Dull, but never boring

What of Deaf Hill, asks Brian Mulligan in Sedgefield – always a blind spot, Deaf Hill, none has satisfactorily explained it – what of Six Mile Bottom, asks Tony Hillman in Darlington?

That one’s in Cambridgeshire, he reckons.

Pete Winstanley in Durham recalls visiting Dull, a village between Perth and Kinross, and finding it really rather attractive.

Nearby is St Andrew’s University, to which Dr Tom Wright, lately departed Bishop of Durham, has become attached. None could ever accuse Bishop Tom of monotony.

Heading south, adds Pete, motorists will pass a road sign to Conundrum, near the border at Berwick, though that appears to be only a farm and visitor centre. Another puzzle, anyway.

If they stick the headline “Never a Dull moment” atop today’s Gadfly, it may only partly be true.

PERHAPS the most intriguing of all the names ventilated in last week’s column was Linger and Die, a couple of rows of railway cottages near Ferryhill of which none round here had ever heard.

Tim Brown of the Ferryhill History Society had, and so had MJ Murray in Spennymoor. Mr Murray was not only born at Linger and Die in 1951 – the family moved to nearby East Howle four years later – but sends this gloriously evocative old photograph of the place. No 8 is the house where he was born.

The two men disagree, however, on the name’s origins.

Linger and Die, says Tim, was built on the Chilton branch of the Clarence Railway to house railway staff, with a winding engine at Thrundale Incline to haul wagons from Chilton Colliery.

“If a steam-hauled load were brought up the incline, but the engine was under-powered, the train stalled. Hence Linger and Die.”

Mr Murray supposes differently, his theory less plausible but more appealing.

“Apparently soldiers were billeted there, so bored with nothing to do all day that they carved ‘Linger and Die’ on the railway bridge.”

Originally, adds Mr Murray, the houses were much more prosaically called Chilton Branch Cottages. All that remains, says Tim, is the trackbed leading from the Bradbury to Ferryhill road at Gypsy Lane crossing. Linger and Die just faded away.

MUCH the greatest response, however, has been to the whereabouts of Fatty Man’s Squeeze – a tight spot no longer – which we’d foolishly suspected to be in Durham.

Many agree that it was a narrow, brick-arched alley near what is now Darlington’s inner ring road, connecting Weir Street with Russell Street.

“As children, we’d go through there to the weir, throw sticks into the Skerne and see whose stick would go under the bridge first,” recalls Liz Coates.

George Kipling was transported back to the late Forties when Borough Road school kids would have swimming lessons at Gladstone Street baths. “Fatty Man’s Squeeze led to the back lanes which followed the river and was just wide enough for one person to get through. We kids tried to walk through it in twos, but never really succeeded.”

An additional hazard, recalls Valerie Gold, was being soaked with water from the laundry as they tried to squeeze past.

Thanks also to Yvonne Edwards, whose father had a wholesale fruit and potato merchant’s in the area, to Alf Hutchinson too and Rita and Peter Everett. Coming clean, we should now wonder whatever happened to the Lily Laundry?

SIMILARLY aground, John Robinson in Blackhall Rocks seeks help with a saying much used by his late mother, born and raised in Ushaw Moor.

“If anything were untidy or a mish-mash,” recalls John, “she would say it was like Stage Bank Fair.”

Mrs Robinson clearly had something in common with the column’s old mum – who’d have been 100 two weeks ago – except that in similar circumstances she preferred to liken the confusion to Staffordshire Bank Fair.

Though there are other variations, the reference is undoubtedly to what was said to be England’s one-day fair, held biannually at Stagshaw Bank, four miles north-east of Hexham.

There was a colliery there, too.

Scale alone suggested chaos, the extent of ale swilling – “it was before the days of teetotalism,” explained an 1850 account – no doubt adding to the general pandemonium. “The fair and other clatter, often mingled with the roar of Wombwell’s lions, was almost a Babel,” said the 19th Century writer.

The fair died out in the second half of that century. Its description, however corrupted, happily survives.

DAVID Moyes draws attention to a headline in last week’s paper: “Pupils’ proud acheivement”.

Maybe the sub-editor should himself be sent back to school, suggests David, though at least he got the apostrophe in the right place.

Similarly themed, I’m approached in Darlington town centre by the splendid Philip Tarry, gaffer of the renowned Hackett and Baines store in Shildon founded by his great grandfather in 1898. They’ve just had a new fascia, but face a problem.

“You’re the world’s greatest expert,”

says Philip, perhaps a little flatteringly, “where should the apostrophe go in ‘House furnishers’?”

It shouldn’t go anywhere, I tell him. “Wonderful,” says Philip, and wanders off. As probably they say at Hackett and Baines, another satisfied customer.

INDEPENDENTLY, Mel Gray in Chilton and Liz Coldicutt somewhere in the US send lists of puns – one, apparently, compiled by a former director of education in Barnsley.

There are lines suggesting that when two egotists meet it’s an I for an I, that if you don’t pay for your exorcist you get repossessed, that condoms should be used on every conceivable occasion and that the man who fell into an upholstery machine is now fully recovered.

Liz’s list includes the suggestion that she was only a whiskey maker but he loved her still, and that the man who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.

There’s the rubber band catapult that was confiscated from an algebra class because it was a weapon of math disruption.

The week’s best, however, is about the chap who thought he saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island.

It turned out to be an optical Aleutian.

The usual pun and games, the column returns next week. For now we linger no longer.