Lip service

BLOWING his own trumpet – or euphonium, as the picture clearly shows – Tom Moffatt has successfully completed the last of his great projects.

Remarkable lad, Tommy Moffatt, though perhaps better remembered as a wicket keeper – 40 years in league cricket, seven games for Durham County – than as a musician.

That he didn’t lift an instrument for 64 years and then struck up again at 78 is extraordinary. That he plays with the youth band may require a little more explanation.

“We’re allowed a few over-age players, though probably there won’t be many aged 80,” says Tom. “It was bloody hard getting back into it. I’d sit upstairs playing 20 or 30 hymns a day, trying to get my lip in, longing for my wife to call me down for coffee.

“A lot of brass banding is about breathing. I missed a few notes going up Silver Street at Durham Big Meeting, but you know what they say – you can’t have a car without a brake.”

He was a Sunderland lad, his father corps sergeant-major at Monkwearmouth Salvation Army and himself an enthusiastic brass bandsman.

Tom’s MBE came in 1989, services to the Durham Small Business Club which he chaired for 20 years. “They used to call me Small Business Tommy, but it wasn’t the only thing they called me. You don’t keep wicket for 40 years and not get called a few names.”

Nor, it might be added, do the stumpers get much recognition, his only mounted ball for claiming six victims at Blackhall. The bowler had nine. Some feller called Len Shackleton.

At 27, he was a chief pit electrician, became a senior college lecturer, masterminded with Don Robson and Ian Caller the campaign to secure first class cricket for Durham County.

His final big project – “before I pop my cork,” he says, though there is no sign of fading fizz – was to raise funding for a band room for the NAS/UWT Chester-le-Street Riverside Band, which he chairs.

Costs started at £72,000, rose to more than £100,000 – “they always seem to” – but in two years he’s done it. “It’s not the sort of thing that you can do with a committee,” he says.

“It’s like the Durham County project; the three of us were just given carte blanche. I’m lucky, I seem to be able to hit the right desks.”

IT had begun in 1878 as the Pelton Fell Methodist Band, soon became the Colliery band, continued until the 1960s when the pit shut.

Newcastle Breweries sponsored them from 1972 to 2000 – they were the Newcastle Brown Ale Band – the county cricket club for several years thereafter. Tom was also the club treasurer.

Six years ago he started the youth band. “Durham County became one of the most successful cricket clubs because we had a wonderful academy.

This was the same philosophy.

At first we only had about ten, and half of them could hardly play a note.”

The other problem was that they weren’t so much a marching band as a wandering one, always nomadic.

Tom decided two years ago that for the first time in 130 years they should have a permanent roof over their heads.

He searched the district for suitable band room premises before settling on the old tennis pavilion in Pelton Fell park – about 200 yards from the church and colliery where it all began, closer yet to the war memorial where they’ve played every Remembrance Day for 130 years.

The building has been impressively extended and refurbished, the windows bricked up. Partly it was for security reasons, partly to live in peace with the neighbours. “We stood at the other side of the tennis court, 20 yards away, and recorded the silence,” says Tom.

The band’s delighted. “It’s fantastic to have a place of our own, to be able to just sit down and play rather than carrying all that heavy gear up the stairs,” says Carolanne Duncan, 17. “It’s such a relief to do it this way.”

She’d joined the youth band at 11 – “could hardly tootle,” says Tom – is now principal tenor horn and second horn with the senior band. Her dad’s principal solo horn, her two sisters also play.

“I make the sandwiches,” says mum.

THE most remarkable bit’s in the finale. Two years ago the youth band entered the regional fourth section contest and was eleventh out of 14. Last year they were seventh out of 12. This year they were second and thus qualified for the national finals in Harrogate next month.

Tom doesn’t play in the competition.

“The band’s restricted to 25. We have 30-odd players and if I’d played it would have meant that a 14-yearold wouldn’t have done and that wasn’t fair.”

The same day, the championship band – the top section – also reached the national finals, at the Royal Albert Hall on October 9. They’re now the only band in the country with finalists in both youth and championship sections.

Someone from Brass Band World had asked Tom all about it, about how he managed to finance and build a band room in two years, about the unique double success. “I said I was doing it for my dad because he loved brass bands and he gave me my love of brass bands, part of the north’s culture,” he says.

He gazes round the still-unfinished band room, anticipates two big days out in the autumn. “It’s a wonderful situation. No one could have imagined it two years ago. Just perfect.”

AFTER a couple of hours learning the score on the NAS/UWT band, we head for Chester-le- Street Rotary Club’s weekly lunch, a convivial gathering at Chilton Moor.

Mostly retired, getting on a bit, they’re action men, nonetheless – none more so than former North Eastern Co-op chief executive David Hughes, now 84.

Reckoned a retail rebel – he was the man who abolished divvy, who introduced the region’s first self-service store, who pioneered buy-oneget- one-free – he’s now a tireless charity worker.

In the last ten years, it’s reckoned, he’s raised more than £70,000 through his paintings, books and talks, without charging a penny expenses.

His latest novel, My Son the Enemy, is about a German-Jewish family in Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s, all proceeds to Help For Heroes and the Army Benevolent Fund.

David, who lives in Houghton-le- Spring, was an RAOC sergeant from 1946-48.

The Rotary Club is also much occupied with the Pakistan flood relief appeal and with sending “shelter boxes” to the homeless.

They’ve won permission to hold a collection – “an awful lot of buckets,”

says Fred Richards, the organiser – at England’s one-day cricket international with Pakistan on September 10. More than most, they’ll hope it goes ahead.

AHIGH note on which to end, a surprise tea party marked Sylvia Bestford’s 70 years as organist at St Peter’s church in Byers Green, near Spennymoor.

They’d invited Mark Bryant, the Bishop of Jarrow, who spoke of her “extraordinary faithfulness”. They’d invited me, too, but just to help clear the tables.

Sylvia began playing at 12, when the regular organist started working weekend shifts. Two years later she became permanent, had a little break, also played piano for Bishop Auckland and Spennymoor op socs and at 84 is retiring through failing eyesight.

The church hall thronged. Ken Brownson, later to become the village fish shop owner, recalled that he’d been bellows boy on 7/6d a quarter and a bob for weddings and funerals.

“Sylvia was lovely,” he said.

Sylvia earned a few shillings more, eventually up to £100 a year, though that could mean three times each Sunday and arranging holidays around special occasions. “I just love music, singing too. It’s been my life,”

she said.

“Mind, I don’t like that pop stuff.

Every morning the wireless is straight onto classical.”

Favourite hymns? “Well, 703 in Ancient and Modern – Beloved Let us Love, they don’t sing that these days – and in the red book I Vow to Thee My Country and in the new book Be Still for the Presence of the Lord.”

None has been found to take her place on the organ stool. St Peter’s will play CDs, instead.

SPLENDID at Byers Green to bump into the Rev John Stephenson, described by the Echo in 1991 as the North-East’s best known priest.

Once one of the Hear All Sides column’s most prolific – and most contentious – correspondents he has latterly, alas, been maintaining a vow of silence.

Consett lad and former Church Army captain, John was curate of Spennymoor – effectively of Byers Green – from 1976-79 before becoming vicar of Eppleton, Hetton-le- Hole, until his retirement in 1996.

Now 75, he was a pacifist, a poet, a campaigner for social justice, a friend to the miners and an inveterate opponent of the first Gulf War.

“I even declared Hetton a nuclearfree zone. It seemed to work,” he said.

Frequently he began exchanges with other Hear All Sides correspondents, most notably – though they were political poles apart – with the late Basil Noble, former Darlington chartered surveyor and Maggie man. Basil even bought him a bottle of sherry for Christmas.

The moment after which the Echo no longer heard John’s side came in 1991 after his letter to another Darlington reader accused her of being “thick” over the Gulf War issue.

The nationals picked up the story.

John used his Easter sermon to suggest that he, too, had been “crucified”

– by the “gutter press”.

A good man, he now lives in East Herrington, Sunderland, where the vicar of St Chad’s is, appropriately, Jeremy Chadd. John’s impressed.

“The most wonderful priest I’ve ever known,” he says.

AYCLIFFE Village unites this weekend in a crafts and flower festival, centred on St Andrew’s church. I’m opening it at 7.30pm tomorrow.

“It began as a church thing but the whole village has become involved.

It’s lovely,” says Dawn Herbert, one of the organisers.

The flower festival has a crafts theme. Tomorrow’s preview evening – 7-9pm, £5, includes wine and nibbles.

It’s open on Saturday from 10am-4pm and on Sunday from noon- 4pm, £2 admission including tea and biscuits.

Other events, organised by the scouts and the village hall committee, include a village hall table top sale on Saturday (11am-2pm; tables £5) and a photo hunt at 2pm.

On Sunday from 11 30am-2.30pm the village hall holds a fete with “breakfast butties” and at 2.30pm there’s a duck race at Monks End.

Splashing out, ducks are £2.

IN October 2006 we noted the death of Denis Towlard, retired head of Thornaby Church of England school and an occasional, delightful, correspondent of these columns. One of his finest hours was a sign outside an “Irish” pub called Scruffy Murphy’s. “Smart dress only,” it said.

Ruth Wilcock, Denis’s daughter, now emails to report that Audrey, his widow, has died. She was 94.

Both were from Darlington, met at the old Majestic Cinema, love at first reel. When Denis spent two years on his back in Wolsingham sanatorium after a rugby accident, Audrey visited him every week by public transport. They married at St Luke’s in 1939.

Ruth’s also intrigued to discover her mum’s Nig-Nog Club badge – but that’s another story.

The brass neck of it…

LAST week’s column revolved around blue plaques, albeit in Sunderland. The day previously, perchance, we’d cause to alight at Widnes railway station – between Manchester and Liverpool and site of one of the most famous plaques of all.

It was on platform one at Widnes station, so folklore has it, that the great American singer and songwriter Paul Simon penned Homeward Bound while on a melancholy tour of onenight stands.

And all my words come back to me

In shades of mediocrity

And every stranger’s face I see

Reminds me that I long to be…

The plaque was nowhere to be seen, nor little else save for a beauty parlour that also offered de-stressing and a youth falling off a skateboard. Finally I ask the ticket clerk, who indicates a humble brass thing about a quarter the size of the plaque commemorating the station refurbishments.

The blue period? “This is the seventh or eighth plaque,” says the ticket clerk. “All the rest got nicked.”