Spread betting

A manse may be too obvious, a Conference too arcane.

A glory possibly, a gloom hardly.

A solemnity or a celebration? A fervour, a firmness or a faith?

Five, at any rate, are gathered – quintessentially – at Howden-le- Wear last Sunday to celebrate the chapel’s 140th anniversary. Four are retired ministers who’d formerly had responsibility for Howden, the fifth is Ann Shepherdson, the West Durham circuit superintendent.

“There’s so much life and energy and care and fun here,” she says.

The observant will have noted, of course, that Howden chapel is exactly the same age as The Northern Echo, though it seems more conspicuously to be marking the milestone.

There’ve been ceilidhs and concerts, an open air service to mark the pub leek show, a flower festival and – just the day previously – a fair opened by Billy Lee, the second oldest member, and by Jackie Gent.

Their ages also total 140. Billy’s 87.

Sorry, Jackie.

Across the road, the Green Tree is bunting-bedecked, too, though whether in salute to 140 years of Methodism it is impossible to say.

BACK then, they were Primitive Methodists. The year of opening’s sure, the chapel anniversary more arbitrary. None knows the opening date for certain.

Howden-le-Wear was a teeming mining village, its railway station on the Bishop Auckland to Crook line inexplicably called Beechburn.

Three churches opened in as many years.

Had the Primitive’s opening been on November 6, the date of the formal anniversary, the infant Echo would have reported on a new parish clock at Loftus, told of talks with the North Eastern Railway to open a line from Tyne to Tees via Sunderland and that Robert Pybus had been charged at Richmond with letting his horse stray on the Gilling turnpike.

At Whitby, meanwhile, George Walton – described as “an old man”

– had been jailed for three weeks for begging. His plea that he was a Baptist minister fell, inexplicably, upon deaf ears.

Howden’s a proper chapel, an agreeable and an embracing chapel, a terraced building squeezed in between numbers 29 and 30 Bridge Street but, like the angelic host, unnumbered.

By 1903, it had been extended upwards and outwards at a cost of £1,100. There were 100 members, 300 Sunday School pupils and, around the corner, a Wesley Methodist church, too.

Though the two Methodist traditions were formally united in 1932, in Howden, as in many other places, they retained separate – some say suspicious – identities until continually falling numbers compelled a rethink in the early Seventies.

“An independent panel was formed to decide which chapel would close but we all thought it would be this one,” recalls Billy Lee. “They chose the other one because they thought it would be easier to sell. It wasn’t.”

The Wesleyan church is now the Victoria Hall, best known as the home of a giant Wurlitzer theatre organ (and for Howden-le-Wear Methodist knees-ups).

The village’s parish church also closed several years ago, several of St Mary’s congregation opting to join the Methodists.

Though there’s been a vibrant carers and toddlers group for 20 years, and now “messy church”

gatherings for the youngsters, the Sunday attendance is rarely above 25.

VERY many more are gathered for the anniversary, the seats downstairs so greatly filled that I head for the gods, and the gallery. This is a mistake; dizzy heights and all that.

The service is led by the superintendent and by Frances Ann Johnson, the chapel steward. She calls them “an august collection of past ministers”, insists that even if the church building weren’t there, their faith still would be.

The other four ministers are introduced in the order in which they served. “I’m not very happy about this chronological order,” says Eileen Appleyard, the first, appointed in the Seventies soon after Methodism embraced women’s ministry.

“Some said they thought it would never work but are now happy to tell me that it did,” she says.

Each of the ministers has been invited to choose a hymn that they associate with Howden. Tom Wilkinson, a prolific composer, hasn’t just chosen one, he’s written one.

They’re accompanied on the organ by Graham Lee, Billy’s son, whose mother, uncle and great aunt had all done the job before him.

Dr Alan Powers, retired to Northallerton and still magnificently whiskered, has chosen Love Came Down at Christmas – even before the MetroCentre switches its lights on – because it reminds him of an act of “terrible ecclesiastical snobbery”

when someone complained about having a “magnificent” Santa Claus and reindeer at the back of the church.

“There’s as much historical fact in that as there is in three wise men and shepherds,” he says.

Bill Middlemiss, who succeeded him, hands Dr Powers a spoon. “You always were a good stirrer,” he says, affably.

All affectionately recall the chapel and its folk. “A congregation of great, practical Christian witness,” says Tom Wilkinson, now back in his native Scotland and helping at the kirk.

The service lasts 90 minutes, ends with One More Step Along the World I Turn, is followed by 94-year-old Annie Gibson cutting the anniversary cake and, inevitably, by a marvellous Methodist tea, eagerly assailed.

However thinly, may be the latter-day collective noun for ministers be a spread?