Hair raising

RECENT columns have been recalling guvvy jobs, those blind-eye enterprises familiar at workplaces throughout the land. They appear really to have started a rabbit away or, since we are to be discussing cut-price barbering, possibly a hare.

Dick Graham writes of his time at Cargo Fleet works, on Teesside, in the 1950s, where colleagues included Septimus Jones, known to all as Seppy, who worked as an overhead crane driver in the mixer plant.

“His job,” Dick explains, “involved pouring molten metal from the blast furnaces into the holding furnaces (known as mixers) and transferring it out when required by the steel plant.”

Seppy was also a stand-up comedian on the local club circuit. “The third string to his bow was hairdressing,”

says Dick. What might be supposed a short back and sides-line.

Distinctly hair raising, the job was accomplished in the cab of his 150ft ton crane, to which the only access was via a 60ft vertical steel ladder.

Though it was haircutting which clearly required a head for heights, it was a snip for all that – a shilling so long as customers didn’t mind Seppy rehearsing his act, or 1/6d in silence.

“Not a guvvy job in the true sense of the term,” concedes Dick, “but in the spirit of it, undoubtedly.”

ALL this inescapably recalls Bert Mangles, a wonderful character who in the 1970s had the Queens Head in West Auckland.

Bert had a good house, kept a very canny pint of Gold Tankard and hosted more brag schools than the Headmasters’ Conference.

The workmen’s club was next door. That’s where Bert would cut the old lads’ hair – the price inexpensive, the style unmistakable.

None of it required a word from the tonsor. It was the bowled-over look: Bert’s boys could be spotted at the other end of the green.

NIGEL Dowson, hairdresser to the gentry, recalls his 1960s childhood when Cockfield lads would have their hair cut by a gentleman known thereabouts as Electric Mike.

“He had a hardware shop down the village, sold paraffin and that sort of thing, but at night he cut hair. He’d have a set of clippers in each hand and grease a parting with Brylcreem.

We all went because it was cheap, but it was rubbish.”

Then as always, folk – men especially – took shortcuts with their hair. Still there are back street barbers prepared to do it on their Sweeney (as the rhyming slangers might have it).

Nigel has the Jigsaw salon in Darlington, helped by his daughter who daily makes the four-hour round trip from Kielder, in west Northumberland.

“You expect everyone who works for you to do a little bit on the side,” he says. “She must be the only one who doesn’t because when she gets home she’s shattered.

“All you need is a pair of scissors, a comb and a back kitchen. Cutting hair is one of the easiest things to do and one of the easiest to do badly.

You don’t do a five-year apprenticeship for nothing.

“Home cutting is one of those things that increases when times are hard but it’s a false economy. It’s not the other end of the green, you can spot it a mile away.”

MOSTLY it’s the ladies’ hairdressers which essay fancy names to match their fancy fashions. There are any amount of Upper Cuts and Cuts Above, of Hairports and of Head Quarters.

Darlington has a Hackers and a Wavelength, Stockton a Crowning Glory, Catterick Garrison a Sweeney Todd’s and Leyburn a Cut the Mustard.

The best from a swift comb through the Yellow Pages may be Deb’n’Hair in Newton Aycliffe – but more stylish examples much welcomed.

NIGEL Dowson also runs a Cockfield blog, on which – though the local interest may not immediately be obvious – appear extracts from a 1960s guide for the married woman. Hair’s barely covered.

“When retiring to the bedroom,”

it begins, “present yourself for bed as properly as possible.”

Women should on no account hog the bathroom – “your husband does not want to queue, as he would have to do for his train” – nor apply face cream and rollers before the old feller’s asleep. “It can be quite a shock to a man last thing at night,” it adds.

Matters thereafter get a bit more personal and may largely be passed over. Suffice that the master should always get what he wants (or doesn’t) and that, whatever happens, he’ll almost certainly fall asleep immediately afterwards.

That’s the big chance for the little woman. “You can then set the alarm so that you can arise shortly before him in the morning. That will enable you to have his morning cup of tea ready when he awakes.”

In Cockfield, as elsewhere, bedside manners may not have changed at all.

THAT’S Cockfield, County Durham, of course. Memory suggests that there’s another in Suffolk, or Sussex, or somewhere.

The point that it’s County Durham was made in The Times last Saturday by Jon Smith, a former chief subeditor hereabouts, who now lives in Barningham, near Barnard Castle – one of those villages south of the Tees that are ecclesiastically in the diocese of Ripon and Leeds but administratively in the county palatine.

Jon’s happy for it to be County Durham – “Britain’s finest and least known county” – and thereby lies his grumble. The Times keeps on referring to the county simply as Durham, most recently suggesting that Auckland Castle was in Durham.

“No it isn’t, it’s in Bishop Auckland, a town in Durham 12 miles south-west of Durham City and very proud that its castle is home to the region’s bishop,” writes Jon.

Probably, he adds, they should be grateful that The Times hasn’t suffered from the Royal Mail’s “frequent delusion” that County Durham is somewhere in Ireland.

The readers’ editor’s wary. “It’s only a matter of time,” she says.

DAVID Walsh, who started all this guvvy job business – and thus could have a guvvy job for life – turns his thoughts to other aspects of our industrial past. What of the armies of feral cats that used to roam our shipyards, steel works and factories, he says? What indeed, though that particular cat may not be out of the bag for another week at least.

…and finally, last week’s column not only had a beer with comedian Joe King but tried to generate one or two other laughs. It prompts a note from a politically incorrect reader in Chilton asking if we’ve heard about the fat, alcoholic transvestite – all he wanted to do was eat, drink and be Mary – and another from Baz Mundy in Coundon warning about an email that advises recipients not to eat tinned pork.

“Just delete it. It’s Spam.”