Free spirit

A VIBRANT rejoinder to all who lament proper pubs, Ian Richardson is celebrating 40 years at the Joiners Arms in Hunwick.

There was a big party on Tuesday evening, when for 40 minutes a pint cost 40p. “Mind,” said Ian, “it’s a bit better house than the usual Tuesday night.”

He moved in on D-Day, February 15 1971, when Britain’s currency officially went decimal. The beer had been one and elevenpence ha’penny, shot up to 10p. “There was hell on,”

he recalls. “We got a lot of farmers in them days, some of them who’d come in the back door when we were shut. They reckoned I’d robbed them of a ha’penny.”

Though it may not be said – who knows – that he’s been decimal coining it ever since, the Joiners has made a thoroughly good fist.

It’s a proper pub, a community pub, and has had a proper, communityconscious landlord. “I can tell you the name of everyone here tonight, what they do, where they live, what they’re like and what they like.

There’s some real characters, nice people.

“Our lass says I think more of the customers than I do of the family, but it’s no good a landlord never being behind the bar.”

When officially he retired, replaced by his son – Ian junior – he simply moved next door, though he still runs the Tuesday bar.

“You don’t normally want to live next to a pub, all those clashing doors and not knowing who’s knocking about, but I thought it was in pretty good hands,” he says.

Hunwick’s between Bishop Auckland and Willington, village history evocatively illustrated by a wonderful photo gallery on the pub wall.

There’s a gathering on the green to celebrate the Relief of Mafeking, more crowds on the railway station returning from the 1951 Amateur Cup final, the Hunwick Silver Band, the United Methodist Women’s Mission Auxiliary, the pipe works smoking as perhaps a pipe works should.

Ian had been a milkman in Bishop, finished at 10am and took on a Calor Gas round, went into the can’t-beatem Joiners as well.

“I ended up in hospital after all that,” he says and hasn’t been too clever lately, either. “Two heart attacks, a triple bypass and a stroke last year. Apart from that I’m champion.”

He owned a racehorse, still races greyhounds – “It’s a habit, like smoking, you just can’t shake it off” – still makes sea fishing trips of the mackerel to catch a sprat variety.

His advice is to have nothing to do with the pubcos.

“It never works out. You might have to put in 100 hours a week, might earn less than the minimum wage every hour, but you have to do it for yourself.

“If you’re prepared to work, it’ll happen. There’s still plenty of money in free houses. I don’t regret a minute.”

Depart in peace

SAD to learn while joining the Joiners of the death of Chris Jones, a man who put the public into pubs. He was 60.

Chris worked for the Sunderlandbased St Aidan’s Community Trust, achieving national publicity a few years back when they reopened – and reinvigorated – the village pub at Rookhope, top end of Weardale, and laid on a 40-year-old Morris Minor police car to get folk home again.

Entrepreneurial and innovative, he introduced everything from flower arranging to Saturday night hulahoop classes, planned to open a brewery and a cinema, even launched a village paint recycling scheme with an old English sheepdog called Dulux in attendance.

Philip Greenhalgh, then Weardale’s vicar, had agreed to be the brewery’s chief taster on condition that the first ale would be called Nunc Dimittis – Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.

Though the beers never really got up and brewing, Chris spearheaded other community pub initiatives at the Grey Bull in Stanhope, the Fox and Hounds in Shildon and the Bridge in Middleton-in-Teesdale.

His funeral was in Sunderland last week. Nunc dimittis, indeed.

50 years later, and still on the right track

ANOTHER anniversary, the North Eastern Railway Association (Nera) marks its golden jubilee on March 4, and with a wonderfully evocative image on the front of its latest magazine.

Inevitably it’s at Stainmore, on the Barnard Castle to Tebay line. Almost inevitably it’s the winter of 1947. Somewhere beneath it all, it’s reckoned, is an 0-6-0 locomotive – the little engine that couldn’t.

“Locomotive and snowplough appear to have been temporarily abandoned and only now are being dug out,” says the caption.

Nera was the brainchild of Bob Hunter, then the administrator of the Railway Museum in York, anxious to preserve an interest in the region’s railway heritage.

Annual membership was set at five shillings, half-a-crown for concessions, though it doubled the following year.

Membership now approaches 800, things running pretty well. If there’s a problem, and there is, is that officials know how the 0-6-0 might have felt. They’re becoming snowed under, too.

Their archive and collection overflows available space at the North Road railway museum study centre in Darlington. The engine crew back in 1947 may never have imagined themselves allegorical.

“To conscientiously and comprehensively discharge the unrelenting volume of work requires a commitment of time that I personally find quite unacceptable,” says librarian and archivist Robin Coulthard in his annual report.

“We have struggled and not too successfully to cope with a sudden influx of new material.”

Where snowploughs were harnessed 60 years ago, it’s now hoped that technology may be able to find a way through.

North Eastern Express editor John Teasdale admits a problem, enthuses still for railway history. “It’s the most accessible form of heavy engineering. Most people can’t travel by ship or by plane, but they almost all use the trains.

“Most of the membership is getting on a bit but there’s still interest among the younger generation.

Railway enthusiasm is a broad church, there’s something there for everyone.”

A year of events to mark the anniversary begins on Saturday (1.30pm) with Colin Ryder’s talk at the North Road museum on the Railways of Durham City. The jubilee lunch is on March 5, in York.

Robin Coulthard lives in Darlington.

Unfortunately, it has not been possible to speak to him. When last heard of he was in the study centre in North Road, still trying to dig his way out. The annual meeting will hear that he has resigned.

􀁧 Further information on the North Eastern Railway Association at ner.org.uk