Poker games

A “guvvy job” appears originally to have been anything in which company time, material and equipment was employed – as it were – for personal use.

“At North Road locomotive works in Darlington it was part of the ethos,” recalls Dave Burdon. “There were GJs going on all day, every day.

The chargehand would normally turn a blind eye, but it wasn’t something the foreman should discover.”

Though the term may more recently have been expanded to mean any “cash in hand” task – a nice little earner, as Arthur Daly observed – the guvvies, like the luvvies, were everywhere. Especially on the railways.

Dave – from Hurworth Place, near Darlington – still has three souvenirs of those DIY days. There’s a poker with a multi-coloured handle – “there was a big demand for those decorative pokers, I made several for others who didn’t have the nous or the access to lathes” – a metal shovel and a large copper vase which his father also made at North Road.

His dad, in truth, appears to have been guvvienor general. “He was a sheet metal worker and in the 1950s he took GJs to another level, that is to say an 8ft by 4ft greenhouse.”

That’s Dave, then about 19, standing in front of it.

“He made the framework from scrap strips, suitably engineered and short enough to slip down his trouser leg and still be able to cycle the mile home. Then he soldered it all together; I couldn’t say where the glass came from.”

The greenhouse lasted until at least 1990, rather longer – alas – than Dave’s dad did. “It was probably stealing but men with young families in those didn’t have working wives and lived a hand-to-mouth existence,”

says Dave. “It says a lot for his skill and ingenuity.”

THE term’s origins remain obscure. Eddie Hope, also in Darlington, manufactures an explanation of his own. “A guvvy job meant you were working for the HOME office,” he says.

MALCOLM Conway, now in Eaglescliffe, was apprenticed at Doncaster locomotive works. Such practices clearly travelled; Malcolm was told that the term originated during the war.

Back then, he says, a guvvy job was an order for a batch of components – “supposedly top secret work”

– that was sent to one factory, but made elsewhere.

It was wholly coincidental that on Friday we should be at a 70th birthday party for Durham County councillor and former Shildon wagon works man Tommy Taylor.

At the wagon works they called them government jobs, says Tom, but then they always were posh lads in Shildon.

As at Darlington, at any rate, the house speciality appears to have been pokers. “We couldn’t knock them out fast enough,” says Tom.

Whether they were strictly straight and narrow is, of course, another matter entirely.

SO Tom, smashing bloke, fell to musing about his threescore years and ten. The phrase, like so many others in everyday use, is from the incomparable King James Bible, published 400 years ago this year.

Psalm 90: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

Shakespeare borrowed the phrase for Macbeth, as he did many other bits of scripture, though – curiously – he never once mentioned the Bible.

There’s a website that lists 122 familiar phrases with biblical origins, ranging from wolf in sheep’s clothing to baptism of fire, from pearls before swine to casting bread upon the water.

“Straight and narrow”, coincidentally, is also biblical – Matthew 7:13: Enter ye in at the strait gate… because strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”

Despite diligent research, however, there appears to be nothing about pokers and guvvy jobs whatsoever.

ALL this guvvy job lark started with David Walsh’s musings about cabin fever – like guvvy jobs, familiar on North-East building sites when the blokes couldn’t work because of the weather.

Ian Forsyth in Durham finds it in a 1918 Oxford English Dictionary – “North American, colloquial” – defined as “lassitude, restlessness, irritability or aggressiveness resulting from having been confined too long with few or no companions”.

Joan Forster, in Ingleby Arncliffe, near Stokesley, convincingly narrows the search to the Yukon in the 1890s gold rush, cabin fever suffered by the miners unable to get out during the long winter nights.

It’s something with which Ted Harrison, born in Wingate in east Durham and now Canada’s best known and most honoured artist – “a list of awards longer than a Yukon winter,” someone observed – is familiar.

Trained at West Hartlepool College of Art, Ted got his first Yukon job in 1967 – “weaklings need not apply,” said the ad in The Times Educational Supplement – and has since been declared a national treasure.

He also had some homespun advice for those suffering from cabin fever. Play solitaire, he said.

LAST week’s column carried a picture of Australian cricketer Michael Clarke, said by the caption writer to show the poor chap being bowled. Former Durham Country cricketer Keith Hopper is best qualified of several readers to have pointed out that the ball is passing at least two feet over the stumps. “They wouldn’t even have given that one out in the Mid Durham Senior league,” says Keith.

PREACHING to the unconverted – for there are dissidents, even among the most learned of our readers – we’ve been banging on for several months about the absurd fashion for terms like pre-booking, pre-ordering and, last week, prewarning.

At last there is a heavyweight ally.

Half of The Times “Feedback” column last Saturday was devoted to the same thing – “a curious grammatical phenomenon,” it concluded.

The Times collection included prenaming (of the England cricket team), pre-use and, of course, prearranged.

Happily, their columnist finds no justification whatever for such nonsense.

Gadfly sets a pre-cedent once again.

􀁧 The discerning will also be pleased to learn that colleagues who wrote the terms “free up” and “head up” during the course of last week’s labours have roundly been rebuked. Why this compulsion to tag on unnecessary bits to what could be a fairly straightforward language? Up with this we will not put.

SINCE last week’s column ended with a joke (of sorts), Baz Mundy in Coundon, near Bishop Auckland, feels obliged to point out that there’s a new café up the road from him offering chicken dinners for just £1.50.

“I asked for one and was given a bowl of corn.”

Corn-fed as always, the column returns next week.