A light on the town

LIKE the new town starting to show its age, St Mary’s Roman Catholic church in Newton Aycliffe celebrated its golden jubilee – memorably, magnificently – last Sunday.

The church overflows, standing room only; drums and trumpets augment the organ. Handel, too. The parish priest speaks of a fabulous community of faith, the Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle of a parish that visibly looks out and not in.

There’s a splendid flower festival, a 50-panel quilt painstakingly embroidered with scenes of Newton Aycliffe life, a new red carpet, a Brobdingnagian bunfight and, two weeks earlier, a week-long pilgrimage to Rome made yet more unforgettable because easyJet cancelled the flight back.

No matter how great the occasion, however, there’s the usual conversation before the service.

“Eeeh,” says the lady in front, “I’ve had a horrendous year with my foot.”

Fr Michael Campion, the present priest, has been doing his homework.

Back in September 1960, he recalls, Chubby Checker was twisting again, Cassius Clay had just won the light-heavyweight title at the Olympic Games, Fidel Castro had spoken for four hours 29 minutes at the United Nations – “you thought that my sermons went on a bit” – and Enterprise, the first atomic-powered submarine, was launched.

More locally, The Northern Echo reported that Frank Emmerson had become the first Shildon postman to receive the Imperial Service Medal, that West Hartlepool had been left with just four of its eight post-war cinemas and that a market trader had been fined £40 at Richmond for “unlawfully exposing Guernsey tomatoes for sale”.

St Mary’s cost £46,000, took 16 months to build. Twenty five years later, the rotting windows alone cost £42,600 to replace. More recently, the church has had a new roof and ceiling and been completely rewired.

Now the concrete window surrounds are crumbling in both church and presbytery, the porch roof needs replacing and the list, the litany, goes on.

“We’d go round the houses on Friday nights, pay day, collecting money for the building fund,” recalls Lorna Reece. “I don’t suppose it was much more than threepence a time.”

She was one of six, her father a teacher in Bishop Auckland. Lorna herself worked in Brough’s, the first shop. She never left the town. “I’ve just grown to like the place and to love the spirit in this church,” she says. “The only thing that disappoints me is the town centre. It’s really disappointing, that.”

THE first house was built in 1948, folk then as now talking of living on the town. Kevin McGowan’s admirable parish history recalls that, in 1851, most people in Darlington “existed in low, crowded and ill-ventilated hovels”.

“If only,” adds Kevin a little ambiguously, “they could have imagined the houses in which their descendants would live in Newton Aycliffe 100 years later.”

By 1949, priests were being sent from St Thomas’s in Darlington to lead Saturday morning mass in a Nissen hut – among the first Father John Caden, a young curate who in the afternoon would keep goal for Darlington Reserves.

“Fr Troy, the parish priest, didn’t think much of the idea of coming to Newton Aycliffe so he got me a good Catholic taxi driver,” he recalls.

Now 87, Fr Caden went to Sedgefield in 1966, was asked by the bishop to stay for five years and faithfully remains there – still leading services, still working, he supposes, three or four hours a day.

He’s back for St Mary’s jubilee.

“There really wasn’t much to Newton Aycliffe in those days,” he says.

“It’s amazing how it’s grown.”

Fr Martin McBrien had been appointed parish priest in 1954, lived in a house that’s now a vet’s surgery, first oversaw the building of a presbytery and then of the church.

The parish history also records that the adjoining school was opened in 1962, run by the affectionately remembered Sisters of the Cross and Passion.

The head was Sister Siobhan, from whom young teachers would claim that they learned more in three days than in two years in college. Sr Giovanni was an assiduous visitor, Sr Gabriel an elderly nun who’d still walk miles to take communion to the sick.

Sr Geraldine was among the first to drive – breakdowns frequent, it’s recorded, burned-out clutches a speciality.

The convent closed in 1995.

St Joseph’s school opened in 1968, a granite chapel added to the hall in 1984. Fr Campion now has charge of both churches, a total weekly mass attendance of around 400.

“I repeatedly tell them that though I have been in larger and wealthier parishes in the diocese,” he says, “I’ve never been in one more generous.”

FATHER Harry Ryan, parish priest for 20 years, and Fr Paddy Kennedy, at St Joseph’s for 12 years, are also back for the celebration.

The church looks light and lovely.

Bishop Seamus Cunningham speaks in his introduction of the “heresy of activity” – “there’s not just material poverty, there’s spiritual and psychological poverty, too”

– and in his closing remarks of the need to let go. “In this day and age we will sometimes have to accept change. There’s no point in getting uptight and upset about it.”

He also tells a story that involves a bundle of pound notes. It must be quite an old story.

Fr Michael, for nine years dean of Newcastle Cathedral, repeats his thanks for his flock’s munificence.

“It’s second to none in its generosity.”

Bishop Seamus clearly appreciates the affection in which the parish priest is held, plays his cards right.

“I think we’ll leave him here for a while,” he says.

On a great morning on the town, it brings the warmest applause of all.