholesome to have a look.

WHAT else? Well, Anne Gibbon in Darlington is struck by the now little-used phrase “a thousand pities” – “A thousand pities my client could not follow his dream after getting his PhD from Durham” – in a court report last Friday.

So far in this millennium, the paper has used it just once previously, also in a court report. For Anne, however, it’s almost a family heirloom.

Some time in the late 1940s, she recalls, they were taking afternoon tea at the Black Swan in Helmsley.

“From Pam’s point of view,” said Robert Capes, her uncle, “it’s a thousand pities that the war started when it did.”

And from everyone else’s? “We never did find out,” says Anne.

SPEAKING of Helmsley, that attractive little North Yorkshire town, last week’s column touched upon the puzzle of how Harold Wilson, a West Yorkshireman, became Lord Wilson of Rievaulx, the nearby abbey.

“At the time it generated a fair amount of heat in the letters page of the Darlington and Stockton Times,”

recalls Alan Macnab, in Darlington.

It was as we supposed – Wilson’s grandfather had been a cobbler and smallholding occupier thereabouts until, unable to support his growing family, he became master of the Helmsley workhouse.

Another reader corrects the claim that Wilson insisted on the phonetic pronunciation Riv-ix – it was Riv-is, he says, that being an old family name in the Helmsley area.

WITH some incredulity, we’d also noted that the pharmacy in Tow Law, supposed Switzerland of the North, is advertising treatment for malaria. “It wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” writes John Heslop from Durham.

“The internet tells me that the insect which was the main bearer of malaria in Britain is still present in marshy and coastal areas and that the risk of infection is likely to increase with a rise in the average temperature.

“However, it is no longer considered fatal and can be completely cured with modern drugs.”

For verification, of course, they could always ask Ms Cheryl Cole, though it’s unlikely she was bitten in Tow Law.

FROM Billingham, where Marsh House Avenue is prominent, Martin Birtle reports that his local newsagent’s window has separate postcards seeking the whereabouts of a lost cat and a lost Yorkshire terrier and another offering for sale an 18-month-old royal python – “very tame.” Enquiring within, Martin wondered both how they defined tame – “is it a Carol Malia fan, or something?– and whether they’d considered a connection.

“They hadn’t,” he insists.

THE last word to Geoff Carr, however. He’s just been admiring a Cofresh crunchy hand-made peanut butter bar – made in Australia, contains 67 per cent peanuts.

Beneath all that there’s a large print warning: “This product may contain traces of peanuts.”

The trip continues next week.