Tubby’s army

A LITTLE candle burning in the night – an appropriate metaphor for most of these columns – last week’s John North pondered, in passing, the phrase “As dim as a Toc H lamp”.

It sparked with Tony Stainthorpe, in Durham. “I can remember a house in Ferryhill, just up from the town hall, where there was a Toc H lamp above the door,” says Tony, though he can never remember it lit.

“These sayings keep turning up and take you back many a year. You can remember them as if it were yesterday, but you can hardly remember what you had for dinner.”

Toc H was originally a servicemen’s association, formed in Belgium in 1915 by the Reverend “Tubby” Clayton, an Army chaplain.

Originally known as Talbot House, the headquarters became Toc H after Signallers’ code for TH.

Clayton burned a light – “the lamp of maintenance” – in the chapel. It became Toc H’s symbol, said to have been dimmed outside premises close to the front line. Any resemblance to Aladdin’s lamp was coincidental; there was nothing wishy-washy about Toc H.

The organisation grew worldwide, with Christian values but open to all and active in all kinds of social services.

Toc H members, for example, began the first talking newspaper for the blind, began football commentary on hospital radio and had a big part in starting the blood transfusion service.

Every branch had a lamp, lit – then as now – to commemorate Tubby Clayton’s birthday on December 11.

Latterly, however, the light seems further to have dimmed. All full-time staff were made redundant in 2008; a website talks of “radical rationalisation”.

The clock may be ticking for Toc H.

NOR may local links more greatly be illumined, though distant memory suggests a Toc H Club in Bishop Auckland Market Place.

Certainly there’s still a Toc H lamp in the St Anne’s centre there, though its light remains (as it were) under a bushel.

“So far as I can gather there was a Toc H Club, but it’s long gone,” says Canon Neville Vine, the vicar.

In the past 22 years, the Echo’s only reference to Toc H was in 1991, when the Middlesbrough branch in Zetland Road was said to be lighting its lamp to mark Clayton’s birthday.

The telephone book lists only a “Toc H” in Redcar, though its address isn’t given and its number remains unanswered. As always, further enlightenment much welcomed.

AFTER Tubby Clayton, for 40 years vicar of All Hallows by the Tower in London, the best known figure with that expansive nickname may be Tubby Morton, Melchester Rovers’ goalkeeper from 1958-83.

Melchester, of course, was – maybe still is – home to Roy of the Rovers. Roy and Tubby played together in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.

The Roy of the Rovers website still keeps track of him.

Like most footballers of his generation, Tubby Morton was last heard of running a pub.

STILL suitably penumbral – neat link, this – the proposed £4m restoration of the Globe Theatre in Stockton prompts Martin Birtle to recall the Shadows’ tune Stars Fell on Stockton, B-side of their No 1 hit Wonderful Land.

If not quite universal, the most popular theory is that the Shadows wrote it one quiet afternoon while open-casting the orchestra pit.

Martin has some fanciful idea of a connection to one of the Stocktons in the US, perhaps the Californian town of that name which we mentioned last week.

Happily, we’d danced to this particular tune in 2008 when John Carter in Darlington offered pretty conclusive testament from the sleeve notes of The Shadows: Greatest Hits.

“There is no great significance to the title,” they wrote. “We might just as well have called it Moonlight over Wigan.”

LAST Saturday’s At Your Service column, on the likely secession of most members of St James the Great in Darlington from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic churches, has already attracted a record response for AYS.

Perhaps typical is Ray Gibbon, a former mayor of Durham, who recalls a less complicated childhood in Witton Park – “that most tolerant of communities” – when the variety of churches was equalled only by the number of pubs.

Ray’s family were Methodist, strictly Primitive Methodist. Father Walmsley, the Roman Catholic priest – “loved and feared by his people in equal measure” – kept his car in their yard.

“My dad refused to take payment so when Fr Walmsley got his regular supply of communion wine he would give dad a bottle for use in the monthly Methodist communion service – you don’t get much more ecumenical than that.”

A small problem arose when it was discovered that the RC wine was alcoholic.

“Dad continued to use it on the grounds that it would be churlish to refuse a gift so well intended.”

The present conflicts bewilder Ray, and many more. “The waters, I feel, are much too deep and dangerous for me.”

TRAWLING back through what are now called the personal announcements in the Durham Advertiser, Billy Mollon discovers that on October 3, 1908, at Durham register office Miss Margaret Hook married Mr George Fish. One of them was clearly quite a catch.

MORE bread upon the waters, we have been talking about hairdressers, and the neat names under which they trade. The elder bairn reports that in the West Yorkshire town of Todmorden there’s a place simply called Sweeney of Tod.

It prompts Ian Andrew in Lanchester to recall childhood days in Blackpool, where the barber was an ex-Blackpool footballer – “He never asked what we wanted, it was always short back and sides” – who also repaired umbrellas.

“When I was having my hair cut, men would sometimes come into the counter behind a wooden screen and quickly leave again. In my naivety I thought they’d come to collect their repaired umbrellas.”

It was many years later before he discovered the meaning of that famous barber shop euphemism, “something for the weekend”.

FROM the Blackhall Wok school of takeaway humour, incidentally, Roger Cliff reports that his favourite’s in Belfast – the Thai Tanic.

…and finally, readers continue to send humour from the web. There’s a great deal of it about. Sometimes, however – especially in emails – the internet can lose something in the transmission.

I’m due next week to attend a crucial meeting at the Royal Station Hotel in Newcastle. An email followed to the hosting organisation (which best had remain nameless).

“I’m willing to pay my own rail fare,” it said, “but would you consider meeting taxi expenses from the station to the venue?”

A reply suitably, solemnly, followed.

“I have consulted with senior colleagues and we feel that, on this occasion, you must meet your own taxi expenses.”

So be it: the Royal Station Hotel is ten yards away.

Low maintenance, credibly crepuscular, the column returns next week.