Trial run

THE familiar figure of George Henry Wilson, dishevelled and still drying, would ascend reluctantly from the cells on many a Monday morning. Bishop Auckland magistrates awaited George Henry was the town drunk.

No real harm in him, understand, just – well – disorderly. Though he lived in Copley, beyond Cockfield, he’d do his carousing around Bishop.

Even when he managed the last bus home, he’d often be dumped off it again.

Usually he’d plead guilty. Once or twice he’d get 14 days, more often be fined a few bob in an unsuccessful attempt to stop his tap.

I could still see him there on Tuesday morning, the first time I’ve occupied the Bishop Auckland press bench for more than 40 years. Poor George.

Back then, our Bishop Auckland office alone covered courts in Barnard Castle, Spennymoor, Stanhope and Wolsingham. Ferryhill had closed not long previously; Castle Eden would still sit on Saturday mornings. Even the little village of Wath, outside Ripon, had its own court, one of many in North Yorkshire.

I once covered a murder remand there. All are long gone.

Now, court short, it’s Bishop mags that itself awaits sentence – one of seven remaining North-East magistrates’ courts under threat of closure as part of a national cost-cutting exercise.

Others include Guisborough, Houghton-le-Spring and, most contentiously, Hexham.

“While public finances are under pressure, it’s vital that we eliminate waste and reduce costs,” says a consultation document.

The consultation closed on September 15. A spokesperson for Her Majesty’s Court Service tells the column the Lord Chancellor is expected to announce his decision before the end of the year, though some believe it could be as early as today.

Few are hopeful of leniency. Few in Bishop Auckland believe that justice will be seen to be done much longer.

TUESDAY’S what they call a Triple S Day. While none seems quite sure what it stands for, the old short, sharp shock of the Seventies detention centres may be ruled out.

Though the police station is next door, Bishop court no longer has custodial facilities. Nor does it have staff. They’re all based in Newton Aycliffe, one of two courts – the other Darlington – which would deal with business were it to close.

One ‘S’ is for streamlined. Triumph of optimism over experience, each case is listed for five minutes, a sort of petty sessional fast track just begging to collide with the safety car.

Mind, the magistrates are clearly not the retiring types, decisions usually reached within a minute without leaving their seats. Back in the Sixties they were in and out like fiddlers’ elbows, as if anxious not to miss Mrs Dale’s Diary.

It’s not George Henry who’s first up, but Joanne Louise Martin, charged with being drunk and disorderly in Barnard Castle and with assaulting PC 2067 Oliphant in the execution of his duty. She’d kicked him on the left shoulder, admits it, blames the booze.

The court hears that she was screaming, shouting and swearing.

Not very ladylike at all. “A real wakeup call,” says her solicitor. “She realises she can be quite a horrible person when in drink.”

Forty years on, drink still has a major influence (as it were) on many cases. “Alcohol is still a bigger problem than drugs around here,” says John Turner, a defence solicitor.

“Women and drink have been the ruin of many a Bishop Auckland lad.”

There’s a 45-year-old on a couple of charges of pinching wine from Asda, a chap from Shildon charged with peeing in the doorway of a Chinese takeaway – “acting like a complete divvy,” he admits – and with having a bit of skunk cannabis in his pocket.

The cannabis was a birthday present.

When I was that age in Shildon you got a brush and comb set and were glad of it. When I was that age, come to think, divvy was something you got from the Co-op. Just shows how long ago it was.

MUCH else has changed since the Sixties, not least in the relative informality of the place. “These courts really used to be quite fearsome. Some of the magistrates were monsters,” says John Turner. “These days it’s much more relaxed.”

On Tuesday, bench chairman William Unsworth – Billy to his friends – can be heard before the court rose discussing Sunderland’s football fortunes with the lawyers.

Legal guidance is gained through a computer system. Before, it was from a series of hefty books called Stone’s Justices’ Manual. Stone’s may have been avoirdupois. Let he who is without sin… There are multi-agency arenas, victim surcharges and sentencing guidelines so carefully applied from a huge matrix that it almost becomes justice by numbers. What there aren’t, anywhere, are police officers.

Much more sensationally, however, one of the young lady solicitors had been called a “finicky ponce” – on air – by the dreadful Russell Brand. Something to do with a reference to podcasts in the local paper.

Probably ours. It seems a pretty unwise thing to call a CPS solicitor, but she’s reluctant to discuss it. “It’s top of the download charts,” she says.

There’s security on the door, a selection of legal aid cards arrayed like a Kings Cross call box, even a television in the waiting area.

They’re all watching something about vets – It Shouldn’t Happen to a Hamster, perhaps – and seem oddly fascinated. One lad’s fresh out of jail.

“It was mint,” he boasts. “I came out fit as fire.”

(“Fire”, it will be appreciated, was not the exact f-word in question.) Perhaps the greatest change is in the dress code, however. Even George Henry Wilson with Bishop’s biggest hangover was better turned out than any of these.

The public seats are empty – It Shouldn’t Happen to a Hamster may be more interesting – the legal courtesies no longer so scrupulously observed.

Told by Mr Unsworth that he is to free go, the skunk birthday boy simply replies “Cheers”.

The chairman should perhaps be grateful. How much longer before it’s “Cheers, mate”?

JOHN Turner has appeared at Bishiop Auckland court since 1981 – “I was on work experience,”

he pleads – now represents the grandchildren of his first clients.

“It’s a bit like groundhog day, quite eerie,” he says. He believes that justice is best served locally.

The closure consultation document talked of travel times and fares from Bishop Auckland, but paid no heed to those at the top of Weardale, or around Crook and Willington.

“It’s just another bit of Bishop Auckland that’s going. All we have now are superstores,” says Mr Turner.

“An awful lot of people who come before this court are on benefits, and it’s going to be a lot more expensive for some of them. The document says you can drive to Newton Aycliffe in 15 minutes. Even at my most frantic, I couldn’t do that.”

The document also puts utililisation of the three Bishop Auckland courts – county and magistrates in the same 1964 building – at just over 60 per cent. Mr Turner admits it’s not as busy as it used to be. “We’ve tried to work out why not. We think it’s because there are now so many cautions and other procedures. It can be your fifth offence before you get to court.”

The chances of a reprieve, he fears, are very slight. In Bishop Auckland as elsewhere, the silence in court may be permanent.

Take note

WHOLLY coincidentally, I’d also been in court the week previously, the locally celebrated case in which Hartlepool United FC is seeking to wind up Billingham Town of the STL Northern League over alleged debts.

This was Civil Court No 1 at the Combined Courts Centre in Middlesbrough. It really gets worrying when even the judges start to look young.

Particularly, however, I was taken by the statue outside – a mother trying to keep apart two warring offspring.

If it’s not called Justice, it probably should be – a piece of modern art that all can understand.

The egregious “Bottle of notes” is nearby.

Marriage lines

LAST year we wrote of Mike Thompson and Sue Jones, medics who are helping lead the impressive restoration of Kirkby Stephen East railway station on the former Stainmore branch across the Pennines.

Mike had taken early retirement from his lecturing job at Newcastle University medical school – he’s a diabetes specialist – in order to devote himself full time to the railway.

“I’m an unemployed labourer,” he said, though for ‘unemployed’ read ‘unpaid’.

Sue’s still at Hartlepool and North Tees hospitals, also in diabetics – their lines so inextricably crossed that now they’ve married.

“He has converted me into a railway enthusiast, but with a passion for restoring and painting things that already existed,” Sue writes in the latest Stainmore Railway Company newsletter. He’s company chairman, she secretary.

The cake was decorated with a saddle- tank locomotive, the reception was on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway – some guests barely able to recognise one another out of oily overalls, says newsletter editor Mark Keefe.

The couple, who live in Sedgefield, invited donations to the SRC instead of wedding presents. More than £2,000 will go towards improved disabled facilities and signage.

One guest, however, insisted on giving them a concrete mixer – a firm foundation for marriage, if ever.

OUT of their glad rags and back into the oily ones, the SRC folk are now planning a three-day celebration weekend – August bank holiday 2011 – to mark the 150th anniversary of the South Durham and Lancashire Union Railway, and the coming of steam to Kirkby Stephen East. “The magnitude of the event will depend on our ability to raise the necessary funds,” says Mike – but it’s looking very special indeed.

JAMES Lancelot celebrates the 25th anniversary of his arrival as organist and master of the choristers at Durham Cathedral with a Question and Answer page in Church Times.

Asked what last made him angry, Mr Lancelot cites an example of people gossiping away – about their computer problems – before a service. He should think himself lucky; usually they’re comparing operations.

Train seats with no adjacent windows come a close second in the angry files, he says.

I’m reading it a few miles south of Durham. The train’s stationary, delayed by almost an hour because of a conked out Cross Countryman in front. It’s Saturday afternoon, the match starts without me.

The seat has no adjacent window.

It is entirely possible to share the great organist’s dim view.

CONSCIENTIOUSLY attributed, Church Times also picks up the column’s story (September 30) about Stephen Williams, the 18-year-old churchwarden at St Peter’s in Bishop Auckland.

There’s no parish priest, an average congregation of eight, a neighbouring Elim Pentecostal church that so overflows its own premises that it moves into St Peter’s when the Anglicans have gone home.

Stephen, to whom greetings, is promoting St Peter’s through Facebook and Twitter and things. “It’s a challenge,” he says, inarguably.

The Church Times has a cartoon about it, too. Equally attributed, it shows an elderly couple leaving church. “You probably don’t need to tell the churchwarden about the ‘suspicious youth probably up to no good’ you saw ‘messing about in the church’,” says one.

“That was the churchwarden.”

AREMINDER, after the photograph in the column two weeks ago, that the good folk of Hamsterley Methodist church in west Durham will this Saturday be auctioning the 30 soft toy gorillas – from 2ft 6in to just a few inches high – given them by a collector. “They’re in excellent condition and would make great Christmas presents,”

says John Wearmouth, one of the organisers.

There’s a coffee morning, too. Viewing in the schoolroom starts at 10.30am, the monkey business – auctioned individually – at 11.

…AND finally, we wrote in the summer about the upcoming “Images of Eldon” exhibition, memories of that south Durham village and surrounding communities in the Gurney Valley. It was so successful – “people from all over the place found numerous ‘lost’ relatives,”

says Colin Turner, the organiser – that Colin’s leaving it in place, more than 1,000 exhibits and admission free, at St Mark’s church.

Viewing can be arranged through him – 01388-772807.